The Fourth Law - Make It Satisfying - Nutrition Habits pt. 5

Reinforcement

The most important factor in any behaviour change - Reward.   We are more likely to repeat a behaviour if we find it satisfying.  If you have made it this far in the blog series, I commend and thank you for your support.  Positive emotions created by a reward, after a routine, cultivate habit formation.  Negative emotion created by a routine can destroy habits.  What is rewarded is repeated.   Season your food, use sauce, make it taste good.   Use an inclusive diet to reward yourself for sticking to the menu.  Don’t set up your diet in a way that punishes you by forcing yourself to eat a bunch of food that you don’t enjoy.  It is up to you to cook your food in a way that is healthy and tastes good. 

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in an immediate return environment while the society that we live in today is a delayed return environment.  We work now so that we can get paid later.  We exercise today so that we are not obese in 15 years.  The world has changed to an extreme degree since the time of our ancestors but we are still walking around with the same hardware.   Why do people smoke if we know it will increase lung cancer?  Why do we overeat if it increases the risk of obesity?  The reason for this is that the consequences of these actions are delayed, but the rewards are immediate.  Remember that you won’t be able to rely on motivation and good intentions in order to successfully complete all of your desired habits, your willpower is finite. 

            If we want to make a habit stick, it has to feel successful, so be sure to make the ending of your new habit satisfying.  Tie your desired habits to an immediate reward.  If you are trying to avoid a certain habit, make that avoidance visible.  Say you are trying to stop buying Tim Horton’s or Starbucks on your way to work, or worse yet quit smoking. A great strategy that is used by many is to create a savings account reward system.  Every time that you skip out on buying Starbucks or cigarettes you transfer an amount equal to what your normal Starbucks costs would be into your savings account.  Eventually you will have enough money saved to take yourself on a trip, or reward yourself in a way that pleases you! 

Be sure to select short-term rewards that reinforce your identity.  Don’t reward exercise with ice cream, this routine and reward have conflicting identities.  Rewarding exercise with a spa day makes more sense, it is a luxury reward and it casts a vote in favor of taking care of your body.  In order to get a habit to stick, you need to be immediately rewarded, even if it is in a small way. 

Habit Tracking – The Paper Clip Strategy

There is a famous example of a high level sales broker who had to make lots of sales calls every day. His strategy? Put 2 jars on his desk, one filled with 170 paper clips, the other empty.  After every sales call he would move 1 paper clip over to the empty jar, and he would not leave that day until all 170 paper clips were moved over.  This progress is satisfying.  It gives you a visual measure of how much progress you are making.  Food Journals, workout logs, calendars, even crossing items off a to do list every day can be visually satisfying. 

Jerry Seinfeld’s strategy for becoming great at comedy? “Write better jokes.  In order to write better jokes you have to write jokes every day.”  Get yourself a calendar and every day that you write jokes; you mark an X on the calendar. Once you have a string of days going you begin to take pride in that chain. Don’t break the chain. This tracking will give you a lead measure on how things are going from week to week or month to month. You take pride in that string of X’s.  Don’t break the chain, and never miss twice. 

Habit tracking can be great because it leverages multiple laws of behaviour change:  It is obvious, attractive, and satisfying.  Habit tracking is a series of visual cues.  Studies have shown that people who track their progress on goals are more likely to improve than those who don’t.  Our habit tracker keeps us honest.  The progress of habit tracking can be attractive and motivate us to continue the behaviour.  It shows us that we are moving forward in the right direction and is visual proof of our hard work.  Empty squares can motivate, and tracking itself can be its own reward.  It feels good to watch our results grow.  The habit tracking is also visual votes in the yes column of your desired identity. 

As a coach, it is easy for me to say, “weigh and track all of your food, and track your bodyweight.”  But what this does for most people is create the burden of 2 habits.  Counting calories is a hassle if we are already trying to follow a diet.  Luckily these days you don’t need to track and measure your whole life.  Want to see how much money you are spending on fast food and alcohol? Online banking tracks all of that for you.  You probably only need to manually and visually track your most important habit which in this case is your new nutrition plan you are trying to institute. 

My suggestion would be to find an app that allows you to enter your specific meals ahead of time and save them.  In Part 2 of this series we developed strategies for developing your menu.  Now you can take this menu and enter all of your options into your macro-tracking app.  Having these options saved into your app will save you lots of time, effort, and make things easier (reduce the friction) at the end of the day when you need to track your food.

A Note on Breakdown

Life is going to interrupt you from time to time.  It will be impossible to be perfect with our habits.  This is okay.  This is the where the rule of never miss twice comes in.  If you miss a day on your diet or maybe you just have a full out binge, this is okay.  You don’t need to try and make up for this and punish yourself with less calories the next day, just try to get back on your normal plan.  The first mistake is never the one that ruins you.  Remember that the most important goal of any habit is to just show up on bad and busy days.  Lost days hurt more than successful days help.  The “bad” workouts are just as important as the good ones.  It is not what happens during the training session that is the most important thing, it is being the kind of person that never misses a training session.  Remember that doing less is still more than doing zero.  Don’t break the chain. 

Inversion of the 4th Law – Make it Immediately Unsatisfying

            If failure is painful it can often be an effective teacher, fixing the habit.  The more severe the consequences are, the faster people will learn.   If you want to change a habit you most create an immediate cost to any and all actions that you wish to change.  The strength of the punishment must be strong enough to change your behaviour. 

            We need to make the cost of laziness greater than the cost of training or nutrition tracking.   Behaviour will only shift if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced, you need to have someone there holding you accountable. 

The Habit Contract           

The laws of that we have in our society are a great version of a habit contract.  Seatbelt laws, no smoking laws, no texting and driving laws, Habit contracts are similar verbal or written agreements in which you state your commitment to a particular habit, and the punishment.  As long as you find a reliable accountability partner, knowing that someone is watching is a powerful motivation tool.  If you make the costs of bad habits public and painful this will be a very high motivational tool. 

            There are extreme example of this strategy used by entrepreneurs and CEO’s who formally wrote out and signed a contract that listed the rules and punishments of their relationship with their personal trainer.  Miss a training session? 100$.  Miss your macronutrient goals for the day? 100$.  Yes this is extreme, but it gets the point across.  Having someone to hold you accountable to your strategies is advantageous, and having punishments set ahead of time for if and when you fail will help you beat the habits that you are trying to get rid of. 

            Hopefully some of you are able to take some of these strategies and apply them to your nutrition planning.  All in all I want to remind you to remember that the goal is not to use every single one of these strategies, or to use all or nothing thinking in creating the most 100% optimal diet for you.  The goal is to raise your 1%, however you achieve that is up to you.  My hope is that showing you some of the doors that you can walk through in order to improve your 1% allows you to decide which door you would like to walk through. 

Burke, L. E., Wang, J., & Sevick, M. A. (2011). Self-monitoring in weight loss: a systematic review of the literature. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 111(1), 92-102.

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Avery.

Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: Why we do what we do in life and business. Random House.

Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., ... & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological bulletin, 142(2), 198.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted world. Hachette UK.

Lally, P., Van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European journal of social psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.

Woodburn, J. (1982). Egalitarian societies. Man, 431-451.