The Third Law - Make it Easy - Nutrition Habit Formation pt 4

The goal of this section is to help teach us how to direct our efforts appropriately.  Our plan doesn’t need to be optimal, it just has to get us moving in the right direction.  If you are in Florida and want to head to Canada, just start heading north, as many roads will get you there.  Remember, we are not seeking the most optimal diet, we are just trying to improve an individual’s diet 1%.  This is why we began by raising the awareness of our particular habits.  There is no point in trying to find the ‘optimal’ meal plan when our current habits are so far gone from the theoretical ‘optimal’. 

In the early stages of habit change, the goal is to focus on small wins, keystone habits, and to build some momentum.  We can often get lost in gimmicks and minutiae of nutrition planning causing us to focus on the wrong things and miss the big picture.  At some point, we just need to buckle down and get some practice in as more good habit practice will lead to more automatic habits.   If we are trying to change a nutrition habit, we will have to use the same attention and effort that we would use if we were trying to make a technical change in the squat, benchpress, or deadlift.  More perfect practice will lead to physical changes in the brain, and every time we repeat that practice, we will activate a particular neural circuit associated with that habit.  The secret to building effective habits that last is repetition and frequency.    

It is important to understand that the human brain is lazy and will gravitate to options that require the least amount of effort.  We need to use this information to our advantage when trying to plan our habits so that we can optimize our adherence.  Setting a goal for yourself of making a big habit formation can be motivating, but what happens to your motivation after 2 or 3 weeks?  If you had the goal of completing 100 pushups a day vs 1 push up a day, it would be easier for you to complete 1 push up per day and build momentum.  The same thing can be applied to our nutrition habits. To plan an entire overhaul of your habits, you must reduce the amount of friction that it takes to get your habit moving.  If you don’t eat vegetables, set a goal of 1 vegetable per day, not veggies at every meal; set yourself up for success and build momentum. 

Whether current or desired, our habits are obstacles to meeting our goals.  Our nutrition habits are obstacles to being jacked, shredded, making weight, recovering well, fueling hard training, and great performance.  What we really desire is the outcome that comes from the habit, and therefore we need to make adhering to our habits as easy as possible.  The harder that it is to start a habit, the more difficult it will be to maintain that habit. 

Prime Your Environment

            Take a look at the environments that you work, play, and live in from day to day.  How can you better optimize these environments to make actions easier to

better maintain your habits? 

            If you are trying to create a new habit of going to the grocery store to buy food for dinner, make sure that you choose one that is on your way home from work.  You want this new habit to fit in to the flow of your daily habits.  If you choose a grocery store that is out of your way, you are more likely to decide not to go.  Do your best to reduce the friction of completing your new habits. 

            You could also try meal delivery services or grocery shopping on Amazon.  Both of these options are habit-forming products that reduce the friction of actually going to the store yourself.   It is easier to order off of Amazon than go to the grocery store.  It is easier to order off of Canadian Protein than it is to go to the supplement store.  As much as we can reduce the friction of our environment to completing a new habit, the better off we will be.

            Want to start exercising?  Set out your workout clothes ahead of time.  Want to follow a meal plan?  Cook lots of food ahead of time so that when hunger strikes you don’t have to go looking. Want to eat more fruits and vegetables?  Chop and sort them ahead of time.  Give yourself fast access ready-to-eat options, while increasing the friction of your bad habits. 

2 Minute habits

            The friction stopping what we are doing can be enough to get stuck doing things and wonder what happened to the time.  We sit through a bad movie for 2 hours, we continue snacking while full, we check our phone, and 30 minutes later we are still browsing memes.  One strategy that is very useful when we are looking to overcome the inertia of changing what we are doing, or starting a new habit, is to break that habit down into its smallest moving part.  Once we have started doing something, it is easy to continue. 

Break a habit down into something that takes 30s-120s to do.  This will help you get your reps in.  The goal is not the completion of the habit.  The goal is to practice showing up. 

            Exercise for 2 minutes every day. 

            Read before bed = read 1 page

            30 minutes of Yoga = Take out Yoga mat

            Meal Prep = Start boiling water. 

            Chop Veggies = Take out cutting board

You know what to do after you do the first thing, so breaking it down into a small chunk makes it easier to overcome the challenge of beginning the habit.  Help yourself stop procrastinating by making it easy.  It can be really easy to try to start too big when you are excited and motivated, but it is better to start small.  The dream of change can take over, but this can be too much too soon.  The goal should be to make new habits extremely easy to commence, so don’t make it a challenge.  Once you start something it will be easy to continue.  

            The goal is not to focus on getting in shape, the goal is to be the person that doesn’t skip workouts, even if it is only for 2 minutes.  1 Pushup is better than zero.  1 minute of reading is better than no reading.  It is better to do less, than nothing.  Once you have mastered your 2-minute habits, you can begin to shape those habits.  Remember that we are trying to let our identity drive our habits.  Completion of our 2-minute habits are all vote in the win column. 

You may think to yourself, “I know that this is a trick that is just trying to get me moving.”  This is true, it is.  But if you are worried that you will talk yourself out of the habit because you know that you are trying to trick yourself, then for the first little while put a time limit on your desired habit.  Only exercise for 5 minutes.  Only read for 5 minutes.  You are only allowed to do 5 minutes of yoga.   At this point, the goal is not the completion of the habit, the goal is to complete the habit every day.  The goal is to become the person who doesn’t miss workouts, or to become someone that reads every day.  

Inversion of the Third Law: Make it Difficult

            Success can sometimes be less related to making our productive habits easy than it can be to making our unproductive habits hard.  Make your bad habits more difficult to do.  A commitment device is a choice made in the present that controls your actions in the future. 

• Reduce overeating by purchasing food in individual packs, snack sizes, rather than in bulk.

• Make weight by leaving your wallet and money at home to avoid buying fast food.

• Ask your waiter to split your food into a takeaway box ahead of time. 

            Don’t try to change the person, change the scenario, then the environment.  Use smaller plates, budget food expenditure, use a meal delivery service, cook food ahead of time and eat it before it goes bad.

The next part in this series will continue with the fourth law of behaviour change, Reward, Making Habits Satisfying.