Strategy 1: Commit to an Environmental Makeover
If you want to succeed with food, make it easy to do the right thing. Create
personal environments that are full of healing options. Your fridge, your freezer,
your pantry, your kitchen counters, and your bag should be well stocked with
foods that can sustain you through a day’s arc of hunger pangs and emotions.
Think about it: How many times do you reach for organ-strangling foods just
because they’re closest? It happens when you walk by an open cabinet and see
that orange box, beckoning you to crunch some crackers. (There’s a reason that
manufacturers make boxes so brightly coloured—they say “eat me!” loud and
clear.) It happens when that nice lady brings in cupcakes for the volunteer crew.
It happens when you didn’t think ahead about lunch, one o’clock rolls around,
and the closest thing to you is the Chinese buffet—a great deal at £4.99. But at
3,000 calories and who knows how much deep-fried fat, that buffet is the
furthest thing from a bargain. It happens all the time. (By the way, you can make
good choices in a Chinese restaurant, and I’ll show you how.)
I’ve learned so much from food researchers who have done fascinating work
in the area of mindless eating—how subconscious cues get us to eat more and
choose poorly. For example, researchers at Cornell University, led by Brian
Wansink, have done some wild experiments in which they show how visual cues
have a huge impact on how much we eat, using things like bottomless bowls of
soup (soup is pumped up through the bottom of the bowl so the eater has no idea
more is being added). And they have looked at factors like noise and light levels
to see how they influence food decisions. They found that a lot of factors
unrelated to hunger nudge us to eat more and more and more.
The two keys to thwarting those forces are planning and creation. Have you
planned for thin-ice moments—times when you’re most vulnerable to overeating
or flooding your bloodstream with enemy ingredients? And have you created
simple solutions that let you eat, snack, graze, and treat yourself the healthy
way?
Picture this and you’ll see what I mean: It’s ten at night, you’ve had a hard
day, the dishes are washed, and you finally get a chance to kick back and watch
an episode of your guilty-pleasure reality TV show. Quiet time. De-stress time.
Me time. Time, you might think, for a heaped bowl of vanilla ice cream scattered
with chocolate chips that you can roll your tongue around for the next little
while. Three minutes later, that bowl is on your lap, the remote is in your hand,
and before long, your insulin response team has dialled a biological 9-9-9.