Do you make a habit of eating badly? Yes, you heard right – you making eating badly, a habit.Bad eating habits, as you well know, are hard to break. 'Once a habit, always a habit' is too harsh.

What if you formed a new habit; a healthy habit? What if you did this each day, with only a miss here and there? The emphasis is on consistent, personal motivation here. Now one more ingredient: the cue. Think what would be a good cue for you?

Let’s say a good cue is breakfast. You want to make it a habit to eat dieting food for breakfast. So you set this up to happen, day after day, breakfast after breakfast.

You will eventually establish good diet food as a habit for breakfast. In the process of forming this habit, you will notice that you get to points along the way, where you don’t have to work so hard at it anymore.

The sticking to this happens more automatically. You automatically start reaching for the good, diet food, and not the fattening food, or so much food.

You hardly think about the new “moves” you’re making. When you’re running on autopilot, you’ve got a habit. Now it’s a good eating habit.

What if you miss a day or two here and there? Will you still be able to form the habit of good eating behaviour (at breakfast)?

Recent research shows that missing a day every once in a while made only a small difference in the time it took to form the habit. But in the long run failing to do it habituallyhere and there did not make any difference in how strongly the habit was formed.

Okay. We’ve got some important variables here. Are you ready? Because this is about you.Variable #1: Your motivation. Variable #2: Your consistency. Variable #3: Your reaction to missing a day here and there. Variable #4: Dealing effectively with any interference.There you have it in a nutshell. Too simple-minded? Try it and see!