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Healthy Habits Suck

How to Get Off the Couch and Live a Healthy Life… Even If You Don't Want To
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Healthy Habits Suck by Dayna Lee-Baggley offers a refreshingly blunt and humorous guide for those who struggle to maintain healthy routines. Rejecting the usual advice about enjoying exercise or making vegetables taste like treats, this book delivers practical skills grounded in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and neuroscience. It explains why we crave junk food and dislike exercise, helping readers accept self-criticism, develop self-compassion, and find real motivation to adopt healthy habits even when they feel unpleasant.
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Format: Paperback / softback
$3999
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book is ideal for readers who find traditional healthy habits challenging, struggle with motivation, and seek practical, science-backed strategies to create lasting change without sugar-coating the difficulties involved.

Book Hero thinking about your next read

Healthy habits are the worst. Blending humour and irreverence with the science of behavior change, a health psychologist and runner who's never experienced a "runner's high" offers practical, counterintuitive strategies and a playful approach to help readers live a healthier life-even if they really want to just sit on the couch and eat ice cream.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

Salad instead of steak? Working out? Skipping that second beer or glass of wine? Healthy habits are the worst.

If you're someone who gets up every morning and can't wait for your run, considers eating sweet potatoes a splurge, and sets aside thirty minutes before work to meditate—Healthy Habits Suck isn't for you. If you're someone who thinks about getting up to go for a run but goes back to sleep, regrets last night's dinner of fast food, and can barely get to work on time—let alone meditate—then this book will help you find the motivation you've been looking for to live your healthiest life, even when you don't want to.

With this funny, in-your-face guide, you won't find advice on how to enjoy exercise, or tips for making broccoli and kale taste as good as donuts and ice cream. What you will find are solid skills to help you actually do the healthy things you know you should be doing. Using these skills—based in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) and neuroscience—you'll learn to find the motivation you're really craving to adopt healthy habits, even if they do suck.

You'll also discover how to accept self-criticism, develop self-compassion, and live a more meaningful life. This book not only acknowledges that many healthy habits suck, it uses science to explain why we want the things we want (junk food), crave the things we crave (sugar), and dislike the things we dislike (exercise). At the end, you'll feel validated in feeling like these things are the absolute worst. But you'll also find the motivation to do them anyway.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Healthy Habits Suck has been praised for its compassionate, science-based approach and engaging, humorous style. Jason Lillis, PhD, highlights its blend of clear science, clinical examples, and relatable personal experience, while Denise Campbell-Scherer, MD, PhD, commends it as a laugh-out-loud introduction to managing instincts that undermine health goals, helping readers live more meaningful and vibrant lives through emotion-focused coping.

Book Hero reading reviews

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781684033317

Publisher: New Harbinger Publications

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 29 August 2019

Country: United States

Imprint: New Harbinger Publications

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 12.0mm

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 202.0mm

Weight: 231g

Pages: 184

About the Author

Dayna Lee-Baggley, PhD, exercises regularly and rarely enjoys it. She is a regular runner who competes in 10K races and never gets a runner's high. She drinks green smoothies and hates vegetables. Every time her kid asks her to go do some physical activity (biking, swimming, etc.) she thinks "crap, I don't want to do that" and she does it anyway.
Dayna is also a health psychologist and registered clinical psychologist. She holds positions as a clinical health psychologist at the Nova Scotia Health Authority for the Multi Organ Transplant Program; as core faculty member of the Behaviour Change Institute, which trains healthcare providers in behaviour change skills for chronic disease management and was lead psychologist for Partners for Healthier Weight, an obesity management clinic. She is president of the Atlantic Chapter of the Association for Contextual Behavioural Science (ACBS) and vice chair of the Halifax Chapter of the Canadian Obesity Network. Her areas of expertise include facilitating health behaviour change, managing and treating obesity, adapting to chronic health conditions and professional resiliency/burnout prevention in health care providers.

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