Five flights of stairs that restarted my Atomic Habits

I bought a bunch of self-help books in June 2021. We were in lockdown, I’d just started my new job, and sitting at home all day I had a lot of free time that I wanted to use better. The Psychology of Money was the first one I read (I’ll write about that one soon). Atomic Habits was the second.

I’ve always felt happy after I do something productive. The problem was that most of the time I didn’t have the motivation to actually do the productive thing. I started reading Atomic Habits hoping it would change that.

Ironically enough, I didn’t finish it. I got lazy, got distracted with other things, and stopped somewhere in the middle. A couple of months went by, lockdown ended, and I moved to Bangalore. In February 2022 I started going to the gym. After my first day at the gym, I was finding it difficult to even climb the five floors up to my apartment. That’s when I decided I needed to change my lifestyle, and that’s why I started reading the book again. This time I sat down, read every day, and finished it in about a month.

I know this book has been reviewed a million times, and they all have pretty much the same summary, so I’m not going to write another one. On the off chance you haven’t read it, James Clear has a summary on his site (although I do recommend reading the whole book). I’m only going to talk about the two ideas that actually stuck with me.

When I moved to Bangalore I wasn’t really a healthy person. I was eating a lot of junk. I’d started going to the gym to change that, but the gym on its own wasn’t giving me much in the way of results, because I was still eating badly.

The first idea was making bad habits difficult. So I stopped buying junk food and keeping it at home. Those same stairs helped here, since the building doesn’t have a lift. If I got a craving, the only way to get junk food was to climb down five floors, walk to a shop, and climb all the way back up again. I really don’t like doing either of those things, so most of the time I just didn’t bother. That alone cut down how much junk I was eating by a lot.

The other idea was identity-based habits. In school and college I was never an athletic person. I wasn’t into sports or anything like that. I’d learned swimming in college and used to swim every summer vacation, but that was just for fun. I’d started looking at my body and my age, and I wasn’t happy with how I looked. That’s why I started going to the gym in the first place, and a month later, in March 2022, I started boxing too.

Being consistent was hard, though. A lot of days I just wasn’t motivated to go to the gym. I was training alone and I was afraid to ask anyone for help, and the junk food cravings didn’t just go away. So I did what the book says and convinced myself I already was a fitness freak. I’m someone who’s on a diet. I’m someone who goes to the gym regularly. What helped even more was saying it out loud. Colleagues at the office or friends I’d run into would ask if I wanted to go out for dinner, and a lot of the time I’d say no, I’m on a diet, or I have boxing class. I didn’t really care what they thought. But saying it to people kind of made me believe it more, even though I wasn’t there yet.

In 2022, I set myself a challenge and lost 12 kg in three months. In 2023, I finished the then viral 75 Hard Challenge (that one’s getting its own post too). I picked swimming back up, and after that I got into badminton. I’ve also gotten better at boxing. It hasn’t all been smooth though. I’ve had several injuries along the way. There were also phases where I slipped back, stopped following a diet and gained weight. But it’s been more than four years now since I started going to the gym, and I still go at least five days a week.

I can’t say it’s all because of one book, but I do think it’s a big reason for a lot of it.