The one question you need to ask yourself if you want to get healthy

As a Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, my job is to help people understand the role that their food choices, activity and sleep patterns, habits of thought, and relationships with themselves and others play in sickness and health, and how to break the habits that are keeping them sick, tired and overweight and establish health-promoting habits instead.

In other words, my job is to help people change.

Ever since I opened my practice in 1995, I have been intrigued, and sometimes exasperated, by my clients’ widely varying responses to the need to change their way of living.

Even when they acknowledge that their habitual diet and lifestyle choices have significantly contributed to the complaints that landed them in my office, and even when they completely understand that if they want to regain their lost health and vitality, they need to make radically different choices from now on, some will enthusiastically embrace change while others resist it.

Case in point: I saw two new clients on one day last week, each of whom had been diagnosed with a chronic condition that, even with the best treatment that modern medicine has to offer, will shorten their life expectancy by 10-20 years. In both cases, there is compelling evidence that making comprehensive diet and lifestyle changes would narrow that life expectancy gap, or even close it entirely.

Both were married with children, and both reported that their intimate relationships were generally satisfying. Both came from ethnic backgrounds in which the preparation and sharing of food is an integral part of the ‘glue’ that binds families together. Both were well educated and financially comfortable.

And yet their responses to the need to change were very different. One told me that he would do whatever he had to do in order to take control of his health – including letting go of foods that were an almost sacrosanct element of his culture. He said, with clear conviction,

“Nothing tastes good enough for me to lose a limb over it.”

The other focused on how hard it would be to ‘give up’ the cooking methods she had grown up with, and the favourite dishes from childhood that she still prepared for her family.

I used to believe that there was a magic key that, if I could only find it, I could use to unlock the willingness to change in every client I saw. Time, personal and professional experience, and extensive study of the science of behaviour change have, thankfully for my own sanity, altered my perspective.

It turns out that there is no single magic key which will unlock a giant door, and once you step through that door you’ll find that all the resources, understandings and mindsets that you need in order make and sustain comprehensive lifestyle change.

Instead, there are countless small keys, any of which might unlock a small door to changing just one habit, or maybe your whole life… as long as the timing is right.

The client who is now enthusiastically embracing radical lifestyle change shared with me that he had actually watched the documentary Forks Over Knives, which promotes the health benefits of a wholefood plant-based diet, several years ago. At that time, he had some niggling health issues but had not yet received the diagnosis that brought him to my office. He found the documentary somewhat interesting but thought the dietary changes that it advocated were “too extreme”.

On watching it again after his diagnosis, he found it utterly compelling, and told his wife and family that he was going to embrace the diet-style advocated in Forks Over Knives… as of right now. And he did!

What made him open to radical change this time, when he had resisted it previously? You could certainly argue that the sense of urgency generated by his new diagnosis might be a key player. But I’ve seen hundreds of clients over the years who still cling to bad habits even after they’ve received the scariest diagnoses you could think of.

How about fear of the consequences of not managing his condition properly? Sure, he is afraid of losing a limb, going blind, suffering kidney failure and dying prematurely, leaving his family without a husband and father. But once again, I’ve seen plenty of people who are deathly afraid of the potential complications of their disease, and still they don’t change. (One of them was my father, but that’s a story for another day.)

How about having a supportive environment? His wife and other close family members are definitely on board with his new lifestyle, and that is helping him enormously. But I’ve had clients whose family members were completely supportive of them changing their diets, and even offered to grocery shop and cook for them to make it easier, and still they clung to the way of eating that was slowly (and in some cases, quite rapidly), killing them.

I’ve come to the conclusion that one of the key determinants of a person’s willingness to change is their identity – how they see themselves. Self-identity is not a single, coherent entity, but a melange of beliefs – some of them consciously acknowledged, and some that bubble away beneath our awareness, driving our behaviour in ways we struggle to understand – that we have accumulated since earliest childhood. Beliefs such as:

• I’m a victim of my genes – all the women in my family struggle with their weight.
• I’m hopelessly addicted to food/cigarettes/gambling/shopping/whatever; I’ve tried before but I just can’t give it up.
• I’m unworthy of having a healthy body that I enjoy living in.
• It’s selfish to focus on my health; I should be taking care of other people, or animals, or the environment.
• I will never find any other sources of pleasure or satisfaction in my life to replace the bad habit that’s undermining my health.
• If I change, I’m betraying or abandoning my family and my culture.
• I’m a loser – even if I have initial success at anything, I always fail in the end.

And the big one:

• This is who I am (overweight, sick, addicted, unhappy). I can’t change who I am.

Once a person starts to see themselves differently, in even the tiniest way, any of the keys to change might work for them, even if they never have before.

Sometimes that shift in identity happens spontaneously, as it did for my change-ready client. All of a sudden, before he ever booked in to see me, he just started seeing himself as a person who could take responsibility for his own life and health, and hence, could make whatever changes were necessary.

For most people, though, even after they’ve recognised the need to change, the necessary shift in identity has not yet happened when they come to see me. In those cases, my primary work is to help them uncover the aspects of their identity that lie under the surface, like a giant iceberg, sinking all their efforts to break bad habits and establish good ones.

So what’s the one question you need to ask yourself if you want to get healthy? It’s “Who am I?” Or more precisely,

“Who do I think I am?”

Only once you’ve identified the aspects of your identity that are sabotaging your efforts to change, can you begin the process of reforging that identity – embracing a new version of yourself, as a person who deserves health and happiness, and has the internal and external resources to cultivate them.

My favourite tool for uncovering and transforming these subterranean aspects of our identity that trap us in unhealthy behaviour patterns is Matrix Reimprinting, a form of energy psychology that helps us understand the limiting beliefs we’ve picked up throughout our loves – especially in early childhood – due to our life experiences, and consciously adopt new beliefs that support our health and happiness. (To learn more about Matrix Reimprinting, read my article How working on bad memories helps you build a better future.)

As we uncover these unconsciously-held beliefs and replace them with beliefs about ourselves that we’ve consciously chosen to hold, as mature, responsible and resourceful adults, our identity starts to shift… and then the door to change swings open.

Are you stuck in an endless spiral of self-defeating bad habits? Struggling to figure out why you keep getting in your own way? Apply for a Roadmap to Optimal Health Consultation today, and let’s get you on the path to becoming the healthy, happy ‘you’ that you really want to be.