Nutrition Habit Formation pt.1

If you are reading this I am going to make the assumption that you have an understanding of what you need to eat from day to day to recover from hard training.  You know that if you eat too many calories you will gradually put on more body fat than you would aspire to, and that if you eat too little calories you will not be able to effectively grow muscle.  You have heard of these magic macronutrients; protein, carbohydrates, and fats, and that if you make your food intake fit into these magic macros, you can eat whatever you want, you don’t even have to eat vegetables.  But you do eat fruits and vegetables; at least you try to, because you know that eating enough fruits and vegetables is important for proper vitamin and mineral intake.  Lastly you know that proper hydration is important for maximizing performance, yet you still struggle to drink that 3rd or 4th liter of water from day to day. 

If we have a general understanding of all of this information, why are so many of us so unsatisfied with how we look or feel?  Why do so many of us struggle so hard to adhere to a diet plan that we have set for ourselves? Is it our goals? Probably not, most people reading this have probably set a reasonable goal that lies somewhere on the spectrum of being as jacked and shredded as possible.  When we are able to stick to nutrition plan long enough to achieve our goal, we usually slide back into our old self fall into old eating habits after the diet has finished.  We believe that reaching the end goal will bring us happiness, but once we have achieved that goal what do we do?  How do we shift our mindset to better fall in love with the process that leads to long-term progress, rather than focusing strictly on our current goal in hopes that it will lead to happiness?

It can be easy to simply explain what someone needs to do in order to reach a goal.  As a coach, I am often frustrated by my inability to convince clients to do what they need to do to get better outside of the gym.   I am missing the point.  People mostly know what they need to do to get better; they just don’t know how to do it.  People know that they need to track their calorie or macronutrient intake against their bodyweight so that they have a general idea of how they need to manipulate these variables in order to reach their goal.  Developing an effective method, however, that doesn’t involve strict meal plans, black and white thinking, or all or nothing dieting, can be much more difficult than knowing how to manipulate certain inputs in order to reach a certain output while still being able to enjoy their life. 

The problem lies in the methods we use to attain this goal.  The problem lies within our day-to-day habits.  The goal of this series is to give you a general understanding of what a habit really is, how habits are actually formed, why habit formation and change is so powerful, to provide strategies to make changes to our habits, and how to synthesize this information with the basics of what we know in the realm of sports nutrition.  This work is based on the writings of Charles Duhigg and James Clear, if you aspire to learn more I highly recommend that you check out their books:

If you would like to learn more about the principles of nutrition planning, I recommend that you check out the work of either Dr. Eric Helms or Renaissance Periodization.  Both of these books do a great job of breaking down and distilling the important information that you need to know in order to set up a successful nutrition plan. 

What is a Habit?

Almost half of the decisions that we think we make every single day are not actual decisions, but are habits.  Over the thousands of millennia that human evolution has occurred, the human brain has figured out how to make actions, thoughts, and responses habitual.  The human brain wants to save energy and effort so that it could free up space for more cognitively demanding tasks.  If you had to actively think about every step you took when you walked, this would leave less time and room for ingenuity, creation, and more importantly on survival.  Habit formation also makes the brain more efficient so that it requires less room in our skull.  The Basal ganglia, located in the deeper, older, part of the brain where the brain meets the spinal column, is integral to recalling patterns and acting. 

There is a famous study done on rats where scanners were surgically inserted into the brains of rats so that they could monitor brain activity.  They then placed a rat in a hallway with a door in front of it that led to a maze with a piece of chocolate at the end. The experimenters opened the door and that made a “click” sound upon opening, signaling to the rat that it was time to navigate the maze.  As the experiment progressed through more and more trials, the rat learned to navigate the maze, and it’s brain activity decreased.  There were high amounts of brain activity at the beginning and end of the maze.  When the brain first encounters a problem; it is unsure how to solve it.  It takes time to analyze all of the information in its environment and all of the decisions that are being made are conscious.  All of this exploration eventually culminates in a solution to the problem.  Habits are reliable solutions to problems in our environment.  These habits reduce the cognitive load that is required and set up mental freedom to do other things.  The brain has stored this information so that it becomes more and more automatic over time. 

The trigger of a habit or behaviour is called the Cue; this is the hint for the brain to know what habit to use.  The Cue puts the brain into automatic mode. This habit can be a physical, mental, or emotional Response or Routine.  This Routine is the actual habit, thought, or action that is being performed.    The spike in brain activity at the end of a habit is caused by the Reward, the reward centers of the brain help the brain remember the important chunk of information that came before it and allows the brain to make sure that everything unfolded as expected.   The brain knows when it is getting a reward; a brain scan would show that individuals are experiencing happiness when they receive a reward at the end of a routine.  The whole process is driven by anticipation of the reward at then end of the habit, known as Craving.   If we don’t receive the reward at the end of our routine we can become angry or frustrated, this is why habits are so powerful.  Over time the wanting evolves into obsessive craving.  This whole process is referred to as the Habit Loop, an endless feedback loop that is occurring throughout the day, every day. 

The Cue notices a reward

The Craving wants the reward

The Routine or Response obtains the reward.

Duhigg Clear

Habits can be ignored, changed, replaced, but when a habit emerges, the brain stops completely participating in decision making.  One of the problems is that the brain cannot tell the difference between a good habit and a bad habit.  Even when we are able to break an old habit, those habits will always be stored in our brains.  Unless you deliberately fight your bad habits with new routines, the old patterns will tend to emerge.  Before we go on to strategize ways to raise our awareness of our current habits, let’s discuss why habit change can be so powerful.

Why are habits so Powerful?

I would like to discuss the idea of The Aggregation of Marginal Gainz; simply stated, this is an approach to progression where by one works to find small improvements in every input that goes in to a particular output.  James Clear defines this concept as a “philosophy of searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything that you do.”  If you breakdown and think of every single habit or system that goes into powerlifting, and somehow improve all of those things by 1%, you will get a significant improvement in your performance.  This may sound extreme, but remember that we are trying to find 1% improvement on every thing that you do.  A major reason as to why diet plans fail is that people all too often focus on trying to create the most optimal diet, without considering where their current nutrition habits lie.  Focus on improving your 1%.  It may be easy to underestimate the power of making very small improvements on a daily basis, but focusing on tiny changes that get 1% better every day for one year will yield a huge improvements.  On the flip side of that coin, if we don’t make any changes and get 1% worse every day for a year, we will regress almost all the way down to zero. 

It can be hard to visualize why small daily habits may make such a large difference in the long term.  It can be easy to dismiss a single decision as not having a huge impact.  The goal is to systematize your thinking so that you don’t have to make decisions in the short term; the goal is to build better habits. 

If we are going to make rice, first we need to boil some water.  As the temperature the water slowly heats up degree by degree, there is still no visible boiling occurring, and the water isn’t sufficiently hot enough to cook rice.  Eventually the water reaches 100 degrees, and now we are cooking!  The energy used during the time it takes to boil water is not wasted it is stored. This is how habit change works.  This is what James Clear refers to breaking through the Plateau of Latent Potential.

It can be frustrating in the initial stages of building new nutrition habits when it is harder to see tangible results resulting from those new found habits.  This brings us back to why we need to do our best to focus on the processes we are using to reach our goals, rather than the goals themselves.  As Powerlifters, most of us have a pretty good appreciation for delayed gratification when it comes to strength development.  We understand that if we train hard multiple days per week, for weeks and months, these processes will pay off on meet day.  Let’s build a system that will help delay gratification of some of our nutrition habits. 

A Note on Belief

Before we discuss how we can best go about working for change in our habits so that small daily habits will yield large improvements over time, we need to add an ingredient of habit change that is probably the most important part, belief.  We need to believe that we can achieve great things, and that this system that we are trying to create for ourselves can get us there.  It doesn’t matter if we give ourselves new habits if we can’t change the “why” behind our old habits.  If we don’t have the capacity to believe that things will get better, then we are defeating ourselves before we ever start the process. 

Habit change can be difficult for 2 main reasons:  We try to change the wrong things, and we try to change our habits in the wrong way. 

The three layers of behaviour change:

Outcomes

            e.g lose weight, publish a book, win championship, what you get

Process

            e.g. new routine, decluttering, meditation practice, what you do

Identity

            e.g. worldview, self image, judgments, what you believe

In order to achieve successful behaviour change for long periods of time we need to reframe the mindset of always focusing on the outcome.  Outcome based habits focus on what you want to achieve.  A smoker would tell you that they are “trying to quit smoking.”  This is backwards in that the person still identifies himself or herself as a smoker.  Identity based habits focus on who you wish to become.  “I am trying to quit smoking” vs. “I am not a smoker.”  The most powerful intrinsic motivation that someone can get is when a habit becomes part of one’s identity.  The real reason that we fail to stick with habits is because our self-identity gets in the way. 

Now that we have a general sense of what goes into the formation of daily habits.  We will spend the next four parts of the series discussing how we can leverage the four laws of behaviour change in order to build some better nutrition habits.