A Change of Focus to Start Healthy Eating

istockphoto.com

Many medical insurers are adopting wellness programs to save themselves and participants money.  My insurer’s wellness program consists mostly of printed materials and webinars.  Does education work? Anyone who owns a TV must have head that a diet high in saturated fats and sugars bad for you. So why, with all the knowledge we have about health, are people in the United States becoming fatter and less healthy?

With my decades of training and organizational change background, I know that education or information alone isn’t enough to bring about change.

Psychologists and change agents sometimes say that it takes a major shock, like a heart attack, to push people to new behavior. Yet many people don’t change their behavior even after a stroke or triple bypass surgery. But why do some people who have never had a major shock switch to more healthy lifestyles?

It’s a really complex problem. I certainly don’t have the answer. And despite all the experts, self-help books and programs out there, there doesn’t seem to be a major shift in our wellness.  So I’ve wondered, just why is it that we don’t change and what might help shift our behaviors?

Some reasons why we continue unhealthy behaviors

The feeling of being deprived of pleasure. Let’s face it. Our body likes the taste of fats and sugars. We associate these tastes with comfort. And once we’ve become accustomed to the taste of certain fats and sugars, it’s hard to give them up or switch to their healthier counterparts (e.g., from saturated fats to unsaturated; from high processed sugars to natural sugars in fruits).

It seems too hard.  It does take a considerable amount of effort to adopt a healthier eating style, especially initially. If you fix your own food, you have to experiment with new recipes and change your way of shopping and cooking. If you buy prepared food or eat out, you also have to invest a lot of time and energy in finding new foods and/or restaurants.

Medicine will fix me.  Since medicine seems to have a fix for most of our unhealthy behaviors (pills for high cholesterol or diabetes, procedures for opening clogged arteries), we figure we can continue with our bad behaviors and medicine will fix it.

One Possible Solution – A Change of Focus

I’m working on a coaching class right now. One of the coaching principles to help people improve their performance is to help them change their focus to help them achieve more. People focus on the wrong things and that blocks them from achieving goals. So what does that mean in terms of changing to healthy eating behaviors?

Perhaps if we change our focus on the three examples above, we can move to healthier behaviors or help our loved ones move to healthier behaviors.

Instead of focusing on the craving for animal fats and refined sugars, focus the taste or experience of the healthier food. When buying or using olive oil, imagine you are on a Greek Island, eating like the Greeks or in Rome or , eating in an Italian restaurant. Choose sweeter, juicier fruits instead of sugared desserts and focus on bright colors and sweet juicy taste as you eat them.  When you enter the produce section, take a minute to focus on the artistry of the section. The bright colors and beautifully arranged fruits and veggies can look as pretty and inviting as an impressionist painting. Much prettier than a bunch of boxes in the freezer compartment. Do the same with your plate. A plate filled with a variety of colors from fruits and vegetables and be much prettier than a plate of only browns and whites from only meat and potatoes.

Instead of focusing on how hard it is to do all the things you need to do to switch eating habits, focus on making healthy eating an enjoyable family activity to experiment and learn about new things. Spread out healthy recipes on the table and have the family vote for a new one to try. Pick a fruit or vegetable you normally don’t eat and have everyone in the family search for a healthy recipe that everyone might like.  Competitive families can even make it a contest to see who finds the best new recipe each week.

Instead of focusing on the fact that pills might make some of you medical tests get better numbers, focus on your overall health and well being.  Cholesterol reducing drugs have some side effect such as reducing the absorption of fat-soluble vitamins (e.g., A and E). In addition, unsaturated fats have a lot of other health benefits such as eliminating belly fat, reducing the risk for certain forms of cancer. So just taking the drug alone does not have the health benefit of switching to unsaturated fats.

In my first blog, I talked about the NLP Swish technique to replace unwanted thoughts. The Swish technique can be used as a tool to change your focus and help you and your family on the way to healthier eating.