Get Control Back with Better Eating Habits

Do you feel like even though you know you shouldn’t be digging into the cookies in the snack cabinet late at night, you find your hand doing it anyway?

Why is it that despite that part of the brain saying, “I shouldn’t be doing this,” your arm and hand seem to have a mind of their own?

It’s frustrating, especially to women who are used to being in control.

Like you and I.

We do what we promise others we will do, in our careers, with our relationships, with tasks that need to get done.

So why can’t we do what we keep promising ourselves?

Promises like eating better, exercising more, drinking more water, getting to bed earlier, all the things we know are good for us?

How do you get that control back?

With better eating habits. Not perfect, just better.

In this post, I’m sharing how you get control back with better eating habits, and why your brain is doing exactly what it was intended to do for survival.

Why Your Brain Forms Habits

So to answer earlier the question of “why can’t we do what we keep promising ourselves?”

Well, it’s because your brain (mine too!) is designed to get really efficient at doing what it’s been doing. That means forming a habit cycle that just gets stronger and stronger.

This was important back in the day, because humans needed to be really efficient and conserve physical and mental energy. They also needed to be motivated to seek out food and such for survival.

So our brains were programmed to increase survival by seeking out things needed for survival in the most efficient way.

Reaching for those cookies means your brain is doing exactly what it was programmed to do when the human brain was first created.

It takes a behavior that has a reward linked to it, repeats it a couple of times, and forms a neuropathway.

Think of a neuropathway as a trail in the woods. (That’s how it start out at least.)

Once your brain knows there is a trail, it keeps going down that trail, eventually turning it into a back road, then a main road, then a highway.

A highway takes you from point A to point B the most direct and quickest way. You no longer think about how you’ll navigate the trail in the woods, push through brush, or figure out which way is the best. You just hop on the highway automatically and drive.

The next thing you know, you’re at your destination (those darn cookies).

That’s why bad eating habits are so annoying. They make you feel like you don’t have control.

Luckily, you can get control back with better eating habits. Next, I’ll talk about “why” so you can easily understand “how.”

Why Better Eating Habits Helps You Get Some Control Back

The short answer of why better eating habits helps you get some control back is that you’re no longer doing what you don’t want to be doing.

Meaning, no longer eating 6 cookies when you’ve been wanting to cut down on sugar. (Just an example of course.)

• Related (blog post): Sugar Addiction and How to Stop the Cycle
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In addition, it proves to your brain that you’re capable of controlling what you put in your body and what you don’t put in your body.

This is huge, because capability oftentimes leads to confidence and confidence tends to be correlated with being in control.

Someone can tell you that you’re capable of being in control of what you eat, but your brain thinks otherwise based on prior behavior.

Until your brain sees the evidence, it tends to be a non-believer.

So when you’ve been doing something for so long (that not-so-great eating habit), your brain tells you that it’s just the way it is and you’ll always be someone who can’t stop eating the cookies.

That’s just simply not true.

A new neuropathway just needs to form in place of the current one. That old highway needs to be broken down and a new one with a better destination needs to be build in its place.

Of course it’s not as easy as I made it just sound, but that’s why you can benefit from an eating habit coach.

• Related (blog post): Eating Habit Coach for Career Women

An eating habit coach knows what will effectively weaken an otherwise very strong neuropathway, plus the best way to do this so you:

A. Don’t give up.

B. Actually change your brain.

(Yes, your brain literally changes when you change your habits. It’s called neuroplasticity. So fascinating.)

How You Get Control Back With Better Eating Habits

As I mentioned earlier, you don’t need perfect eating habits, just better eating habits to start changing those neuropathways and gaining some control.

When you make a small change to the highway, it throws the vehicle off just a bit. Meaning, when you make a small behavior change, the habit cycle is slightly disrupted.

Small changes are way easier for your brain to handle.

Your brain likes familiarity, so it gets really uncomfortable with very new things, or drastic changes. So if you try to make a massive change, especially right away, your brain is going to say “nuh uh.”

You also don’t need to make ALL the changes.

You don’t need to go from really unhealthy eating habits to amazing eating habits to get that control back.

You just need to make a small change, so your brain sees the evidence, realizes you’re capable, and you start feeling a little bit more in control.

Then you make another change, and another, until you feel very in control. You just keep changing that highway just a bit and eventually you’ll have it going exactly where you want it to.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take an exit on occasion and have the double-scoop ice cream cone.

It just means that you normally take the highway to your intended destination on autopilot, but sometimes plan ahead of time to get off an exit for a little treat.

You’re the driver, so you get to decide.

Luckily, when you’ve formed a new highway that you designed with your health goals in mind, you drive on it without even having to think much at all.

You just go.

And that my friend, is the beauty of habits.

Final Notes

Habits in general, are simply ways for your brain to improve efficiency.

So when it comes to eating habits, try to think about your eating habits (whether they are “good” or “bad” eating habits) as your brain trying to be efficient.

It created a highway to get from point A to point B as quickly and easily as possible.

However, if you don’t love the path you’ve taken with your eating habits, you CAN change it.

It takes a bit of time, but once you start creating that new eating habit, you’ll prove to your brain that you can do it.