Wrapping Your Head around Change
Why is giving up things you know aren’t good for you so hard? Often you have more than enough of the information and reasons to know that you need to stop doing whatever behavior. And yet, you find yourself doing it again and again. It’s probably obvious by now that having enough of or even the right information is rarely the issue. This is why it’s ridiculous when governments talk about making the warnings on cigarette packs bigger. As if the smoker would one day buy a pack at the shop, see the now larger label and say “My god! These are bad for me? I’m quitting immediately.” So it goes with diet and exercise. Everybody seems to know that eating less and moving more is the way to get rid of love handles. Yet so few do it and stick with it. Maybe what's needed, in addition to looking at the behaviors that got you here, is a look at your beliefs and identity. Relax, I’m not going to get all hippie-dippie, psychobabble Dr. Phil on you.
You’ve got a fixed mindset. This is when you and other people around you say things like “You don’t like exercise” or “I’m lazy” or “I’ve always been fat.” You’ve decided that you’re a certain way and that’s static. You’ll always be that way. It’s no wonder that, when you try to change, things don’t pan out as you’d hoped. Your idea of who you’ll be in the future is the same as who you are now. For example, you think of yourself as "being fat." Look, unless you’re an actual block of lard with arms and legs, you’re not fat. Yes, there’s a lot of overlap between your body and your self, but they’re not the same. You know what your body is, but you might not know what the self is. It’s the part of you that can change you. Think of the body as being an ox and your self as the guy who steers the plow. Left to its own devices, the ox will do what big dumb animals do, wander aimlessly and graze. But with somebody steering the plow, useful, fantastic work can be done. Mentally separating your self from your body a bit puts you back in control and lets you think about how to get the ox to do what you want it to.
So now that you’ve decided to steer the beast, what does that look like in action? Well, the first thing is to stop saying those things that lock you in a box. The problem with staying in a box is that if you’re in there long enough it becomes your coffin. Self-hate isn’t going to change a thing either. You can’t curse yourself into being better. There’s only one way out of this pickle: love yourself enough to take care of yourself and make changes. This means that, yes, you are currently not somebody who exercises. However, the solution to that is simply to start exercising. Get ready, you will feel like an impostor and you’re trying to be somebody you’re not. And the truth is that you’re right. You’re trying to be a better version of you, which means you’re trying to be somebody you’re not…yet. When you first start to do something, it’s difficult, you screw it up often, and it doesn’t feel right. It takes a while, but eventually you build the behaviors that make up the new identity. You go from “somebody who doesn’t eat healthily” to “somebody who eats healthily.” You stop showing up late and become punctual. You stop losing your temper and start communicating effectively. Again, there are plenty of stumbles along the way, but often simply being pig-headed enough will bring real change.
Get thee behind me, Sugar: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.
Black and white thinking. You think of your goal as “right” of “wrong.” You think of food as “good” and “bad.” This isn’t a fairy tale. Celery and quinoa aren’t the knight and princess, and chocolate and cheeseburgers aren’t the wicked step-sisters and witch (everybody knows that celery is the real wicked witch.) Foods are only more or less helpful for hitting your goals, and even then it depends on quantity. Something that seems to be very human is to have simple stories about things. We love to have clear good guys and bad guys. We also love absolutes. I was talking to somebody recently about how in our society today it seems like there are two groups when it comes to body image: people who say that how your body looks is of utmost importance, and those who say that it doesn’t matter and you’re beautiful and perfect as you are. Of course, both are kind of right. Physical appearance is to some extent an indicator of physical health. But we also know that beauty is only skin-deep, don’t judge a book by its cover, and all the other platitudes that are really quite true. Yet there are a great number of people who take one side or another and throw away the opposite side’s points.
I get why we tend to do this. By adopting a black and white worldview, whole hosts of questions can be answered with complete certainty. It makes us feel safe and comfortable to have an answer, formed by our very simple, black and white model of the world, to a problem. Humans evolved in a time where things just seemed to happen and there was no knowing what the future brought. Our brains evolved to like quick, dirty ways of thinking to quickly end uncertainty and tell us how to act. This is why diet fads just keep coming. “Sugar is bad. Don’t eat it and you’ll lose weight.” This feels a lot safer and more certain than “As long as you maintain a calorie deficit and keep protein at 1 gram per pound of bodyweight, you’ll lose weight. Just make sure the deficit isn’t too big and that you still get enough fiber to maintain gut health. Oh, and don’t let your fat consumption drop too low because our our endocrine system needs fat to make hormones and some vitamins are transported by fat.” It’s also easier to put into practice. After all, looking at a food item and thinking “Meat bad. Don’t eat,” is much easier than eyeballing the portion and putting it into a tracker.
You’re too tied to the old ways. Ask anybody who’s ever tried to quit smoking. Often, the problem isn’t the nicotine withdrawal. That usually goes away in about a week, so their problem isn’t physical after that. The real problem for a lot of former smokers is all of the psychological stuff. If you’ve had a cigarette with your coffee every day for the last ten years, what urge do you think you’re going to get when you stop at the shop for coffee? Even worse, what happens when you’re at a gathering with your friends who still smoke and those people all go outside together to have a cigarette? All of the cues that told this person it’s time for a cigarette start hitting them like the pillow sacks of soap hit Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. Food isn’t much different. If you’ve been getting a croissant with your coffee at your favorite coffee shop for the last few years and you go back to that coffee shop, you’re going to have a little croissant with devil horns on your shoulder tempting you. You’ll have to change something. It might be time to change coffee shops or maybe get tea instead of coffee. You get the idea. Certain restaurants or menu items might be off the table (literally) for you for a bit.
I think you already knew to some extent that most of the biggest challenges about losing weight or dieting don’t revolve around the physical part. It’s the mental aspect that’s usually the hardest. Maybe as you’re starting to work on your diet or exercise you could take a look at how you think and reassess. Cleaning up your head might be just as important as cleaning up your diet. You may have a few ways of thinking that need to change, and others you may need to drop entirely. Either way, getting your head in the right place is pretty much mandatory if you’re going to make real changes in your life. And that goes for things outside of diet, too. Work, relationships, and just anything that really matters to you require you having your head in the right place.
