Changing for good
I obviously spend a fair amount of time thinking about the changes I’m making (not merely to lose my excess body fat but to prevent its return) and observing myself to see how the changes are taking hold. Last night I realized that, since the first of June when I started this program, I’ve been more or less working through the process described in Changing for Good: The Revolutionary Program That Explains the Six Stages of Change and Teaches You How to Free Yourself from Bad Habits, by James O. Prochaska, John C. Norcross, and Carlo C. Diclemente. I highly recommend this book (and do so periodically). It describes a research-based structured program that has proven effective in making permanent changes.
They describe the process as consisting of six stages, with tasks appropriate for each stage. The common cause of failures in our reform efforts is that we don’t understand which stage of change we’re at and thus don’t know the tasks we should be addressing at this stage. This problem particularly afflicts programs that work with groups of people who are attempting to change some particular habits: in any group, people will be at different stages of the process, so (generally speaking) the advice being given is appropriate only for those at the appropriate stage and will not help the others. (One benefit of Healthy Way as opposed to, say, Weight Watchers, is that Healthy Way works with clients individually, and thus can advise each client appropriately for the stage at which the client finds himself. OTOH, this costs significantly more than a class-based approach—a common tradeoff: cost vs. effectiveness.)
To take an example: my habit of taking small bites of food (“just a taste”) more or less anytime I was around food and in particular throughout the evening: The Long Dinner.
The first stage is complete unconsciousness of the habit, and the first task is to raise consciousness by reading, observation, and the like. I only gradually became aware of the habit (as a habit) by keeping the food journal and trying to figure out why my weight loss was not correlating with the entries in the journal. The answer, I finally discovered, was that I was not entering those individual “bites.” That brought them to awareness, and then I started to observe how often they occurred.
Then there’s a process of several stages, in which you first decide to stop the habit, then find yourself still doing it and recognizing that you’ve done it only after the bite (in this case) is eaten. Then you recognize it as you take the bite. Then, gradually, your start to recognize the impulse as it forms and you can fight it: you still have the impulse, but it triggers a conscious response (at last). That’s the point I’m at now with the bites: I’m not taking them, but I still feel the impulse—which now (thankfully) triggers an immediate counter-impulse.
Ultimately, of course, the impulse itself dies away and you are established in a new habit and the issue never comes to mind again. This is my situation with respect to, for example, smoking a cigarette. I’m sure I had the impulse for a smoke at one time—I smoked cigarettes regularly in college—but after going through the fight and the process, I no longer even think of smoking a cigarette: it literally never comes to mind.
With food, of course, the situation is somewhat different: I do need to continue eating. But I’m pretty happy with a habit now forming of no food at all entering my mouth save at the two snacks (mid-morning and mid-afternoon) and mealtime. And meals are now easy to plan: protein, veg, and starch, with measured portions. (Measures of veg are approximate: they are not the problem.)
