Author T. Harv Eker uses an interesting analogy of a printer to explain your financial results in life:
“For example, let’s suppose you’ve just written a letter on your computer. You hit the print key and the letter comes out of your printer. You look at your hard copy, and lo and behold, you find a typo. So you take your trusty eraser and rub out the typo. Then you hit print again and out comes the same typo.
What’s going on here is that the real problem cannot be changed in the ‘printout,’ it can only be changed in the ‘program…’”
Health, it turns out, isn’t that different.
Your lifestyle—what you eat, how and how often you move, your work, your relationships, etc.—is like the program that’s running all the time. What that program “prints” is the health of your body.
When you “diet” to lose weight, or start an “exercise plan”, you’re making an effort to change the program. And that’s a good thing…except that diets and exercise plans have a nasty tendency to be temporary.
“Get your beach body ready!” is a temporary program. It ends when summer does.
And when the program ends? You go back to the old one.
And then you go back to the old printout, too. You gain back 15 pounds, or you get back the digestive troubles or the heart issues or the blood sugar challenges or the low energy. Old program, old results–every time.
Programs are Habits
What you have right now is the result of your current daily habits—both mental and physical. Those habits are your “program”.
Do you want long term health? You need to create new, long term habits. You need to make changes to how you eat, move and live that you can sustain forever. You need a new program that runs all the time.
Does that program need to be perfect? No. It can have a few bugs–plenty, actually. Trying to run a perfect program is no help in the long run either, because you’ll always crash. The goal is to gradually rewrite your program—to gradually and sustainably shift your habits, one by one—in a way that lets you keep running it forever.