Love Food and Be Slim

Build Up Good Habits, Remove Bad Ones
How long do you think it takes to form a habit? And what is a habit anyway?
My Concise Oxford English Dictionary’s definition is: ‘a settled or regular tendency or practice’. And the Oxford English Dictionary also has an old-fashioned definition: ‘a person’s health or constitution…’ (my italics).
It has been found that it’s the ‘regular’ part of a habit that’s important. Behaviour needs to be repeated to become ‘settled’ or automatic – like a toddler learning to sit on the potty!
Now for the science behind it. In his book Psycho-cybernetics, Dr Maxwell Maltz explained that it took 21 days for amputees to stop feeling ‘phantom’ sensations in the place where an amputated limb used to be. From this starting-point he deduced that it took 21 days to create a new pattern of thinking.2
Since a habit is quite simply a new pattern of thinking, you can therefore create a new one in 21 days!
We all know that the longer you do something, the more it becomes automatic – like driving or even learning to walk. But sometimes we’re not quite so aware of how we’re creating habits day after day. We pride ourselves on going to the gym regularly: that’s a good habit! But what about reaching for that snack when our favourite TV show’s on? What type of habit is that?
If you love a snack – say, crisps – what do you love exactly: the texture, the taste, the crunch? You might associate the taste with good times and pleasure and relaxation. But have you ever noticed that the crunch is kind of oily? That oily crunch is actually what makes that crisp so unhealthy! Every bite releases fatty calories into your mouth. Then those calories travel to your hips and sit there, and won’t budge easily! They hold you hostage to hours at the gym and too-tight jeans!
A client of mine thought about this and every time she sat down to watch TV she imagined the crispy calories were evil crispy little gremlins conspiring to fatten her up! Soon she was no longer reaching for the crisps and was drinking sparkling water instead!
All she’d done was change her pattern of thinking. Instead of thinking about how nice those snacks were, she’d started imagining all the nasty consequences. When she’d thought about those consequences for long enough, day after day, she’d created a new habit: not eating crisps in front of the TV!
So, how are habits formed? Let’s go a bit into the background of how we learn. The brain creates connections (synapses or neural pathways) between brain cells (neurons), which are like a roadmap for learning information or behaviour. You can imagine them as short-cuts. Without going into detail, the most accepted theory on the working of the brain today is called ‘Hebbian Learning’, which summarizes that ‘Neurons that fire together wire together.’3 Quite a jingle, isn’t it?
All this sounds quite technical and your neurons are probably overloaded already! But it’s actually just like learning the route to a particular destination: the neurons are your landmarks and the synapses are the roads which link them. When you’re in an unfamiliar part of town, you concentrate on watching out for the landmarks on the way. But if you drive past them on a regular basis then you know the way ‘instinctively’. But it’s not instinct at all – it’s learned behaviour. It’s your brain coding the route, running a little mini program every time you have to get from that particular A to B. The more your brain runs the same pattern of connections, the more you’re making it automatic and permanent. This is how you learn.
On the other hand, to break an established habit, you have to make the route less effective! You can do this by reprogramming the pattern of behaviour that created the habit in the first place – basically, by doing something different. This has the effect of weakening the synapse (the established link).
Furthermore, when you change established behaviour, you need to put new behaviour in its place – bright yellow diversion signs to take you in a new direction! The more you substitute the new behaviour, the weaker the old route becomes. But unlike the yellow signs, you can’t take the new behaviour away, or the old behaviour will return – which is why just one drink or cigarette can be disastrous for those training their brains to quit craving alcohol or nicotine.
My husband is always telling me to ‘break the pattern’ when I nag at him to pick up his smelly socks. Trouble is, he never suggests substitute behaviour for the nagging. So do you think I quit nagging and break the pattern?!
Another way to break the link is to make the outcome undesirable. This is like training dogs not to poop on the floor by tapping them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper every time they do it. But motivation is generally more effective than punishment. Punishment causes resentment and dissatisfaction – which is why diets don’t work!
Which of these two options sounds nicer to you:
‘If you eat that doughnut, you’ll be fat, miserable and guilty.’
‘If you refuse that doughnut, you’ll feel slim, healthy and empowered!’
And which do you think gets better results?
The best way to harness the power of the mind is to repeat positive actions and thoughts daily. Now I’m not talking about repeating affirmations in front of the mirror, though this can help some people. I am talking about making a change to your thinking patterns and practising those changes every day.
Remember: change + action = progress!
It’s consistency that’s important here. We all know that if you change your eating habits for the duration of a diet but then revert, the weight lost will creep back on. Why? Like the thermostat controlling temperature in your house, the ‘ponderostat’4 in your body carries the in-built ‘memory’ of your optimum (read ‘famine-proof’ and ‘fattest’) body weight, to which you’ll return to time and time again unless you reset its calibration over a longer term. This is why ‘quick fixes’ and ‘crash diets’ don’t work! You may be forcing your body to burn fat in famine mode, but you’re doing nothing to re-route the behavioural patterns that created the fat in the first place!
That’s why when you’re changing established neurological patterns, you need to commit to being consistent, trusting that the new route to a better habit is being carved out day after day after day. Until eventually, the new thoughts and actions become so easy they appear effortless.
So, how are we going to put all this theory into practice?

You’re going to make one positive change, like quitting snacking in front of the TV and drinking sparkling water instead (but please do personalize it), for a calendar month – 28, 30 or 31 days.. Mark up your calendar and promise yourself that you’ll do it for the duration – no more, no less. This is not about forcing yourself: it’s a holiday, an experience of something different, an opportunity to go a new route! It’s your chance to realize how easy it is to re-route a pattern of behaviour! And once you’ve made that first decision, it’ll become easier … and easier … and easier…
Then on the first day of the following month, ask yourself, how you feel. If you feel oh so much better, then you can easily keep on going, can’t you? You see, after your initial commitment, it can feel effortless!

What you’ve done is wired yourself to behave in a way which will better serve you.

Take a pen and paper and write this down:
‘The decisions I make and the actions I take determine my “wiring”.’

Consider this quote from the Dutch Renaissance humanist and theologian Desiderius Erasmus: ‘A nail is driven out by another nail, habit is overcome by habit.’5