Sometimes it is not good enough to do
your best; you have to do what is required.
- Sir Winston Churchill
You can’t eat what’s not there. When you
reduce your exposure to food, you programme yourself against
out-of-control eating and make it practically impossible to fail at
weight loss. Creating a no-fail environment means you are able to
create ‘external control’. External control means that your
environment – places like your home or office, anywhere you see food,
think about food, prepare food, sneak food and eat food – is safe from
problematic foods and reminders to eat. With external control,
food is out of sight, out of reach and out of mind.
Because for many people, they overeat because
food is available and accessible, the best way to counter
inappropriate, problem eating is to change your exposure and access to
food by rearranging and managing your external environment. It’s
a very, very simple way to ensure that weight loss becomes so much
easier. Managing the external environment has nothing to do with
increasing willpower or trying to mentally resist food temptations, but
with re-engineering your environment in such a way that it supports the
result you want. Any self-destructive behaviour involving a
substance of choice – nicotine, alcohol or food, will come to the fore
depending on the level of access to that substance in the
environment. Remove the exposure and you stand a better chance of
quitting. As proof, there are documented cases of soldiers who
became addicted to heroin in Vietnam but upon returning home to a
different environment were able to permanently kick their
habit. Unfortunately it’s not as easy with food as we can’t avoid
altogether, but each and every step towards a temptation-free
environment improves your chances of success. So if you truly
want to manage your weight, you must programme your environment in
every way possible to avoid difficult foods, binge foods and reminders
to eat.
In order to manage your environment, I need you
to understand about the triggers operating around you and how they’re
standing in your way to change. Another word for these triggers
is ‘cue’ ie the signal to a performer to recite a line or begin an
action. Similarly, eating cues – which are basically reminders of
food – trigger your decision to eat. Most overweight people are
more vulnerable to these triggers than their thin counterparts and much
research bears this out.
Eating cues are either internal or
external. Some internal cues are physical ie they’re signs of
true hunger, brought on by your body because it demands
nourishment. Some of the main internal cues for eating include
stomach contractions (the growling you experience when your stomach is
empty) and a physical weakness brought on by low levels of blood
sugar. These cues arise from honest-to-goodness hunger.
Hunger is, of course a very basic motivator guiding your food choices
and certainly one that is essential to your very survival.
If these were your only internal cues for eating,
however, you’d probably be slender and fit because you’d eat only when
truly hungry and stop when full. But many people who are
overweight don’t recognise when they are physiologically hungry and
instead eat according to other types of internal cue, such as painful
emotions, boredom or stress. These cues are entirely
psychological, rather than physiological. The desire for food
comes not from your stomach, but from your head.
External cues are triggers that exist and operate
in your environment and they powerfully stimulate your urge to eat,
whether you are physically hungry or not. As I have said, if
you’re overweight, you probably typically fail to respond to biological
internal cues – you literally do not know when you are physiologically
hungry – but instead you are highly inclined to eat in response to
external cues.
What are your external cues? The sight of
food? Time i.e. eating according to the clock? The aroma of
food? Watching TV? Your route to work past McDonalds? Being
offered food? Some of these cues scream pretty loudly, catching you
completely off guard. You immediately start thinking about food
and want to start eating. Every time you even think about food,
your body starts reacting at a physiological level to heighten your
desire to eat. You begin to salivate. You experience a
physiological change in your mouth and you want to eat.
Clearly cues govern your behaviour
in powerful ways – which is why you have to eliminate as many of them
as you reasonably can from your environment and make choices to avoid
them. When you rid your world of cues, making small by meaningful
adjustments to your lifestyle, you powerfully programme yourself
against the possibility of weight gain. So if you want to lose
weight, you must make your environment as free as safe from fattening
foods as possible, because if there is food around, the more likely you
are to eat it. Programming your environment in this way will
produce near-automatic changes in your behaviour, making it totally
unnecessary to rely on willpower.
