How To Control Eating Habits
I call the distance between your hand and your mouth “the last two feet of freedom.” No matter what any television ad seduces you with, what anybody puts in front of your face, or what anybody suggests you eat, what you actually eat is still your choice unless you’ve been strapped down and force-fed. In the end, no one is making you lift your hand from the plate to your mouth.
The problem is that most of us don’t always make healthy choices. just because you know the right thing to do doesn’t mean you’re going to do it.
Before we start beating ourselves up, however, I’d like to point out that the cards are stacked against us. The number of temptations we face on a daily basis is mind-blowing. There is a giant marketing machine out there trying to get us to eat more all the time. When I drive past a billboard that says, “Here, have a refreshing Coca-Cola,” suddenly I want a Coke. I didn’t want one-two minutes earlier, but now it’s back in my head.
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According to scientists, more than 40 percent of the actions we perform each day are driven by habit rather than conscious decision making. The good news is that they can be changed, especially if you employ the right strategies.
A History of Habits
We develop habits because they serve a very useful function. If we had to reinvent ourselves every day, life would be chaos. Habits are really nothing more than things we’ve learned to do by repetition and for the sake of efficiency. If you want to do something well without thinking about it—like ride a bike, throw a spear, or speak a language—it had better become a habit.
Naturally enough, when it comes to food, we all have habits as well. You probably buy the same brand and type of cereal or crackers over and over. You walk down the grocery aisle and pick up the same colored box every time. It’s easier than looking at the ingredients and trying to determine which one you’ll like best, or which one is the best for you.
Like most habits, our eating routines are well-worn patterns of behavior that also become comfortable, well-worn paths. If you’re used to grabbing a Coke and a bag of chips when you get home after work or school, that habit becomes a ritual of comfort, a pleasure you can look forward to and rely on.
Why habits are so tough to break or change comes down to brain chemistry. For every experience we go through, there is a change in our brain’s electrochemical composition. We find certain actions “rewarding” because our brain gets an extra shot of the chemical hormone dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a big part in pleasure, reward, and motivation.
Of course, like just about everything in life, it’s not that simple. Our brains also reward us for higher purposes—including doing positive things for ourselves and for others. the neurochemistry of gratification is extremely complex.
You get rewarded with a sensation of pleasure when you inject yourself with drugs, but you also feel a sense of reward when you act virtuously and say no to drugs. Go figure! Brain-imaging studies show that “providing for a public good”—giving to charity, for example—activates “the same neural pleasure circuit that’s engaged by heroin or orgasm or fatty foods.
Make That Change
So, the positive news is that we have some built-in chemical mechanisms that reward us for doing things that are good for us and for the people around us. “When you choose not to have a doughnut and instead to have something healthy and you feel good about that, you get a little bit of dopamine.” That’s one reason it's recommended to keeping lists of things we do that are healthy.
Keeping a diary or checklist of food or exercise, for example, gives you a feeling of satisfaction when you mark off your progress. It also shows that, unlike old dogs, we actually can learn new tricks.
Even though we have the neural hardware to learn new habits, however, old ones are still hard to break. They are literally patterns laid down in our network of brain cells, like rivulets in the sand after a rainstorm.
Want a good exercise to see how habits affect every aspect of your life? Try sitting comfortably in a chair and crossing your arms. Stay there for a while until you feel relaxed and at ease. Then change your arms by crossing them the other way. Does that feel as comfortable? Probably not. You crossed your arms the first way because it’s your habit and feels the most comfortable. The other way just doesn’t feel right.
So how long does it take to change a habit? In the case of crossed arms, a couple of weeks of crossing them the other way every time you sit down. For the bigger things, such as changing your habits of eating or exercising, or kicking an addiction, it’s probably going to take more. How long? As long at it takes for you to feel comfortable with your new routine. For some people, that means a few weeks; for others, a few months—and for others, a few years. We are all different, but for all of us, it’s possible to change.
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The important thing to be aware of is how powerful old habits are. When you start to change your food habits and get that initial burst of energy and well-being from juicing and eating plants, you might think you’ve got it licked. But as you get further away from your Reboot and that initial surge of progress, and you come under the stress of living, it’s not uncommon to slip back to your old ways. It’s like you’re a record needle: a big enough push and you skip back to an old groove.
If you want to sustain your health, your job is to keep the needle in its new groove and not let it jump backward—and to move it back into place when it does.
10 Useful Techniques
When you come right down to it, eating is just a behavior. What you’re learning about good nutrition and healthy living is wonderful, but in the end, it comes down to how you act. Change your behavior and you change your food habits.
One of the key insights from a series of studies by Duke University psychologist David Neal and his colleagues is that once habits are established, they have little to do with our goals or motivations in life. They believe that everyday habits are far more likely to be changed by changing the “triggers” of those largely unconscious behaviors—things such as time of day and location—than by knowledge or willpower.
A lot of people, in fact, think it takes enormous willpower to succeed at breaking bad habits and replacing them with a sustainable healthy lifestyle. Certainly, a little bit of discipline helps, but it’s not all about willpower. It’s just as much about being smart as it is about being tough, and the smarter you are, the less tough you have to be. The trick is to tilt the system in your favor. Here are some suggestions.
1. Slow it down.
One way to change your eating habits is literally to slow down. It takes about twenty minutes for your body to respond to the clues of satiation and to reach the state of satiety, or feeling full and no longer hungry. So if you eat fast, you generally pack in more food than you need—and certainly more than if you take your time and start to feel full before that huge serving in front of you is polished off.
There are different ways to slow things down. If you treat your food with a bit more reverence—something we talked about in changing your relationship with food—that slows things down. You might want to take more time chewing your food, which research shows make digestion easier and help your intestines absorb more nutrients. It’s also another way to savor your meal a bit more.
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One of the experiments that made headlines a couple of years ago took place in a branch of the Hardee’s fast-food chain. Professor Wansink and a colleague dimmed the lights and played mellow jazz in one section of the restaurant. Compared to the patrons in the noisy, bright areas of the restaurant, the special-section diners ate more slowly. And even though they ended up spending more time at the table, they ate less food—about 18 percent less. Same food, same order, just a slower pace.
2. Break the pattern.
Another insight that Duke psychologist Neal came up with is that deliberately changing your patterns of normal behavior can help break habits. In one study, moviegoers stopped eating a bucket of stale popcorn they were given only when asked to use their “non-dominant” hand—left instead of right for most of us.
Neal calls this interrupting “the pattern and context” of a habit. It can apply to your nighttime snacking habits, for example. Just by changing where you sit to watch TV, or wherever you normally sit when having a snack, can increase your chances of successfully breaking a habit.
What you’ve got to do, says Neal, is “disrupt” the patterns that reinforce mindless habits, which are largely unconscious actions. Once you break the pattern, you’ve got a much better chance to bring your behavior under “intentional control.”
3. Change The Size
Changing your immediate environment is much easier than changing your habits by using willpower. No one knows this better than Professor Wansink, who spent decades researching why we eat so much without thinking about it. He reckons most of us gain weight over the years because we mindlessly consume about 10 percent too many calories every day. Catch these bad habits and you’ll lose weight instead.
Wansink found that a lot of eating has to do with external signals and cues, not what our bodies—or even our conscious minds—tell us. Take serving size. Wansink observed that Americans are generally heavier than Europeans. Why? One simple reason: Americans tend to serve larger portions at meals than Europeans, both at home and in restaurants.
Then they tend to clean their plates, taking the cues of satiation not from their stomachs but from their eyes, regardless of how much is served. Serve more, they eat more. So just by serving a little less . . . you get the idea.
This size factor also works when it comes to boxes. For example, if you buy the largest box of cereal, you’ll eat more than if you’re pouring from the smaller box. The same goes for ice cream; serve yourself from a quart-sized container and you’ll eat less than if you’re carving from a gallon tub. So spoon your servings into a bowl; you’ll eat less than if you eat straight from the container. And try finding plates that are slightly smaller. It’s a subtle difference that will make a big impact over time.
4. Keep It Out Of Sight.
Remember the punch line to the old joke about the seafood diet? “If I see food, then I eat it.” The sight of food is a powerful stimulus, something that advertisers know all too well. For some people, the sight of food actually stimulates the pancreas into releasing insulin, preparing for a blast of sugar. That insulin release lowers the blood sugar level and makes you feel hungrier.
So one big way to change your eating habits is just to keep things out of sight. It sounds simple, but it works. In one case Wansink tracked office assistants who were given a jar of Hershey’s Kisses as a gift for Secretary’s Week. If the jar sat in front of them on their desk, they ate more than if the jar was on a filing cabinet across the room. If the jar was actually hidden, let’s say inside a filing cabinet drawer, they ate fewer still.
You can take this to the extreme, of course, perhaps by not walking down the street where your favorite bakery sits or not driving past your local McDonald’s. That may sound a little impractical, but at the very least, you should reverse-engineer your kitchen and home so that everything tempting is out of sight. Studies show that the first things you see when you open the cupboard are three to five times more likely to be consumed than those you don’t immediately see.
5. Make It Hard To Get.
Part of what was being measured in the secretary experiment was the convenience factor. If you have to walk across the room to get chocolate, you’re going to eat less than if it’s sitting on your desk. The more convenient the food, the more likely we are to consume it.
This seems so obvious, doesn’t it? But when it comes to overeating, knowing that reducing convenience can also reduce consumption is something we should use to our advantage. Why make your relationship with food one of struggle, of you versus temptation? If you have a package of Oreos in your cupboard, and it’s right in your face when you open the door, it sets up a kind of willpower contest.
If you have to drive to the convenience store to pick up a package of Oreos, you’re far less likely to eat those cookies—especially since most cravings are gone in about twenty minutes.
6. Change In Small Ways At First.
It’s hard enough changing any particular habit, for me or anybody else. So it makes sense that it’s even harder to wake up one morning and say that you’re going to change everything, starting today. I think it’s easier to change in small ways at first and build new habits one step at a time.
One of the ways to set yourself up for a relapse into old ways is to take on too much at once. It’s a big reason most diets fail. You set up this entirely new regime of eating, one that’s often uncomfortable if not downright unpleasant, and then you cling to it for dear life while you’re losing weight. Once you’ve lost your weight, you go right back to the way you ate previously . . . heck, you can’t wait to get back there.
One of the reasons I think that a Reboot is so effective is that it changes your relationship with food in a short period of time. Finish a Reboot that lasts fifteen days or longer, and I guarantee you will have a new-found love of fruits and veggies. (I can make the assumption that you didn’t particularly care for them prior to your Reboot or you wouldn’t be Rebooting.)
Nonetheless, if your old habits around food still exist, you’ll slowly find yourself eating fewer and fewer plants after the Reboot, and then you’ll be looking at another failed diet. The diet didn’t fail you; it was the after-the-diet diet that failed you.
So here’s the thing: you don’t even have to Reboot. You can start by eating more fruits and vegetables. You can change your habits around food more gradually, and you will still get healthy and lose weight. It won’t be nearly as fast as on a Reboot, but if you make lasting changes, you will make lasting health gains and weight loss.
7. Eat The Good Stuff First.
A lot of us eat like we’re kids. I certainly did. You know—where you push the vegetables out of the way and eat the mac and cheese first? A good way to change your eating habits is to reverse that order.
I recommend drinking a full glass of water before each meal; this way you won’t confuse hunger with thirst, and you won’t feel as empty. Then, when it comes to the other stuff on the plate, just eat the greens first. Maybe you’ll feel a little fuller by the time you get to the pasta or the meatloaf.
You can also try replacing foods that are not nutritious with healthier ones. Just like when you identify your trigger foods and your treat foods, focus on amplifying what’s going well in your diet. There might be a lot of things we’re doing well, so let’s not declare the whole thing a bloody disaster.
8. Start Fresh.
You can get positive momentum going in a single day, and I think the best time to start is first thing in the morning. I try to approach each new day as if I’m waking up from a mini famine. I want to put only the best in my system, which means as much plant food as possible. Every now and then, I go with an omelet because I think it’s OK to have a little animal protein once in a while, but I try to focus on plants for the first part of the day—juice, fruit, oatmeal, or maybe a smoothie.
7. Eat The Good Stuff First.
A lot of us eat like we’re kids. I certainly did. You know—where you push the vegetables out of the way and eat the mac and cheese first? A good way to change your eating habits is to reverse that order.
I recommend drinking a full glass of water before each meal; this way you won’t confuse hunger with thirst, and you won’t feel as empty. Then, when it comes to the other stuff on the plate, just eat the greens first. Maybe you’ll feel a little fuller by the time you get to the pasta or the meatloaf.
You can also try replacing foods that are not nutritious with healthier ones. Just like when you identify your trigger foods and your treat foods, focus on amplifying what’s going well in your diet. There might be a lot of things we’re doing well, so let’s not declare the whole thing a bloody disaster.
8. Start Fresh.
You can get positive momentum going in a single day, and I think the best time to start is first thing in the morning. I try to approach each new day as if I’m waking up from a mini famine. I want to put only the best in my system, which means as much plant food as possible. Every now and then, I go with an omelet because I think it’s OK to have a little animal protein once in a while, but I try to focus on plants for the first part of the day—juice, fruit, oatmeal, or maybe a smoothie.
Now, I’m fairly certain that if I’d gotten up and eaten a whole packet of Oreos for breakfast, I would have found it really hard to eat something healthy after that. You kind of feel like eating crap all day rather than your veggies. In the same way that you can teach your taste buds to prefer veggies, you can also unteach them, and pretty fast. And it triggers a pattern with me—that I’ve started poorly, that I’ve let myself down, that it’s all over, and that I might as well crash.
Whatever that syndrome is—whether I’m trying to keep that manufactured bliss point going or I’m low on energy or I just don’t like myself—I find that if I start my day by consuming more plants, I’m able to balance myself out and cruise better throughout the whole day. It certainly leaves me less prone to sugar crashes, where I feel like I need a piece of chocolate or some kind of sugar hit to pick me up.
9. Beware The Influencers.
In the process of changing your food habits, it’s important to understand the psychology of external cues that influence what and how much we eat. We’ve discussed these in terms of the inducements of advertisers and in terms of serving and container sizes, but not in terms of the social standards that condition our habits.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll never stop hearing my parents’ voices telling me to finish everything on my plate because the people in Africa are starving. My mum would actually say, “You are now part of the clean plate club.” It was a job, and I felt rewarded. So do most of us in the West today: studies show that on average we eat 92 percent of what we put on our plates. In some cultures, a clean plate is considered an insult to the host or hostess since it implies that you didn’t get enough. Not in our world.
Obese people, it turns out, are more sensitive to external cues and influencers than non-obese people. In his work studying the eating habits of the overweight, the late psychologist Stanley Schachter did one experiment showing how obese subjects kept in a windowless room ate more when the wall clocks were sped up. They were influenced more by the external cues of the “time for dinner” than by their own feelings of hunger. If the clock said it was time to eat, so be it.
So you need to stop playing by the rules of others. Don’t eat to be polite or just because someone is making the offer or because it’s dinnertime. Start to be more of a maverick when it comes to socially accepted food habits.
10. Keep a List.
There is some part of me that doesn’t like keeping lists. It seems a little too controlling. But doctors and fitness instructors know how powerful keeping a list can be for sticking to an exercise or eating program.
There are two ways you can go. The first is the elimination list, where you write down all the things you want to get done and then cross them off as you go. It’s a great way to get organized and a great way to visualize what you want to accomplish. For that matter, it’s also a de-stressor because once you write down what you need to do, you don’t have to think about it as much or worry about forgetting something important. The satisfaction comes with crossing off each successive item.
The other way is to keep a record of things as you get them done. This is particularly effective for exercise regimes and athletic training because of the tremendous reinforcement you get from recording your progress. It gives you a sense of fulfillment and self-esteem as you see your number of reps increase or the length of your running time expands. It also keeps you honest and reminds you to keep to your routine.
The same goes for food and keeping a food diary. It makes you think about each thing you eat, since you’re going to be writing it down, and it lets you see honestly how much you’re really cramming in. In this way, keeping a list is a great way to guard against mindless eating. If you’re keeping a record of your weight and how you feel, you can also see the relationship between food and your weight and health.
You can keep your own notebook or diary, use one of the many online apps, or even wear a fitness device, such as the Withings, Jawbone UP, or Fitbit wristbands.
Everything Is Relative
As you change your food habits, your perception of taste starts to shift. Once you get off the sugar train, you begin to taste flavors that were too subtle to notice before. Without sugar to make your taste buds jaded, fruits become sweeter to the taste.
What you are experiencing is a shifting baseline of what we consider sweet or salty. Once you have recalibrated your sense of taste, there is a balance and a limit where too much of a treat actually doesn’t taste very good; it can taste sickeningly sweet or bitterly salty.
HOW TO BREAK FOOD HABITS
Ready to identify and break your food habits? Try the following:
1. Change your dinner environment. Try turning down the volume at dinnertime. Instead of eating around a blaring TV set, eat at the table to some quiet music. And slow down the pace. Chew more. Savor your food.
2. Change your dinner plates. It may seem like a small thing, but Professor Wansink found that smaller plates meant smaller meals with the same level of satisfaction. Try using smaller plates. And serve yourself just a little bit less than normal. Just 10 percent less will make a big difference over time.
3. Change your kitchen environment. If there are problem foods for you, don’t stock them at home. Or keep them out of sight. Don’t make changing your food habits a contest of will.
4. Change your mealtime patterns. Start by drinking water and eating your greens first, not last. This will fill you up a bit and slow you down a little with the foods you know are going to add on useless calories.
5. Change your breakfast. Start your first meal of the day with a big glass of green juice. Go ahead with your normal breakfast—or what you want of it—after that. But start the day with a good, healthy feeling.
6. Keep a food diary. One of the best ways to understand how different foods affect you, and what sort of long-term eating habits work best for you, is to keep a record of everything you eat. This helps to make mindless eating habits conscious ones too.
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