We introduced last month the concept of cues – your personal triggers that set off your desire 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, you powerfully programme yourself against the possibility of weight gain.  So if you want to lose weight, you must make your environment as free 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.  For example, if you always grab a biscuit from the pack that you ‘buy for the children’, it doesn’t make sense to battle the fickle emotion of willpower in order to resist the urge to eat it.  The best way to deal with it is to not to buy the things.  You can’t eat what’s not there so pretty soon your biscuit craving habit will no longer have you in its clutches. Failure-proofing your environment doesn’t involve any big inner struggle either.  All it involves is removing fattening impulse food from your line of sight.

We can always justify buying treats because we don’t want to ‘deprive’ our family members.  But do they really need those biscuits, sweets and crisps?    We all know that they don’t!  However even if you can’t face the inevitable uproar if you were to stop buying them, have a cupboard or jar that you resolve never to go in.  Make it mentally off-limits and ask your family to support your resolutions by not eating the goodies in front of you. 

The best and most effective way to deal with cues is to wipe them from your environment or lessen your exposure to them.  If you never see chocolate, you will lose your choccy-eating desires and they will eventually become less tempting.  Further, if you replace those sweets with apples, oranges or some other healthy snack food, a new preference is developed.  Every time you choose the healthier substitute, that preference gets stronger and more appetising. 

Decreasing access and exposure to foods is a big deal, and it has been scientifically verified to work too.  In numerous experiments, investigators have shown that a person’s choices will shift from high-calorie, high-fat snack foods to healthy foods when it becomes more difficult to obtain the snack foods but easier to get fruits, vegetables and other more nutritious snacks.  This research into what investigators call “choice shift” acknowledges and proves some common sense wisdom: you’ll eat what’s available, you can’t eat what’s not there, and you won’t eat what you don’t buy.  It also shows that after a period of new eating behaviour, you may not desire any snack food other than healthy options.