Structure your environment to remove temptations
Make it hard to get some of that addictive snack food, and you'll end up eating way less of it.
What is your ideal snack food – chips? M&Ms? Trail Mix? Nuts? Cheetos? Popcorn? Snickers bars? Something else?
Do you keep it in your house? Or handy on the desk at work?
Think hard about that. If you can get it without effort, are you even aware that you’re eating it? I can empty a bowl of M&Ms in a morning, no problem. By the third or fourth handful, I don’t even like the taste, yet I keep eating them. So I don’t bring them into the house except as part of an assorted Halloween bag, and in that case, they’re portioned out – about 8 of them in a package. Even then, I make sure that the neighborhood kids get most of them.
I’ve talked about change being an incremental thing, and I do believe it generally works better that way – make one small change habitual, then build on it to make another. But in one case, removing temptation from your environment, I really think you need to go all in. You cannot expect to go from eating a whole bowl of M&Ms to not eating M&Ms at all by eating one fewer candy each day. It’s not going to work.
Yesterday, I talked about creating structures to support the changes you want to make, to make them easier. Today, the structure still supports the change you want to make, but this time, by making something harder.
Take a tour of your pantry. What items in there form a real temptation for you? What do you find yourself mindlessly eating? Take all those items and get rid of them. If your family protests, make them hide the items and promise not to tell you where they are – but make it hard to get some. Best of all is to remove them from the house – throw them away, or if you have some unopened containers, donate them to a food bank or offer them to a neighbor. Same thing at work – clean out your snack drawer, if you have one.
What you want to do is force yourself to make a decision and expend serious effort to get some of the tempting food. Get in a car and drive somewhere to buy it. In this way, all those mechanisms that keep you from going to the gym after a tough workday are now helping you. And most of the time, you’ll find it easy to decide that it’s not worth bothering.
I am a certified Primal Health Coach. If you’re interested in getting some help improving how you eat, move, sleep, and live, that fits into an already-busy life, check out my website at huntgatherthrive.com