Books

Adam is a nationally recognized expert on behavior and habit change, and consulted with James throughout his writing of Atomic Habits. Adam is mentioned in the acknowledgements.

Section – Someone’s Watching: Accountability

A psychiatrist friend made an interesting point about the difference between accountability partners and psychotherapists. “In the kind of therapy that I do, I don’t hold you accountable,” she explained. “I try to help you learn to hold yourself accountable to yourself. A coach holds you accountable.”

“Then I wonder if some people need a coach more than a therapist,” I said, thinking of Obligers. “Accountability to someone else is what they’re really looking for.”

For instance, my friend Adam Gilbert founded My Body Tutor, a program that provides this kind of accountability. Daily interaction with a “tutor” helps people monitor and change their diet and exercise habits. “People want to do it alone,” he said, “but why? I tell them, ‘You get help in other areas of your life. Why not with this?'”

…

But acting as an accountability partner can be tricky. I don’t want people to dread contact with me because I make them feel guilty about some broken habit. Also, it’s a lot of work to be a reliable accountability partner. Accountability partners often work better if the people aren’t particularly close, or if the accountability is mutual, or if a person is paid to hold someone accountable. Adam Gilbert calls this the “peer or pro” issues, and he’s very pro-pro. “People don’t take peers seriously,” he told me. “They do better with a pro.”

“Because they’re paying?” I asked.

“Maybe people value it more if they pay for it. But I don’t think it’s really about money. A peer isn’t going to tell you the hard truths. You need a pro.”

Chapter 10: Networking and Social Capital

Adam Gilbert founded a business called MyBodyTutor.com. He and his group of online fitness counselors provide guidance to people on getting into better shape, primarily by developing consistent diet and exercise habits. It works like an online Weight Watchers: each day you fill out a form detailing your food intake, exercise, and answers to various other questions, and each morning your fitness tutor comments on what you’ve done. You can also sign up for a higher level that has daily phone interactions. I happen to know a lot about this service because, as a client, I lost 15 pounds using it.

When I first learned about Adam, I assumed he would be a typical weight-lifter kind of guy because that’s how he looked in his photos and that is the kind of person I would hire to help me get into shape. (I wouldn’t hire a trainer who looked like me.) Adam really is super fit and always has been. But as I spoke to him over a series of months, I learned that he is quite thoughtful and in many ways deals with the same kinds of questions that my own business deals with. Career development and physical change bring up a lot of the same issues.

Adam had long been interested in health and physical fitness. However, in college he didn’t connect this with a career. He figured he’d work in public accounting. After a couple of years in that career, he realized his body was going to seed and he was violating many of his personal health commandments. So he jumped ship. He created his company and became an entrepreneur.

In one of our diet check-in conversations, I mentioned one of the points Herminia Ibarra makes about career development: your career evolves partly as a reflection of the people you hang out with. People who change careers, or change the focus on the careers they already have, usually start changing who they hang out with. You don’t need to dump your old friends, but you end up spending more time with people who reflect your new interests.

“If I did college all over again,” Adam said in response, “I would have hung out exclusively with entrepreneurs. But I didn’t hang out with any. It never occurred to me. I wasted the chance to do that.”

I can relate to his statement. In college I had a lot of friends and social acquaintances, as well as later in law school and business school. But I didn’t really think about what I might be trying to learn through other people. This perspective limited me.

The people you surround yourself with will have an impact on what you are learning and how you are evolving. You are allowed to pick people who represent what you want to be, not just who you already are.

Chapter 9: There’s No Such Thing as Failure, Only Feedback

Still Stuck? Other Options:

If you’ve been working on the Easy Eight Habit changes for a while (at least three to six months) without getting any results, and you can’t figure out what’s causing the roadblock, here are a few things you can do:

Ask for Feedback.

Start by asking yourself a few questions and answering them truthfully:

– Am I still motivated to achieve my Whys? Are my Whys what I want to accomplish or have other desires become more important to me?

– Am I really taking consistent action, or do I just tell myself that I am?

– Am I not being totally truthful about my actions and habits on my evaluations?

– Am I recognizing the results I do get? What results am I achieving with my current habits?

If your old habits were leading to weight gain, and now you’re maintaining your weight, that’s progress. Do you have more energy during the day with your current habits? That’s progress. If questions like that don’t reveal any progress you hadn’t noticed before, and you still feel frustrated, feedback from other people could help. Often objective feedback from others can uncover solutions that had been hiding under our noses the entire time:

Get feedback from your support system – Consider asking a trusted friend, family member or colleague for some honest feedback about what may be limiting you. Maybe you don’t realize that your workouts are much less focused than they used to be, or that you’re indulging a bit more often than you used to. Be receptive to their feedback, thank them and then act on it!

Go to a professional for guidance – A dietician, personal trainer or health coach will review your routines to see where there’s room for improvement and changes. Sometimes it’s all about getting an outside source of ideas to refocus and motivate you. Or the professional may push to be more accountable for the results of your choices.

Get a professional feedback service – So far, I’ve only come across two forms of organized feedback aimed at improving health habits. One option is hiring a nutrition or fitness coach and meeting regularly to review the ideas in this book. Remember, knowing what’s in this book is one thing: taking action on it is another! Coaches will help you convert knowledge into action.

The other form of organized feedback is a coaching service called My Body Tutor. The founder, Adam Gilbert, writes that his entire site is designed to help people “stay consistent” with their positive eating and physical activity changes. Having met him and seen his work firsthand, I’m a huge proponent of the service. If it’s within your budget, I recommend it.

The Power of Daily Personal Accountability

Following the mastermind meeting, I had no idea if there had been any follow through, and I gave the conversation no thought until a year later, when I saw for myself the incredible results. Through the power of daily personal accountability, there had been a dramatic change in the course of a relatively young man’s health and fitness. There’s little question that years were added to my friend’s life.

Here’s the secret that was revealed: eating healthy is not a choice that is made weekly or even daily—it’s a choice that is made at every moment of the day, choice by choice. It’s great to have an accountability partner who will hold you accountable for the decisions you make, but the accountability must be daily. Otherwise, you will be tempted to take shortcuts with no repercussions.

If you have to report your success, or lack thereof, every day, you will be held accountable, and there will be no room to hide. Personal daily accountability is the secret to sustained weight loss. Eating healthy is not a choice that is made weekly or even daily—it’s a choice that is made at every moment of the day, choice by choice.

A Solution That Will Work for You If You Want to Lose Weight

A personal daily accountability program exists that can work for you— it’s called My Body Tutor (www.MyBodyTutor.com). Here’s how My Body Tutor works: you are assigned a tutor (a.k.a. your accountability partner), typically a personal trainer with experience in nutrition. On the website of My Body Tutor, you will track your food consumption, exercise, sleep, and water intake and set goals for weight loss.

The daily personal accountability is what makes My Body Tutor special. At the end of each day, you report everything you’ve done that day—good or bad—on www.MyBodyTutor.com. The following morning, your tutor will evaluate the previous day’s report and call you to provide a critique of your food intake and the nutritional content of your food. Your tutor will monitor your sugar and sodium intake and give you a push when you need to exercise more and eat in moderation.

The website for My Body Tutor provides customized graphs that show your progress in weight loss, frequency of exercise, sleep patterns, water intake, and more. Your tutor will encourage, inspire, and hold you accountable. There’s nothing like it.

Make Health Your Number-One Priority

What’s more important than your health? If you’re not taking care of your health, you’re useless to your family, your spouse, and your kids. But let’s face it: weight loss is damn hard. We’re all tempted to indulge at times, and it’s hard to lose weight on a sustained basis without help.

Make a choice today to put your health first, and taking a look at My Body Tutor is a great place to start. And if you do, maybe a year from now, your friends will hardly recognize you.