Fitness with Flan: The importance of prepping when working towards your life and fitness goals

Incorporating a “Designed Thinking” mindset in relation to the term “prepping” is something that has been on my mind to write about for a while. I feel the term “prepping” in the fitness industry can be very overwhelming to a person trying to make a change especially if they are coming from very poor habits, routines and structures in the first place.

You normally hear the term “ Prepping” or “prep” only associated with food but I want to challenge your opinion slightly and say what if you opened your mind up to creating helpful and supportive systems in your immediate environment to ensure your moving forward on all fronts rather than just food alone.

Behaviour Change by designed thinking was a concept created by Kyra Bobinet, who lectures at Stanford university. She believed that modification of certain habits and routines over time can have a longer lasting impact on people trying to be healthier both physically and mentally. For example, a strategy that is useful to implement is designing  certain cues in your own environment that “prep” or “support” you with the overall goal. Like for instance If you want to get into running, leaving your headphones and running gear beside the bed so it’s the first thing you see in the morning or reducing your plate size especially if you overeat on a regular basis.

I feel it is so important as an individual to consider and analyse certain concepts of your day and try to create slightly better daily systems that support you and your lifestyle. Designing certain cues or reminders even if they seem so simple these alone will be most impactful. That 1% change or adjustment every day will build up and gain momentum to the point where your behaviours are shifting and becoming more automatic.  This my friends is where we want our behaviours to get too as the analytical part of the brain requires a lot of energy to make informed decisions each day and only has a certain amount of energy. When this energy is used up we will struggle to maintain these good intentions so when we are trying to change our behaviours we want to make aspects like this as easy and straightforward for ourselves as possible by creating these daily cues in our environment  to make sure we don’t beat ourselves before we have even begun.

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