How to master healthy eating habits | James Clear, Atomic Habits

there's a similar pattern that happens with a lot of habits you know like you'll hear gamblers say like I don't even want to do it anymore but I can't stop myself one of the surprising things about a lot of the research around self-control and willpower is that James Clear is the world's number one habit expert the author of The New York Times bestseller Atomic habits which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide the external environment has made it easier and cheaper than ever to consume more calories than before the reality for most of these Foods is you feel terrible the role of the food industry they primary goal is to sell food products you have to make those Foods extra delicious and not filling to make sure that more of them can be eaten Dr fed am mati nutrition lead at Imperial College School of Medicine scientific researcher and head nutritionist at Zoe James can I ask you something a little controversial on this to really change your long-term lifestyle and health was to change your friends because they are the biggest driver in fact of your environment and what you do or is that a bit too radical for you if you want to build a good habit every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become the real answer to how long does it take to build a habit is James and fed thank you for joining me today pleasure to talk to you thanks for having me excited to be here Jonathan so Federica knows this and I'm very excited to have her join the podcast having been at Zoe now for a long time but James you will probably not be familiar but we have this tradition that we always start with a quick fire round of questions from our listeners uh and we have these uh very strict rules you can say yes or no or if you absolutely have to you can give us a one- sentence answer are you willing to give it again I'm going to be so bad at this all right go ahead good well you know you can only imagine how hard professors find it so uh starting with you James is it easy to change our habits yes that was a long pause all right can a small habit change now make a huge impact on our future yes definitely okay fed does our modern environment push us to unhealthy eating habits unfortunately yes can simple changes at home help us to eat healthily with less thought yes okay and James we had this question from a lot of our listeners is it true it takes 28 days to break a habit no uh ah okay there we go I'm caught out all right and finally James and you can have a you can have a couple of sentences now what's the biggest myth about habits and habit change well one of the biggest myths is the very first thing you asked about which is is it easy to change your habits and a lot of people think it's very hard to change habits it's actually quite easy you do it all the time one of your brain's primary um objectives is to change your behavior based on the room or the people that you are around and so you are changing your behavor Behavior constantly what is quite difficult is to design your behavior to your liking and so it requires much more strategic thought and um tactics to do that and uh we will talk about all that today I have a quick favor to ask if you hit the Subscribe button below and so far 58% of you have done that then I promise we will do everything we can to make the show even better and keep bringing you the most upto-date science each week sound fair okay let's get on with the show I love that so we are constantly changing we're like a machine for changing but the problem is we respond to the environment as opposed to saying like oh I want to be like this and if I say I want to be like this this is um this is tricky correct it's like proactive versus reactive are you in control of the process and shaping the design or are you responding to what's going on around you and reacting to uh what's happening in life well we're definitely going to talk about all of the these uh actionable tips for doing that but I'd like actually to start by just setting the scene so you know it's January which is a time when many of us plan to make positive changes in our lives um and some of us choose to do this in the form of New Year's resolutions it's very much part of the culture now we don't really love the concept of New Year's resolutions here at Zoe um and maybe I can start feder why why is it that in general we're not so keen on this idea well Jonathan usually when we think about New New Year's resolutions we know that they don't really stick so unfortunately people do go into January making huge changes and having very very ambitious goals without a step-by-step plan and so a lot of these resolutions end up not happening by February so there's quite nice data around how long actually people stick to resolutions and a vast majority of them have failed by the summertime and certainly over nine out of 10 of them have failed by the end of the year so at Zoe we're all about sustainable change and making change for life so what we don't want is for people to feel overwhelmed in January with these huge resolutions that won't stick and James how do how do you feel as you hear that I agree with parts of it so I I'm probably more neutral about news resolutions I don't think they're amazing or anything but I also feel like if you have some kind of motivation to change and the turning over to a new year is one reason for attempting that then that's fine to use it there is some research that shows I think they call it the Fresh Start effect but people tend to be more motivated at the beginning of the day the beginning of the week the beginning of a month or the beginning of a year and we see this effect all the time with people choosing to you know start a new challenge at the beginning of the month or to you know adopt a New Year's resolution or something like that so certainly if you find that it gives you some desire to get started on something that you think is important to you then utilizing that motivation is totally fine that said said I don't think there's any reason to wait until New Year's to make a change if you feel like making it in July or in October that is totally fine and you don't need to save it for any reason I also agree with the data uh that Federica shared about um the vast majority of new resolutions falling off Course and there are many things that show this to be the case um I think the summary is if New Year's gives you a little bit of boost of motivation and you want to get started great go ahead and use that no reason to wait if you feel that way somewhere else throughout the year um but mostly what this comes down to and I think is also at the core of what feder R was uh getting at is coming up with a better system for change coming up with a better approach for trying to achieve the things that we say are important to us and if we do have a better approach then hopefully the odds of success are much higher well that's that's quite relieving I guess because it means everybody listening January doesn't have to say okay well I better not make any resolutions now I got to wait till June so you can keep listening to the rest of the podcast now look this is Zoe science and nutrition so obviously there's many many different habits that people could be interested in in changing in January but I think we're inevitably really interested in saying you know what could you do if you want to change the um the way you eat in order to improve your Dart in order to prove your health given like this you know unbelievable evidence now about just how important what you eat is for your for your health so I think that's where we'd love to um focus before we start to talk about all the clever ways that maybe we might try and um achieve those habits I'd actually love to start with like why is it so hard for us to achieve our goals about changing what we in the first place and actually maybe I could start federi with with you about like so what role is like the food that food companies are making and that you know are sitting in our grocery store um playing in this well I think Jonathan it's important to remember when we talk about the role of the food industry that their primary goal is to sell food products and we live in a world now where luckily we have more than enough food for everybody in countries like the UK and the us at least um so if you're an industry that's trying to sell more products and there's enough food to eat you have to make those Foods extra delicious and not filling to make sure that more of them can be eaten now the food industry is very good at doing this they formulate products and test them and see which is the most delicious and the most moish and which one can you eat more of and those are the ones that end up on our shelves and so you know food companies I think we can't it's not about demonizing the food industry you know they are an industry looking to make money and they're very good at that and their shareholders are happy about that it's just about working with the food industry and putting some regulations in place so that we're not constantly bombarded with this message and so that we do have some opportunities where for example near schools and where children are involved where there's less of it so that we can actually help to shape a better each eating environment especially for those who are more vulnerable and who are more affected by the impact of poor nutrition in the long term um so yeah they do definitely have a role to play but it's really important we work together to try and resolve it I think James what are your thoughts well I have two thoughts um one is internal to the person who's trying to change their behavior and one is external to the the food that we're actually talking about so to build off of feder's comments let's start with the external one so that you know there are many things that uh food companies do to try to create foods that are more palatable or more desirable so some of them like one thing that's pretty common is to use Dynamic contrast which is like this this contrast between soft and creamy or crunchy or you know like imagine like an Oreo cookie where it's like creamy on the inside but crunchy on the outside or um the top of like creme brulee and you know that uh contrast is very desirable it's very palatable it's very interesting compared to say like a crunch of broccoli which is more or less the same texture throughout and so they find ways to introduce novelty into Foods in these highly engineered ways that are uh you know like we we're still walking around with the same Paleolithic Hardware in our brains that our ancestors had and finding something like an Oreo in um you know nature was impossible and so now you come across these interesting things that like light your taste buds up and so there you know there are tons of scientists and Engineers working on problems like this to try to create foods that are highly desirable and structured in that way um and I don't know that we need to necessarily assign like some kind of evil to that but just to say Hey listen this is like this is the reality now these Foods exist and they did not exist for most of human history and so naturally you are going to feel compelled to eat more of those or to consume a greater amount of calories when you know things are structured in that way so that is just the reality of our environment that we're in and you can imagine imagine I at one point I saw a graph and I can't remember the exact number but just to explain the pattern you'll you'll get the general idea it's basically like you could explain a great deal of the rise in obesity over the last 50 years if people just ate an additional 300 to 500 calories a day and 300 to 500 calories is so easy to find especially with some of these highly engineer food foods and the prevalence of food so um I think the the punchline here is just the external environment has made it easier than ever and cheaper than ever to consume more calories than before um and so that is just a a reality of where we're at um all right now the second piece that came to mind is um I think your original question was something around like what makes it difficult for people to achieve their goals uh related to this and I think if we connect this with our conversation about New Year's resolutions just a moment ago a lot of the time when people set out with a goal or some kind of resolution that they want to achieve they start out by thinking about the results they want oh I want to lose a certain amount of weight in the next six months or something like that and uh they don't think nearly as much about the type of person they wish to be or about the type of identity they hope to have and I think that is an interesting internal conversation to have um you know like we sort of assume that if we lose a certain amount of weight then we'll be happy with ourselves or that we'll be the kind of person we wanted to be or that our lives will somehow be satisfying and better and I think if in instead we start with not what do we wish to achieve but who do I wish to become deciding on that identity from the start and then being able to draw a through line being able to connect the habits that you're trying to perform with the type of person that you wish to become I think gives you a deeper reason to stick to habits you know we often talk about habits as mattering because of the external results that they'll get you hey habits will help you lose weight or make more money or be more productive and it's true habits can help you do that stuff and that's great but the real reason that habits matter is that every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become and so they are the way in which you embody a particular identity you know every day that you make your bed you embody the identity of someone who's clean and organized and so by casting these small votes for being that person and drawing that connection between your habits and your desired identity I think it becomes a little bit easier to stick to the the daily lifestyle and not get as wrapped up in the goal or the outcome it's really interesting James so just to make sure I've got that you're saying in a sense you're focus more on the things that you're doing each day that reflect like this slightly modified version of yourself the version you want to be that's a bit better rather than just focusing on like I'm going to be Slimmer or more beautiful or like I'm going to be really healthy versus that unhealthy version at the end but not thinking about like well actually that means that I'm going to going to make this different Choice when I go out for dinner and I'm not going to have the burger and chips CU actually the sort of person I want to be is the person who decides to eat you know that other you know plant heavy meal that's going to be really good for me versus the burger and chips rather than saying oh I don't really want to change that I just want to be this you know healthy you know person in a year but don't really embody myself having a different lifestyle just somehow magically being that other person to want the result but to not be interested in living the lifestyle is to basically guarantee frustration and so it's just figuring out having this honest conversation with yourself about the type of identity that you wish to have and the type of Lifestyle you wish to live and then connecting that to the results that are naturally you know reasonable given that um just to give like two other real brief examples rather than saying you know I'm the type of person who wants to lift a certain amount of weight or I want to you know I want to hit a certain result in the gym you can just be like I want to build the identity of someone who doesn't miss workouts and that gives you such a different lens for thinking about that you know now you can feel successful anytime you went to the gym you're not waiting to hit a certain number uh to feel happy with yourself or the other thing that is a deep truth about habits but we often Overlook is that your habit often needs to change shape over time you know life is dynamic not static and we we never say this explicitly but a lot of people have this kind of assumption that what it would look like to be successful with your habits is to pick one and stick to it and then you just do it forever for the rest of your life but like if we take my writing habit for example this is one of the biggest habits in my career for the first three years I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday so those were like 2,000 words a piece and that was a certain style and that really served me in that time and then I signed the book deal to write Atomic abits and the next three to five years were a very different type of writing for writing the book and then now the last four years I write a daily news letter called 321 it's much shorter it takes like 3 hours to do and it's a different type of writing I've maintained a writing habit the whole time so my identity if I said my identity is I am a writer well now I have I'm casting votes for that identity but it's taking a different shape based on the season of life that I'm in and I think people often will pick a diet to follow and then you know when their season of Life Changes they can't follow it anymore they somehow feel like a failure they feel like oh I knew I wasn't going to be able to stick to it why did I even try this always happens to me you know this kind of like negative selft talk starts and if instead you can see your life as a series of seasons and maintain a cohesive identity throughout you can cast votes for that identity in different ways depending on which season you're in and so it also by making it identity focused and not necessarily results focused you give yourself some additional flexibility in figuring out how to make it work for you over time hi I want to take a quick break to tell you about an exciting new free guide we've made especially for you now if you're a regular listener of this podcast you're no out already aware of how important the gut microbiome is it's responsible for so much from digestion to immune support even our mental well-being as we've learned from Tim and Sarah and other podcast guests and as our members know through using Zoe we feed our gut microbiome through the variety of foods we eat and in return our microbes give us this wealth of health benefits as you know we're all about spreading our science far and wide empowering people with the knowledge should live healthier lives that's why we've created a new free gut guide a series of emails and actionable tips to improve your gut health and start feeling your best and to get yours for free simply go to zoe.com gutshot okay back to the show James before we move on to I guess like the positive ways of think about building up the habits I think one thing I'd like to spend a minute with with Federica on is just it can be very easy I think to fall onto that self-blame that you just talked about to feel that like everything is just because of your own failure and how hard it is and you know interestingly you know we are in this world where for the last 50 years people have said well for example losing weight is as simple as just like have fewer calories and if you can't do that it's just because you have no self-control and interestingly all the science and every single nutritional scientist I've spoken to in the Las five years I said well that's just not true that doesn't reflect the science as we understand it now um and therefore there's this sort of Gap between everybody bidding themselves up because it's all about willpower and then I think more and more of the science talking about um you know the biology that we have for example how much harder it is to to lose weight than to to put on weight but also I think the increasing interest in the way in which the the food that we eat it's not just it has more calories or that it's tasty but we have this New Concept sort of around Ultra processed foods and that if you're listening to this in the states or Canada or the UK then you know you're probably eating more than 50% of your diet that is ultra processed fed can you tell us a little bit about like I guess what the latest science is telling us about that because I guess that's part of the challenge that we're then facing as as James is helping us to uh to understand how to uh to achieve our goals nonetheless yes and Jonathan I think a really big part of it is for people to be aware so talking about these foods and talking about what they are is a step in the right direction cuz as James said if you know the kind of person you want to be and it comes back to the big why like why are we doing this why do you want to have a healthier diet why do you want to feel better we need to have also the right Tools in our toolkit to be able to achieve those daily goals and Ultra processed foods and the science around them has shown us that you know if you are somebody who wants to see themselves as being healthy and active and your why is because you want to play with your grandchildren one day Ultra processed foods are not going to help you together so Ultra processed food science is evolving very rapidly and there's a big big body of evidence coming out specifically with Association studies so when we're looking at large cohort data and we're associating ultr processed food consumption with specific Health outcomes now there's I think at one point there was a paper coming out every single week that was a huge analysis of hundreds of thousands of people that looked at okay the more Ultra processed food you're consuming the more likely you are to suffer with consequences such as type 2 diabetes cardiovascular disease heart disease um you know metabolic disease mental health disorders and what's important to say is that this body of evidence is really growing and and it's all pointing in One Direction um to associate these foods and we're still looking to do more research to understand the mechanisms as to how this is happening an ultra processed food there is a classification called the Nova classification which is like the gold standard for now but I'm sure that will evolve too and essentially these are foods that are made industrially so they are some you know Tim Spa loves to call them edible food like substances they are these foods that are made in in large factories and there are a bunch of chemicals that are thrown together to look like food so essentially when you're looking at the back of pack and you're looking at an ingredients list if you see lots of ingredients that you wouldn't possibly have in your own kitchen and if the food that you're about to eat doesn't look anything like food so an Oreo is a good example right an Oreo doesn't look like anything you could ever grow or kill um they are very likely to be ultr processed foods and these Ultra processed foods I mean I think it's almost impossible to imagine a world where there's not going to be any of them but all we have to do is zoom out a little bit to our European neighbors and see that it is possible to live in a world where maybe 10 to 15% of our calories come from these Foods as opposed to as you said Jonathan over 50% and in some groups in our in the UK up to 75% so there are these food- like substances that have mounting data showing that they are not helpful for us they are not good for our health physical or mental and my biggest worry is the impact that they're having especially on our children because children are amongst the highest consumers of ultra processed foods I think one of the things that seems to have really changed our view about this um is also understanding how this interacts with our microbiome and from there may even interact with our brain and elsewhere so I think historically the view of these Foods is well they're they're not very good for you because you know they're high in saturated fat or they're high in calories but fed I think what what we've seen you know even just in the last couple of years right in ter of some of this latest research is a suggestion that these Foods May in fact be influencing our brain and that's sort of why I want to touch on this here because I feel like you know there's this double layer it's not just that it happens to tastes nice but actually you may be fighting foods which are actively changing the things that you want to eat like could you tell us a little bit about that and then I'm hoping James is going to tell us how to fight back yeah for sure I mean you're right Jonathan we are we have trillions of microbes in our gut and one of the things that has emerged in in the past Yeah couple of years is that a lot of the ingredients we're adding to these Ultra processed foods seem to interact with our microbiome in ways that we couldn't have predicted so yes these foods are high in fat salt sugar high in calories but the UL if the sweeteners and the the fact that the food structure is completely destroyed means that our microbes are interacting with these Foods very differently to anything you would find in nature and the the thing is is that when we disrupt the G microbiome we are disrupting an essential part of our immune response and we're disrupting an essential part of our gut brain connection some of the science is pointing to the fact that these Ultra processed foods actually change our gut microbiome composition but also change the way that the gut microbiome interacts with the layers of the gut and sends messages through the Vagas nerve to the point where we think it might be influencing the food choices we make so somebody who eats um for example Big Max every day might actually be also influencing their gut microbiome in a way that makes them want to eat Big Macs again and in an evolutionary sense this makes sense because if you're a g microb and you're thriving off some of these chemicals or you're thriving off specific composition of the Big Mac then it is in your interest to survive by getting your host I.E us to eat more Big Macs um and you know if that's the case then the impact the layers of impact that Ultra processed foods are having on us run really deep and it also helps to address you know when I working as a nutritionist I do work with people who really change their dietary habits and they'll say to me after some time I can't believe I was eating this food so often I don't even want to eat it anymore so the actual desirability of that food changes when you change what you eat so feeding our G microbes does also seem to feed the foods that our brain then drives us to consume more of which is really interesting there there's a similar pattern that happens with a lot of habits you know like you'll hear gamblers say like I don't even I don't even want to do it anymore but I can't stop myself um and so there are a lot of bad habits that people know don't serve them but they still find themselves compelled to do it the brain is wired to notice and remember rewards that are in your environment and so you're going to remember anything that feels good or that benefits you and that includes not only food but also many other experiences in life and so of course if you're eating Big Macs or whatever uh and that elicits a favorable emotion or a positive response you're going to remember that for next time and um eventually the more that you repeat that behavior and the more that you receive that reward the tighter the loop becomes and the more ingrain the Habit becomes though one of the interesting things I think often about these Foods is you eat far too much and afterwards you don't feel very good even when you start right James so there is something interesting about one's brain You' think would have recognized this wasn't a great pattern but before rather than fall more and more down the loop of how miserable and difficult this is actually James I would love you to dig us out of the H that feder is talking which is of surrounded by all this brilliantly designed food by these food Architects that is like genius for like triggering our desires maybe our microbiome is now pulling us in the wrong direction you have literally written the book on how to change one's habits so could you I I haven't been able to say that before I like I like that that's a good line um could you tell us about how to think about making changes that then might support new resolutions sure so there's a lot more science behind this for just for the sake of this conversation I'll say if you're interested in the science Atomic habits covers that in much greater detail so feel free to check it out there but what I'm going to do is cut to the chase in a practical sense and in a practical sense if we're trying to figure out what can I actually do about this there are roughly four big categories of things that you can focus on and I refer to them as the four laws of behavior change so if you want to build a good habit there are four things you can do the first thing is you want to make it obvious so you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious available visible easy to see easier it is to get your attention the more likely you are to act on it the second law is to make it attractive the more attractive or appealing a habit is the more motivating or enticing it is the more likely you are to feel compelled to do it the third law is to make it easy the easier more convenient frictionless simple a habit is the more likely it is to be performed and then the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is just like we were talking about a minute ago whatever you feel like is rewarding or pleasurable the more likely you are to repeat in the future so make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying now there are many ways to do each of those things and atomic habit covers that in Greater detail and we'll talk about some examples here in a minute there are many ways to do those different things um but if if you're sitting there and you're listening to this and you're thinking you know I have this habit I just keep like I want to get started but I keep procrastinating on it or maybe you're like you know I I have this Behavior I do it every now and then but I wish I did it more consistently you can just go through those four laws and ask yourself how can I make the behavior more obvious how can I make it more attractive how can I make it easier how can I make it more satisfying and the answers to those questions will reveal different steps that you can take to increase the odds that the behavior is going to occur you don't always need all four but the more of them that you have working for you the better positioned you are to fall through on a good habit now we can use that framework to talk about building better eating habits and that can be helpful because good habits can sort of like a plant crowding out another one a good habit can kind of crowd out some of your bad habits it creates less space for those to kind of exist and be repeated so that's a really effective place to start of course many people are also interested in how do I break a bad habit um and so to break a bad habit you just invert those four so rather than making it obvious make it invisible unsubscribe from emails don't keep junk food in the house if you're trying to follow a new diet don't follow a bunch of food bloggers on Instagram you know like reduce exposure to the queue rather than making it attractive make it unattractive rather than making it easy make it difficult so increase friction add steps between you and the behavior and then rather than making it satisfying make it unsatisfying layer on some kind of a cost or a consequence to the action so to build a good habit make it obvious attractive easy satisfying to break a bad habit make it invisible unattractive difficult unsatisfying and again there are many ways to do each of those things but that's like the big picture framework to keep in mind thank you James I would love to dig into each of those in turn just to make sure that um I and the listeners understand it a bit more so could we maybe start with the first one he said make it obvious so imagine someone's listening here and saying like I want to go and make these changes to um to what I'm eting what does make it obvious mean so it's mostly about how you structure your environment and I think a simple question to hold in the back of your mind just like think about one habit that you're trying to build maybe it's a certain type of food you're hoping to eat more of or you know something you're hoping to do maybe you just want to cook more meals or something like that um and then walk into the rooms where you spend most of your time each day and your kitchen your living room your bedroom look around those rooms and just ask yourself what is this space designed to encourage what behaviors are obvious here what behaviors are easy here and you know if you walk into one person's house and the chips and the cookies and snacks are on the counter and visible and easy to get to and you walk into another person's house and those things are either tucked away maybe some of them already been in the house or they're you know on the highest shelf in the back of the pantry and they're harder to get to and they've got you know a piece of fruit out on the counter individually these are small choices and no single one of them is going to radically transform your behavior you're not just going to be able to put an apple on the counter and magically become a healthy person but collectively you can make a dozen or two dozen or 50 little adjustments like that and the more that the good habit is the path of least resistance and the more that the bad habit is distanced from you and has many steps or is higher friction the more likely you are to fall through on the thing that you want to do and I think this is just true about many habits in general which is people often say something's important to them but then you look around the spaces where they live and work each day and the room is not optimized for that thing and so the more that you can prime your environment to make the next action easy whether that's cooking the next meal instead of purchasing it or whether that's eating something healthy rather than eating something unhealthy and so on the more likely you are to be able to fall through on those things and when you have energy and time and extra capacity maybe you make whatever CH choice you want but when you're press for time or you're stressed or you're exhausted you're tired what are you going to choose you're going to choose the path of least resistance and so redesigning your environment is a really effective way to promote some of those healthy behaviors and one of the reasons why I love starting with environment design is because it's something that's very controllable it's very tangible and often you can do it once and it'll continue to serve you again and again so it's sort of resetting your default if you like as a result of this because your environment has changed just your your sort of easy path of behavior has has adjusted as a as a result of this I think that's a good way to describe it there's a chapter in atomic habits that's called the secret to self-control and one of the surprising things about a lot of the research around self-control and willpower is that when you look at someone and you're like oh I just wish I had the discipline they had or I wish I had as much willpower as they have what a lot of the studies have found is that these people are not necessarily like super human certainly there may be some variances and willpower between people but to a large degree the people who exhibit the greatest willpower are the ones who are tempted the least and so it's actually designing an environment that tempts you less that positions you to make good choices by making those obvious and easy that is the best way to increase your willpower and that I always think is something that's very in your control it's funny I'm listening to this and thinking I've got this massive tin of nuts here which is one of the things that at Zoe we very very Pro cuz the science behind nuts um almost for the vast majority of um people is incredibly good and so I'm a big snacker it's really effortless because it's just sitting there and as you quite rightly said it's a lot less effort I'm sitting on my calls on the rest of it to do that than to go and try and eat something that is in fact less healthy so that would be an example it's like it's obvious it's right there I see it in front of me to give an example that pretty much everyone can resonate with think about your smartphone so when I I'm like everybody else when my phone is next to me I will check it every 3 minutes just cuz it's there but I have a little rule for myself and I can't do it all the time but I probably do it about 70% of the time which is I leave my phone in another room until lunch and I have a home office and so it's only like 30 seconds away I just got to walk down the stairs and go get it but I never go get it and I always think that's interesting I'm like did I want it or not you know in the one sense I wanted it bad enough that I would check it every 3 minutes when it was next to me but in another sense I never wanted it so bad that I would work 30 seconds for it and you'd be surprised how many habits are kind of like that they will curtail themselves to the desired degree if you just introduce a little bit of friction I've noticed that I'm that way about beer as well if I buy a sixpack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge and it's just like in the door I can see it as soon as I open it I'll grab one and have it with dinner just cuz it's there but if I put it like down at the back of the fridge it's like on the lowest shelf and I kind of bent need to bend all the way down to see it sometimes I'll forget that it's there it'll be there for two weeks or 3 weeks I won't even remember that we have it and uh so again just optimizing your environment to make the good actions obvious and the undesirable actions less obvious or less easy to do it sounds simple but if you can do that in a dozen or two dozen or 50 different ways you often find that it's much easier to stick to the behaviors that you want to stick to James can I ask you something a little controversial on this uh one of my other guests said that in fact therefore the biggest thing that you could do to really change your long-term lifestyle and health was to change your friends because they are the biggest driver in fact of your environment and what you do and therefore if your friends like don't do any exercise eat really badly all of these sorts of things that's what you do with them whereas you know if your friends like to go for like walks or whatever then in fact you're going to do this different like does that count within your like change your environment make it obvious or or is that a bit too radical for you yeah so certainly um I don't I don't know about saying it's the biggest thing I don't I don't even know that it's possible to measure that or that you could even say that you know about I don't think he had a clinical study to prove it to be fair I AG sure and the and the biggest you know uh the biggest is going to change based on the situation the habit and all kinds of other things but I setting that aside I think we can say certainly it is a major element or a large factor in driving your habits and um it's not just your friends though it's also just if we more broadly think about so we've been talking about the physical environment if we just more broadly think about the social environment that you are in that is an enormous driver of your habits and behavior we are all part of multiple groups some of those groups are large like what it means to be British or what it means to be American or something like that some of those groups are small like what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your little friend group or a you know a member of the local CrossFit gym whatever it is like those groups that we all belong to large and small have a set of shared expectations a set of social norms for what you do when you're in that group and when habits go with the grain of the expectations of the group they're pretty attractive and this actually leads us to the second law that I mentioned make it attractive so habits are really attractive when they help you fit in with the friends and the family and the relationships that you have around you um when they go against the grain of the expectations of the group they're kind of unattractive and so this comes back to one of the deepest human needs that we all have which is this desire to bond and connect you know humans are very social creatures and even if it's just like your little family unit we all want to be a part of something and so if people have to choose between you know I have habits that I don't really love but I fit in I belong I'm part of something or I have the habits that I want to have but I'm cast out I'm ostracized I'm criticized you might be able to do that for a day or week or I don't know a month or two but at some point it does not feel good to run against the grain of all the relationships in your life and so the desire to belong will often overpower the desire to improve and I think that is one really good reason to try as best as you can to get your Social um environment aligned with the habits that you want to build and I think the the punchline is actually pretty simple the punchline is you want to join groups where your desired Behavior behavior is the normal behavior that's really I think of drinking for example as you describe this seems like a a classic example lots of people will be listen to this saying like one of the things I want to do in January is probably drink less than I have been doing because they will be aware of the evence it says you know a glass of red wine might be fine but you know more than that that isn't and that if you're friends of the sort of people who go drinking then there starts to be a lot of social pressure right and a sense of of not participating that an example of of what you're you're talking about James sure there I mean there are examples like that which are kind of like your you know a classic kind of habits example but it influences your behavior in ways that you don't even realize you know like we're talking right now I could be wearing a bathing suit for this conversation but that would be weird right it would violate every expectation we have so you know for anyone listening uh listening on the podcast and and not on YouTube James is not in fact wearing a bathing suit or if he is he's got clothes on top so just to set your that slightly anxious listeners at this point James so in a sense I chose what I wore today but only sort of right like the menu of options was already pretty restricted based on the social norms of what we were going to do in the group that we're involved in um or like you know if I walk outside my house in the summer and I see my neighbor mowing their lawn I might think oh I need to cut the grass too and you might do that for 5 or 10 or 30 years like however long you live in the house we wish we had that level of consistency with a lot of our other habits and why do you do it partially because it feels good to have a clean lawn but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn because you want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one and so it's the social Norm that drives a lot of these actions and certainly that is true with what you eat and what you drink and I think that's really interesting as you were saying that I was thinking about my own experience you know changing my diet through Zoe over the last seven years and some listeners have heard like one of the things that made that most easy was the point when my wife ended up doing the tests and then starting the membership and following the program and changing her diet because suddenly instead of being something that was a sort of source of conflict over dinner every night about maybe what I want to eat why you want to eat all of those plants and things like this suddenly like um Justine was like all in and actually she's got really into it now she's cooking lots of these dinners and I'm delighted in and eating this and so it suddenly switched in the way I said from it feels really attractive we're very compatible in this and before we were quite incompatible um and actually there are quite a lot of members who've talk to me and um and feder I imagine you've heard a lot of these stories of people like well I managed to get my my husband or my wife to do this as well or we did it together and it's sort of been this journey of change versus people who's saying like you know what this is really hard I'm trying to do this on my own but like my husband and my children like don't want to change any of this and that makes it very difficult yeah we know through so much Public Health health research that Community is crucial so actually finding a community of like-minded individuals that have similar goals massively increases the likelihood of success you know to some extent I think I what James is saying being aware of the influence of our social setting and the people we spend time with can also sometimes help us to maybe reduce the time we're spending with some of our friends who maybe are no longer on the same trajectory and I think we have to be AIT a little bit less scared of that because for example you know friends who are was friends with in my 20s who have a very different lifestyle to me I think it's a lot of listeners will maybe uh align with this but when you have children you do Lose Friends right CU suddenly you're not going out on a Saturday night until like 3: in the morning you have different priorities and that doesn't mean that you don't love those friends anymore it just means that they're not aligned with the person that you're becoming anymore and that's okay like things change and you might see each other again later in life but making sure that you know you know who you want to be and what is priority to you like what is the big why what kind of habits do you want to cultivate to get you to that place where you want to be in 10 years time sometimes that's going to have some Discord with some people but finding your new community that has similar goals and similar principles can really help to mitigate any sort of changes in friendships and and communities James would you tell us about the third one make it easy sure so one of the most common challenges with building new habits is the people bite off more than they can chew you know they they decide to try to do too much and this is I I have made this mistake more times than I can count so you know it is something that uh is very natural to do I think particularly for ambitious people there's kind of this conversation in their head where they sit down and they start thinking about the changes they're going to make and then the Assumption in the back of their mind even if they don't state it explicitly is man you know like what what could I do if I really got going like what would Peak Performance look like for me you know if I I was like really on my game and like living my best days if I really had my habits dialed in what could I achieve and I think when you're in that mindset which is great it's great to be hopeful and dream about where you could go it's also really easy to end up doing too much oh well I'm going to change five six seven habits at the same time and rather than asking yourself what could I do on my best day I actually think the place to start is by asking what can I stick to even on the bad days and that becomes your Baseline that becomes the new habit that you try to get established and once you establish that then you can start to feel successful and feel like you're moving forward you gain some progress and a feeling of momentum and then great now you're showing up each day and there's all kinds of things that you can do from there and so does that mean your guidance is in general don't try and like make this massive change all at once but think about this more as a series of like smaller habit changes step by step and is that and is that in fact what the sort of the science shows is more successful so I I think there let me give you two examples that'll probably help clarify so the first one this is just a really simple tactic I think a very actionable thing that you can use for building better habits I call it the two-minute Rule and it just says take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less to do so read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat now sometimes people resist that a little bit because they're like okay buddy you know I know the real goal is just to take my yoga mat out I know I'm actually trying to do the workout so this is some kind of trick and I know it's a trick then why would I fall for it basically but I have this reader his name is Mitch I mentioned him in atomic abits he lost over 100 pounds so what is that 40 50 kilos and um he kept it off for more than a decade and he had this strange little rule for himself where he first started going to the gym for the first like 6 weeks he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than 5 minutes so he would get in the car drive to the gym get out do half an exercise get back in the car drive home and it sounds ridiculous you know it sounds silly it's obviously it's not going to get the guy the results that he wants but what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up you know he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for 5 minutes and this is a pretty deep truth about habits which is that a habit must be established before it can be improved you know it has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn it into something more you need to standardize before you optimize and so the two-minute rule kind of helps push back against that perfectionist tendency that we have sometimes or against that tendency to try to do too much and encourages you to master the artst showing up I'm reminded of that quote from Ed Latimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door like there are a lot of things in life that are like that you know the hardest step is the first one and the two-minute rule kind of helps you open the front door it helps you get started I love that James can I just ask about the 28 day the 28 days cuz you laughed at that at the beginning but I was still thinking oh so you need to do that for 28 days or is that maybe 6 weeks so uh cuz you just talked about six weeks I think everyone was like well okay but come on how many times do I have to do this for it to somehow start to become a habit sure so this is a very common question how many days does it take to become a habit and so and you'll hear 21 days 28 days 30 days 90 days I don't know there's all kinds of stuff that people say um the answer is it depends um there was a study that shows that on average it takes about 66 days to build a habit so that's a common number you'll see floating around now people science says it takes 66 days but if you actually read the study the range is quite wide so something pretty easy like drinking a glass of water might only take a couple weeks um something more difficult like going for a run after work every day might take seven or eight or nine months and even that I don't think tells the story very cleanly because you can imagine one person who wants to build the habit of going for a run after work who lives with people who nobody is working out and nobody's interested in that and it kind of goes against the friction of that group and then another person who lives with all athletes that are excited about working out and they just need to join their friends to do it obviously these are two different circumstances and so it's going to depend but I think the real answer the honest answer to how long does it take to build a habit is forever because if you stop doing it it's no longer a habit and what I'm trying to get people to realize with that answer is that we often think about our habits as this Finish Line to be crossed but they're not a Finish Line to be crossed it's a lifestyle to be lived so it's not like do this for 30 days and then you'll be healthy and you won't have to worry about it anymore it's much more along the lines of what is the kind of Life Style what is the type of identity that you're hoping to build and how can this become your new normal and I think when you start to shift your perspective in that way you can see the importance of choosing a small change a non-threatening change um something that feels sustainable and is going to last for the long term I think alongside that though we have to be kind to ourselves and that if you forget to do the thing once it doesn't mean you've broken that habit so I really resonated what you said earlier James where people come to resolutions in New Year and they take on a huge challenge or like six different things so like I'm going to start running I'm going to go vegan um I'm going to write a letter every day and you know they take really lots of changes all at once and I think when we scale it back and make it realistic and make sure it resonates with who we want to be we also have to be mindful that if you just don't make it to the gym one of the days you planning to go or if you are trying to reduce how much alcohol you drink for example and you end up having an extra glass at a party it doesn't mean you've broken that habit formation you know 8020 rule where 80% of the time you're able to achieve the things that you set out to do and then you leave 20% of the time for life to happen essentially and and unplanned things and as long as you're on track 80% of the time we you know the long-term benefits of what you're doing will show themselves would you say that with habit formation it's a bit stricter or do you think that it's again about the overall pattern as opposed to daily daily position it's a fantastic point that you make and a crucial thing to remember that you know missing once does not ruin you and I feel like it's almost even there's an extra layer that gets thrown on top of all this which is people Fall Off Track they they do something for you know 12 days and then on the 13th day they miss or they do something for a month really consistently and then in the second month they start to fall off course and it's even worse than just missing they a lot of the time they start assigning there's like self-worth to it oh I knew I was going to fail at that oh you know oh this always happens to me I try to start something and then I fall off track um and my responsib is like we don't need to turn it into that you know like it doesn't need to be this assignment of your selfworth it can just be that uh one day was different than what you had planned and now we can show up again the next day and try to get back on course and what you you know realize if you zoom out a little bit is that it is impossible to go through your entire life and to not have days where you miss and so if you are going to be missing at some point one of the most important things to have is a plan for getting back on track quickly if the reclaiming of a habit is fast the breaking of it doesn't matter that much and I think we all have felt that at different times in life you know it's not really the first mistake that ruins you it's the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows it's letting slipping up become like a new three-month pattern that's the real problem but if you get back on track the next time then the mistake doesn't actually mean much at all and so one of my favorite mantras for building better habits is never miss twice maybe you've been following a new diet for 8 days and then the ninth day you binge to Pizza well you know wish that hadn't happened but never missed twice let me make sure the next meal is a healthy one or in my Cas Italian there's nothing wrong with pizza in my case The Habit that kind of launched my career was that I wrote a new article every Monday and Thursday and I did that for the first three years and if I missed on Monday well you know wish that hadn't happened but never miss twice let's make sure that I get one out on Thursday and again if the reclaiming of the Habit is fast the breaking isn't that big of a deal it's really it reminds me of something we we talk a lot about within Zoe which is that no food is off limits so clearly it's something foods are better for you some food is more like a treat it's not creating lots of you know healthy things for you but but nothing is off limits and I think once because if you start to think about it like that then he it's like well this is all a bit miserable right one should also be able to enjoy one's life but also um I think you get to this point where you say well I sort of failed right so then you break yourself and you give up and you you sort of go into that spiral now I would like to cover the last one before I'm so slow and we run out of time make it satisfying what does that mean so it's mostly about feeling good in some way you know pretty much there are all kinds of behaviors in life and some behaviors are positive and make you feel good some behaviors are just kind of neutral and don't really mean a whole lot and some things have a consequence you touch a hot stove and you burn your hand once you're like oh I want to avoid that for the rest of my life um but if a behavior is not rewarding in some way if it doesn't have some positive emotion associated with it it's really hard for it to become a habit because you're asking yourself to repeat something that brain is like well why would I remember this it didn't really get me very much and so you need some positive emotional experience with it you need to feel good about yourself in some way um in order to remember it and come back to it in the future I think actually there was something that was mentioned earlier um Jonathan about like a lot of these Foods we eat if you zoom out just a little bit an hour or a day later you actually feel terrible after eating them and I think that's an interesting thing to realize with many habits is that it's often worth it if you want a habit to be satisfying to to find a different way to measure it you know a lot of people when they talk about food the only thing they talk about is how it tastes and really what they mean is how it tastes immediately that's like their only measure for whether something is enjoyable or not but if you can find a different way to measure the experience um and I don't even mean measure in like a technical sense I just mean a quality of it that you like um you know like you could say well I really like eating this food and it's because of how my body feels an hour later or it's because of how much energy I have in the afternoon or some other I mean it's because of how well I sleep at night and if you can find some other aspect of the experience that feels enjoyable to you then you can start to draw this connection between the Habit that you want to build and what is pleasurable about it and um that is by changing the way that you measure the experience you often give yourself a chance to find something enjoyable about the thing that you're trying to build James I love that I want to ask you one last question shifting topics a bit but it just came up a lot from all of our listeners and that was a question about approaches that we could use with our children as we think about healthy food and I think everyone listening to this knows this is a really hard thing to do there's no straightforward answer um uh you know and it's something that I struggle with a lot but I also know you know that the science says that what my children need is quite important um is there anything that you can uh share out of you know everything you've been studying here that might be relevant as we think about our kids sure so let me give you three quick things so first thing is model the behavior that you want to see to ask somebody else to do something and then to not do it yourself like your kids are almost always going to imitate your behavior more than they listen to your words and so if you want them to act a certain way then you should try to set the standard as well people often play to the standard that you set not the one that you request and so like how can you showcase that second thing is you cannot have a human that is outside of an environment and so in many cases your kids and yourself you share share an environment together uh in your home and so how can you design that environment to optimize for the things that you want so we talked about that a lot earlier but all of those things the kitchen is not just a space that you walk into it's also a space that they walk into and so how can you structure that in a way that promotes and makes the good habits easy and obvious and then the third and final thing which is something we haven't talked about yet and this is not just for your kids but also for yourself I really think it's worth asking yourself or asking them or thinking about this for them what would this look like if it was fun and in a lot of ways I actually feel like this is maybe one of the biggest hurdles to cross when you're getting ready to start a new habit is to figure out the version of it that works best for you you know we started by talking about New Year's resolutions I think a lot of people are going to the gym in January just because they feel like they should go to the gym or Society wants them to go to the gym not because they actually want to do it but we could come up with a really long list of you know Ways to Live an active lifestyle rock climb kayak do yoga go for a run like that you should list those out and then pick the one that makes the most sense for you um another example uh related to eat healthy eating and perhaps to kids let's say you want to get your kids to eat more greens or eat more salads I just talked to a woman who she wanted to get in the habit of making a salad for lunch every day and when she started she At first she had this idea in her mind that it had to be like pure and perfect that it wasn't if it wasn't like a perfectly healthy salad then it wasn't worth it for her to do it and then she shifted to this idea of like what would it be like if it was fun and so she tried to make each salad bowl like a party and she would put little toppings on it and she even some days she would even like crumble up potato chips and put them on or whatever but it made the Habit enjoyable and then once she got to the point where she was actually having a salad 90% of the days there are all kinds of ways to improve that and to you know optimize it because she's actually showing up and eating it every day and so I think you can take a SIM SAR sort of approach whether it's with yourself or with your kids and whether it's an eating habit or something else what would it look like if this was fun let's start there get the Habit established and then we can optimize and improve it from there James I I love that so much I have many more questions but we're we're definitely hitting time I would like to do a quick summary which is something we always do here and please um both of you keep me honest if I've got any of it wrong so we started by just saying like why is changing food so hard um and uh I think there were two parts of this one is just like uh what we're talking about which is all habits are hard in part because we focus too much on like what the end result is like I want to be healthier you know I want to look better on Less on the type of person that I want to be as I show up every day and James I think you gave this a great example of like if I decide I'm the sort of person who doesn't want to miss workouts then like every day if I just turn up to the gym I've already modeled that person but of course if I turn up to the gym I'm going to do some exercise I'm sort of on the path and so I guess the same thing is about like I want to be the sort of person who is eating food that is better for my microbiome it's going to get me to the point where I'm actually going to be much healthier and and all the rest of these things and then the second thing we talked about is our food environment is really difficult so this is not an easy thing you're surrounded by Foods where super smart uh scientists food Architects have been designing this for decades to make you want to eat more to design the food so it tastes yummy but doesn't fill you up and then there's all this new science around Ultra processed food that suggests this is actually changing your microbiome it may be affecting your brain so this is like literally trying to um you know fight against some very real things so you need all the tools you can have but James you have this wonderful guide your four laws so these are our tools to uh to try and get started on the on the positive direction um your first is make it obvious and I think the heart as I understand it is changing your environment so that somehow you're you're def faulting into the right direction and so I think examples you gave was you know in your kitchen you know you're having your nuts you're having your your fruit and uh as opposed to maybe um you know default unhealthy choices um the second thing is make it attractive and interestingly you said your social environment is a very big part of this so human beings really want to fit into the environment they're they're with so if your social environment your friends all these sorts of things actually supporting your habits that becomes very easy if your social environment is really at odds with the change you're trying to make that's that's very difficult um the third thing you said is make it easy and I think you both talked about lots of people trying to do too much so if you're listening to this in January you may have created this crazy list of goals just like you know somebody might start Zoey and want to just you know go from you know a diet that in in our wording might score 45 and jump straight to 75 and it's just not realistic you've got to go go step by step uh and James I think you mentioned a two-minute roll so you said if you could scale that all down to something you can achieve in 2 minutes that might be a lot easier and again you have this beautiful example take out the yoga mat and as you said presumably once you take the yoga mat out you probably don't just roll it up and put it away again but like success is just that first step so um but the associated part of it is you've just got to keep doing it forever so you can't just do the two-minute rule do this forever like all of these habits are really about lifetime habits um and then the fourth the fourth rule was make it satisfying so how do you get some reward because you were saying our brain is wired to respond to reward so if there's nothing positive about these habits it's very hard to get anything and so I think you're sort of saying can you reframe what's going on so for example as you're thinking about food think less oh it's so sweet and sugary in the second I've got it and more like actually how do I feel two hours later because actually the reality for most of these Foods is you feel terrible 2 hours later and if you were to start to think about it in that and you've Chang changed your diet you might be shocked how within just a few weeks it's Shifting the way that you're you're feeling um and then I think you said if I would to paraphrase give yourself a break like if you break your habit it's not the end of the world don't give up forever missing once doesn't ruin you but try and get back on track and James you're quite tough you're like never miss twice so like once you fail get straight back on um but I guess if you have missed twice still you can still do it the next day right so there is always it's not like it's all over um and then finally we asked about kids uh which I think might be a whole podcast if I can tempt you back because it's such an important topic um which I'd love to do but but I think the three rules you said here is model the behavior you want to see right so if your kids don't see you doing it why will they do it secondly again think back to the environment so what's in the kitchen for them what are they surrounded by and then and then thirdly what would this look like if it was fun beautiful summer you guys don't need me just run that that we we definitely do need you James thank you so much I really enjoyed it and I would definitely like to tempt you back for the you know what do we do with our children which I think if there's other listeners like there this is the thing that makes me consciously uh frequently a bit anxious so uh I I need that well this has been great thank you both so much appreciate the opportunity to uh chat and uh learn from both of you and uh it was a lovely conversation I appreciate it on today's episode episode we've learned four great rules to change our habits to improve the way that we eat and I hope that armed with this knowledge you feel that you're in a great place to make positive changes now if you want to take things further and get personal support and advice on how to improve your diet and eat the right foods for your body then you might want to consider becoming a Zoe member Zoe can help you to feel better now and live healthier in the years to come why not give it a try head to zoe.com /p podcast now to learn more and get 10% off your membership as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and nutrition is produced by yellow huin Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fford the Zoe science and nutrition podcast is not medical advice it's for General informational purposes only see you next time one final thing listener if you're enjoying Zoe science and nutrition on Google podcasts I want to let you know that Google is closing down its podcast app in the next two months in favor of YouTube music we wanted to share this so you aren't caught out Zoe science and nutrition is available on Apple podcast Spotify or if you are an Android fan there are plenty of apps like castbox overcast Pocket Cast and lots more if you follow Google's plan and switch to YouTube music you'll find us there already search Zoe science and nutrition wherever you listen and hit the follow button I look forward to seeing you [Music] there [Music] a

Channel: ZOE

Views: 114,486

Keywords: zoe, zoe podcast, gut health, ultra processed foods, tim spector, jessie inchauspe, gut health diet, ultra processed foods documentary, ultra processed food, james clear, atomic habits, quit bad habits, motivational

Id: mcdzK8BOfBY

Length: 65min 11sec (3911 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024