Welcome to the MyBuddyGreen podcast. I'm Jason Wackeb, founder and co-CEO of MyBuddyGreen and your host.

Dr. Michelle Sieger is an award-winning NIH-funded Sustainable Behavior Change researcher

at the University of Michigan and a lifestyle coach. For nearly three decades,

she has pioneered methods to create sustainable, healthy behavior change that are being used

to boost patient health, employ well-being and gym membership retention.

And today, she's here to chat about her new book, The Joy Choice. How to finally achieve

lasting changes in eating and exercise. Michelle, welcome.

It's great to be here, thanks for having me.

It's great to have you because when I think when it comes to all things nutrition and diet,

we all know those very sad statistics around New Year's resolutions.

So I'm going to segue to the big question which I think hits at the why behind this book.

What are we getting so wrong when it comes to habit formation or achieving lasting

changes when it comes to nutrition and fitness?

Well, what if, and I'm going to ask a rhetorical question to your question and then I'm going

to answer it. The first question is, what if we've been getting it all wrong? There have been so

many approaches and strategies. And so as I was taking a walk this morning and I was really

trying to understand, how can I distill this information in its simplest form? And I think in

its simplest form, the answer to your question is, we have been paying too much attention. Our focus

has been on the ideal. How do we do this right? Instead of, how do we do this wrong? How do we

succeed in ways that's going to let us do our healthy eating, our intentional eating, our exercise

in ways that are going to be perfectly imperfect and reflect the other ways we have to live

complex areas of our lives? So I'm going to give you an example. I see that your brow is furrowed.

...