Use THIS Instead of Willpower

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Full Episode Transcript:

Use THIS Instead of Willpower to Eat Healthier

Hi there career women. Willpower, as you may have found out through personal experience is unreliable. That’s because it takes an incredible amount of mental energy, and our human brains were designed to try to conserve as much energy as possible.

In this episode I am going to share what it is that you need to do instead of using willpower to eat healthier. This is going to be the simplest thing that you can start doing now, without my help in my coaching program.

This will actually help you to create healthier eating habits that you can maintain for life. And make it much easier for you to lose weight and keep it off.

But before we get into that, I want you to listen and nod your head yes if any of these are you.

You feel like you are a hard worker in your career or in your personal life, so why is it so hard to just stick with healthier eating?

Or you love feeling in control as a career woman, so it’s really frustrating when you feel like you can’t control your eating habits, especially when there are attempting foods around.

Or you feel like you start out really strong using all of the willpower, and then someone offers you chocolate, you don’t even know why you take it and eat it, but you do, and then you feel terrible about it. Wondering why you did that when you were doing so well.

Then, you feel like a failure and completely fall off the wagon.

I could go on, but I’m sure you’re nodding yes to at least one of these by now.

As I mentioned in the beginning, willpower will only take you so far.

Think of trying to use willpower to either break bad eating habits, or eat healthier as you swimming against a really strong current in the ocean. You may be successful at first, but you’re going to get so fatigued and end up drowning.

And career women really don’t want to be wasting mental energy trying to rely on willpower to eat healthier.

I know certainly didn’t when I was trying to change my eating habits to lose weight and feel more energized. That was the thing. I wanted to feel more energized, not feel like I was utilizing all of this mental energy to try to choose the healthier thing.

So, you’re going to use this instead of willpower to eat healthier.

It’s actually a little 3-step process that you can start doing right away that take the place of willpower and are much more effective to create healthier eating habits.

Those three things are a trigger, a doable behavior, and a reward. I’ll explain each of these.

Our brains need to have something in the outside world trigger us so that we then have a thought which then creates a feeling in our body. The feelings that we experience in our body are what either make us do or not do something. That’s called a behavior.

And then a behavior always results in something. Our brain will only repeat that behavior if it has some sort of reward associated with it. If there is no reward at all, you can repeat a behavior, but you’re going to have to use willpower.

There’s a sequence of events. A trigger that leads to a thought, that then creates a feeling, that then leads to a behavior, which then should have a reward. This sequence needs to be repeated multiple times to have a chance of becoming a new habit.

We’re not going to worry about the thought and the feeling right now, because I’m going to keep this really simple for you, so you can do it on your own.

So for this, we’re actually going to start with the behavior first. Decide what it is that you want to do. If you want to start packing your lunch for work, rather than ordering take out or not eating at all, then that’s the behavior.

You’re going to make that behavior doable. Something that you’re pretty darn sure you can follow through on.

So, if you’ve been ordering take out five days a week, and ultimately, you’d like to just order take out once a month, I wouldn’t jump right to that.

I’d recommend maybe deciding that you will pack your lunch just one or two days during the week and make that your doable behavior. At least for the first week or two. Then you can always increase the frequency of packing your lunch.

Now, once you have your doable behavior, you’re then going to think about what will trigger you to do that behavior. What will make it easier for you to remember to do the and do the behavior?

This can be as simple as a post it note or an alert on your phone reminding you to pack your lunch the night before for work.

And if you’ve predetermined that you’re going to do this on Monday and Wednesday to start out with, which I highly recommend getting very specific and planning it out ahead of time, then this is a great thing to put on your phone as an alert.

Then, you’re going to think what else you can do to make this task of packing your lunch easier.

Also, if you’re concerned about actually eating that lunch that you’ve packed instead of ordering the takeout, then you’ll want to think about what will make it easier for you to then eat the lunch and not order take out.

So that might mean making sure you pack a lunch you enjoy eating.

Maybe something that’s quick and easy to eat. Maybe even stick a note for yourself inside of your lunch box reminding you of how good you’ll feel after you eat this lunch instead of the takeout.

So you’re going to just think of a few things you can trigger you to actually pack your lunch and then how to make it easier to actually follow through and eat that lunch instead of the takeout.

Which then brings me to the reward part. That all ties in with the reward.

So, there are main two types of rewards, external and internal rewards. External rewards would be something like putting a sticker on a calendar, lighting a candle, putting on some cozy slippers and reading a book, or getting your nails done.

Internal rewards are positive feelings. Positive feelings are created from positive results. An example would be a feeling of pride, from knowing in your mind that you made the healthier choice for lunch.

So, you get to decide what reward you want for yourself for this behavior.

Here’s the caveat. No food or drink rewards. We want to get out of any habit that you may have of rewarding yourself with food. Because that defeats the whole purpose.

Once you choose your reward, you’re going to want to make sure that you actually do give yourself that reward. When I’m working with clients, I check in with them to make sure that they rewarded themselves.

I think it’s so easy for people, especially people and definitely career women, to just do without taking a pause and telling ourselves what a good job we did or rewarding ourselves with a non-food treat.

And it’s so much more fun to be able to take that moment to feel good about something that we did or to give ourselves that little external reward.

And it really is useful because it helps to encourage that new behavior.

Doesn’t this sound so much better than just utilizing willpower and then dealing with the frustration when that willpower runs out? And then all your efforts feel like they’ve gone to waste?

And it takes just a little bit of thinking in the beginning to see what will serve as your trigger and what will help make that behavior easier to do, but once you’ve decided that in the beginning, you’re set.

And once this behavior turns into a habit, you’re really set.

It will be so much easier to gain that momentum, start eating healthier, and lose the weight that you want to lose. And then you’ll actually be able to keep it off, because these are healthy lifestyle changes, rather than drastic diets.

Or even non drastic diets. There’s a lot of diets out there that don’t seem that drastic, but they don’t address the things that need to be addressed in order to stay consistent.

Alright, so that’s what I have for you on what to use instead of willpower for healthier eating.

If you’re a career woman who is wanting to lose some weight and recognizes that you have some eating habits that are making it more difficult for you, this is the podcast for you.

You have come to the right place. So be sure to follow the show, so you get all the newest episodes as they come out.

And if you’d like my guidance to break bad eating habits more quickly and efficiently, so that you can lose weight without wasting further time, then book a free consultation with me using the link below in the episode description.