Healthy Eating Made Easy

I’ve often heard people complain that buying and preparing whole, healthy foods is hard, expensive, and takes too much time. In truth, healthy eating is no more difficult than what you do now. The way you currently shop, meal plan, and prepare food is a conditioned response to your subconscious beliefs and preferences about food that have been reinforced over the years. In other words, habit.

Any new behaviour that is reinforced over and over again eventually becomes a habit. A new habit takes about twenty-eight days to create. So, in about three weeks time, you can replace your old shopping and eating habits with new behaviours.

Creating Healthy Eating Habits: Start small 

Pick one behaviour to change each week. For example, if you usually purchase frozen, prepared foods for most of your meals through the week, choose one or two days that you think you can comfortably prepare a home cooked meal from scratch. Pick up fresh vegetables, whole grain pasta or brown rice, and boneless, skinless chicken breasts and you’ve got a healthy, low-carb (sugar) meal. Make extra and you have an easy lunch or dinner for the next day. If you currently buy lunch every day, prepare lunch for a couple of days of the week, gradually increasing that number over time.

Each visit to the grocery store is an opportunity to explore unfamiliar territory. If you normally spend more time in the frozen food section, you can switch it up for a week. Ban yourself from frozen, processed foods, and take a look at what’s available in the produce isle.

Practice, practice, practice

Practice makes perfect, but it takes conscious effort. Plan your strategy before you leave the house. Set a goal and have an action plan ready for shopping day. Know the specials of the week ahead of time and plan healthy meals accordingly.

Remember, one step at a time. Before you know it you'll have a handful of new healthy eating behaviours that will enhance your life. Once new behaviours become habit, they require little or no thought and begin to match the old habits in ease and comfort.

To your health.

How Can Understanding Behaviour Change Help You Lose Weight?

Why is change so darn hard?

I suppose if it were easy no one would struggle with weight and food. We'd all stay at our ideal weights, exercise regularly, and not have the horrible, emotional attachments to our bad diets that we do. But change is difficult, and there's a reason.

Every thought and behaviour we have is defined and controlled by biological and neurological connections in our brains and bodies. When we do anything, whether we're brushing our teeth or grocery shopping, we're operating on a subconscious set of connections that were formed when we first took up the behaviour, and they were strengthened and solidified (with repetition) over time.

We've all had the experience of arriving at our destination while driving without consciously remembering how we got there. That's because our brains and bodies were driven (pun intended), subconsciously, by a fixed set of neurological connections while we thought about something else. It's the same with all behaviour--good or bad.

What do emotions have to do with it?

Behaviours come with emotional attachments. When you end up on the couch with a bag of chips, and you don't know how you got there, it's because the simple thought of the chips created an emotion that caused you to react.

When you thought about the chips your body released some feel-good chemicals in anticipation of eating them--a reward. That initial thought and the emotional response to that thought are what drive our behaviours. Eventually the process reverses and the chemicals begin to drive our thoughts, which drive our emotions . . . and we have a viscous, addictive cycle  So, even though we might want something badly (a healthy lifestyle), we're struggling against some pretty, powerful connections that control our thoughts and actions on a subconscious level. Sounds a bit hopeless--but it's not.

Can we change?

The good news is that nothing is written in stone. All behaviours can be changed. I didn't say it was easy. But it can be done, and your life and happiness are worth the effort.

When we attempt to create a new behaviour--deviating from an old routine--we create new connections in our brains that didn't exist before. So, for example, if we go to the grocery store and decide that this week we're going to scrap the white, starchy carbs (that are very bad for us) and buy whole grain bread and pasta, we've literally changed our brains. New neuronal connections are formed based on the new behaviour.

Let's say that making this healthy choice makes you feel good. Now you've attached a positive, emotional response to this new behaviour. (Don't forget, everything we do is emotionally and chemically driven.)
If you performed this new behaviour once and reverted to your old ways, those new connections would quickly fade and die. However, if you kept at it (despite any obstacles), each time you made healthy choices those connections and the emotional chemicals attached to them would grow stronger and stronger, eventually solidifying the new behaviour. The best part is that the connections to the old behaviour grow weak from lack of use, just like our muscles. Eventually the new, healthy behaviour takes over, becoming a subconscious way of life.

Use will power while you've got it.

As I've said before, will power will only get you so far. Eventually it will fade. It does help during the tough beginning stages of change, though, as your brain and body learn the new behaviour. When the behaviour becomes habit, the connections are then fixed and become part of who you are. You no longer think about it. It becomes a way of life, and you don't need will power any more.

This is how permanent change takes place. It takes time, effort, repetition, and consistency. When you begin to understand how change is part of our neurological and biochemical makeup, it's easier to pursue. Can you understand why going on a fad diet doesn't help you make lasting change?

We need to think long-term here. It's not about losing a certain amount of weight in a short period of time, gaining the weight back, and repeating the process. It's about lasting change. Because, the powerful chemical (emotional) and neurological responses that are attached to bad, unhealthy behaviours will always pull us back to our old ways. We can't help it; we're wired that way. However, we have the power to rewire our brains and change our lives forever.

In future posts, I'll help you move through the necessary steps for lasting change .

Let's Talk Jillian Michaels, Shall We?

If you follow "The Biggest Loser", you may know that Jillian Michaels has a new show. In "Losing It With Jillian", she follows families that are struggling with weight and health issues (she actually moves in with them for a week), and turns them around. Kinda like "Biggest Loser", but on a more intimate level.

I like Jillian. I think she's one of those celebrities that you either love or hate. Now, I don't agree with everything she says or does, but then again, I don't agree with everything anyone says or does. However, I respect her for a couple of reasons.

When I was actively working in the fitness industry, I was continually frustrated with the lack of response (from the entire industry--club owners to sales to trainers) to people's emotional reasons for wanting to get healthy. There was no time or structure or training available to get to the real issues. By ignoring the emotional side of the equation, people dropped out of their programs like flies.

Emotions drive our behaviours. Jillian's main focus in all her episodes is to get to the root of the emotional crisis in people's lives. We're so stuck in a dreamy-fog that most of us need either a catastrophe or a Jillian to get us off the couch. Her "in your face" style pushes people beyond the surface until they finally see how they're killing themselves and their families. Everyone has pain. Everyone has something that drives them toward bad behaviours. This is where we begin.

Jillian's tough guy approach in the gym goes way beyond simply getting in shape. When these people accomplish physical feats they believed were impossible, they move to another level of self. It's like a tipping point. They move past the place where they've been stuck for a long time, and they change. The blockage is gone, and a new core belief sets in, allowing them to do what they came to do.

The other reason I like this show is that Jillian leaves these folks on their own for six weeks. They're forced to work together and with themselves to reach the individual goals they've set. This teaches them real-life behaviours, under real circumstances, that will go a long way to solidifying their new habits. Each time we stick with our goals--despite challenges--we're strengthening and solidifying the connections in our brains that will turn our new behaviours into habits, and, eventually, into a way of life. Jillian taught them how to workout, how to eat healthy, whole foods, and then left them alone to handle the day-to-day reality of their lives. This is how we create permanent change.

But in order to move to this place, we always need to get to the root of what drives our behaviours. We must become aware, and learn to point the arrow inward. Only then will we change our core beliefs from "I can't" to "I can".

Aligning What We Want With Who We Are

Who are you?
Changing something about your life without knowing who you are is like trying to get to a destination without knowing where you are. You can't do it.

We're made up of ideas and beliefs and values that blend together and represent our lives. They tell us how to behave, how to work, how to think; basically how to live.When we have an idea that something's not right and we begin to think about change, we can easily get sidelined (sometimes through desperation) into pursuing change that fits more with someones life other than our own.

How does this happen?
Let's say your weight's started to creep up a little and it's affecting your life, negatively. You decide you want to lose some weight. Great. So what do you do? Maybe you had success on a particular diet before, or you go online and see what's knew and quick in the weight loss arena.

You find one you think you'll like, buy all the specific foods, join a gym so you can do the workouts, and you get started. Fantastic. The first couple of weeks go well, and you've actually dropped a few pounds. This is working!

However, in the third week, you find you're motivation lagging, your enthusiasm for the workouts waning, and you start to crave what you used to eat. You cheat a little on the diet, start skipping some workouts, and begin to get down on yourself. What happened?


Aligning your goals with your values
Usually when we decide to act on something we go in feet first without using our heads. We don't take the time to really examine why it is that we want something, and we fail to look beyond the obvious: 'I need to lose weight, so I'll diet and go to the gym.'

Simple? Not really.

Let's say, instead, that you sit down with yourself and go through the question and answer process that we discussed in the previous post. What did you find out?

You hate the gym; you hate all the fit people prancing around, showing off their bodies; and you despise the thought of showing up there. Secondly, you really miss all the good food you were eating, and when you thought about it, you really do eat healthy food, you just need to cut back a little and remove the junk.

Through your analysis, you discovered that the weight gain was do to stress at work. Food became an elixir when exercise would have been a better choice. Which, by the way, you prefer to do outside, alone, in nature. It brings you peace.

So what values can we take from this exercise? Easy. You value good food and exercise as a way of life; you value health; you value nature; and, you value time for yourself. Now take this information and build a weight loss program, based on YOUR values, lifestyle, and capabilities, and take control.

Motivation pulls us either toward or away from something. The key to successful change is finding out what is truly motivating your desire for change, and building a plan that fits your life--not some imagined life.

Plant a Seed and Watch it Grow

When we plant a seed in the ground, we don't walk away and expect a flower to grow. We nurture it, feed it, water it, watch it, and, ultimately, if our actions are right, we witness the fruit of our efforts.

When we plant a seed in our minds (a thought or idea) like, 'I'd like to lose weight, be fit, have more self-confidence, more energy . . . ', we tend to think on it for a while, maybe come up some sort of formula for action, then walk away expecting the seed to take care of itself. It won't. Only conscious planning, analysis, and consistent action will grow your idea into a fruitful endeavor.

Before you can begin to move towards your goal, it's necessary to know (specifically) what it is you want. This is vitally important for success. If you don't know what your want, say, beyond losing some weight, your project will end there. (As you probably well know.) You need to spend quality time with yourself, preferably in a quiet space, so you can really dig deep and ask some important questions. Write down the answers. It's important to have a reference to help you stay on track.

Become a nag: Pepper yourself with questions
When you begin to ask yourself the deeper questions, something wonderful happens. You become consciously aware of your true feelings and emotions. Here's where it gets fun. Become that annoying little kid that never stops asking questions. Ask yourself a question, such as, 'What  do I really want?' Write down the answer, then immediately fire off another question. This will propel you deeper into your desires, driving the discovery of yourself below the surface.

For instance: Your first response to the question might be, 'I want to lose weight.' Now ask yourself why? This forces you to go a little deeper. You might answer, 'Summer's coming and I want to look good.' Keep going, this is where the magic takes place, and, unfortunately, it's where most people stop. Ask why that is important to you. Answer that and continue to ask more how, what, and why questions. Soon you'll be closer to the real reasons for your desire to lose weight. And, from there, you can start to build a solid plan.

In the next post I'll discuss how to align what you've discovered to your core values. Then we'll take that tiny little seed and make it flourish.