Part 2: Making it More Difficult

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Related Episodes:

• Part 1: Eating Behavior Triggers
• Part 3: Rewarding Yourself
• Short vs. Long-Term Behavior Change

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Full Episode Transcript:

Part 2: Making it More Difficult

Ep. 31 – Part 2: Making it More Difficult

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. And welcome to part two of the three-part series on eating behaviors. This one is on the actual eating behaviors themselves or the action of eating.

This episode comes out right in between Christmas and New Year’s, so if you are listening to it on release day or shortly after, you may feel as though you’ve been overindulging for the past week or so and are ready to start this new year out with some improved eating habits.

So, in this episode, I’m going to be help you understand what makes an eating behavior happen, plus how to make it less likely to do the eating behavior that you would rather not do. Or said differently, this episode will help you to decrease the likelihood of going forward with the action of taking seconds or thirds when you are not that hungry anymore or eating more treats than you intended to eat.

I’m going to be sharing some tips on making it more difficult to do the eating behavior that you would like to break the habit of doing. These tips will help you break any bad eating habit and are based on behavioral science.

Before I dive in, a new year is coming up, which means a new offer at Kate Johnston Coaching. I’m now offering free consults to any career women or even women who don’t necessarily identify as career women any longer, who want to get control of their eating habits for life. I’ll see where you’re struggling, where you truly want to be, and how we can get you there.

If you start now, you can start making real progress toward your goals, whether they be weight loss, or non-weight loss. Maybe you want more energy, better health, maybe some of your eating habits are contributing to medical issues you’d rather not have affecting your quality or even length of life. Whatever it may be, now is the time.

Not because we’re approaching the new year, but because now is ALWAYS the right time. Life is busy right? Well, the longer you go NOT getting the help you need, the longer you put off feeling better. Feeling healthier, happier, more confident, more energized, all of it. You’ll see how all different areas of your life improve after you truly get control of your eating habits.

So, don’t put it off any longer than you have been. Take advantage of the free consult now, so you can get a start on the life you really want to be living. Just fill out the very short form on the episode page or visit https://katemjohnston.com/consult.

If you listened to the last episode which was part one, titled Eating Behavior Triggers, you learned that there always must be some sort of a trigger, cue, or prompt, that comes before any sort of eating behavior or action. The trigger can be something visual, something that you smell, an emotion like stress or boredom, even just a craving, which is an emotion as well.

The next thing that must occur for an eating behavior or action to take place, is that the eating behavior must be physically possible to do. Meaning, the action of putting the food in your mouth, chewing, and swallowing, must be doable.

You might smell pizza, which would be a potential trigger, but if the pizza is sitting on the passenger seat of someone else’s locked vehicle and you can only smell it because the windows are cracked a little bit, you’re most likely not going to eat the pizza.

That’s because eating the pizza would be difficult to do. If it’s in someone else’s locked vehicle, you would have to break into the vehicle to eat it, right? Now of course it’s possible to still do it, however because it’s not physically easy, you are much less likely to eat the pizza.

I’d like to give you another example. You could be sitting on your couch at night and have a sudden urge or desire for chocolate. If you don’t have any chocolate in your home, you could still certainly grab your wallet, get in your car, drive to the store, purchase some chocolate, and either eat it in your car or bring it back to your house to eat. However, as you can see there are a lot of steps involved here. There is some effort required.

At least more effort than if you had chocolate in a kitchen cabinet, and all you had to do to go and eat the chocolate, was to get off the couch, walk to the kitchen, and grab the chocolate from the cabinet.

This could also work the other way too. If it would take more physical effort to eat something on the healthier side, than something that is less healthy, it’s going to be easier to eat the less healthy option.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. Let’s say that you have a very busy day at work, and you’re going to have to work through most of your lunch break.

If you didn’t bring your lunch to work, and your two main lunch options would be to either walk down the road to a nearby cafe for a sandwich or salad, or hit up the vending machine that is right down the hall, it’s going to be easier to just get a couple of less healthy snacks from the vending machine, than to leave the building, walk down the sidewalk, and buy the healthier option.

Now, I’m not saying that every human is going to do this, but because the vending machine would be physically easier from a behavioral science standpoint, eating the vending machine snacks as a lunch would be more likely to occur.

I used to see this all the time working in the hospital. Everyone would be so busy, that if there were cookies or other snacks in the OR lounge or up on the hospital floors in the staff areas, it was much easier to just eat these foods throughout the day, because they’re there and easy to pick up and eat, then to maybe go down to the hospital cafeteria for a sandwich or salad.

I would observe it all the time and I know I’ve mentioned this in a previous podcast episode, but there are always peanut butter and crackers in the OR lounge, that I would personally snack on because it was a quick way to satisfy my hunger in between surgeries.

So, I’m just going to have you take a moment right now and think about some of your eating behaviors. Do you tend to skip some of the healthier options for less healthy options because they’re easier? And don’t worry if you do, it’s so incredibly common. It’s just a human behavior thing and there is nothing “wrong” with you.

Think about some of your snacking habits. do you wish that you snacked on fruits and vegetables, but found yourself not doing so partly because it requires some effort to maybe cut up some fruit and vegetables? Instead, it seems much easier to reach for the box of crackers, or bag of pretzels or chips, right?

The interesting part is that when you think about it, there’s not that much more effort required to maybe cut up an apple or peeling a banana and putting a little peanut butter on it. It’s probably a minuscule amount, however when it comes to choosing the healthier option, if there’s any sort of extra effort required, the brain just seems to be somewhat resistant.

I haven’t researched this, however in my opinion I think that’s partly because we already want to tend towards the tastier foods, so we’re already sort of leaning in that direction. Then, when it’s a little bit physically easier to go for the less healthy option, even if it’s only very slightly easier, we tend to lean even more in that direction.

And in the next podcast episode, which is part three, I will get more into why as humans we are drawn to those tastier foods, the sweet, salty, fatty ones even when we know they’re not great for us in larger quantities. This HAS been heavily researched by behavioral scientists.

So, getting back to having you think about some of your eating behaviors. Think about the eating behaviors that you wish you did less of, or the eating habits that you feel are out of your control that you’d like to break.

How is it physically easy for you to reach for the food and eat it? Is it always in your home? Do friends or family offer it to you often? Is it at your workplace in an easy to access location?

I wanted to mention the friends or family example, because when you think about it, how easy is it to accept a cookie when someone is holding out a plate of cookies in front of your face and offering you a cookie? Rather than if the plate of cookies was in another room.

You’re probably going to be less likely to walk to another room to eat some cookies at a friend or family’s house, then if they were holding them in front of you, right?

This really is the first step, just some awareness of how some of your eating behaviors are relatively easy to physically do, even if that part of your brain is telling you, “Don’t do it.” It can seem so much out of your control, but there are some ways to start to get control of this.

Also, I help clients be able to be around these foods and still not act upon any sort of triggers, by helping you develop the skill of letting the trigger not bother you, letting the craving come and go and not control your actions. Until you develop this skill, there are ways to set your environment up for success though to help you start to break that eating habit cycle. That’s what I’ll be sharing in just a moment.

But like I said, awareness really is the first step, because you’re identifying where the problem is at, so that you can actually then problem solve for that.

So if you feel like you are eating more at dinner than you want or need to, think about what’s making it easy to eat more at dinner than you want or need to. Is it because the food is sitting there on the table, enticing you?

If it’s sitting there on the table, it’s very easy to reach for seconds, right? So, once you become aware of this, you can start to tackle the problem.

You can make the behavior more difficult to physically do. It doesn’t have to be impossible to do, but even if it’s just a little bit more difficult to do, it’ll be a little less likely for you to go forward with the eating behavior.

It creates some friction between the eating behavior trigger and the eating behavior itself, or the eating action itself. Any little bit of friction can help to decrease the likelihood of you going forward with the eating behavior. Certainly, the more friction there is, or the more difficult it is to do the eating behavior, the less likely you’ll do it.

So, to start to weaken a habit cycle, meaning break an eating habit, you would need to do the eating behavior less often. To do the eating behavior less often, you learned in the last episode that you would need to decrease the trigger in the first place, and then the next part would be to make the eating behavior itself more difficult to do.

Making it more difficult to do, won’t necessarily mean that you can’t or won’t do it, but will decrease the likelihood. At the very least, it’ll give you a moment to really think about if you want to go forward with the action.

It allows you a moment to take control back. Making it more difficult to do, when done over and over again, will overall decrease the number of times you actually go forward with the eating behavior, weakening that eating habit cycle.

Making it more difficult to do the eating behavior, just simply means making it so that you would have to put a little bit more physical effort into picking up the food, chewing it and swallowing it.

The easiest way to do this is to put some distance in between you and the food itself. Some physical distance. Even if it’s just putting the food up on the kitchen counter, rather than leaving it on the kitchen table in front of you while eating dinner.

You can even go one step further and wrap the food up after you take a serving, and put the food in the fridge, so that if you were tempted to go for seconds, you’d have to physically get up from the table, go into the fridge, go into the Tupperware, take the food, and probably heat it up in the microwave if it already got a little bit cold.

Do you see how that’s more effort than if you left the food on the dinner table while you’re eating, and all you would have to do to take seconds would be to reach to the center of the table?

Also, if you think about this, you’re also decreasing the trigger here as well. You’re decreasing that visual trigger.

I’ll give you another example of how you can make it harder to do an eating behavior or eating habit that you are trying to break.

Let’s say you want to stop snacking on candy at night. of course, you can decide to not buy candy and keep it in the house. That would make it much harder to snack on candy at night if it’s not even in your home.

But let’s just say that the candy is in your home. If you put the candy in a difficult to get to place, you’re making it more difficult to snack on candy, because of more effort to go and dig out the candy.

You could maybe put the candy in the back of a cabinet that’s really high up, so that you’d actually have to maybe stand on a step stool and pull a few things out of the cabinet in order to get to the candy.

You could even buy a lock box and put the lock box in an unusual spot and then put the key in a completely different side of your home, in a difficult to get to spot. That way, you can still have a treat on occasion if you want to, however it’s going to be more difficult to do the action of eating the candy, so you’ll probably start eating it much less often.

So, these are just some examples, but what I help my clients with is looking specifically at what your eating behaviors are, and problem solving for those specific eating behaviors as far as finding the triggers, treating the triggers, and seeing how we can make the behaviors more difficult to do.

Plus, developing skills to get more control so that you don’t have to be putting in the effort to decrease the triggers and making the behavior harder to do for the rest of your life. You become the person who no longer has bad eating habits, because you’ve developed skills, rather than having to use willpower over and over again, dieting, etc.

These things just help more with setting you up for success before you’ve learned the important skills that will serve you for life. Think of it as doing all the little things you possibly can to make it much more likely you’ll have success with breaking bad eating habits, not just for a short period of time, but for a very, very long time.

You really want to do the things required to break bad eating habits for the long term, so that you don’t keep going through the efforts and frustration of “being good” for a short period of time and then just going right back to the eating habits that are contributing negatively to your life.

All right, so that’s what I have for you on making it harder to do the eating behaviors that you’re trying to break. Join me next week for part three, where I’m talking about what motivates us to do the eating behaviors in the first place, meaning the reward, and how to control this as much as possible in your favor.

And again, I want to help you make these lifelong changes, so that you don’t have to keep going down this path that you really don’t want to be going down. You can pave a new path, no matter your eating habits, your age, no matter how many times you feel like you’ve tried and failed. So much can change for you, when you get control of your eating habits the right way.

If you want to set up a free consult where we can talk face to face via zoom, just visit https://katemjohnston.com/consult.

Take care, happy new year, and I will see you next week in 2023.