The First Law - Make it Obvious - Nutrition Habit Formation pt. 2

In the first part of this series, we discussed what a habit is, how habits form, and why they are so powerful.  The next four posts will each focus on building strategies to address the four laws of behavior change. 

If we really want to change a habit or behavior, we need to start by addressing the different aspects of this loop.  James Clear refers to this process as The Four Laws of Behaviour Change

The Cue notices a reward

The Craving wants the reward

The Routine or Response obtains the reward.

Raising Awareness

Before we can make habit change obvious, we need to formally assess where our habits are currently sitting.  A Habits scorecard can be a great tool for fleshing out which of your day-to-day habits are good, and which ones are bad.  Keep track and write out all of your daily habits on to a sheet of paper.  Beside each daily habit write a plus, minus, or equal sign.   The goal of the habits scorecard is to raise awareness of any habits or routines that may be causing performance failures that we are not aware of. 

Good and bad habits may be a bit of a misnomer, depending on the individual what is considered good and bad may be different; it would be better to frame this as a search for our most effective habits, effective at meeting our goals.  To adapt this habits scorecard to our nutrition habits, we are going to make a nutrition scorecard.  Write every food down that you eat for 1-2 weeks.  Don’t weigh, measure, track calories, macronutrients, etc., this is not the goal of this exercise.  The goal of the exercise is to raise awareness about what you are currently eating, see how it lines up with your goals, and use this information to build yourself a menu of food.  Do not observe or judge yourself. 

I want to reiterate that the goal of this exercise is not to label a bunch of foods as good or bad.   There is no such thing as a good or bad food.  Stealing a line of thought from Eric Helms; there is nothing inherently destructive about eating a Twinkie, a Twinkie will not go into your body and start wreaking havoc and destruction on your insides.  However, if we were to eat a diet that was comprised entirely of Twinkies, your diet would significantly lack a number of nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.  There are no such things as good or bad food, only effective foods.  Effective foods are unprocessed, dense in micronutrients, and taste good.   With that in mind, the goal at the end of the day is not to exclude all of these foods that we deem ineffective, the goals is to include them.  We want to build a meal plan that is inclusive rather than exclusive.  This does not mean that we are going to build a meal plan that allows us endless amounts of Oreos and chocolate, but it does mean we will allow ourselves to eat the things we enjoy.  If we do not allow ourselves to ever eat the things we enjoy, once our will power fails we are more likely to binge and eat a whole row of Oreos.   If we allow ourselves to eat Oreos, perhaps as a reward for sticking to the assigned meal plan, we are more likely to practice restraint and adhere to the overall plan in the long term.  How inclusion of certain foods fits in to your plan is up to you, it is going to be different for everyone depending on their currents habits and their long-term goals. 

Another strategy for raising your awareness is to speak the consequences and/or outcomes of what you are about to eat out loud.  This will make the consequences of that habit more real. 

            “I am going to eat this doughnut.  This doughnut is filled with delicious sugars and fats but it lacks important micronutrients.”  I know that this seems somewhat silly, but again the goal of these exercises is to raise your conscious awareness of what you are doing every day regarding your nutrition habits.

Implementation Intention

There is a study where the goal was to see how motivation and education impacted the subject’s commitments to exercise.  The subjects were divided into 3 groups.  The control group was simply asked to track their exercise frequency.  The second group was educated on the benefits of exercise, read and watched motivational material, and also tracked their exercise frequency.  The third and final group was asked to read the same educational material as group 2, but their strategy was to formulate a plan.  Specifically, this group was told to write out a series of “I will” statements that outlined the day, time, and place, that they would engage in exercise.  Motivational material did not seem to make that big of a difference, as only 35%-38% of groups 1 and 2 exercised 1x/week.  91% of group 3 ended up engaging in exercise 1x week. 

            Implementation Intension is the act of outlining how we actually intend to implement a particular habit.  It outlines 2 of the most common cues, time and location, and forces us to use them to our advantage.  People who make a specific plan involving when and where, are more likely to follow through. 

            I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].

A simple way to effectively apply this strategy to your nutrition is to take the idea of implementation intention and use it to build a menu or meal plan.  First, use the food list from your nutrition scorecard to come up with a menu of food options for the week.  Remember that we want to be inclusive in our meal planning, while being able to practice restraint.

            When creating your menu, it is best to give yourself options for each meal for each time of the day.  If you were more serious you could try to match the macronutrient or calorie values for these meals, but this isn’t mandatory, remember that the goal at this stage is just sticking to your menu, teaching yourself to practice restraint, and rewarding good behavior with restrained inclusion.  

At Breakfast will eat:

3 eggs, 1/2  cup oatmeal, 1 banana

or

1 bowl cereal, milk, 1 apple

or

2 pieces of Toast w/ avocado, 1 orange

From there, use your menu and nutrition scorecard to figure out how much of each food you will need to buy for each week.  Once you have created your grocery list, implement your intention to buy those groceries

            I will [Stick to my shopping list] at [10:00am Sunday] at the [Grocery Store].

            I will [prep my food] at [11:00am Sunday] when I get [Home] from the grocery store. 

Building a menu of options and cooking the food ahead of time sets the ball rolling for success.  You have given yourself a list of options and prepared them ahead of time, that way when hunger strikes you have food ready and are less likely to order take out or eat a roll of Oreos.  The strategy of implementation intention will also help us to say no to things that may derail our progress, distract us, or pull us off course.  If we have set up an inclusive plan ahead of time, we are more likely to stick to that plan. 

Habit Stacking

One of the reasons that it can be difficult to institute new habits is because our minds prefer familiarity as we go through the day.  This familiarity gives us a sense of comfort and safety.   Radio stations know that we have a preference for the familiar, so when they plan to release a new song they camouflage the song between 2 other hit songs.  Globo gyms know that new gym goers may be uncomfortable and unfamiliar with a fitness setting, so they do their best to create positive social experiences that are familiar. 

            We can leverage this craving for familiarity to create new habits by stacking our new desired habit after a habit that we already do.  Our old habit becomes the cue for our new habit. 

            After [OLD HABIT] I will [NEW HABIT]

Habit stacking is a simple yet effective tool.  Make sure that the cue or trigger is absolutely clear and specific.   A lot of human behavior unravels because we fall into automatic mode and unconsciously execute habit after habit without giving it too much thought.  Remember that half of the decisions we make every day are not actually decisions, but they are habits.  I already stacked one habit in our previous example: 

When I [RETURN FROM GROCERY SHOPPING] I will [MEAL PREP]. 

We want to try to tie desired behaviours into things that we already do.  Say for example that we want to create a habit of tracking our calorie and macronutrient intake against our bodyweight.  We already have the habit of eating every day, so when we finish eating that will be the cue for us to track our food. 

When I [FINISH EATING] I will [TRACK MY MACROS]. 

Having somewhere where you have all of this information can be advantageous in order for seeing longer-term changes with bodyweight, macronutrient intake, and recovery trackers. If we use our list of daily morning routines from earlier, we can use it to create a bunch of habit stacks. 

When I [Go to the bathroom] I will [Weigh myself].  When I [weigh myself] I will [Track my bodyweight].  When I [track my bodyweight] I will [fill out my daily readiness questionnaire].  When I [fill out my questionnaire] I will [log my macros from the day before]. 

You can see how this process could go on and on, but now we have stacked a bunch of desired habits that raise our awareness of how our training, nutrition, and recovery are going, all into one block.  We have tied a desired behaviour into something that we already do.  Continue to create big and bigger stacks and build momentum.  Stacking is a great tool creating a set of rules that help to guide future behaviour.  It prepares us with a game plan. 

Environment Matters More Than Willpower and Motivation

            There is an oft-cited study that that took a look at the ability of children to delay gratification.  Researchers put 4 year old kids in a room one at a time, placed an Oreo and a bell on a table, told the kids if they waited 15 minutes they could have an extra Oreo, or they could ring the bell and eat the Oreo.  They tracked the children down years later and found that the children who were able to delay gratification and receive 2 Oreos, on average, had higher SAT scores, higher paying jobs, better friendships, and a better ability to cope with important problems.

It has previously been thought that willpower is a learnable skill, but research has been done to show that willpower is more like a muscle; it gets tired, and has less energy for other exercises of willpower and restraint.  Another study looked at measuring how finite a resource willpower really is.  Researchers put a number of individuals in a room with a plate stacked full of radishes and cookies.  Half the participants were told that they could eat as many cookies as they would like, but they were not allowed to eat radishes.  The other participants were told that they had to eat 1 radish, but they could not eat any cookies.  After a period of time they were asked to try to complete a maze, which unknown to the participants, was unsolvable.  The cookie group tried to solve the maze for 19 minutes on average. The radish group only lasted 8 minutes, 60% less time than the cookie group.  They had exhausted their will power trying to choke down a radish and not eat any cookies. 

Knowing that our willpower is going to be finite, we must do our best to shape our environment to set us up for success in the future.  After working and making decisions all day, you are going to come home from work exhausted.  Do you have cookies or chips sitting on your counter? It is going to be hard to resist these urges.  The environment that we live in is going to play a large part in shaping our behaviour.  Our vision is our most powerful sensory stimuli, therefore it is extremely important that we design our living and work area to be productive and keep us on track towards our goals.  Become the architect of your environment. 

Make It Visible

   An interesting study on living environment went into people’s homes and simply took a photo of their kitchen.  In the households where chips and cookies were visible on the counter top, the average bodyweight and BMI of the household was higher than that of the houses that had nothing visible.  If a fruit bowl was visible, the average bodyweight and BMI was lower than that of the houses that had nothing visible.  You can make the argument for whether this infers correlation or causation, but I think either argument sways in favour of designing our environment to suit our desired habits. 

Remember that habits will be initiated by a cue in our environment.  That cue will create craving.  Want to eat more fruit or vegetables? Put them on the counter, not in the crisper where you will forget about them and they will go bad.  It can be easy NOT to follow a certain behaviour when it isn’t in our vision – make your productive cues stand out.

Reversal of the first law:  Make it Invisible

There is a common misconception that any unhealthy behaviour as a moral weakness – “you lack self control”.  During the Vietnam War the American army had a horrible problem with heroin addiction among the ranks.  The American government foresaw a serious issue when these soldiers came home but weren’t prepared with a way to deal with the problem.  The most interesting thing was, most of the soldiers came home and immediately stopped using heroin.  They had completely been removed from the environment that they associated with heroin use. 

Disciplined people don’t have superpowers of the will, or amazing self-control.  Instead they have structured their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower or self-control.  Don’t want to eat cookies or chips?  Don’t buy them, or at least don’t leave them on your counter top where you are going to see them. Put your reward snack up high on a shelf in the garage.  Every time you think that you want to have these snacks you will have to put extra effort into having them, which will give you time to think whether you really need that snack right now or are you just bored, tired, or stressed.

 Reduce your exposure to your unproductive habits.  Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.  Self-control is a short-term solution.  Cut bad habits off at the source.

The next part in this series will continue with the second law of behaviour change, Craving, Making Habits Attractive.