When you feel ashamed about doing something, you are much more likely to do that same thing again. Shame cycles are devastating and persistent, because shame weakens the self. When you’re weak, you’re vulnerable to making decisions you’ll feel shameful about later. It’s the opposite of the prototypical commander, captain, king, or queen, who makes firm, confident decisions from their position of strength.
When I’m feeling shameful about playing video games and let it fester, to put it eloquently, it makes me feel like a pile of poop. Then I’ll want to do something fun to make me feel better and distract me from my feelings, something like playing video games. So, by feeling shame about playing video games too much, I’m more likely to play them more. Ouch.
Shame Is Pain
Shame is a form of emotional pain, and, like all pain, its purpose is to deter the behavior that causes it. Shame rarely works as intended, because it weakens us. The weaker you are, the more pain you’ll feel, and, when it’s too much to handle, it leads to the same comforting and distracting behaviors that caused your initial shame, and the cycle begins. Therefore, shame doesn’t work very well to deter shameful behaviors.
Shame weakens us, making us become more pliable to our environment, so a person can become a more willing puppet to another party (or dieting system) through shame, but, aside from harming the individual in ways more important than weight, this offers no chance at sustaining weight loss, which must come from an individual’s inner strength and choices. When shame is self-inflicted, like when you feel it before, during, or after eating something, it only harms you, your confidence, and your sense of self-worth and self-respect, all of which are far more devastating to your goal of weight loss than the most fattening food. Shame motivates us to avoid behaviors that cause further shame, which is useful in theory, but it is an even more powerful destroyer of self-respect, which is why it seems right and works wrong.
We need to reduce feelings of shame as much as possible, and the upcoming strategies are designed with that in mind.
Autonomy
What’s the difference between a person who exercises because they enjoy it and a person who does it because it’s a part of their “15 Pounds in 15 Days” bootcamp? Autonomy.
Autonomy in psychology is defined as making choices according to your own free will. It’s a critical but chronically overlooked factor in self-improvement and goal-setting. Autonomy is important for one simple reason—we all want to (and do) run our own show. Sometimes we give up our sense of autonomy for the promise of a specific result. There’s one serious problem with that. You can only lose your sense of autonomy, not your actual autonomy.
What happens when you’re told that you must exercise until exhaustion and eat less food to lose weight? You lose your sense of autonomy, but not your actual autonomy. In time, you will rest and eat as before.
While you can suppress your sense of autonomy to “follow the system” for a while, you’re eventually going to take control again. This is the calculation we get wrong, isn’t it? We commit to a difficult workout or diet program and think we can just “suck it up” until we get the result we want, but at some point, we will officially take back the control that we pretended to give up.
This isn’t limited to ideas we read from others, either. You can lose your sense of autonomy from a goal that you set previously. For example, let’s say that Jane decides for her New Year’s Resolution that she will lose 100 pounds by exercising two hours per day. Ten days later, Jane wants to rest because her knee hurts and she’s so sore she can barely move, but she feels controlled by the public decree she made on top of the dining room table after her second sixth glass of champagne. Jane’s going to quit her plan altogether. And what will she feel at that point? Relief. Freedom. After such a letdown and failure, why does Jane feel relieved? Because she’s regained her sense of autonomy.
People receive undeserved criticism when they stop dieting. Others say, “You should have stuck with the program.” They imply that it’s better to be thin and miserable than overweight and free. But we’ll never stick to a dieting program, because our freedom means more to us than anything else.
The Two Levels of Autonomy
The best goal strategies will not only protect your sense of autonomy, but also enhance it. This is tricky because autonomy exists at two levels, conscious and subconscious. The opposite of autonomy is slavery, and here’s what it looks like at the two levels.
Conscious Slavery Example: You want to lose weight and decide to avoid eating cake, but you see a slice of cake and eat it. Your conscious desire (lose weight, avoid cake) was controlled by your subconscious desire (eat cake). You’ll feel like a slave to the cake.
Subconscious Slavery Example: You want to lose weight and decide to avoid eating cake, and when you see a slice of cake, you resist it. Now your subconscious desire (eat cake) is being controlled by your conscious desire (lose weight, avoid cake). You’ll feel deprived because you want the cake.
It seems like a lose-lose situation, doesn’t it? Whether you eat the cake or not, some part of you is going to feel controlled. Anyone who has attempted to lose weight is familiar with this predicament, because dieting provides people with a temporary way to make the healthy choices to get the results they want. Until their motivation and willpower are exhausted, they can live in such a way to lose weight (their conscious desire). But our subconscious is powerful, and it will not allow itself to be controlled for long. Your cravings will get stronger. Your ability to resist will weaken. The conscious mind wins in the short term, but the subconscious wins in the long term.
The only lasting, permanent solution for this conundrum is to align your conscious and subconscious to desire the same thing. What if you wanted to avoid cake to lose weight consciously AND didn’t have a strong urge to eat it subconsciously? That’s now a win-win situation, because neither part of you desires the cake. This puts us into habit formation territory, which is the practice of shaping the subconscious to mirror your conscious preferences.
To successfully form a habit or change an old one, you must be consistent with the change for an extended amount of time. A 16-year cake-eating habit will not go away after 10 days of starving yourself on green smoothies. You won’t likely go from a couch potato to a lifelong fitness freak in 30 days either. Both of those strategies, as popular as they are, strangle your subconscious’s sense of freedom. We choose these plans because they align with our conscious interests. But ignore your subconscious desires at the peril of your goals, because if you fight it, you will lose. You may win for 10 or 30 days, but we’ve covered the folly of temporary weight loss. To win, you need to change your subconscious preferences, not declare war on them.
The Mini Habits for Weight Loss strategy is designed to preserve and protect your sense of conscious and subconscious freedom. When you’re in charge, and when your strategy is flexible enough to adapt to your life and subconscious desires, the gradual changes you make can last a lifetime.
The best strategies for big changes are adaptable to you. The worst strategies for big changes tell you to suck it up and follow directions if you want results. If you’re mailing a letter, sure, follow directions, but if you’re attempting to overhaul the way you’ve lived for decades, you’re going to need more than a list of foods, an exercise plan, and a pat on the back. You need a strategy that can meet you where you are subconsciously and integrate changes into your life as seamlessly as possible.
Now it’s time to delve into that strategy. We’ll begin with food.
6
Food Strategy
Here’s a List of Foods to Eat and Avoid.
Just Kidding. Let’s Do Something Smarter.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
~ Viktor Frankl
Do Not Ban Junk Food
If you want to give this strategy a try, you are allowed to eat
any food whenever you want. No limits. Nothing is forbidden. You can eat unhealthy food. There’s no calorie counting. It’s all up to your discretion.
We’re using a pro-healthy-food strategy, rather than the common anti-unhealthy-food strategy. When you rely on food avoidance rules, your willpower and motivation to adhere to them will almost certainly fail you at some point, and then it gets awkward. Once you’ve failed, do you reinstate the rule immediately? Do you try a different plan? Many people give up once they “break the seal” and eat even more forbidden food than usual.
Food bans actually make the banned food more desirable in the long term, as we’re psychologically drawn to things we can’t have. A formal ban also suggests that this food is so desirable that your only chance is to force yourself to stay away from it. It’s the wrong approach, because it increases the perceived value of low-quality food.
The true goal is to eat healthy food, anyway. Eating is mostly a zero sum game, in that if you’re eating healthy food all day, you won’t have room left to fit in other food. Some people fear eating healthy food, thinking they’ll continue to eat the same amount of unhealthy food and therefore eat even more calories. This is not true to a relevant extent, because healthy food WILL take up some room in your stomach and it’s very satiating on a per calorie basis.
Besides, cutting out unhealthy food 100% with no exceptions is not sustainable or desirable for most people. It may sound crazy, but it’s better to fully allow junk food so that you’ll be able to eat less of it long term.
You probably have some questions about this approach, such as: How is this different from the typical person not on a diet who already allows unhealthy food and eats it excessively?
Live Between Banning and Mindless Eating
To control food intake, people initially try banning it, causing them to cycle between total abstinence and out-of-control bingeing. You will gain control of your diet by finding a sustainable place between those extremes. Whatever you attempt to do in order to improve your body must be completely and unquestionably sustainable. Trying to do too much will make it worse.
The New York Times said of Danny Cahill, former contestant of The Biggest Loser: “Mr. Cahill, 46, said his weight problem began when he was in the third grade. He got fat, then fatter. He would starve himself, and then eat a whole can of cake frosting with a spoon. Afterward, he would cower in the pantry off the kitchen, feeling overwhelmed with shame.”132 This type of shame- and deprivation-driven cycle is not only a horrible experience, but it’s also an extremely poor strategy that results in binges and a waistline that expands like a scared pufferfish. For food and life in general, the harder you directly try to suppress your desires, the stronger they’ll become.
A no-cake run that ends in a cake binge is far more weight-gaining than not dieting at all. On the other hand, consistently choosing to eat cake less often or in smaller portions can result in a big, permanent, and positive change that can be further improved. Also, when you consciously and mindfully eat cake, you might decide in hindsight that it isn’t worth it, and that could help you choose differently next time. The transition from a person who always eats unhealthy food to a person who allows it but usually chooses not to have it is first mindfulness and then new habits.
A great “side effect” of having mini habits is increased mindfulness of your food and movement choices every day. Being mindful of your behavior means you’ll be better able to control it. You’ll know your triggers. You’ll be cognizant of what you need to do.
Even if you do just one minute of jogging in place per day, you’ll be more mindful of exercise. Even if you only drink one glass of water at a specified time every day, you’ll be more mindful of your subsequent beverage choices. One mini habit in your breakfast routine will make you more mindful about your other meals. If there was only one change a person could choose to make for their weight loss journey, the right choice would be increased mindfulness. It helps change bad, mindless habits back into decisions we make and keeps us looking for other opportunities to make progress.
When you combine mindfulness about your food decisions with a positive drive forward to eat real foods, the effect is a small and consistent change in the right direction. The power in this change is exceptionally more potent than it will ever seem, because, unlike temporary change, sustainable changes compound over time.
No Limits Means Smarter Choices
I allow myself to eat unhealthy food in any amount, but rarely choose to do so. Because of gradual changes I’ve made to my diet, I now generally prefer the benefits and taste of unprocessed, nature-made food.
One day, I ate at a Greek restaurant, and my side choice was fries or a salad. This is a classic weight loss decision between foods at two ends of the spectrum. (I don’t need to lose weight, but my desire to be healthy rivals the desire of people wanting to lose weight, so it was a similar situation.) I had been eating very healthy food for a while, so I decided to splurge and order the fries. But then I started fantasizing about the salad. This isn’t a joke, it’s a true story. I ended up getting the salad when I planned to get the fries, and this sort of thing now happens frequently in my life (and need I remind you, I am a former candy and fast food addict).
This is exactly the reverse of what typically happens with people who have unhealthy eating habits, isn’t it? They try to order the salad, but fantasize about the fries and get those instead. It’s no different from my salad story; it’s just the opposite habit driving the decision.
If I had told myself that I absolutely can’t have fries because they’re unhealthy, the little bit of desire I had for them would have increased dramatically. It would have been a choice between the boring salad I’m “supposed to eat” and the forbidden, delicious fries that I can’t have. See how that perspective pushes us in the wrong direction?
Don’t underestimate the power of habit to change your preferences. Notice that my salad story above is not about me overcoming an insatiable desire for fries and heroically choosing the salad. I’m not lying to you when I say I’m lazier and have lower willpower than most people. I didn’t overcome anything and I’m not a hero, I just preferred the salad, which exemplifies why successful weight loss is not a willpower fight.
It is possible for you to plan on eating junk food and desire healthier food when the time comes. If people could fully understand and experience how much easier and more effective it is to target their habits to change their preferences than to fight themselves, they’d drop the diets and cleanses and prioritize habit formation. I hope this book helps make that happen.
Habits are our preferences, and, if we’re smart, we can shape them to work for us instead of against us. Contrast the effortlessness of habit-driven behavior to the person who tries to win through sheer willpower, suppressing their food choices and calorie consumption for days, weeks, or months. Those who attempt to win through brute force work much harder, but those who leverage habits work smarter to get much farther.
Take 100% Responsibility
Self-responsibility is dying because of all the systems we rely upon today. We eat the food produced by the food systems in place. When attempting weight loss, we eat things labeled “diet.”
These systems take away our control, which can limit our sense of responsibility for our lives. There’s nothing wrong with following a system if the system brings you the right results. If a system does not produce the right results, it’s our job to get out of it and take back control and responsibility.
Ideally, we’d accept 100% responsibility at all times for all things, but it takes time and energy (two limited resources) to assume full responsibility for something, so we end up selectively choosing what we’re going to focus on.
So many people are overweight today because they rely on the world’s food systems, which are highly obesogenic. The diet and weight loss systems that are supposed to “fix” the problem are even more broken and ineffective. With two failing systems, we need to take 100
% of our responsibility back to get healthy and lose weight.
The way to take back responsibility is to question everything. Is food coloring safe to eat? What does potassium sorbate do in the human body? What happens to oils when they’re heated to high temperatures? Will this diet product actually help me or just give me a short-term result and false hope? Is this fruit smoothie really 100% raw fruit blended up, with nothing else added? These are questions that the typical person does not ask, does not care to ask, or doesn’t have the time, energy, or expertise to answer. These questions matter, not just for being at a healthy weight, but for being in good health and minimizing your risk for disease.
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 14