Many see good health as the single most important part of a high-quality life. Those already in decent to good health might not say that, but those in poor health understand its supreme importance. That’s just to say that this particular area is worth taking full responsibility over, regardless of where you currently stand in weight and health.
Think about this: Dieting trains people to give up their responsibility by following a set of rules. This book will arm you with strategies and ask you to take full responsibility for your food choices outside of your daily mini habits. Those who take back responsibility and stop pressuring themselves to eat perfectly and instead look to make small, sustainable, and reasonable changes will succeed.
Take full responsibility for your weight and health from this point on, and never give it away. If we could trust things labeled low-calorie, diet, low-fat, no carbs, etc., then we wouldn’t have to think about food and we’d all be thin. The next section is called “How They Trick Ya.” You’ll see why those who trust food corporations end up sick and fat.
Some people see the word “diet” on a food product, assume it helps them lose weight, and drop their responsibility on the spot. They will continue to gain weight. There is no regulation for labeling a product “diet,” and even if there were, it would probably be based on the calorie content of the product, not the total weight impact of the product.
The Modern Challenge of Healthy Living
The current difficulty of living a healthy lifestyle is the unfortunate result of what many societies worldwide are becoming and have become. American society in particular has demanded convenience and branding over simple healthy eating. We the people are to blame, just as much as the corporations. No-added-sugar products don’t typically sell as well as those with added sugar, which is why those products are now hard to find. That’s the sign of an entire society not taking responsibility for their food choices, because, if taste is the highest or only factor, high sugar products will sell the best (and they do).
While making it easier to live well is the basis of our strategy, taking full responsibility for yourself is the one thing you must do that cannot be made easier. Nobody else can do it for you. You must own what you eat and own how active you are. How can anyone not eat healthy food if they make it the most important thing? Many have delegated their personal responsibility for their health and well-being to grocery stores, restaurants, and the government—they are too busy making money and governing, respectively, to take responsibility for individual health.
If you take responsibility (which, in most cases, is as easy as being generally skeptical of food and looking at ingredients to know what you’re eating), and set up some mini habits, you will succeed. But you need to know what you’re up against. Food is big business, and therefore, deception is rampant. Let’s talk about how they deceive us.
Know How They Trick Ya
If a food corporation uses phrasing that seems healthy but has a potential loophole, their product is almost certainly unhealthy and to be avoided. Sometimes, actually healthy qualities will be listed, but it doesn’t mean it’s a healthy product, as processed food can hit you from so many angles. In this section, I’ll give you a few examples of trickery used to deceive customers into thinking a food is healthier than it really is.
If you read any of these on a package, pull the alarm, because a company is probably trying to trick you into making a poor decision. Every time you pick up a food item, skip the branding on front, flip it over, and look at the ingredients. Here’s some reasons why you shouldn’t trust everything you read on the front packaging. There are far more examples than the ones listed below, but these will give you an idea of what we’re up against.
100% Wheat!
What a person might think: 100% wheat! Perfect! This is the type of healthy wheat product I should be eating.
What it means: The product does not contain millet or quinoa (useless information). Saying 100% wheat does NOT mean that the wheat is whole, that there aren’t other ingredients, and that it hasn’t been refined and processed into oblivion.
Multigrain!
What a person might think: Yes! A lot of healthy grains for me!
What it means: More than one grain is used. They can still be refined, devoid of nutritional content, and doctored with caramel coloring to make them look like whole grains. A very popular sandwich chain has a nine-grain bread with the first two ingredients being “whole wheat flour and “enriched flour.” Enriched flour means refined white flour. Then, it goes on to list the other eight grains in the 2% or less category. It’s basically a combination of whole wheat and white bread, with trace amounts of other grains. Technically, it contains nine grains, but aside from some whole wheat, it contains more white bread than the other eight grains combined! It’s white bread wearing healthy-looking make-up.
Made with whole grains!
What a person might think: This product is 100% whole grains!
What it means: Whole grains are somewhere on the list of ingredients, probably right after the refined grains (which make up most of the food). The magical phrase to look for when it comes to bread or pasta is 100% whole grain. That’s what you want to see. Anything else is a loophole. And of course, any ultra-processed foods, even those made with 100% whole grains, are still not ideal.
Made with (100%) real cheese!
What a person might think: This product is mostly real cheese.
Wheat it means: Real cheese is used, but it might account for 2% of the total product. This is common practice with cheese crackers, which contain a little bit of cheese and a lot of refined flour.
Low Fat!
What a person might think: This product is healthy and good for weight loss.
What it (probably) means: High sugar! High sodium! High in preservatives! Highly processed! Highly unhealthy! Highly profitable!
Extra Virgin Olive Oil!
Olive oil’s health benefits are top tier when it comes to fats, and it’s an ideal choice for weight loss. If you’re after the health benefits, you should only consider buying extra virgin olive oil, which is made by crushing olives (other oils are often heated and processed with chemicals). Since extra virgin olive oil has become a big business in high demand, it has attracted corruption, and your bottle of extra virgin olive oil might not be so pure. Whereas the other prior cases were misleading, but technically true, this is a case of pure deception.
UC Davis collaborated with the International Oil Council to analyze 186 olive oil samples in two studies over two years. In the second study, they found that, of the five top-selling imported bottles of extra virgin olive oil in the United States, 73% of samples failed the IOC sensory panel. “Sensory defects are indicators that these samples are oxidized, of poor quality, and/or adulterated with cheaper refined oils.”133 As for the latter, extra virgin olive oil is sometimes mixed with cheaper, unhealthy, refined oils like canola or soybean oil. They also tested the fatty acid profile to distinguish real olive oil from other nut/seed oils.
If you just want to know the brands that passed the tests as real, pure, and quality 100% extra virgin olive oil, the two brands that passed all tests in all 18 samples were California Olive Ranch and Cobram Estate. Lucini was third, with 16 of 18 samples passing the tests. If you want to see the full study, you can see it here. Consumer reports did a similar study, with very few brands making the mark (once again, California Olive Ranch and Lucini were among the winners).134
Based on these results, I decided to purchase a bottle of California Olive Ranch extra virgin olive oil. It smelled like no other olive oil I’ve tried—very rich and aromatic, and clearly the real deal. The last oil I tried was an organic Mediterranean blend and it didn’t have that type of rich aroma. I highly recommend going with one of the above-listed brands for your olive oil. I have no affiliation with California Olive Ranch or any incentive to promote them or any other olive oil company. Honest companies deserve to be talked about.
Change Your
Food Preferences
When a soccer player wants to improve his kicking mechanics, he doesn’t slap himself in the face if he kicks the ball incorrectly; he practices kicking it correctly. If he can learn the correct kicking technique and continue to practice that, it will become a stronger habit than any of his former poor techniques, and he’ll have improved his game. This is a simple, obvious, and straightforward process. But how many people when dieting try to use guilt and punishment to motivate themselves to eat the right things? How many people make their food choices into a moral battle between “good” and “bad” foods, rather than just practicing healthy eating?
Perhaps it’s hard to see that eating is like every other behavior, in that it’s tied to habitual processes. The way to change your diet is to practice the new diet you’d like to have, not to forbid certain foods and hope you can resist. That bears repeating. You change your diet by practicing the new diet you’d like to have, not by forbidding unhealthy foods.
Let’s assume that you’re currently a candy-eating, soda-guzzling, fast food hall-of-famer. Do you really think that avoiding these foods is the answer? All that would do is leave you hungry and frustrated. If instead you learn to enjoy healthy foods, you’ll begin to prefer them. Our dietary preferences aren’t as innate as we think they are. They can change.
Habit Reversal without Rules
To break poor eating habits, we must make them into conscious decisions again. It’s the opposite process of forming a good habit, which is to make conscious decisions into subconscious non-decisions. Instead of making a decision conscious again, most people go with the dieting strategy and “forbid their habit.” Forbidding a core part of your behavioral framework is not smart.
If my rule is that I can’t eat ice-cream, that gives me some incentives to eat it. Eating ice-cream would demonstrate my autonomy, show I’m more powerful than the rule, make me feel like I’m in control, and I’d get to eat delicious ice-cream. Sign me up! That’s awfully appealing for something that’s supposed to dissuade me. Poorly designed rules like this may trigger our desire for control and backfire on us.
Just as processed food becomes more desirable when you forbid it, healthy food struggles with appeal when it becomes the food you “have to eat.” It’s important to grasp the following concept: People who eat a healthy diet long-term do not need to forbid themselves unhealthy food or force feed themselves healthy food. They just prefer healthy food. This is attainable for you too.
While following the mini habits plan, you can eat cheeseburgers, pizzas, fries, and candy, and drink soda or diet soda. In the meantime, you’ll have some mini habits to shift your preferences. To an outsider, it may seem absurd, but that’s because we’re ignoring superficial change and going for the roots—your habitual dietary preferences.
Once you lose some weight and feel better by eating better food, your perspective of ultra-processed goods will change. As your palate adjusts to the delicious spices and flavors of nutritious food, you’ll wonder why you were so focused on not eating certain foods in the past when you have so many delicious alternatives to enjoy.
The Pimento Cheese Disaster
I was lying in my bed one night when I suddenly sat up, leaned over the edge of my top bunk, and vomited all over my favorite Detroit Lions pillow below me. You may think I was giving my opinion of their performance on the football field, but no, I was sick with food poisoning. It was the beginning of a miserable couple of days. Earlier that day, I had eaten pimento cheese. It wasn’t as fresh as I had hoped.
To this day, I dislike pimento cheese. Before that night, I didn’t think pimento cheese was the greatest food ever, but I liked it. The pimento cheese incident changed my preference because of the power of association. I associate pimento cheese with food poisoning. Other factors that can affect our food preferences include: texture, appearance, smell, memories, beliefs, health impact, energy impact, gastrointestinal impact (beans, anyone?), and social influence (a common driver of alcohol consumption). Our food preferences involve many more factors than just taste.
Are Preferences Innate or Learned?
Much of the world is at least semi-addicted to salt. Processed and restaurant food comes loaded with salt, and some people still pour extra salt on top of that. Is this salt affinity an innate desire? Of course not. We don’t need that much salt to live and we’re not born loving it—we’re taught to like it.
Study: “Newborn infants generally display an aversion or indifference to moderate levels of salt, and it is not until age 2-3 that they prefer salty tastes. Similar effects are observed in low salt intake groups following initial experience with high salt diets, suggesting that at any point during the lifespan the introduction of a high salt diet induces an initial aversion and thereafter requires a period of habituation.”135
This is bigger than salt. We perform the behaviors that bring us rewards, and from a young age, society trains us to enjoy the foods that cause obesity—high salt, high fat, high sugar foods. Salt, fat, and sugar aren’t unhealthy naturally; they’re unhealthy in unnatural states and amounts. If you eat a processed food, it’s nearly guaranteed to have unnecessary amounts of salt, sugar, and/or fat. At first, we’re likely to find this somewhat repulsive. Have you ever tasted something too sweet, too salty, or too rich? If you ate it frequently enough, it would become normal to you.
We’ve become habituated to eating foods that overdo everything. Flavors, sugars, salt, and fats burst forth from these lab concoctions onto our tongues and overstimulate us. Sensory overstimulation has become not only acceptable, but an expected part of eating.
How to Change Your Food Preferences
The following is just my anecdotal experience, and it’s probably not the same as your experience, but I’m not unique in the fact that my dietary preferences can change.
I had a legendary sweet tooth. I liked sweet food so much that I’d eat non-food items if they were sweet. I vividly remember my sister yelling, “Mom! Stephen ate my Mini Mouse chapstick again!” That was my favorite flavor. I’d also take Tums, gummy vitamins, and candy I snagged from the grocery store into my room. I’d crawl under my bed and eat my forbidden treasures sneakily. (I don’t know how I survived childhood.)
I used to love candy and hate kale. Now I dislike candy and enjoy kale. I used to hate sauerkraut. Now I enjoy it. I used to eat at the worst fast food restaurants. Now I never do. I used to drink soda with meals. Now I always drink water.
Food preferences can and will change if there’s a reason for change combined with the right approach. I have a healthy diet now, and I’m the guy with weak willpower who loved candy.
You’re going to find that, with the complete freedom to eat unhealthy food, it’s going to lose a lot of its power over you. Guilt and shame compel us to self-destruct, and when you remove them by making all food fair game, you can make better decisions. By combining this approach with daily mini habits and situational strategies, weight-gaining foods will look differently to you than they ever have before.
I still eat unhealthy foods, but infrequently and in small amounts. When you regain your sensitivity for sugar, salt, and the like, it will take much less of it to satisfy you. I used to pile several scoops of ice-cream into a large cup because bowls couldn’t hold enough. Now I rarely eat ice-cream, but when I do, one scoop satisfies me. I never deprive myself. My tastes have just naturally changed, not by banning ice-cream, but by increasing my consumption of healthy food. Once I realized I liked frozen fruit with cinnamon and peanut butter nearly as much as ice-cream, I stopped buying ice-cream.
The Belief and Experience Paradox
If someone must experience change to believe it’s possible, but won’t try to change if they don’t yet believe it’s possible, how can they change? Once you’re inside this circle, positive change and belief (self-efficacy) will feed each other. But which comes first, belief or change? Or rather, which one is the better foundation?
Start the change, and belief wi
ll follow. Mini habits can enact real change, even with little or no belief, because they begin the change and make you believe.
It wasn’t until my one push-up mini habit morphed into a consistent gym habit that I actually believed I could build meaningful amounts of muscle. After dabbling in weight lifting off and on for 3-5 years and seeing nearly nonexistent results, how could I believe? Likewise, how can you believe changing your eating habits will change your weight after dabbling in healthy eating for years and seeing no difference? It takes more than dabbling to see the true effect of a new course of action.
The one perceived benefit of a crash diet or cleanse is that rapid weight results can spark belief, but getting rapid results without sustainability is harmful in the long run to your metabolism and your belief that you can change. Why? This “benefit” turns into a downside once you start eating normally again and regain the (mostly water) weight—you’ll go right back to thinking that real change isn’t possible. And ironically, you’ll think, “If this sudden massive change wasn’t enough, then there’s no hope.” Your problem was that you attempted a massive change—the brain and body don’t like that.
Mini Habits for Weight Loss: Stop Dieting. Form New Habits. Change Your Lifestyle Without Suffering. Page 15