Habit change that works and why you can’t convince yourself to eat broccoli twice a day
Everyone knows that eating broccoli is healthy and eating hot dogs is not. Everybody also knows that we should be eating broccoli every day, even better twice a day. Do you do it? No. Why? Because lifestyle gets in the way.
This lady who came into my clinic yesterday brought ‘a small bag’ of health concerns with her. She had a friendly and assertive demeanour about her, but she didn’t want to waste my or hers time, so she dove straight into her health issues. She said to me, “My doctor told me recently that I have kidney problems, my blood pressure also shot up out of the blue, and now my cholesterol is also high. I have had a really healthy diet all my life, I don’t know what is going on.”
She was slim, sportive, had great skin and hair and looked full of energy at her 68 years of age. She told me that a long time ago when she had a diet rich in desserts and sweets she worked with a nutritionist who put her on to a healthy diet, and after that she followed very healthy eating patterns. Why were they not protecting her health now?
There is a lot of healthy advice in every kind of medium out there; most of it could be applied to each one of us, daily. But why do we not adhere to it? What stops us from taking the advice and just following it? Enter the realm of habit change.
According to Charles Duhigg in his bestselling book “The Power of Habit, Why We Do What We Do and How to Change”, all habits follow this cyclic structure: we get a cue for a desire or outcome - this elicits a learned routine behaviour and we get a reward following this behaviour. Thus, why would you start eating broccoli every day (if you never did that), for what reward? The reward is not exciting enough to bring about the change.
In behaviour change science we distinguish between external and internal factors affecting change of behaviour, I prefer the terms ‘extrinsic’ and ‘intrinsic’. If you decide to lose 10 pounds before the summer to get into your summer clothes or a desired swimsuit, this is an extrinsic factor influencing your behaviour (“Summer is coming, I’d better look good”, you may say to yourself). If someone who has smoked for many years meets a new girlfriend who tells him that she will only think of them as serious couple after he quits smoking, this is another example of extrinsic behaviour.
The fascinating thing about our brain is that it always chooses pleasure over pain. Thus, if any behaviour change means you need to go through some form of ordeal, hardship, your brain will procrastinate, delay and throw many good reasons at you why you shouldn’t do it. Marissa Peer, one of the world’s leading motivational speakers, says that “your mind does what it thinks you want” - your own thoughts and beliefs about your desires and goals influence your actions. To give you an example here, the primary goal for your physiological body is survival. If you woke up, went to work without eating breakfast and it is now 12 pm, most likely your brain will be ‘urging you’ to eat a high energy snack: high in calories, something sweet, possibly something high in fat too. These foods are geared for you to gain energy quickly in order to survive when energy is scarce. There is practically no chance your brain will be alluding you to eat some broccoli or a cabbage salad to get those powerful greens in.
The biggest part of Health Coaching is habit change and mindset coaching. I worked with many people who had previously had a nutritionist advise them to eat a specific, individualised list of foods (and to avoid a smaller list of foods), in many cases they followed a designed weekly or monthly menu plan. All my clients liked the foods from those menus, they lost the desired amount of weight, but about 6 months later they didn’t know what to do next. In the words of many, it puzzled them why they didn’t feel like cooking the dishes from the weekly menu plan that had worked for them before.
Why did those meal plans not last longterm? Why do diets not give us long-lasting effects? Because the changes they elicit are for a temporary goal or gain (in most cases, the loss of the weight gain, tautology intended). If you have been on a diet, you achieved your desired results, and now you are back to square one, your body has not learned a new behaviour, it simply followed a plan given to you without the rationale why this new pattern of healthy eating should become your new adopted behaviour. This means that the motivation behind trying a new diet was based on an extrinsic factor - your partner, your friends or parents, circumstances out there, society as a whole.
Change is possible and is going to stick longterm when it comes from your internal set of values and desires. Based on internal factors you can achieve self-autonomy - have the behaviours that are promoted by your own values, beliefs and desires, no one else’s.
The end game of Health Coaching is achievement of three S behaviours:
self-efficacy
self-autonomy
and self-determination
Start with self-efficacy, it is the easiest to adopt. Self-efficacy is this: the more you do something successfully, the more evidence you see that the results are working for you, the more you believe that you will be able to do it again. Unfortunately, the opposite of this is also true. (The more you believe that you are unable to do something, the less likely you are to try a new behaviour). If you had never been a gym goer and now you have tried the gym for the first 4 or 5 sessions and they were relatively light and enjoyable for you, the more easy it will be for you to convince yourself that the gym isn’t a ‘scary place suitable for bodybuilders only’ and accept your gym routine as a new habit in your lifestyle.
Once you get self-efficacy, it’s time to examine your internal values and desires - moving towards self-autonomy. Ask yourself questions: What are my internal values and beliefs why I would like to change?
Weight loss, for example, works successfully when your desire to lose weight is based on your wish to stop feeling lethargic and gain more energy daily, or being able to exercise regularly, for example rejoin your cycling group where you fell behind because the weight gain made it hard for you to go on long distance rides. Weight loss would not be successful if you have heard your partner comment several times that it is time you lost a few pounds. These are not your internal motivation factors.
Self-autonomous behaviours stem out from our own values and desires and not those imposed by external sources - people in our life, circumstances out there or the societal norms. Autonomously regulated decisions are more stable, sustainable and long lasting. A tip here is to find the ‘why’ behind ‘the why’. Dig deep on your reasoning for change. For example, you have read in many sources that strength training exercise is good to be incorporated into lifestyle to promote longevity. Why would you want to try it for yourself? Potential answer: because this will help me to prevent bone loss and bone deterioration during menopause. And the second why: what may bone loss mean for me? Answer: feeling frail and susceptible to injuries. Thus, as a way to avoid these implications, including strength training is a good habit to adopt now.
Lastly self-determination. Gaining self-determination, you are able to reach your highest level of motivation, engagement, performance and persistence towards the achievement of your individual goals without anyone’s help. This is the ultimate desire of any coach to help people achieve this state. Identifying your problem areas, setting goals and working on new habits to attain those goals is this infectious drive we see in highly motivated speakers and leaders. It is available to all of us, following the formula of the 3 S’s above.
All the three self-automated behaviours are part of your mindset change. Mindset change doesn’t happen if we simply follow the prescribed plan given to us either by a nutritionist or a medical professional. We need to know the ‘why’ and the ‘how’.
Health Coaching is exactly about that. While working with a person I take into consideration all of your lifestyle factors: family medical history, health in childhood and adolescence, your current lifestyle: work commitments, family life, hobbies, sleep patterns, eating habits, stress factors, exercise routine, etc. Understanding your lifestyle, listening to your values and your health goals, together we can work out how habits change will be possible for you. Your goals are my driving force: Do you want to have a healthier diet, but you also want to include exercise daily? Daily exercise isn’t possible as you have too many meetings, or your commute is too long? What has worked for you in the past? Do you prefer to exercise at home or in a class/ gym? What factors been been preventing you to making the changes yourself? How can you overcome those obstacles? And most importantly, what limiting beliefs do you have?
My lady patient repeated several times before it caught to me: “I have a very healthy boring diet”, to which I finally exclaimed, “But if it is healthy, why is it boring? It can’t be boring and healthy”. Then she added a crucial detail: “I don’t like to cook”, and with this proceeded to show me her meal plan in an app where she had listed several take-aways, ready-made meals, such as pasta bakes, soups, curry dishes. In her belief, she thought that eating chicken and vegetables was healthy (healthier than eating red meat, for example), but her oversight was that the chicken came prepackaged with a marinade and some of her vegetables were tinned.
My plan to help her improve her diet was not telling her to eat more fresh vegetables (vague, unspecific and not measurable), but something she could do straight away: start with going through her pantry and reading the ingredients on the jars, sauces and packaged goods. At the session I taught her how to read labels with a bit of nutritional knowledge. Then taking her favourite dishes, she would un-process them, cook the same dishes but completely from scratch, learning new flavours and figuring out what she and her husband liked most. And lastly, part of the plan was to encourage her to give herself a treat, now and again, baking an oatcake with berries, or a dark chocolate brownie to show the body that healthy eating is about balance, not restrictions and austerity.
Have you worked with a nutritionist, dietitian or health coach before? Was your experience different or the same each time? I would love to hear about it.