Life has many challenges that we want to achieve. To fully succeed at that is a challenge everytime.
If we want to achieve a certain goal we need to follow certain guidelines we set for ourselves. For example if you want to become healthy one of the components is that you have to eat and drink healthy. If you decide you want to do it initially by drinking less soda you decide how to do it. For example if you normally drink soda in the afternoon and in the evening you could decide to never drink it in the evening anymore. If you want to commit fully you can decide to never ever drink soda anymore. The benefit of never doing it again is that you will never have to question your options anymore. You just know that you will no longer drink it. Obviously abandoning it completely will be harden on yourself, yet is makes the decision making easier on you because you never have “give in” to the urge anymore. Once you made your mind up to never do it again you will never have to force yourself to make the right decision and you are less at risk to cave in again.
It’s easier to hold your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold them 98 percent of the time. – Clayton M. Christensen
If instead of 100% of the time you only follow your own guidelines around 90% of the time you are uncertain what you will pick next time. This means that it’s not 10% of the time that you are putting yourself to take a decision, but rather 100% of the time. As a consequence you are more likely to cheat on your own plan. You will need willpower everytime you have to make the decision. If instead you align yourself with the idea of for example never drinking alcohol anymore it will in due time require no willpower anymore. You will get so used to the new lifestyle that you are no longer considering that you actually stopped drinking. Rather than that you have decided how your future you will look.
Currently you may be extremely far from completely banning something you liked before. For example you are used to eat fast food once every day. Instead of quitting cold turkey you could consider reducing the amount of times you eat fast food. But rather than letting you have to make the decision every single time/every day add in a rule. For example only eat a bit fast food in the weekend. This will help you that you don’t have to make the decision consciously every time you have to eat. Prepare your meals in the weekend for next week. So that when you are in a hurry you only have to grab the food and enjoy the quick eat while you spent the time preparing it in the weekend. Slowly you will get used to it more that you cold even decide to never eat fast food anymore, unless for example twice a year when you are going to a festival.