Breaking the Habit

I've been living off of egg whites and brown rice as my main staples for a week now. When dressed up with the proper accessories--caramelized onions, tomatoes, spinach, scorching quantities of cayenne pepper--the blandly blah becomes unexpectedly awesome.

I like to eat. Delicious things. Crispy, fried things. Triple-bypass-instigating things. I am absolutely shocked that not only am I not missing any of those things, but I'm looking forward to my lunch of brown rice pilaf (cooked with nonfat beef stock instead of water), refried beans, and of course enough cayenne to scorch the face of the Earth.

You might think you could never let bad food go. Day 1 is a challenge. Day 2 is easier. By day 3, you've adapted. All the usual temptations are still there, but we can fight temptation. It's habit that whoops us. Initially, it's changing your high-level habits around eating that is most important. This is absolutely key.

We all have beaten the shit out of our own self esteems at various (and for some, numerous) points in life, because we had succumb to some temptation or another. Our standard temptations challenge us because of our habits around those temptations. If I decide to indulge and have bacon and whole eggs one morning, it's so much easier to indulge the next morning. At that point, I'm establishing a habit. It's not about the food, but about the entire experience of the food. Walking down the hallway to the work cafeteria. Interacting with people there. Smelling the food wafting from the cardboard tray during the trip back to my cubicle. The experience of reading through my emails or checking out Facebook and relaxing into the start of the day while enjoying the tastes and textures and aromas of crispy bacon and savory egg yoke and drinking my coffee. All the specific activities and specific experiences around eating make it hard to break bad eating habits. There is comfort in continuity.

We are such suckers for routine. We habitually scarf down the same foods for comfort and even just their sheer entertainment value (popcorn at the movies, anyone?). This has to do with the entire experience around eating those foods.

Sometimes, radical action is required to rewire a habit in order to take out temptation. As an example, the most cliché dietary downfall is eating in front of the TV. Rather than fucking around struggling with the temptation around grabbing an unnecessary sandwich or bag of chips (that you'll eat not until you're satisfied, but until you reach a point that you're sick of them), just cancel your cable service. Don't fight the temptation; simply remove the habit. Cable is gone: you can't watch TV, you won't take in those extra calories consistently and habitually every time you flop down on the couch.

Do you buy a Snickers bar from the same store everyday, as part of your routine? Try this... next time you're there, buy one. Unwrap it outside of the store. Look at it. Now throw it as far as you can. You can have it as long as you're willing to walk over to it and it eat it off of the ground. Do this every time you find yourself at that store. You'll effectively go from habitually being tested to habitually testing yourself.

I used to be a "frequent flyer" with these 25 cent candy machines that are in the pantries on every floor here at the office. It wasn't just the fact that Peanut M&Ms are crazy delicious, but the experience of taking the walk to the pantry around the same time everyday. Breaking a food habit is less difficult when we replace it with another, better one. Now rather than walking to get some M&Ms, I'll pull out a snack more aligned with my fitness goals--like salted peanuts, dried mango strips, beef jerky (an amazingly healthy food), or even one of those nutrition type bars (I prefer crunchy peanut ones)--and take a stroll around the floor while leisurely enjoying it.

Swap out brown rice for other starches, and cook it using nonfat chicken or beef stock or onion soup instead of water, and for perhaps the first time ever you'll feel that brown rice legitimately fucking whoops white rice's ass.

Rather than getting bacon and a couple of whole eggs every morning, go through you're normal breakfast routine, but get a 3 or 4-egg white omelette with a little ham and a few veggies. I go with onion, spinach, and tomato. Eat it on top of a slice of salted multigrain toast (yeah that's right... the salt does a good job of replacing butter) and you still won't break 300 calories. And good luck being hungry for lunch.

And a slice of multigrain toast with peanut butter (obviously being a fan of peanuts, I prefer chunky) is a much more productive and more filling indulgence than a cookie or other waistline-busting bit o' junk food. I even add a few dashes of salt to accentuate the sweet/salty effect.