Eating vs. Buying

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

― Samuel Johnson

Do your attempts to lose weight end in failure? Eating habits aren’t the problem, buying habits are. Refusal to buy is much easier than refusal to eat. Employment and Social Development Canada reported in 2008 that thirty-seven percent of Canadians were overweight and twenty-five percent were obese. Health authorities say that over-eating and making unhealthy food choices contributes to diabetes, cardiac problems and illness overall.

Habits have three components. First, is the behaviour itself. Second, is the consequence of the habit—our habits cause pleasure or avoid pain. Third, is a cue or signal that we learn to associate with the behaviour and the pleasure it brings. These cues start to act like triggers for the habit. For example, we see the package, imagine the taste (both of which are cues) and, before you know it, it’s in the cart and a little closer to our stomach.

Psychologists have shown for decades that any behaviour or habit is maintained and strengthened when it produces pleasure or reduces pain. When these three things—the cue, the behaviour, and the consequence of the behaviour— occur together often enough they produce a well learned, hard to break chain of behaviour that forms our habits.

We can change behaviour if we change any one of the components. The question is do we have the will?

When it comes to stuffing ourselves with unhealthy food, at least two behaviours are front and centre: (1) buying it, and (2) eating it. For example, if we don’t buy the cookies we can’t eat them. Problem solved; weight under control.

But, how do we keep ourselves from buying our favourite comfort foods? One way is to get rid of the most obvious cue for buying: leave them off our shopping list. You’ve heard that you should only shop with a list. That’s why. Lists are cues to buy. If it’s not on your list, and you only buy what’s on the list, you can’t have a problem.

Similarly, we can interrupt other links in the chain if we eliminate other cues for buying junk. For example, we can avoid that part of the store where the cookies hang out. We can refuse to stand and admire the cookies. If our shopping absolutely requires that we pass close to the culprits, we can at least avert our gaze and hurry past them.

In an effort to weaken the desire you feel when you’re in the presence of cookies, you might try to associate buying them with visual images of other less desirable consequences of cookie buying. For example, you might visualize a chubby you, clogged arteries, heart surgery, you in your casket, the hassle of regular insulin shots, or lying in a hospital bed with a mess of plastic tubes in and out of your body.

If, despite your best efforts, your hand takes a notion to dart out, grab the cookies and put them in your cart, you’ve failed. You probably won’t put them back and it’s almost a certainty you won’t throw them out when you get home. So now what?

If they’ve made it to the house, the next best thing is to hide them. Good luck, it never works for me. I can forget everything else, but I know where every cookie is and how many are left. The problem is they are in the house and—cookies, chips, or whatever—you’re at their mercy. 

The behaviour we need to nip in the bud is buying the stuff. Keep it off your list and out of your cart. As vividly as you can, picture your clogged arteries and the other health hazards instead of imagining how much you’ll enjoy the taste of those fat-laden little devils.

The nutritionists want us to practice similar habit-crushing steps with the ice cream, potato chips, chocolate bars, boxed breakfast cereal, mountains of bread, muffins, cheesy boxed pizza, breaded meat, and sugary soft drinks to name a few. Any area of the grocery store, other than the produce section, contains nothing but delicious looking triggers for buying stuff that will satisfy your craving for sugar and carbs and grow your belly. So, if watching what you eat isn’t working, try watching what you buy and live well between your ears.