Wellness
Newsletter
ISSUE
BI-MONTHLY
JOURNAL OF
HEALTH AND
WELLNESS
36
January/February 2020
in this issue
10 Diet Lessons From the French …………………….Page 2
What Mireille Eats in a Typical Week………………….Page 3
8 Scientific Health Benefits of the
Mediterranean Diet & Sample Menu……...……….Page 4/ 5
Is Your Brain Wired to Create Food Cravings?
Under Pressure Challenge…………………………Page 6
Heart Disease: It can Happen At Any Age…………...Page 7
How To Avoid Processed Food/Upcoming Events...Page 8
Habits: The ultimate way to
make eating fruits and vegetables easy
When something is a habit, it’s easy to do. That’s because habits are automatic behaviors
– things we do without even thinking about it.
Habits are better than goals for changing behavior, yet for New Year’s resolutions, people
usually just state their goals – “I’ll eat more vegetables.” What if people resolved to
create habits, instead?
“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” Those are
wise words from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. Habits are internal systems. And
they drive what we do, in a way that goals simply don’t.
How do we create habits? It goes something like this:
1. Pick a simple behavior (e.g., when you start your day, pack carrots to bring with
you)
2. Pick a time and a place (e.g., your kitchen, after you brush your teeth in the morn-
ing)
3. Repeat the heck out of that behavior at that time and place (this is effortful, at first)
Enjoy a reward when you do it (e.g., breakfast, a nice shower, or just a moment of pride)
How can we succeed at habit creation?
1. Choose a bottleneck behavior. New habits should focus on a key bottleneck be-
havior that can be repeated each day. In my example above, I emphasized the morn-
ing preparation for fruits and veggies, since, for me at least, the actual eating is pret-
ty automatic once the carrots are in my face. The habit should be focused on getting
the carrots in front of me. I can handle it from there.
2. Choose a common context. Habits thrive in context, and usually that means a
particular time and place. Context is important to help a “mental association” form.
Contextual cues will eventually bring the desired behavior to mind automatically. The
mere act of “walking to the kitchen in the morning” will start to trigger the thought of
“open the fridge and grab carrots”.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat. It takes some habits a few weeks to form, others need
many months. It’s not effortless at first. That’s why the New Year is such a great time
to start these things. It’s a time when we are fired up and ready to try. Let’s use
that fresh start energy to repeat a behavior, in a context, so that the behavior can
effortlessly continue after the fresh start energy wanes.
4. Find some reward. Habits are stickier when they are rewarded soon after the
behavior occurs. Enjoying breakfast, or the morning shower, or an entertaining pod-
cast, or just boasting on social media, are all ways to reward the morning carrot
preparation. It’s convenient if the reward was going to happen anyway (e.g., like
breakfast, or the shower). We don’t want
to overthink the reward.
Habits aren’t foolproof. You need some
Gradually, the behavior becomes more automatic. You just do it, without really deciding to organization. You still need to buy the
do it. Eventually, you have a habit to pack carrots at the beginning of the day.
carrots. But with a little upstream effort,
you can remove a lot of downstream
effort.
What is a fruit and vegetable habit?
Wendy Wood, author of Good Habits, Bad Habits, offers some smart nuance: A habit is
This New Year, let’s resolve to start a
“not what the action is.” Rather, the habit is “how you perform an action”. (P.25). So, our
new fruit and vegetable habit.
New Year’s resolution does not focus on the what : Eating fruits and veggies.
Instead, it focuses on the how: Eating some fruits and veggies effortlessly.
It will become effortless because you will be creating an “internal system” – an automat-
ic association between getting to the kitchen in the morning and packing fruits and veg-
gies for the day.
Source:
Riis, J. (n.d.) Habits: the ultimate way to
make eating fruits and vegetables easy.
Retrieved from https://
fruitsandveggies.org/stories/habits-
the-ultimate-way-to-make-it-easy-to-
do-fruit-and-vegetable-consumption/