I just finished reading The Four Hour Body by Tim Ferriss and got really excited about his eating plan and all the fat burning coming my way! So, despite having told myself I was going to be "pure" and not follow any certain eating plan again and only work ever so slowly towards Thinner Peace, here I go. I'm currently feeling the shakes from cutting back on all the "white" carbs.
Goal: (actually making this a 5 day win based on the flow of the week)
Follow my eating plan
Rewards:
Monday-purchase Four Hour Workweek
Tues-Watch Biggest Loser, give self pass on State of the Union guilt-free
Wed-Field trip to renew out of town library card (yes, it's really a prize to me...4200 downloadable audiobooks and 1200 ebooks!!! Yippee!)
Thurs-Massage while I'm out of town next week
Fri-Eat, drink and be merry on cheat day (including a trip for fancy beer!!!)
I may add another goal later in the week. For now, making it through the shakes is about all I can manage.
Hi - This is really intriguing. I haven't read the book, so is the premise that you get a reward for every day of the week? Do you immediately follow a whole plan, or do you get a whole week of daily rewards for changing one habit each week?
ReplyDeleteEve,
ReplyDeleteThe basic premise is that you pick a small change you'd like to make, either adding something or avoiding a behavior, and design a small reward daily for three days and then a slightly larger reward for completing the whole four day stretch. If you don't complete the four days, usually the goal was too big (like too much exercise, too large a dietary change) or the reward wasn't big enough for you. Depending on what you're trying to change, you could move on to something new or do linked four day wins to keep working on a change.
I'm going to do a full post on the whole deal soon, but here's a recent example I did. A behavior I wanted to modify was my daily beer consumption. I knew this would be a tougher habit for me to break, so I heavily rewarded this the first week. I repeated a four day win on the same topic the following week because I knew I needed more time for my new pattern to seem familiar and good. So, the next week I also focused on rewarding the no beer during the week, but I picked less glamourous (to me!) rewards because it was already much easier.
Hope that helps.
Interesting...this approach sounds expensive! We also just cut out beer during the week (for New Year's), but just to save money. Same principle, just with the reinforcement delayed a bit...
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