Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The Psychology of Dieting: Why Willpower Keeps Failing You

Starting point is 00:00:00 You don't need more willpower. You need to understand why your brain keeps sabotaging your meal plan. Welcome back to another episode of Bite Back with Abby Sharp, where I dismantle Diet Culture Rules, call it the charlatans spinning the pseudoscience, and help you achieve food freedom for good. If you've ever thought, I know what I'm supposed to eat to meet my health or weight lost goal. So why can't I just freaking do it? This episode is for you. Because diet culture loves to tell us that healthy eating is just a simple equation. Get the meal plan, learn the rules,

Starting point is 00:00:46 summon the willpower, and boom, you will magically make the quote unquote right food choices forever. And when that inevitably doesn't happen, well, diet culture says that's something. That's on you, babe. You weren't disciplined enough. You didn't want it badly enough. You just need to try harder. But not surprisingly, that is such a wildly oversimplified, scientifically bankrupt way to understand human behavior. Because food choices are not made in a vacuum. They are shaped by our biology, our genetics, our taste preferences, our hunger and fullness cues, our past experiences, with food, our family dynamics, our culture, our cooking skills, our budget, our schedule, our stress levels, our social media feeds, our food environment with motivation tangled up in the

Starting point is 00:01:43 messiness of the mix. So if you've ever struggled to meal prep the damn broccoli, stop ordering takeout when you're exhausted, swap your chips for carrot sticks, or build a health habit that actually sticks, I want you to know this. You are not broken, lazy, or morally inferior. You are a human being living in a complex body, in a complex brain, in a complex food environment. So today, we're going to unpack why, just try harder, is terrible nutrition advice. What behavior change science actually tells us about the gap between knowing and doing and how to build health promoting habits in a way that doesn't rely on shame, perfection, or white knuckling your way through life. Because if willpower alone worked, diet culture would have solved our food struggles decades ago.

Starting point is 00:02:42 All right, friends, buckle up. I'm about to expose some major diet culture lies. So, first of all, Diet culture just loves to tell us that once you've been given a diet plan, aka nutrition knowledge, you just need to, quote, quote, try harder, have stronger willpower and be more disciplined, and then you will always make the quote quote right food choices. But our food choices are actually shaped by layers upon layers of influences that extend far beyond personal motivation. In fact, willpower is just one tiny piece of a much. larger puzzle. At the core of our food choices are factors that we don't necessarily choose, like genetics, taste preferences, and how our bodies regulate hunger, fullness, and pleasure from food.

Starting point is 00:03:36 Next, our food preferences are augmented by past experiences related to familiarity, learned associations, and repeated exposure. Food choices are also affected by our nutrition knowledge, cooking skills, confidence, values, and the people around us. And then finally, the broader environment, including food access, cost, culture, social norms, policies, advertising, and time constraints will affect which behaviors we can realistically maintain. So our food choices are made within complicated systems that can become remarkably difficult to unwind. Let's just say that your outermost needs are met. So you know how to cook, you can afford groceries, and you understand the basics of healthy eating. So why can't you just meal prep the damn broccoli? Well, there are

Starting point is 00:04:33 several core behavior change theories that can help explain the disconnect between human motivation, knowledge, and taking meaningful action. And spoiler alert, none of them conclude that the answer is simply try harder. So the health believes, model suggests that people cannot change their behavior even if they know something is kind of quote unquote good for them when the perceived barriers feel bigger than the perceived benefits. So if eating more vegetables is perceived to be too expensive, boring, socially isolating, flavorless, or time consuming, and the risk of not eating more vegetables doesn't seem urgent enough as most long-term health outcomes don't, we

Starting point is 00:05:19 We're just not going to get over that first hump. Then the theory of planned behavior takes this one step further. It suggests that our intentions are shaped by three major things. Our attitude towards the behavior, the social norms around us, and our self-efficacy or perceived behavioral control. So if you want to be a meal prepper, but you already believe that you're just, you know, not a planner or suck at consistency, the whole place. plan is preemptively doomed. Now, one of my favorite frameworks for this conversation is the ComB model, which stands for capability, opportunity, motivation, and behavior. The basic idea here is that for a behavior to happen, a person needs the capability to do it, so the

Starting point is 00:06:09 knowledge and the skills, they need the opportunity to do it, like time, money, access, and they need the motivation to do it. Note that motivation is not the same thing as just muscled up willpower. It actually includes both reflective motivation like goals and values and automatic motivation like cravings, habits, emotions, impulses, and learned associations. So instead of the common diet culture response of asking, why can't I just be disciplined enough? The real question becomes, what specific facet of my capability, opportunity, or motivation seems to be breaking down. Another reason willpower is a weak explanation is that much of our eating behavior is actually

Starting point is 00:07:00 habitual and cue driven. We don't make every single food decision from scratch like carefully weighing the pros and cons like little nutrition economists. We are busy bodies and brains, so we often rely on what's familiar, available, emotionally soothing, socially, normal or attached to a specific routine. So falling back into quote unquote old unhealthy habits isn't a moral failing. It is literally the brain's way of conserving energy by repeating well-worn patterns. And this is especially apparent under stress, fatigue, or overwhelm. Research on habit formation suggests that it takes on average over two months to build an automatic habit. from a new behavior, with the range being from three weeks to nine months of consistent seating.

Starting point is 00:07:57 That finding really does matter because while Diet culture is selling us the promise of losing 10 pounds in 10 days with their revolutionary new plan, actual behavior change is almost always far more slow, messy, and context dependent. Okay, now let's talk about the brain. Diet culture often frames giving it to cravings even when we know we shouldn't as some kind of moral character flaw. But the human brain is actually wired to respond to food cues, especially highly palatable foods. Remember, humans evolved in environments where food scarcity was a real threat. Our brains were therefore evolutionarily designed to notice food, remember where it is, and

Starting point is 00:08:51 motivate us to eat whenever we can. That system becomes much harder to navigate in a modern environment filled with constant food cues, drive-thrus, delivery apps, grocery store displays, TikTok recipes, influencers, what I Eat in a day videos, and ads for hyper-palatable snacks. And according to food queue reactivity research, visual food cues like hashtag food porn images and videos can systematically and prospectively predict food-related behaviors and weight-related outcomes. So when you feel pulled towards certain foods that your diet plan says that you should be avoiding, you're not weak. Your reward system is simply doing what reward systems are designed to do. So if wheelpower alone isn't enough to get you to swap your chips for carrot sticks or your nightly chardonnay for seltzer,

Starting point is 00:09:49 How do we implement a habit for good? Well, here are my evidence-based tips to implement today. Number one, identify the barrier. Before assuming that the problem is willpower, ask yourself, is this a capability, opportunity, or motivation issue? Maybe you don't need more discipline. Maybe you need five easy recipes on your fridge that you can make on autopilot, or you need an alarm on your phone to remind you to eat lunch so that you're not feral by 4 p.m.

Starting point is 00:10:23 Behavior change becomes a lot more effective when we stop asking ourselves, why am I failing? And start asking what is making this harder than it needs to be? Number two, use if then plans. This is what the research calls implementation intentions. These are simple if then plans that help you decide. what you'll do in advance before you're face to face with a stressful food situation. So for example, if I get home late and don't feel like cooking, then I'll make eggs and toast with fruit. If I'm hungry between meetings, then I'll eat the snacks that I packed instead of waiting until I'm ravenous. If I want

Starting point is 00:11:06 something sweet after dinner, then I'll plate it, sit down, and enjoy it without turning it into a shame spiral. This works because it reduces the need to make a fresh on-the-spot decision when you are already feeling tired, stressed, hungry, or emotionally dysregulated. So it's like diet culture saying just be more disciplined, but behavioral science is saying let's plan for real life. Tip number three, make the supportive choice easier, not perfect. A lot of people try to change their eating by creating a plan, that only works under perfect ideal conditions. But real life includes sick kids and late meetings, bad sleep, travel, stress, and days where cooking an elaborate balanced meal is simply just not happening. So instead of asking what is the cleanest or healthiest

Starting point is 00:12:01 possible option? Ask yourself what is the most supportive option that I can realistically repeat? That might look like keeping frozen meals pre-cut vegetables, canned beans, rotisserie chicken, yogurt, microwave rice, snack plates, or protein bars on hand. Convenience is not the enemy of health if it helps make health-promoting behaviors actually possible. Tip number four, build habits around cues that you already have. Habits form a lot more easily when they're attached to something that already happens consistently. Instead of saying, I'm going to eat healthier. anchoring the behavior to an existing routine. For example, while my coffee is brewing, I'll fill my water bottle and put on my running shoes. After I unpack the groceries, I'll wash and chop one fruit or veggie. The goal is to make the behavior feel automatic over time, not to rely on inconsistent motivation in the moment. Number five, design your environment for the behavior you want. If you want to eat more fruit,

Starting point is 00:13:12 Put fruit where you can see it. If you want to cook more, keep a short list of low effort meals right on your fridge. Reducing unnecessary friction is essential to making changes feel intuitive and effortless. And finally, number six, expect imperfection. One of the biggest differences between die culture and evidence-based behavior change is how they respond to imperfection. Diet culture says, hmm, you messed up, you suck, try harder, starting Monday. Instead, we should be saying to ourselves, okay, well, that didn't go exactly as planned. What would help make that easier next time?

Starting point is 00:13:56 Missing a workout, ordering takeout, eating past fullness, or having a chaotic food day does not erase your progress. The most sustainable health behaviors are not the ones that you perform perfectly. they're the ones that you can return to without shame where the skill we need to hone isn't actually diet perfection, it's resilience and repair. So to wrap up, the goal here is not to white knuckle your way through a rigid plan. The goal is to build the skills, supports, routines, and environments that make the health-promoting choice feel easier, more intuitive, and less morally loaded. Hopefully this gave you some food for thought about some of your diet patterns. So if you found this episode helpful, please consider checking out my brand new book, The Hunger Crushing Combo Method

Starting point is 00:14:49 for loads of tips on an intuitive, evidence-based approach to eating to meet your goals without having to rely on willpower alone. Signing up with Science and SASS. I'm Abby Sharp. Thanks for listening.

Bite Back with Abbey Sharp - The Psychology of Dieting: Why Willpower Keeps Failing You

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