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.