WHY IT WORKS

Quick recap of yesterday's post: a bad snacking habit started over the holidays, adding ten pounds of fat. I first tried to reverse this trend through willpower and vague goals before I remembered my habit training. Yesterday, I committed in the morning to a reasonable number of snacks for the day, gathered those items together and placed them on the work desk in front of me. Then I simply paced myself throughout the day and resisting grabbing extras from the kitchen. 

Result: success. I even ate a bit less than I had given myself permission. 

Here are a few reasons why it works:

1. The fewer choices my brain needs to make, the happier it is. (The same is true of your brain.) This is the very nature of habit formation: the brain finds something that works and repeats it. It's easier on my brain to make one decision in the morning than to keep revisiting the snack problem throughout the day, making a new decision each time that urge to snack creeps back into my head.

2. Maybe this is why the researchers say willpower is like a muscle. It is strong early and weakens as time wears on. I made a single commitment early in the day and then made it easy for myself to stick to it later by having a limited amount of sweets right there within reach.

3. Because willpower is a weak force, attempts at quitting anything cold turkey results in a high failure rate. I didn't even attempt to quit ALL sugary snacks after spending weeks consuming Christmas cookies. 

4. Nevertheless, there is a great desire within us to be consistent. If I make a big commitment ("From this day forward, ZERO sugar!") and fail, it hits my self image hard. (Which is likely to send me to a bowl of ice cream!) On the other hand, if I make a reasonable and measurable commitment in the morning ("Today I will not eat more sweets than these two cookies and a handful of Skittles."), I am likely to succeed and that feels great and will propel me positively toward another success tomorrow.

5. Maybe you've noticed this for yourself, but snacking isn't always about hunger. In fact, for me it is RARELY about hunger. Mostly it is a desire for a break from boredom. By keeping my few snacks at my desk, I interrupt my mindless rummaging in kitchen cabinets. That gives me time to examine my true motives and find some non-food-related way to assuage any boredom. 

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So where do I go from here? Well, I do it again tomorrow. And THEN ... the great part about starting small is that success breeds success. In a few days I might decide that I could cut back to just one sugary snack each day. (Which would then put me in a much easier place to cut out ALL sugar, if I so desire.) Or down the road I may commit to using the snack urge as a reminder to do some push-ups.

This means that any habit, given a small, consistent start, could grow into a future-altering LIFESTYLE.