In last week’s post, The two faces of ‘giving something up’, I discussed the key reason why we humans struggle to adopt healthy eating habits and other behaviours that support our well-being: deep in our brains, we have a set of structures known collectively as the basal ganglia, which make the lion’s share of our daily decisions about what to eat, drink and do… and make these decisions completely outside of our conscious awareness.
Unfortunately for us, the criteria which the basal ganglia use to make these decisions were shaped by an environment of food scarcity, not to mention general uncertainty about whether the organism that the basal ganglia were making those decisions on behalf of, would even be alive tomorrow.
Hence, the basal ganglia prioritise short-term gain (more pleasure – which means more calories, more fat, more sugar, more salt) over long-term gain (longer lifespan, a healthier weight, freedom from chronic disease).
All of which means that if you want to enjoy good health into old age, and inhabit a slim body, you have to override the decision-making process of the basal ganglia by running a fully conscious cost-benefits analysis on every choice you make, that affects your weight and your health.
Once you’ve done that, you will inevitably find that you need to set clear guidelines for yourself about what you do, and what you don’t do.
This is the step that many people baulk at. I’ve had clients give me all sorts of rationales for why they don’t think that setting food rules is a good idea for them:
“I’ve tried cutting out sugar before, but I always go back to it. Making rules doesn’t work for me.”
“Whenever I tell myself to stop doing something, I end up wanting to do it more.”
“I’ll feel deprived if I don’t eat cheese, and then I’m more likely to binge.”
“I need one vice!”
“My psychologist said I shouldn’t set food rules because I have an eating disorder.”
I get it. Setting food guidelines that actually work for you is tricky and there are plenty of ways to do it wrongly.
But the right way to do it is relatively straightforward. First, you run the cost benefits analysis that I discussed in last week’s post.
With that information now available to your conscious decision-making faculties, you choose one food or activity that either needs strict limits set around it, or needs to be eliminated altogether from your repertoire of choices in order for you to be healthy and happy.
I’ll use chocolate as an example as it’s such a common binge trigger. You might decide to place a limit on your chocolate consumption, such as nominating one day of the week when you eat it, the place where you eat it, the person or people you eat it with, the type of chocolate, and the quantity.
Then you ask yourself the crucial question that transforms these types of guidelines from arbitrary rules that you will probably end up chafing against, into agents of personal liberation: Who would I be, or become, if I stuck to this rule?
“What kind of person would I be, if I only ate one square of dairy-free, 85% cocoa or higher, organically grown, fair trade chocolate, while with my significant other [hint – only choose this option if your significant other is not a chocoholic!], after dinner on Saturday night? Who would I become – physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually? What would it do for me if I consistently made behavioural choices that were in alignment with my knowledge, and my principles?”
In other words, you link the guideline with your identity. It makes a statement about who you are, or who you want to become. You are not limited by following the rule – it’s the path you follow in order to shake off the limitations imposed on you by your basal ganglia, which in turn is limited by the setting in which it evolved. It’s the path you follow in order to be free to be who you truly desire to be.
As I discussed in another post, When to say ‘sometimes’ and when to say ‘never’, people who’ve consciously and purposefully made these kinds of decisions around foods that negatively impact on their health very quickly find their attraction to the food diminishing – often to the point where the brain doesn’t even respond to it as food!
When you no longer see yourself as the kind of person who binges in shameful secrecy on cheap, low quality chocolate, and instead, see yourself as the kind of person who very deliberately chooses the most ethically produced, nutritionally valuable version of it, and then intentionally shares the experience of savouring it with a loved one, you’re essentially changing your identity.
You are, or you are becoming, the kind of person who makes good choices – choices that support your health, and are environmentally sustainable and ethically defensible.
Using this process, you’ll make the kind of food rules that you’ll actually want to stick to, because doing so makes you feel good about yourself – really good, as opposed to the fleeting bump in pleasure followed by the dive into disappointment, shame and regret that too often occurs when we mindlessly obey the promptings of our basal ganglia.
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