ALAs).One more time: Control your food environment. Make it easy to do the right
thing.
Strategy 2: More Yes, Less No
Recently, a group of us were playing a volleyball game. A guy on the other team
served as the de facto leader. He yelled, clapped, tried to fire up his team. When
their play turned south, he implored them to do better. His preferred mode of
coaching: “Just stop doing that!”
You know what happened next: His teammates couldn’t do anything right.
When told what not to do, that’s all they could do, and they missed the ball again
and again.
This is exactly the way our diet culture works. Again and again, we hear, Just
stop doing that! Stop eating pie. Stop snacking. Stop carbs. Stop dreaming of a
naughty interlude with that hot Italian, fettuccine Alfredo.
We live in an opposite-of-Nike dieting environment. Just don’t do it.
But the more you’re told what not to do, the more tempted you are to rebel.
That’s not because you’re naturally defiant (though defiance certainly plays a
role). It happens for a couple of reasons—for one, your brain doesn’t always
hear the “no.” For example, when a child’s brain is exposed to the words “don’t
run,” it processes the word “run.” A better imperative is “walk.” By changing up
the messaging, you’re imploring your brain to do something, instead of not
doing something. It also works because your brain needs to have some action to
perform; it wants to be occupied. So the smarter move is to find an understudy
for a habit you want to change, a behaviour that gradually replaces it.
Your brain learns a new behaviour with practice. It lays down neurological
wiring so it knows what to do easily. It may take some time at first, but
eventually your brain just flips the switch and you act accordingly. When you
replace bad habits with healthy ones, you’re laying down new track to hide the
old ones.
So how does it work, practically speaking?
Let’s say your vice is a bag of crisps every afternoon around five P.M. You
crave the crunch, you crave the salt, you crave that ritual of eating and relaxing.