- Eating delicious food to me it feels like a job now. At first it was a bit
rocky because I was like, Wow! You know all those foods, but now it's like, it's a job. And around that I embrace eating healthy. (upbeat music) (hissing sound) I say (hissing sound) - [Kiana] Foodie beauty aka
Chantel Marie is a YouTuber who really loves to eat. - I know what you're thinking, "You're prostituting yourself for pizza?" It gets worse. - Unfortunately for
Chantel her terrible diet and weight have led to some
very serious health concerns, leading her to believe correctly that she must change her behavior in order to save her health
and potentially her life. Chantel has engaged in many
attempts to lose weight over the years but she hasn't
had any success to date. I'd love to show you more than
a few of those attempts here but she was very famous
for her cycle of posting a video saying she's
gonna change her life. - I'm saying this to you
guys for accountability. I want you to help me
through this journey I want, I really want to see this through. - And deleting it and
posting back to back videos of her doing massive mukbangs
for like a month in a row. - How are you? How are you? I need a chip right now. - The most obvious reason
for Chantel's cycle of failure is her extreme
love of fast food. Although Chantel is not
currently on a diet, she's in the mukbang phase
of her cycle right now. Her history suggests that she'll probably be on another one soon. In this video we'll be
discussing why Chantel may as well not even bother trying again unless she's willing to address this one very important thing first. Psychologists have found
that when we attempt to make a big change in our
lives or overcome an addiction, we go through what are
called the states of change. Chantel is constantly flip
flopping between the action and contemplation states of change. With most of her time being spent in the contemplation state of change, which is defined by being
torn between wanting to make the change and wanting
to keep things the same. Which I mean if that is
not Chantel in a nutshell, I don't know what it is. - I say this all the time, why can't this food be good for you? Why? Maybe all we would do is eat in that case. - Research on successful
long term changers. That's people who ended a
drug addiction, quit smoking, or lost a massive amount
of weight and kept it off. Shows that the only way that people can overcome an addiction and change their behavior for good is if their personal
pros and cons list begins to tip toward more
meaningful pros than cons. This is something called
decisional balance. In Chantel's case she is the first person to tell you that she absolutely does not wanna stop eating fast
food, but that she has to because of her deteriorating health. - How am I supposed to give this up? (grunting sound) Why can't this food be good for you? It's like a joke, you know. It's like here. I'm gonna give you all
this food your body craves, it's hyper palatable, it's so pleasurable, releases endorphins in your brain. But you can't have any. No, you can have some,
but it's not good for you. Shake my head. - She has two conflicting desires, the desire to get healthy and the desire to continue her daily fast food binges. But in the end, it's pretty obvious to anyone watching Chantel's channel that her desire to
continue eating fast food is a lot stronger than
her desire to lose weight or get healthy. Her pros and cons list is definitely tipped more toward cons when it comes to changing her behavior. As we'll see in these next clips, Chantel is constantly flip
flopping between wanting to change her ways and just staying obese. - I have these reasons I believe in now, I need to do this and
I know my life will be a lot better 365 days from, 364 days from now (chuckles lightly) That's why I think weight
loss journeys are bullshit. I'm not downing if you have a weight loss journey
and your losing weight. That's amazing, I'm so happy for you. But for me, no. I really don't know what I was thinking with all these muckbangs. I'm just gonna do muckbangs, and if you don't like it,
you don't have to watch. Because I don't know if I
can handle another binge and the guilt and the despair. So whenever I made that video, I'm never gonna binge again, at that time in that mind
frame, i was on a high. I'm eating myself to death. My new attitude is, my weight, my health,
what I eat is my business. - The reason for all this flip flopping. Chantel does not want
to change her behavior. Chantel wants the outcome of weight loss, but she's not at all
interested in the process that is responsible for getting her there. Mainly, quitting eating
fast food every day, beginning to eat healthy food and generally living
a healthier lifestyle. - I hate cardio. - In fact, Chantel believes
that no one could possibly want to stop eating fast food, but rather they're forced to
based on their circumstances. - You have to be ready to quit. You're never ready. Never. You don't quit because you want to. That's bullshit. You do it because you have to. - Now if anyone here has ever
successfully stopped smoking or quit an addiction, you know that what she
just said is not true. Wanting to change the specific behavior that is causing the problem is from what I've seen, a necessary
condition of change. Maybe there are some outliers but from what I've seen in the research, you need to want to change that behavior to be able to change it. But for Chantel she feels
that she's being forced by her medical circumstances to give up something that she loves. She feels that her health her audience, her doctors are dictating to her that she must stop eating fast food. This causes rebellion, something we see in Chantel quite often and an emotional taboo around fast food that makes it ultra seductive. Something called psychological reactance. - I'm not gonna be intimidated to change who I am or how I act. Like, if you don't like it, don't watch me. - Chantel feels that what you really wants is to keep eating as she has been. But what she needs to do, what she has to do is to diet. Changing her diet is a should for Chantel not an I want to. And for her to lose weight successfully. This is what has to change. This is actually what
people are referring to when they say, "Someone is not ready to change." It's a matter of actually
wanting to change the specific behavior that
has caused the problem. It's not enough to want
the outcome of weight loss, you have to want to
change what got you there. For example, if you were
smoking cigarettes say, to change that behavior, you'd have to want to quit smoking more than you wanted to continue smoking. It doesn't mean that the
desire to smoke cigarettes is not there at all. It simply means that your
desire to change is more than your desire to stay the same. So until Chantel actually wants to change, she will not succeed. - How am I supposed to give this up? - Desire is an extremely powerful emotion. It might not be the first
emotion you think of when you think of emotions. But it is, it's that emotional quality of wanting something really, really badly. Dr. Jonathan Haidt is
a social psychologist from NYU who talks about the idea of the elephant and the rider, as the two parts of the brain. The elephant is the
emotional part of our brain whereas the rider is the logical part. The elephant part of our brain is ancient. It actually hasn't changed that much since the early days of our development. It's actually remarkably similar hardware to this day to what a lamprey has. (farting sound) This is the fight or flight
era, it's instinctual, it's what keeps us alive. And as a result, it's extremely powerful, especially when it comes
to governing our behavior. The logical part, the
rider is a lot younger. It deals with more
sophisticated processes, and it's not quite as powerful. As long as the elephant in
the rider are in agreeance, the rider remains in control. But if you've ever seen
a man on an elephant, you know that that control is an illusion. Everything's all good
until the elephant decides to freak the fuck out. (elephant trumpeting) (banging sound) We can have a million
logical reasons to change but our behavior is driven
by our emotion, not logic. So none of those reasons matter an ounce unless the emotional
part is on the same side. (grunting sound) So because Chantel feels
that what she desires more than anything, is to
eat fast food every day. - Let's give you a bitty bite. Oh my god! Bitty bite. (crunching sound) I know this sounds bad. But that bite was like
worth being fat for. - This is what she wants with the emotional part of her brain. The process of losing
weight is going to be, A awful, and B dependent on her level
of willpower on any given day. Science has shown that
willpower is finite, it doesn't last very long. And that means that any weight
loss attempt of Chantel's is destined to fail. - It feels like a job now. - As long as Chantel continues
to view healthy eating as a tedious prison sentence, she's never going to be able
to consistently engage in it. Living a healthy lifestyle is something that needs to be kept up for life, if we're going to actually
lose weight and be healthy. No one can consistently engage
in something that they hate. - It's ridiculous for people to be like, "You're gonna die." Oh well, we're all gonna die. And honestly, I don't
wanna live to be 70-80, eating kale. - That means in order to
succeed Chantel actually has to change her attitude and
her beliefs about fast food. There has to be a fundamental shift there. She has to literally want
to stop eating fast food and start eating healthy food. - Why can't this food be good for you? - So how can someone do this? How can someone with an
admitted food addiction, who clearly gets a lot of
pleasure out of their meals want to stop eating fast food? Obviously, it's not going to be easy, and it's a complicated process. Some people have like a rock bottom moment or an epiphany, where they feel so much
pain and unhappiness that they never quite view
food the same way again. It loses its sparkle so to speak. But no one can engineer a rock
bottom moment unfortunately and honestly, Chantel seems
to have them all the time. They say that most people
have to hit a rock bottom to change and the amount of health issues I've amassed for myself because of my obesity is definitely scary
and eye opening for me. And I really want that
to be my rock bottom. - She gets a medical scare, a very serious medical
scare from what I can see. She gets very emotionally
invested in the idea of changing and the dream of changing and then a few days go
by and she's not really as emotionally connected for her reasons for wanting to change. - MSG! - And she falls back into her old habits. What's happening here is
she's really losing sight of her reasons for wanting to change. The emotional quality kind of
fades away after some time. When you get a medical scare or some sort of wake up call your reasons
for changing are crystal clear. You can really picture
them, you can feel them, and they'll help you
to drive your behavior in one direction. And as time goes by food
remains very salient but your reasons for change don't. Food is everywhere you go, you can see it, you can smell it, you can very clearly
visualize yourself eating it. But unless you've done
the work to make sure that your reasons for
change can stay top of mind, they won't really be there. In order to change for good, Chantel's perception of fast food needs to change indefinitely. It needs to become clear to her that fast food isn't her
forbidden friend, it's her enemy. It seems to be the single greatest cause of the problems in her life but she has to see that for herself and it has to stay that way. So how to stop obsessing over fast food. First, Chantel needs to connect more with her deepest held values. She needs to ask yourself
some tough questions about what her food addiction
has caused her this far? And what it will cost her in the future if she does not change? She needs to discover how eating like this every single day
conflicts with her ideal vision of herself and the hopes and dreams that she has for her future. She needs to spend some time
thinking about her life story. Who is she? Where does her obsession
with food come from? And where is she going if
she doesn't change her ways? Essentially Chantel needs
to find a new vision of her life that she desires more than she desires keeping things the same. While also finding reasons that fast food isn't quite as attractive as she built it up in her head to be. She needs to literally get to the point where her dominant view of food is that, it takes away from her life
more than it adds to it. I know for me once I
stopped and I figured out what was really important to me. It was just like this huge realization that I had been putting
my entire life on hold. That I had been sacrificing
my whole life for food. And once I started thinking
of it in terms of that, it just wasn't as enticing anymore. Now I'm not saying from
that moment on I was like, "I never wanna eat bad again." It wasn't like that, I still
wanted to, to a degree, but I wanted to change more than I wanted to keep eating like that. And it gave me the
strength I needed and like the real start to start gaining
control over my behavior. But it wasn't until I had this fundamental shift and realizing, no, this is not what I want. That I was actually
able to start changing. Okay, second part. Chantel is focused solely
on the momentary pleasure that she feels when she
puts food in her mouth, while ignoring all the negative feelings that occur shortly thereafter. She's impulsive, and she's
biased towards short term gains over long term health. We all are to a degree but
Chantel particularly so. Help combat this short term bias. Chantel needs to connect with
the other immediate feelings that accompany eating fast food. The physical feeling of indigestion, the loss of energy, the sluggishness, and possibly worst of all that horrible sinking
feeling we all experience as a result of letting
ourselves down, once again. These are all the immediate feelings that accompany eating fast food. They don't happen in an
abstract future that may or may not happen like a medical concern. They happen right now. And every time Chantel gets a craving, this is where she needs
to refocus her attention. And for the third point. If Chantel does decide that
she wants to lose weight. If she does decide that she
wants to give up fast food. She needs to begin the process
of detaching her identity as herself as a foodie and a food addict. She's built her life and
her image around eating and that makes it a polarizing force, bringing her back to it. Anyway I'm not saying it's gonna be easy or there's gonna be this one moment where she just never wants fast food again when she decides what
she really does want. It's not like that. It's really just doing the work,
figuring out what you want, taking responsibility for your thoughts and deciding whether or
not the eating fast food in copious amounts every single day is really a behavior that you want to keep around in your life. Is that something that's
truly fulfilling for you? And that is going to lead
to your long term happiness. Until then now, until
Chantel takes some time to figure out what she wants. She's really just forcing herself to do something that
she does not want to do. Starting a diet thinking
we have to do it versus we want to is a recipe for failure. And yet I personally
know, I did this for years before realizing how
wrong my thinking was. And I'm sure many people watching this video did the same thing. When you begin a diet
telling yourself you have to do this because your health is bad or you hate your body or you have some event coming up that you can't possibly be fat for. You create this huge taboo around food that makes it absolutely irresistible and cues you up for
failure and a big binge. But when the balance starts to shift and you want
to change your actions, you want to make healthier choices because it makes you feel good or
you feel more authentic to yourself or you're excited about becoming a new and better
version of yourself. Or maybe you're just so
tired of your own bullshit that you don't wanna let
yourself down one more time. At this point, it's suddenly
becomes a lot easier to stop eating fast food every single day. If you guys watch this
video and you think, "Damn! maybe I'm in the
contemplation state of change." I know I spent a long
time there despite trying to take action when I
wasn't ready a lot of times. Most of the tips in this video come from a very famous psych book
by a pioneer in the field of personal transformation. Pretty boring book,
honestly (chuckles lightly) But it definitely has what you need. So I'll link you below. I hope that this video has been helpful. I usually don't like to have
such a long period of time when we just like
sitting here and talking. But Chantel was the perfect
embodiment of this principle. And this principle is so so so key. I think most of us deal
with it to some degree when it comes to trying to diet or trying to change our behavior. Anyway guys, thank you
so much for watching Oh my God! MSG!! (upbeat music)
