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  3. Start a really hard workout regimen

  Having someone kick your ass in boot camp may sound like what you need to get in shape, but how long do you really think you will subject yourself to pain and suffering before you give up on exercise completely? Most people don’t last two months.

  4. Never learn to eat mindfully

  One of the biggest differences between American culture and those of less obese nations (e.g., France) is our complete and utter lack of food culture. In healthier cultures, mealtime is an important event when people gather to share good food and stories from the day. With these habits come standards for portion sizes, eating speed, and nutritional balance.

  Sadly, it’s unlikely the United States will suddenly establish a healthy food culture in time to help the majority of the population. But you can get a lot of the benefits yourself by learning to eat mindfully (see chapter 7). Mindful eating helps you slow down, savor your food, and appreciate each bite. For these reasons it is incredibly effective at helping with portion control—without leaving you feeling deprived. In our culture, mindful eating is very difficult and takes some practice. It’s hard to slow down when your friends are wolfing down food by the handful. But it is possible. Practice when you’re alone, and it will be easier when you’re with friends.

  5. Ignore how much you miss your favorite foods

  Love ice cream? Can you go your entire life without it? What about six months? Or do you just plan to hold out as long as you can before the next inevitable binge? Cold turkey isn’t necessary if you develop a healthy relationship with your favorite treats.

  6. Assume that what worked for someone else will work for you

  Have a friend who lost a ton of weight on the Atkins diet? Me too. I also have friends who lost weight doing the Master Cleanse or going vegan. Typically only the ones who make permanent habit changes can maintain it, so a plan that works for someone else will only work for you if you enjoy it and can incorporate it into your life. Everyone is different.

  7. Dramatically restrict your eating

  Starving is not fun. Nor are cravings. Nor is malnutrition. Limiting your calories to unrealistic lows is a great way to begin the cycle of yo-yo dieting that we all know and love. Enjoy!

  8. Don’t find deeper purpose in what and why you eat

  This one may sound a bit esoteric, but bear with me. If the goal is to build healthy habits (which it should be), the people who have the most success are those who want to achieve more than a change in their appearance. Vegans believe so deeply that harming animals is wrong that they never stray from their diets. Locavores want to know and trace the source of all their foods. For some people, being told they will die if they do not change their habits is enough.

  For myself, it’s good to know that my habits are healthy and effective, but I’ve come to understand that how I eat is a way of life that has a deeper political, philosophical, and environmental impact than I ever imagined. It’s also super tasty. For inspiration, check out the film Food, Inc. or read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.6 You won’t regret it.

  9. Pick a diet that is super inconvenient

  We all have our limits on how far we’ll go to stick to an eating plan. Be sure to know yours. If you’re too busy (or have too many taste buds) to eat a specific combination of foods every three hours—I know I couldn’t—then don’t pretend you can. Pick dietary changes you can handle; the little things do add up if you can maintain them for the long haul.

  Treating long-term repetitive behaviors like eating and exercising as individual acts that require willpower in every instance creates many opportunities for failure. The more effective strategy is to use willpower to set up routines that eventually become automatic. When these behaviors become habitual and no longer require mental effort, willpower is reserved for the most critical decisions. As the researchers conclude in the meta-analysis, “The main value of self-control may lie more in creating the healthy habit than in regulating behavior each day anew.”7

  Baumeister and Tierney’s findings match precisely with my personal experiences in dieting. In the past when I attempted to lose weight by restricting my eating, limiting food was never difficult in the beginning—I was well-trained at overriding my hunger signals. But over time I would grow tired and look for new, less painful ways to achieve the same results. Since these hacks never worked out in the long term, I would eventually abandon the diet for a more promising one. Between diets or while I was on a diet that restricted certain food groups but not others (my favorite example is Atkins, with its unlimited-bacon breakfast), I had absolutely no control over my appetite and could put down quantities of food that would make an NFL lineman blush. Now that I have the habit of eating healthy food in reasonable quantities, it feels like the easiest, and at times the most indulgent, thing in the world. I tell people with pride that I eat whatever I want, but the reality is that I now want healthy food most of the time. Since my cravings are gone, I can eat dessert whenever I feel like it, but I only get the urge about once a week, sometimes less. My meals are also a fraction of the size they used to be, and I have trouble comprehending how I was ever able to eat such colossal quantities of food.

  I still use willpower occasionally to control my eating. For example, if I have dinner reservations immediately following a workout, it takes some effort to not inhale the entire bread basket before my entree arrives. But for the most part healthy choices now come naturally to me, and the pain that comes from using my willpower and denying myself the things I want is no longer a daily occurrence. To put it another way, it is not just my body that has changed since I became a foodist; the way I think and feel about food is now fundamentally different.

  Relying on willpower to get and keep you looking your best is not a winning strategy, but willpower does have a place in a foodist’s life. Instead of squandering precious self-control on restrictive dieting, a foodist uses it to start building better habits. It’s not hard to upgrade your healthstyle by eating all the delicious seasonal food that replaces the dimensionless processed stuff you grew up on. That’s the fun part. What’s tough is remembering to go to the farmers market or the grocery store regularly, so you have healthy food in your house and don’t have an excuse to grab takeout for dinner, or teaching yourself to chew your food thoroughly when you’re used to wolfing it down like a savage beast, or finding the time to make physical activity part of your day when you have a thousand and one things to do before noon. I’ll teach you to use the willpower you have to build these kinds of habits into your life. Once they are automated, healthy choices come naturally and in many cases become even easier than your old ways. Then you can use your willpower for simpler, more manageable tasks, like that restaurant bread basket.

  IT’S TIME TO GO ALL IN

  Breaking your reliance on willpower requires giving up restrictive diets—and that means forever. Remember, dieting teaches you to ignore internal satiety signals and leaves you with nothing but external cues to tell you when to start and stop eating. These triggers require willpower to resist, and with every act of self-denial (and every drop in blood sugar) your resolve is weakened. The data consistently show that over time dieting is more likely to result in weight gain rather than weight loss. Dieting also makes your life suck, and that is unacceptable.

  If you accept this premise that dieting is a bad idea, then you’re ready to become a foodist. But the fact that you won’t be relying as heavily on willpower doesn’t mean your journey is going to be easy. It is important to keep in mind that, when you begin on a path toward healthier eating, you are going to face some obstacles. Habits take time to break and rebuild, and there are too many temptations and ways for your plans to be derailed to expect perfection from yourself. Deviations from your ideal will happen, so the best strategy is to plan for them, so you have more control. What’s essential is that you do not let one unexpected slipup demolish your resolve. Being healthy isn’t a destination; it’s a journey. What works for
you will change as your life commitments and circumstances evolve, so you must adapt and continue to experiment on yourself. It is also critical to understand that, for this strategy to be effective, you must adopt the long view and commit to becoming a healthy person no matter what setbacks come up along the way. Giving up on yourself can never be an option.

  Dealing with failures can be particularly hard for dieters. As we discussed earlier, more than other groups dieters are subject to the what-the-hell effect when they break rank for the day, completely abandoning their efforts and better judgment. It can also be discouraging when a substantial weight-loss effort comes undone once their pre-diet habits come back to haunt them. The way to overcome these hurdles is to approach your health with the right frame of mind.

  In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Carol Dweck describes two distinct worldviews that impact how we approach challenges: the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.8 Someone with a fixed mindset believes that people are born with a specific set of qualities and there is little that can be done to change them. This means either you are smart or you’re not, you’re good at something or you’re not, you have willpower or you don’t, you’re thin or you’re fat. With these destinies sealed in stone, exerting effort to make a change is a pointless endeavor (unless it reinforces your predetermined awesomeness). In contrast, someone with the growth mindset believes that innate abilities can always be improved upon and that the key to success is concentrating efforts in the right places. As a result, people with the growth mindset have the attitude that they can improve at anything if they try hard enough and that failure is a learning experience and opportunity to grow and improve. People with the fixed mindset, on the other hand, view failure as a reflection of self-worth.

  A FOODIST’S MINDSET

  Foodists have a growth mindset. We believe that everyone can get healthy and lose weight. This doesn’t mean that if we change our eating habits we can all look like Adriana Lima or Dwight Howard, but it does mean that we can feel and look our best and that our health destiny is in our control.

  One of the most striking lessons I’ve learned since changing the way I approach food is that almost all the barriers we believe are keeping us from our goals are smaller and softer than we imagine. For instance, when I started buying most of my produce at the farmers market, I avoided the fruits and vegetables I didn’t like as a child because I assumed my food preferences were something I was born with, and I had no interest in forcing myself to eat beets just because they were healthy. But since that time I’ve taught myself to not just like but love beets, eggplant, cucumbers, cilantro, spinach, and even brussels sprouts. All it took was understanding that my past experiences with these foods weren’t representative of what I might find when I tasted them fresh and in season from the farmers market.

  I now have the pleasure of enjoying instead of avoiding all these foods, making ordering at restaurants way easier and life more fun in general. Of course, I didn’t just make a decision and start liking these vegetables overnight. It took effort. Brussels sprouts were by far the hardest, and I spent months trying and retrying different recipes and preparations before I was finally able to enjoy them (see recipe). But I found the challenge fun, because I knew from my experiences with eggplant and cilantro how much I was probably missing out on by continuing to shun those little green orbs.

  Those with a growth mindset also know that it’s okay to not always eat perfectly healthy, which, as we’ve seen, is virtually impossible anyway. Instead, foodists strive to make gradual, but constant improvements in their habits that slowly mold them into fit and healthy people over time. Rather than wasting willpower on resolving battles between desires and aspirations, foodists make room for occasional indulgences, because life is too short to turn down every cupcake that crosses your path.

  Never forget that eating foods you enjoy is not a bad thing—in fact, it should be your goal. And you should love all the foods you eat, healthy or otherwise. It can sometimes be hard to remember, but even those unplanned late-night pizza runs are valuable for learning about yourself and sculpting a lifestyle that works for you in the long term (maybe you need to eat more carbohydrates during the day or adopt strategies to drink less alcohol when you go out). In those moments when it feels as though you’re slipping backward instead of progressing forward, think of your situation as what Homer Simpson would call a “crisitunity,” after his daughter Lisa reminds him that “the Chinese use the same word for crisis as they do for opportunity.” Setbacks don’t define you; they are how you learn to improve. In this way not only does being a foodist eliminate your reliance on willpower; it also frees you from guilt.

  The moment you stop dieting, you free up a tremendous amount of willpower that can be put to better use by focusing on building behaviors that last. The thinnest, healthiest people don’t diet, because they never let their weight get out of control in the first place. Instead, they rely on dozens of small but consistent habits that, when combined, allow them to easily control their weight without much thought or effort. They understand that eating a plate of spinach doesn’t make you healthy, just as eating a cookie doesn’t make you unhealthy. Your health and weight are not defined by one moment in time, but are a reflection of all the things you’ve done to impact your body throughout your life. This way of thinking is fundamentally different from that of the chronic dieter, and it embodies the foodist’s mindset.

  THREE

  HEALTHSTYLE

  A KINDER, GENTLER WAY TO LOSE WEIGHT AND KEEP IT OFF

  “The easier it is to do, the harder it is to change.”

  —ENG’S PRINCIPLE

  “It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something.”

  —ORNETTE COLEMAN, AMERICAN JAZZ MUSICIAN

  In late 2008 I decided to launch Summer Tomato, a website dedicated to helping people lose weight without dieting. But when I started building the site’s content, I ran into a problem. How do you talk about eating and weight loss without using the word “diet”?

  In popular culture the word “diet” is synonymous with willpower and restriction, which as we’ve seen are the enemies of long-term success. But the word “diet” technically describes the foods that a person, animal, or community habitually eats. When we talk about a healthy diet, a canine diet, or a Western diet, this technical definition is the one we are using. Keeping the two definitions separate is nearly impossible when writing about food and weight loss. In the context of health, the word “diet” also limits the scope of our discussion to the specific foods you eat. This can be misleading, though, since the when, where, how, and why of eating (not to mention physical activity and mental well-being) are also essential factors in achieving your goals. My solution was to come up with a new word altogether.

  HEALTHSTYLE

  Instead of “diet,” I use the word “healthstyle” to refer to the actions, dietary or otherwise, that impact your health and body weight. Your healthstyle is a reflection of your cumulative habits, from the food you eat, to how often you exercise, to where you live and the company you keep. Unlike a trendy weight-loss diet, your healthstyle is not temporary. It is neither a momentary state of being nor a vague end point, but a permanent, inescapable part of your existence. Another advantage over the word “diet” is that the term “healthstyle” acknowledges that your health is inextricably tied to your style and personality and that people can achieve good health in many different ways.

  An ideal healthstyle won’t look the same for everyone. Some people adore spending time in the kitchen and can craft habits around this skill. I am not one of those people, but I’ve found a balance of grocery shopping, making food at home, and eating out that works for me and my family. Other people hate the gym, but love swimming and spending time outdoors. No matter what your preferences, working to gradually nudge your healthstyle in a positive direction is the secret to lasting success.

  Healthstyle is about the big picture, not sw
eating the small stuff, and having the flexibility to make changes when life throws you curve balls. The challenge is maintaining enough structure in your routines to keep you on the right path, while still giving yourself some wiggle room around the edges. What gives your healthstyle that structure is healthy habits. Because habits are consistent behaviors and not single actions, they are the only truly reliable way to make lasting improvements in your health and physique.

  I’ll give you step-by-step instructions on how to identify the habits that have the biggest impact on your health. We will then work to extinguish or reprogram those that are hindering your success, while continuing to develop and expand those that help. The results may not come as rapidly as they would on an arbitrary restriction diet, but they will last because they are built on a foundation of activities you enjoy, custom-tailored to your own life and needs.

  YOUR BRAIN ON AUTOPILOT

  Building and breaking habits will present different challenges for everyone, but one thing all habits have in common is where they begin: the brain.

  Autopilot is your brain’s favorite gear. Scientists estimate that up to 90 percent of our daily food choices are the result of habitual actions rather than conscious thought. This isn’t because we’re lazy. Decision making requires a substantial amount of mental energy and, like willpower, frequent choices quickly deplete glucose stores in our brains, a phenomenon psychologists refer to as decision fatigue. To streamline the decision-making process, our brains are expert at recognizing patterns and programming automatic responses, thereby saving our mental resources for novel situations. Because they work unconsciously, habits are your secret weapon for sidestepping willpower and bad decisions, allowing you to get past your weaknesses and painlessly achieve your goals.