Try cooking while watching your favorite show.

People start exercising for all kinds of reasons, but if you ask most of them, it usually comes down to one of two things. They want to look better, or a doctor said something that scared them. Both work. Fear and vanity are surprisingly effective coaches.

What gets me is how rarely people exercise to prevent problems before they show up. We're almost wired not to.

A psychologist explained it to me this way. Working out to prevent a disease you don't have yet is abstract. The threat isn't real enough to feel urgent. But exercising to deal with something you're already experiencing? That's concrete. That's now. That matters.

Think about it. If you're getting weaker and you can't carry groceries up the stairs anymore, you don't need anyone to explain why strength training matters. You feel it every day. The same thing happens with smoking. Most people don't quit to prevent lung cancer. They quit after the diagnosis. Few people clean up their diet to avoid a heart attack. Many do it after they've had one.

We also have a remarkable talent for believing we'll be the lucky one. If nine out of ten people are heading toward a health problem, most of us quietly assume we'll be in that lucky ten percent. I do it too. It's human nature. It's just not a plan.

So what do you do if you're not scared yet and you're not trying to impress anyone? How do you get yourself moving before life forces your hand?

Start by making it easier to do the right thing.

Here's something honest about me. I have solid discipline. I can drag myself to the gym when I don't feel like it, stay consistent with training, and follow through on commitments. But my self-control is another story. Put junk food in front of me and I'll eat it. Give me a streaming app and I'll watch four more episodes than I planned. Show me a social media rabbit hole at eleven at night and I'll fall right in.

So I've learned to stop fighting temptation and start rearranging my environment instead. I ask friends not to bring over food I'll mindlessly eat. I put time limits on apps I can't stop scrolling. I've leaned on people around me to keep me honest. If you have that kind of control over your environment, these things genuinely help.

But a lot of people don't. Maybe you've got a house full of family members or roommates. Maybe your partner's idea of a perfect evening is parking on the couch and flipping through Netflix. You can't childproof your entire life, and honestly, you shouldn't have to.
What you can do is sneak healthy habits into the things you're already doing.

Watch your show. Cook your food. Do both at the same time. This one is so simple it almost feels like cheating.

Cooking while listening to Audiobooks.

If there's a show you've been meaning to watch or a movie you keep putting off, make that your cooking time. Put it on, tie on an apron, and spend that hour or two making a recipe with enough servings to last most of the week. Something you can freeze or throw in the fridge and reheat in minutes.

Cook three recipes with eight servings each and you've got 24 healthy meals ready to go. Suddenly the fast option and the healthy option are the same option. That's the whole game.

You're not sacrificing your evening. You're not white-knuckling your way through a diet. You're watching something you enjoy while also doing something genuinely good for yourself. And once reheating a healthy meal becomes the easy, familiar choice, the behavior starts to stick on its own. You've stopped needing motivation because you've built a system that works without it.

WeCookFit.com has hundreds of freezer-friendly recipes with six, eight, even ten or more servings, built for exactly this kind of cooking.

Click Here for part two with several more ways to reduce resistance or “nudge” yourself to make healthier choices.

Part 1 2

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Reference Links:

The inspiration and some of the information for this article came from Nudge: The Final Edition. It's a book written by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.

In the author's words:

A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any option or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not taxes, fines subsidies bans or mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

Not all the suggestions in this two part article are nudges, but they are all based on methods that have helped people make better choices.

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beginning any diet or exercise program.

2/21/2022
Updated 4/23/2026