This is an amazing book, great for the layperson or for a therapist to go through with a client. It's based on ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) which is evidence-based for many conditions and also for regular people who want to live a life more aligned with their values.

The book is very "real". There's no sugarcoating or trying to convince the reader that exercising or dieting will be easy if they do a handful of tricks, or that exercising after an 8hr workday and 1hr round trip commute won't be tiring. Instead, it guides readers on finding what matters and learning how to take actions in that direction, while allocating less energy to fighting unpleasant thoughts/feelings and letting those be present instead.

This is full of really good information. And it comes with the option to print out worksheets if you want to take it chapter by chapter and do a worksheet a week. Well worth the read.!

Healthy Habits Suck is sure to grab anyone’s attention who knoooows it’s important to be healthy but just lacks the motivation to make the changes and stick with them. More than your typical self-help book, this one delves into the psychological reasons behind why our body is hesitant to healthy changes, and some tried-and-true methods to help facilitate healthy changes to our diets & lifestyles.

I was unable to finish this book. I felt like it was a little too American-centric for me. There was a focus on losing weight that I found unfortunate as I feel being healthy is not the same as being thin. Ultimately, I think this book wasn't for me as I'm a long distance runner who quite enjoys being healthy. So sorry I couldn't finish this!

While the writing style was not my cup of tea, I was sticking with the book until the author took a cheap shop at "skinny" people. Some people are very thin due to genetics, and this can cause many problems for them. The generalized assumptions were unnecessary.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC to read and give my honest feedback.

Healthy habits suck....yes they do. This is not what I thought it was going to be honestly and the methods in this book are used for a wide variety of things... not just healthy habits. I would even go so far as those battling depression and anxiety would get use from this book. So it’s an all around helpful book.

What did I like? Well the author makes our mind seem like a traveling bus, voices tell us which decisions to make even if they are good or bad for us. I liked that because it just explains why people do dumb things. Every decision we make and our experiences act like passengers which I felt was a good example on how our brain works when trying to protect us. The scenario was accurate and it was an easy one to relate to. The mindfulness section also spoke to me because the mind is a powerful thing, and we need reminders to be kind to ourselves and not just others.

Would I buy this book? Yes, it would definitely go on my list of books to recommend to people dealing with disorders and such because as I’ve said.... all around based book and a real genius idea. Easy to understand and useful analogies for people trying to help others.

Thoughts for the author? Really enjoyed this helpful book, the bus analogy was clever and my favorite.

"So, if you’re not 90 percent sure you can accomplish your goal in the time frame you set, then change the goal. Usually I recommend setting just one 90 percent goal at a time, or two at the most. If you try to do too many changes at once, even if each one is a 90 percent goal, you’re probably not meeting the 90 percent rule overall. That’s why I asked you to pick just one healthy habit to work on with this book."

I've read too many books on health and food and exercise and at this point I am not sure I can get more value out of a book. There are some concepts here that were great to remember, like the 90% one above. As well as connecting actions/choices to your values. And talking about the passengers/bus analogy resonated with me. Just because the passengers can ask you to go somewhere else doesn't mean you have to change your route.

If you're like me and have read a lot on this topic, I am not sure this book will give you anything new, but if you've only read about diets, I recommend this because it will help you think about how to become meaningfully motivated and move towards a healthier life.

with thanks to netgalley and New Harbinger for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

The synopsis provided stated this was a funny guide to help get off the couch and how to make healthy food taste better. The humor was lost on me, and this seemed to have a lot of repeating "tips". This might be helpful for some but this isn't for me.

I got pulled into requesting this book due to the title. Who wouldn't want to read it?! It's the truth haha
It was an OK book, incorporating humour makes it more interesting, however I didn't really learn anything new. She had an honest view of explaining things and the mind-body connection is key to losing weight.

This book came out the gate strong. Making a lot of connections to how we are as evolved humans and how we treat resting and conserving energy to our caveman roots. Clarify your values. Don't just say "I want to lose weight to feel better". What is the why? What will you do once you feel better? Using the SMART strategy to reach those values. Using behavior assessments along the way.

These are some of the strategies that I was able to take away from the book early on. At some point though it turned a bit too new agey for my taste with the mental 'passengers' that derail us from our goals. I am more a science and fact person, so this was a bit of a turn off for me. Others may feel differently.

I'd give this book a solid 3.5 stars.

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

“The majority of North Americans eat too much processed food, don’t sleep enough, drink too much, and are overweight.” Why? Because Healthy Habits Suck!

Healthy behavior goes against our caveman instincts to rest, avoid pain, seek pleasure, and live in the now. To override those instincts, you must find more pros or reduce the cons of a healthy behavior like exercising. You may never experience a runner’s high but the bragging rights of running a marathon may be enough of a pro in your eyes to encourage running 10 miles before work each morning.

The goal you set has to be within your control. Sometimes, despite eating low calorie food, you just can’t lose weight. You’ve reached a plateau. So you give up and indulge in a chocolate sundae. This happens because your goal shouldn’t be “losing weight” because your body controls that. Instead, you should make “eating more fruit and vegetables” or “eating fast food only once per week” your goal because that is totally within your control.

Healthy Habits Suck uses well-researched psychological methods to allow you to motivate yourself to reach your goals. The author suggests working on only one goal at a time and reading just one chapter per week. The ideas in each of the nine chapters require some introspection so that timeframe seems reasonable. The book also has a website with a 22-page workbook used within the chapters plus three short audio files.

There is a lot to like about this book. It approaches healthy goals in new ways. This is not just another book with a diet and recipes. It digs into the underlying motivation or stagnation of our actions. It might be the way to achieve truly long-term healthier living. 4 stars!

Thanks to New Harbinger and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.

This book is exactly what it says it is, a guide for being healthy when you aren't motivated to work out or eat healthy. The author explains why we crave certain foods and gave some tips that did work for me.

Healthy Habits Suck didn't offer, as the writer stated, a magical exercise or meal plan to lose weight (because let's face it, most would take up the book to lose some weight). It dwelled much on what value do you want. Why did you want to do xyz instead of abc? By digging deeper, she believed that we would obtain a push power that keeps us going.

This book didn't sugar-coated. Eating more veggies won't make you automatically like it, etc., but it excelled in doing and keep doing. Even if you fall off the wagon, which is human, she advised us to be back on track by reducing the 'goal'.

Overall, this book was more of a psychological lifestyle, but everyone might benefit from it.

There is some decent information in here on how to change your lifestyle slowly and permanently.
How she broke down changes into "values" and forced you to dig deeper into the reasons behind these "values" before making a change could be a great way to decide if they are even needed.
I especially liked the 90% idea (make sure you can commit to the new thing 90% of the time before integrating it).
The problem I had with the book is that the writing makes it seem like they are trying to explain adult issues to a small child.
As a result this comes off highly condescending.
Thank you NetGalley and New Harbinger Publications, Inc. for my ARC.

This was one that I picked up on a whim. I thought it was very informative and I enjoyed reading this!

Wow. What a phenomenal book.

I picked up this book solely because of the cover. Based on the cover and the title, I was expecting a book which will use strong language and rant with me about how difficult it is to live healthy.

Instead I got a well researched book on why maintaining healthy behaviours is so difficult and what I can do to make behaviours stick. The author used principles of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) to suggest ways to live healthier.

I have been restless the past few days because of a difficult situation at work. This book was right up my alley. Although it was a book on healthy behaviours, it helped me so much with my anxiety too. It reminded me to go back to the book by Hariss as well.

Please don't consider this a weight loss book, it is not. It is strictly about being in the right mental frame to make health behaviours stick. The author assumes that you already know what to do to lose weight (eat whole foods and more veggies, less sugar and processed food, exercise etc.), the problem is that you don't stick with those behaviours. That's what this book targets.

I will definitely revisit in future once I apply some techniques. A companion book to this can be Better than Before by Gretchen Rubin where she talks about the loopholes. Combo of these two would be deadly for your extra weight.

I received a free copy from Netgalley. Thanks to the publisher, author and Netgalley.

I actually do enjoy having a healthy lifestyle but also love to read about various topics and people from a psychological and biological standpoint. I liked how this book did relate our tendency to not typically gravitate towards those healthy standpoints back to a evolutionary basis. The book didn't really hold new information for me but I thought it was very informative and interesting.

I received an e-copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!

The premise of the book is shown in the title: healthy habits (such as running, eating greens, avoiding fast food) can be difficult to implement, because they are difficult or even counterintuitive. We’d rather stay in and eat a donut / a hamburger with fries, right? And this approach kind of makes sense and makes one’s failure’s at staying healthy easier to stomach. However: then Lee-Baggley goes on to ground these hang-ups of ours in our cave people past (”it was easier to survive back then if you had your belly full!”) , and this evolutionary psychology does not work for me.

Oddly, then there comes another metaphor: that each of us is a “bus driver”, and our “passengers” are various emotions and needs we experience. So, for example, as the bus driver, we think “it’s time to exercise!”, but one of the passengers shouts that “exercise is boring!” and another tells us “eat a donut instead!”. And we should try to work with these passengers to be able to take them into account or dismiss as needed. Again, not a bad metaphor, although not a 100% congruent with the first one.

Overall, I think the book contains some good ideas, but it is unfortunately too chaotic. It switches gears / metaphors too easily, and loses sight of its bigger picture to the point where the reader is not sure what the bigger picture is.

I'm mixed in my opinion of this book. It's putting a technique of behavior modification called ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) into the covers of a book. It's a thorough workshop and one that provides a step-by-step guide to the process, encouraging the reader to go through ACT for one habit using worksheets (available on the book's website) and thought exercises.

I liked that the author used real world analogies such as giving a party or driving a bus to make the principles of ACT come to life. What I'm not convinced of is that this method is effective.

If you are looking for a different approach to creating healthy habits, this book is for you.

Strong Start, Falters About Halfway In, Never Really Recovers. This book had an intriguing premise - it was going to explain the scientific reasons for why you don't want to be healthy and help you overcome them. And it had some excellent points in the beginning regarding human evolution, even as it glossed over any actual science or citations. But around halfway in it begins using a particular metaphor that effectively says "you're not to blame" and rather than continuing with the quasi-scientific explanations it goes full bore with this metaphor through the end of the book. Intriguing in the first half, and genuinely well written throughout. May be exactly what people who generally read self help books are looking for. Recommended.