HABITS

What are HABITS?

Let's define habits. Habits are small decisions you make and actions you take every day. According to Duke University researchers, habits make up about 40 percent of our behavior in a given day.

Your life today is basically the sum of your habits. How in shape or out of shape are you? The result of your habits. How happy or unhappy are you? The result of your habits. How successful or unsuccessful are you? The result of your habits.

What you repeatedly do (ie what you think about and do every day) ultimately shapes the person you are, the things you believe, and the personality you portray. Everything I write about—from procrastination and productivity to strength and nutrition—starts with better habits. When you learn to change your habits, you can change your life.

This site has recommended resources on building better habits and breaking bad ones in any area of ​​life, but if you'd like to explore information on specific types of habits, check out these articles:

Healthy Eating:

Healthy eating. It's something everyone knows they should be doing, but few of us do as consistently as we'd like. The purpose of this guide is to share practical strategies for eating healthy and break down the science behind why we often don't.

Now, I don't claim to have a perfect diet, but my research and writing about the psychology of behavior and habit formation has helped me develop some simple strategies for building and reinforcing a healthy eating habit without much effort or thought.

Click on the links below to jump to a specific section or simply scroll down to read the whole thing. At the bottom of this page you will find a complete list of all the articles I have written about healthy eating.

The Science of Healthy Eating:

Every nutritionist and diet guru talks about what to eat. Instead, I'd like to discuss why we eat the way we do and how we can change that. The purpose of this guide is to share the science and strategy you need to get the results you want.

The benefits of proper nutrition are quite obvious to most of us. You have more energy, your health improves and your productivity blossoms. Eating healthy also plays a huge role in maintaining a healthy weight, which means a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, some cancers, heart problems, high blood pressure and a host of other health ailments. (Genetics also play a significant role. I'm not some crazy person who thinks genes don't matter.)

But if there are so many good reasons to eat healthy, why is it so hard to actually do it? To answer this question, we should start by finding out why we crave junk food.

Why We Crave Junk Food:

Steven Witherly is a food scientist who has spent the last 20 years studying why some foods are more addictive than others. Much of the science that follows comes from his excellent report Why People Like Junk Food.

According to Witherly, when you eat delicious food, there are two factors that make the experience enjoyable.

First, it's the feeling of eating the food. This includes how it tastes (salty, sweet, umami, etc.), how it smells, and how it feels in your mouth. This last property – known as “orosensation” – can be particularly important. Food companies spend millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying level of crunch in a potato chip. Foodies will be testing the perfect amount of fizzy powder in the soda. All of these elements combine to create a sensation that your brain associates with a particular food or drink.

How Food Scientists Create Cravings;

There are a number of factors that scientists and food manufacturers use to make food more addictive.

Dynamic contrast. Dynamic contrast refers to the combination of different sensations in the same food. In Witherly's words, foods with dynamic contrast have “an edible shell that is crunchy, followed by something soft or creamy and full of flavor-active compounds. This rule applies to a whole range of our favorite food textures – the caramelized top of a creme brulee, a slice of pizza or an Oreo cookie – the brain finds the crunch of something like this very new and exciting.”

Salivary reaction. Drooling is part of the experience of eating food, and the more food makes you salivate, the more it will float through your mouth and coat your taste buds. For example, emulsified foods like butter, chocolate, salad dressings, ice cream, and mayonnaise encourage a salivary response that helps lather your taste buds with goodness. This is one of the reasons why many people enjoy foods that have sauces or toppings on them. As a result, foods that promote salivation have a happier effect on your brain and taste better than those that don't.

Rapid dissolution of food and disappearance of caloric density. Foods that disappear quickly or "melt in your mouth" signal to your brain that you are not eating as much as you actually are. In other words, these foods literally tell your brain that you're not full, even though you're eating a lot of calories.

In his best-selling book, Salt Sugar Fat (audiobook), author Michael Moss describes a conversation with Witherly that explains vanishing caloric density perfectly…

He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.”

“I brought him two shopping bags filled with a variety of chips to taste. He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it … you can just keep eating it forever.”

Sensory specific response. Your brain likes variety. When it comes to food, if you experience the same taste over and over again, then you start to get less pleasure from it. In other words, the sensitivity of that particular sensor will decrease over time. This can happen within minutes.

However, junk foods are designed to avoid this sensory specific response. They provide enough flavor to be interesting (your brain won't tire of eating them), but not so stimulating that your sensory response is dulled. This is why you can swallow an entire bag of potato chips and still be ready to eat more. For your brain, the crunch and sensation of eating Doritos is new and interesting every time.

Caloric density. Junk foods are designed to trick your brain into getting nutrition, but not to fill you up. Receptors in your mouth and stomach tell your brain about the mix of protein, fat, and carbohydrates in a particular food and how filling that food is to your body. Junk food provides just enough calories for your brain to say, "Yes, this will give you energy," but not so much that you think, "That's enough, I'm full." The result is that you initially crave food, but it takes quite a while until you feel full from it.

Memories of past dining experiences. This is where the psychobiology of junk food really works against you. When you eat something tasty (say, a bag of potato chips), your brain registers the sensation. The next time you see that food, smell that food, or even read about it, your brain starts to trigger the memories and reactions that came when you ate it. These memories can actually cause physical reactions like salivation, creating the "drooling" cravings you get when you think about your favorite foods.

All of these factors combine to make processed foods palatable and desirable to our human brain. When you combine the science behind these foods with the incredible prevalence of food (cheap fast food everywhere), eating healthy becomes very difficult.