Written by: Rebecca Laurel-Hill, RDN, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There is the saying "old habits die hard" and there is a lot of truth to this saying. We've all experienced the challenge of letting go of habits that no longer serve us and keep us from experiencing the health and well-being we desire.
If you are someone who is finding it difficult to change a long-standing pattern with food, I intend to give you some guidance with this six-step process.
I know from personal experience as well as professional wisdom from my years as a dietitian, that eating habits can be very difficult to change. And here's why: our habits are structural pathways in our brains.
How Habits Are Formed
When we repeat a certain pattern over and over our brain creates a neural pathway for that pattern to create efficiency and conserve energy, because the brain is the most energy-demanding organ in our body. This automation is great for our survival, but not so great if the habits we have do us more harm than good. This primal part of our brain that holds our habits cannot decipher between a "good" habit or a "bad" habit. It only notices repeated patterns and creates automation pathways to conserve your energy and thus help keep you alive.
Once a neural pathway is created, that pattern can run without your conscious attention or effort. This means if you find yourself in the habit of "mindlessly eating" and are frustrated by it, don't be too hard on yourself.
The good news is the brain is plastic, meaning it is moldable and changeable in its structure and function. It has neuroplasticity, which allows your neural networks to be changed and rewired to function in a new way. For a deep dive into this topic, I recommended the book “The Brain that Changes Itself”, by Norman Doidge.
Your old eating habits can fall away and new healthy eating habits can be “wired in” so that they become the new automatic pattern, simply by practicing and repeating something new over and over.
If you have a certain eating habit you want to change, you don’t need to rely solely on willpower or be perfect at it right from the start. All you have to do is practice the new pattern more than the old pattern.
The challenge for most people comes from feeling impatient and wanting the “quick fix”. This, however, doesn’t give your brain enough time or the repetition it needs to wire in the new habit. We can never fail at changing a habit, but often we give up.
To truly create a new habit that feels automatic and easy to you, you have to be willing to repeat and practice that new habit more often than the old habit, and be willing to practice it long enough and consistently enough for the brain to make it the dominant new pathway and pattern. This requires a willingness to be in that practice as well as patience as the brain restructures itself.
A 6-Step Process to Change Any Eating Habit Permanently
1. The first step is to get very clear on what your new habit is going to be. Think of who you desire to be with food. So, instead of saying “I want to stop doing X”, phrase it as “I want to be a person who____.”
Once you are clear on what your new habit is going to be, come up with your first baby step behavior you will practice. In my book, It’s Just Food, I have a chapter that is dedicated to helping you create these baby steps if you want a more in-depth guide.
2. The second step is to declare your commitment to this new habit. Decide that you will be unwavering in your practice. Now, this doesn’t mean being perfect, it simply means being 100% committed to practicing the new habit.
3. The third step is to be emotionally connected to your commitment by knowing your powerful “why” for change. I often recommend a process called 7 Levels Deep to find your powerful “why” so that re-committing each day to your practice feels non-negotiable, even after those bad days.
4. The fourth step is to realize failure is part of the process of change. When learning anything new you must fail along the way, otherwise, you wouldn't be learning something new. Day-to-day failures are meaningless to achieving your new habit as long as you keep practicing it.
5. The fifth step is that you need to be willing to gather data from your failures to help you improve your practice. For example, instead of judging or shaming yourself for bingeing on cookies, try to understand why it happened and use that data to help you be more successful in your practice next time.
Ask yourself questions such as:
“What was I thinking about before I ate all the cookies? What was I feeling before I ate all the cookies? What was I doing before I ate all the cookies? What was I doing while I ate all the cookies?”
Gathering this data will help you make the unconscious conscious. The nature of a habit is to do something unconsciously and automatically, thus you need to do this type of reflection after every “bad practice”. Then, use the data and your new awareness to come up with some strategy that can help improve your practice.
6. The sixth step is to celebrate your wins every day no matter how small and to give zero emotional energy to your failures.
Don’t let bad days of eating upset you, just let them go. Our brains learn more quickly with emotion because emotion helps create neural pathways more quickly. This means there is science behind celebrating your wins and not stressing about failures. When you have a bad day of eating, simply put on your scientist hat to assess the situation and gather data. Don’t fall into emotional drama or self-judgment about it. Just let it go.
It was Socrates who said:
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new."
These are very insightful words for a man who lived around 400 B.C.
When you fight with your old habit by feeling frustrated or angry with yourself for slipping, that stress response and negative emotional energy actually strengthen the old pattern in your brain. Instead, decide to use your emotional energy to wire in your new habits by looking for, and celebrating, what you are doing right.
Rebecca Laurel-Hill, RDN, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Rebecca Laurel-Hill is a registered dietitian-nutritionist and mindset coach who previously struggled with exercise bulimia. She teaches other driven, high-achieving women how to end cycles of over-striving, over-stressing, and emotional eating to cope. Her mission in business is to create a world of women who have an easy, healthy relationship with food and love living in their bodies.
