What if everything you think you know about change is wrong?

Downside of being a university student (again!): an endless stream of lectures, textbook and literature readings and assignments to cram into an already overstuffed schedule. Down time? What’s that???

Upside of being a student (for those of you who don’t know, I’m enrolled in an Honours program in preparation for doing a PhD in nutrition research): access to free full text of practically every nutrition, medical and science journal I would ever want to read. Rather than having to pay hefty subscription fees or purchase individual articles so I can read the whole thing, not just the little potted summary known as the abstract, which you can find for free on PubMed, I can just use my university’s online library catalogue to find and download articles. Yippee – my Inner Nerd is off the leash!

In researching a recent assignment, I found a hidden gem published in 1999, called ‘Complex systems model of dietary choice with implications for improving diets and promoting vegetarianism’. The article, by Carl Phillips, described the development and application of a computer program using what was then an emerging science, complex systems analysis, to model how people make dietary choices.

I’ll summarise a fairly lengthy and complex article in just one sentence:

Despite the common wisdom that a ‘baby steps’ approach to improving your diet is best, major dietary changes are actually easier to make and maintain.

How could this be? Change is hard, right? Surely it would be easier to break down dietary change into little chunks and take them one at a time – cut out red meat, then poultry, then eggs; switch to low-fat dairy products; swap sugar for stevia; replace vegetable cooking oil with coconut oil… That’s the approach taken by many health professionals and wellness coaches, as well as by popular books and programs that promote dietary change.

The problem with this approach, as Phillips points out – and as I’ve observed countless times in over 20 years of clinical practice – is that small changes bring about insignificant health benefits and alterations in dietary preferences, causing rapid loss of motivation to make further changes, and backsliding into old, bad habits.

Using stevia in your drinks and cooking reinforces the preference for highly sweetened food, and leaves you open to the temptation of eating the ‘regular’ stuff if you can’t get hold of the stevia-sweetened option; cutting all concentrated sweeteners out of your diet rapidly shifts your taste preferences so that you come to find sweetened foods and drinks cloying and off-putting. (I can personally vouch for this, being a recovered sugar addict :).)

Swapping vegetable oil for coconut oil doesn’t change the preference for fatty, oily foods (and doesn’t improve your health one iota, as I pointed out in a previous article); learning no-oil cooking techniques, such as those I teach in Empowered Eating, causes you to ‘lose your taste’ for oil in a surprisingly short period of time, rendering you highly resistant to the temptation of take-away from Greasy Joe’s. (Again, a personal anecdote: I recently dined at a Sydney burger joint that underwent a plant-based makeover, and was receiving rave reviews from the vegan community. I found the food oily, stodgy and overly salty, and walked out with a craving for a green salad and no desire to ever eat there again!)

Carl Phillips elegantly summarises what he calls “the paradox of dietary change” as follows:

“First, many people make major changes in their food choice, stick with the changes, and do not want to change back. This includes changing from an omnivorous diet to a vegetarian or vegan diet, adopting intervention diets in response to disease, or eliminating certain foods or changing nutrient intakes to improve general health. There is empirical evidence of satisfaction among those who have made imposed dietary changes, as well as countless anecdotes and the observation that many new vegetarians become extremely committed to their diet.

However, this contrasts with a second observation, that most consumers believe that changing their diet would be painful and a permanent burden, and that health professionals who would like to improve diets of their patients or the general public often believe it is hopeless to try to encourage changes. Even people who are happy about one major transition they have made, such as becoming vegetarian, often think that making another change, such as reducing fat intake or becoming vegan, is too daunting to even attempt.”

Instead of trying to persuade people to make better dietary choices by educating them about the health benefits of those choices (an approach which rarely succeeds), Phillips suggests educating people about the system dynamics of change, namely that making big changes all at once is easier, more sustainable and ultimately more enjoyable, than making a series of little changes over time.

He also points out that when people set ‘stretch’ goals rather than taking a baby steps approach, if they fall a little short of their goals (which he calls ‘sliding into the utility valley’), they are more likely to keep aspiring to achieve them (‘climbing back up the utility hill’) than to entirely revert to their old habits.

This has always been my experience with clients. I’ve lost count of the number of times a client has said to me,

“I really stuck to the plan you gave me for a whole month. Then I went to a friend’s barbeque/restaurant/ work function/family Christmas/[insert social occasion of choice] and I ate a piece of meat/cheese/ice cream/cake/[insert formerly tempting food of choice]… and it tasted disgusting!!! This is like witchcraft – I don’t even like the foods I used to crave anymore.”

Yes, exactly :). What puts people off making change is the thought that they will have to fight the temptation to eat the unhealthy foods they currently crave, for the rest of their lives. But that’s not what happens. Taste preferences change rapidly when you make big changes all at once… and as an added bonus, you’ll experience dramatic health improvements that make you want to maintain your new eating style for the rest of your life.

Would you like to change your eating habits, but don’t know where to get started? My regular Empowered Eating seminars are a great place to start, or apply for a Roadmap to Optimal Health consultation to develop an eating plan tailored to your specific health needs.