make a new habit

This isn't about food directly - but perhaps it is really.

I read an article about some research into creating habits. (original abstract at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/hbrc/diet/lallyp.html).  The study participants took on a new behaviour such as eating fruit with lunch or going for a run, and tried to do it at the same time every day to create an automatic cue for the behaviour.  It took between 18 and 254 days for this new behaviour to become automatic, with more complex behaviours taking longer (eating a piece of fruit is easy, going for a run is harder).  Average time to self-reported aromaticity was 66 days.

So, if you do a new desired (or undesired) behaviour every day, or almost every day, within a couple of months you are likely to do it without thinking or making  yourself have to do it.   If you have new year's resolutions that you want to keep, look out for the long haul.  Better still, start now, and when everyone else is just getting started you will be half way to the new you.

Maybe this is about cooking after all.  I started blogging about food a couple of months ago.  I had some gaps when I was teaching, but now if I haven't done something I can write about each day I feel oddly bereft, and lurk at the computer.  I've almost got the habit of blogging...now for some of those other things, like vacuuming...how can I make housework as simple and rewarding to do.  I need the equivalent of reader statistics to make feel more motivated.