The One You Feed - Understanding Choice Points for Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise with Michelle Segar

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

Struggling to stick to your goals? In the upcoming 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control Workshop, we’ll uncover the six hidden obstacles that sabotage your progress and teach you how to overcome them. From breaking free of autopilot habits to tackling self-doubt and emotional escapism, this live session offers practical tools and strategies to help you make better choices and stay aligned with your values. Join us on Sunday, January 12 at 12pm ET and take the first step toward lasting change. In this episode, Michelle Segar explains the importance of understanding choice points for lasting changes in eating and exercise. She is an expert in sustainable behavior change for health and well-being and provides valuable insights and strategies for implementing consistent and lasting lifestyle changes. Michelle’s insights shed light on the complexities of habit formation, challenging conventional approaches and advocating for a more holistic and compassionate perspective. Key Takeaways: Mastering the art of transforming unskillful behavior into skillful actions for lasting change Overcoming the motivation bubble to unlock the secrets of healthy habit success Unveiling powerful strategies for building and maintaining consistent exercise and eating habits Harnessing the role of executive functions in making healthy choices for a thriving lifestyle Embracing value-based decision making for sustainable and meaningful behavior change For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey friends, it's Eric. Let's talk about something hard. How many times have you made a promise to yourself and broken it? You said you'd go to bed earlier, start exercising, or stop reaching for that late night snack. But when the moment of choice came, something pulled you in the wrong direction. Those moments, those choice points are where everything happens. And when we keep failing at them, it doesn't just derail our goals. It chips away at something deeper, our trust in ourselves. But it doesn't have to stay that way. In my upcoming free workshop, The Six Saboteurs of Self-Control, we'll explore what happens at these choice points, why they're so hard to navigate, and most importantly, how to approach them differently. This isn't about willpower or trying harder. It's about understanding the hidden forces that lead to making the wrong choices and learning the tools to rebuild your confidence one choice at a time. Imagine trusting yourself again,

knowing that when you say you'll do something, you actually follow through. That's what this workshop is about. Join me and let's turn your choice points into moments of strength. Go to goodwolf.me slash self-control. That's goodwolf.me slash self-control to register for this free workshop. Having conscious awareness enables us to see what we're about to do and potentially to make a different choice to feed the good wolf, the one that, again, represents what we aim to do. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.

And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michelle Seeger, an award-winning researcher at the University of Michigan with almost 30 years studying how to help people adopt healthy behaviors in ways that can survive the complexity and unpredictability of the real world. Michelle's first book, No Sweat, was featured in the New York Times and won the 2015 Best

Book Awards in the Diet and Exercise category. It also became the number one selling book in Amazon's Exercise and Fitness category when released. Today, Michelle and Eric discuss her new book, The Joy Choice, How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise. Hi, Michelle. Welcome to the show. Thank you. It is great to be here again. Yes, I am so happy to have you on. I was saying to you before we started that I don't remember when we talked to you. It's probably at least four years ago, but the conversation really has stuck with me since then.

really has stuck with me since then. It's one of the things I reference a lot, which is the basic idea that, you know, the key is just to move in any way, anytime that you can, and that everything counts. You know, those things really, really left an impression on me. But you've got a new book out called The Joy Choice, How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise. And we'll get into that a second, but let's start like we always do with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second, and looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent replies, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that you start the podcast this way. It's a profound, foundational thing, both I would say in my life and in my work. And this time around, I actually am going to tell you a quote that is so meaningful to me, and I think it has to do with this, what you just read, the parable. And it's from Dan Siegel, who I'm sure your listeners know, where our attention goes, neural firing flows and neural connections grow. And so putting that parable within, you know, this essential neuroscience, which speaks to how important it is for us to feed the wolf that we really want to become, if you will, the virtues that we want to embody and live. But I also, I think it's really important to bring the challenge to doing that. It sounds logical to say, well, if we feed the right wolf, then we're going to live in the way we really value living. And again, I value this. I believe in it. And it's

still challenging sometimes because, and this is the thing, because it takes conscious awareness before we feed the wolf. And having conscious awareness, number one, enables us to see what we're about to do and potentially to make a different choice to feed the good wolf, the one that, again, represents what we aim to do. Yeah. I mean, so much of the quote unquote bad wolf behavior in our lives is completely unconscious. As you said, it's just running on autopilot. It's just the default behavior that we've either been conditioned into that we are left with after we deal with all our stresses and problems and busyness. The parable is a little dramatic, right? I mean, it's, you know, good wolf and bad wolf. And, you know, I've always preferred

the Buddhist terms of skillful and unskillful, right? But as I've joked many a time, a parable about an unskillful wolf just doesn't work the same. But that's really what we're talking about. So most of our unskillful behavior is happening on autopilot. And we have to be able to bring things to conscious awareness in order to change them. And that is at least half the battle. I think when we first spoke about this five to seven years ago, I don't know that I raised that issue. That's why it's so wonderful to have an opportunity to rethink, well, what does it mean to me today? That idea is so important to me that it is pasted on my wall right in front of me. So it's hard to do when we have the intention and when we practice, we get better at it. Yep, absolutely.

So I want to pivot to the book and I want to start with the idea that a lot of us who are listening, many if not most of us have had significant challenges in building consistent exercise and eating habits. They are elusive for many, many, many people. And so a lot of this conversation where we're going to start is trying to explore why that is. And then we'll move into some of the ways we can solve that. But you start off by saying we initiate a change in eating or exercise in what you call a motivation bubble. Say a little bit more about what a motivation bubble is. The motivation bubble is a concept that just came to

me when I was talking to a journalist about why we start and stop and start and stop endlessly. It's because we've been taught to approach exercise, intentional eating in this way that focuses us on very aspirational goals. And of course, if we're going to achieve aspirational goals, then we've got to do it right. And we have to do it precise in precise ways. And if you think about that as a bubble, it's this big thing. And we often don't think of exercise or healthy eating in the same way we think about parenting or our work or being a life partner with someone. It's separate and it's over there and we have to do it right. And I'm going to plan it. And it's on a separate trajectory than everything else. It's a bubble that is in a different orbit from

the other life bubbles that we live in. And so because it's so overinflated by the moment we make it, whether it's New Year's, whether it's leaving our doctor's office and we're finally going to please them or do it right or whatever it is, it bumps up against any other life area and it just bursts. It's fragile because it's overinflated. Yeah. I love that idea of how these bubbles rub up against the other areas of our life. And, you know, that's a fundamental idea that runs through this book. And it's a fundamental idea that I learned through coaching a lot of people over the years. And that idea, and you say it very well in the book and in many different ways, the core idea though that you say is that habits require a stable context to form.

So that's great. However, most of our lives are not anywhere near a stable context. If you have a demanding job and you have children and you have perhaps aging parents and you have a social life and I mean, our contexts are never stable. They're always changing. And like I said, I really figured that out working with people where I'd be like, well, let's just, you know, every morning at 10 a.m. you're going to do X, right? And there's a lot of benefit in some degree of specificity. And what do you do if 10 o'clock every day, you have no idea quite what's going to be going on then? And so this idea of a stable context, share a little bit more about that. planning is very important. So if we don't plan something, it is unlikely to happen. So this concept that we're talking about, it's not mutually exclusive of planning. It's actually

what we have to do when our plans don't work out. But before we go to that issue, I want to stay focused on your question about the stable context. So habit formation, context. So habit formation, which is doing something automatically without the need for cognition or effort or willpower, is wildly popular. There's been a lot of bestselling books about it over, well, quite a few years, but it's become even more popular recently. Part of the reason it's become more popular is because it is an easy way to develop apps. So if people are trying to develop fitness apps or different types of apps, it seems like, oh, I'll use the habit loop and I'll create my app around. It's very easy and it makes sense. But the problem is, is that what works in theory doesn't necessarily and often doesn't work in reality.

And so let's go back to the stable context. Habit formation is based on, in academia, it's discussed a little differently than, you know, the three steps of the habit loop, which is a context cue that is stable. It requires stability. Then we've got two step two, the behavior. Let's say flossing. We associate the cue as either putting our toothbrush down or walking in the bathroom at night, whatever the cue is that you've established.

And then three is some type of reward. With flossing, that could be a feeling of a clean mouth or accomplishment or whatever the reward is. Now, with a behavior like flossing that happens in the bathroom, often at night after the kids are asleep, there's not a lot of room for disrupting that context. But when we step out of the bathroom into the realities of our full life context and daily needs like you introduced in the beginning. There are so many forces and unexpected things that we simply don't know are going to happen.

And the habit loop is based on the assumption that this context is going to remain stable. But when we're talking about more complicated behaviors that might have multi-steps, that might have a lot of resentment or ambivalence with them like exercise and intentional eating tends to have, well, those forces easily disrupt the context cue. And so that's why the whole concept of habit formation, its value has been overgeneralized in the field of health promotion, because health promoting behaviors are much more complicated than a simple behavior like flossing our teeth. many of the leading proponents of the popular writing about habits. And there's a lot of wisdom in there. And there is limitation in there. You know, let's take BJ Fogg and tiny habits, right? A great method. But like, how do you scale from a tiny habit to a big habit? I mean, there's some ways to do it. But there's a point where it crosses over from something that can be automated

to something that really can't. And, you know, I love what you just said there, because you pulled out two really important things, two things that are working against us. One is just the chaos of life. I plan to go to the gym this morning at 8am and I woke up and my kid has a fever. Okay, well, not going to the gym, right? So we've got all these external things. And then you brought up the fact that we often have all this ambivalence inside of us around this. And when those two things collide, it's a disaster, right? Because maybe I could overcome the internal ambivalence if I can get just a routine going. You know, I often think I can't make a habit out of exercise, but I can build momentum around it. You know, I can get

some energy behind it where it's way easier to do than it used to be maybe when I was first starting the habit. So you've got these external things that rub up against the internal. We all would know this phenomenon, which is that like, okay, we are supposed to be working out at 10 a.m. We get a call from our boss at 10 o'clock and at 1010, we're done and we don't work out, right? We could, but that combination, we've got just enough excuse that is now rubbed up against our internal ambivalence that it just comes off the rails.

And that's why I don't wanna leave this conversation prematurely because it's so foundational to everything else we're gonna talk about, but that is why I call them decision disruptors and decision traps, because it's that internal self-talk that, by the way, is not our fault. It does not derive from us.

It derives from outside of us. We've internalized it through our socialization, through the education we've received in society, in the media, in research, you know, from our clinician's office. Everything we've learned about exercise and eating has taught us to think about it in a very myopic and really unhelpful way for most people. I mean, why is it that we think of exercise and healthy eating with this need for precision, with this need to hit a bullseyeye when all these other life areas, again, things that we want to sustain for life, being parents, good parents, hopefully, but guess what? There's

ups and downs in our parenting. There's ups and downs in our relationships, in our marriages. There's ups and downs in our career, but we don't bring that same sensibility and wisdom to eating and exercise. But again, it is not our fault as individuals. It is simply the way we've learned to approach it. And I have to say, some behavior change strategies cultivate a type of a precision thinking, which doesn't help most people. Yeah, there is a world of difference between something that you can manage to sort of keep rolling for 30 days versus something that you're going to keep rolling for 30 years. Nearly

any relationship can survive 30 days. That's right. Good point. Good point. But very few can survive 30 years. And it's a completely different orientation. And so we'll get to orientation around exercise and eating, like why our orientation is difficult there. But let's stay for a couple more minutes on this idea of habits when they work and when they don't. You talk about people being habiters or unhabiters. What does that mean? Sure. Well, you know, I want to be clear that that was a playful concept that I created to get us to think more critically about what we've been taught about how to change our behavior, whether it's worked for us,

why it may or may not work for us, why it may or may not work for other people. So as you know, in my book, I use my husband as an example, a pure habiter. And while I contend in the book, a pure habitor. And while I contend in the book, and I've been doing a lot of talking about this recently, that habit formation is not going to work for most people when it comes to complex health-promoting behaviors, it does work for some people. And my husband is a great example of this because he has created a frictionless experience, again, to create his context cue for his exercise habit in the morning. He sleeps in his exercise clothes. And I always say, thank goodness he is a good laundry person. And his alarm goes off at, you know, 5, 530 in the morning. I'm not sure exactly what time because I am still sleeping. And he goes into the basement.

He's already dressed, gets on the bike, exercises. And he goes into the basement. He's already dressed, gets on the bike, exercises. No one else in the house is up. And then he has a sense of satisfaction. So his reward, and I have asked him about it, his reward is that he feels like he's accomplished something. And it's often the only thing he feels that way about. So some people can do that, but he's a habitor in all areas of his life. And this isn't necessarily true for everyone, but I have tended in my coaching too to see that people who succeed with a complex behavior like exercise or healthy eating often are quite disciplined, often structure their life so that it doesn't have a lot of interruptions. They check off their to-do list, most of it every day because of who they are. And I believe that

they represent a minority of the population and they have the innate self-discipline to push through even when they don't want to do something. I want to pick at that for a minute, but I'm not going to. We'll come back around to it because I think there's a lot in there that is actually very interesting because I think some of what he's doing is, you know, sort of best practices, right, for this. So some of it is he's naturally oriented that way. And, you know, the other is he's figured out how to get up at the time that nothing else is going to get in the way. You know, as people often ask me, like, well, should I exercise in the morning or the evening?

I'm like, well, the first answer is it totally depends on you. Right. The second answer would be assuming there's not a strong preference for in your life. Morning tends to be better. And the reason morning tends to be better is less things can get in your way in the morning. Right. Morning tends to be better. And the reason morning tends to be better is less things can get in your way in the morning, right? By the time six o'clock rolls around, any number of emergencies could have occurred in your career and your family. At 6 a.m., there's far less of them.

So there is something to be said for he's done that. But I think what you just pointed to is there's a rigidity in that. And some people, I don't want to make this a gender thing, but I have seen this where, that. And some people, I don't want to make this a gender thing, but I have seen this where, particularly in child rearing families, where the father is able to sort of get some rigidity and the mother doesn't because she's the front line of the support. And so it's not fair to compare those two people in that way because their contexts are very different. That's right. And you know, what you're speaking to is the chapter on chaos. Yes. The fact that research does show that the more chaos in the house, and of course,

the person who is primarily responsible for managing the chaos has much less ability to stick to the plan, right? Which is the quote unquote, and we're not using the word rigidity in a negative way. It's descriptive, right? Yes. There still tends to be a gender that is primarily in charge of child rearing and house management, and it does tend to be the female. But it really, whichever parent is going to be primarily responsible for these issues, I mean, think about how much unanticipated, unexpected there is in our life as singular individuals. Now add on top of that one to three kids, maybe a couple pets, and, you know, whatever else that might be going on.

And that exponentially increases the amount of interruption that our self-care behaviors are going to have. Yep. So let's explore a couple of assumptions underlying why habits don't work for unhabitors. We've got a few different assumptions. I don't think we need to hit all of them, but do you want to hit a couple of them? Sure. Well, one of them, and we've already spoken about this, so I'm just going to check a box by explicitly saying one of the assumptions of successful habit formation is that know, going to be the most precise discussion of habit formation in the academic literature, there's even a nuanced new conversation going on in that literature about, gee, is habit formation really appropriate for a complex multi-step behavior like physical

activity? And so they're discussing it right now, but I think it's important to point out that that is occurring and it's a more nuanced, important conversation. Another assumption I can check the box on really quickly is that it's going to work equally well for everyone. While we already talked about certain roles and responsibilities really make that a much heavier, if not impossible lift. And in fact, the most popular study that gets quoted both, I would say, in academia and in industry is a 2010 study that assessed how long it takes to form habits. Do you know that study that I'm talking about? It gets talked about all the time. And it basically says, while there's a huge variation between behaviors in people from like 18 days to 256, something in that range.

So huge variation, which is so huge that it's almost, it's basically meaningless. But the 66-day average still gets talked about, even though it's an average of 18 days over 200. even though it's an average of 18 days over 200. But the important thing about that, getting at everybody, is that the study was conducted among university students who have very different lives. And yet, even among a group of students who have a lot more flexibility traditionally, 50%, at least of those university participants,

did not achieve the automaticity status that that 66-day average is about. So we have to ask, if students who tend to not be juggling all these things that we've been talking about can achieve automaticity, wow. Then how are people who have a know, and work outside of the home and have aging parents? The third thing I want to say is that the assumption is that automating our choices about exercise and healthy eating is the ideal. Because in theory, automating it, yes, I don't want to have to use willpower. Yes, I don't want to have to use willpower. Yes, I don't want to have to use my cognition. It's such a limited resource. But in lives that necessitate pivoting and being flexible, we need the exact opposite. So the assumption that

automaticity is the gold standard, what we should all aim for, I think is false. Because of the reasons we've talked about already, if we are not optimally primed to pivot with our exercise and healthy eating, then, you know, as 40 years shows us, we won't be successful sticking with it, or at least most people won't. Right. And we want automaticity because it sounds easier. And we know that when something becomes automatic for us, it's easy to do. Flossing as an example. Or I was trying to think of a habit I've just developed recently that I realized has become automatic. But it's a very small thing. I can't remember what it is now. I want to say, not only does Do We Want It because it sounds easy,

it is a wonderful resource that our brains are structured to have. So it is beneficial. You know, a lot of times people drive places that they know, you know, on autopilot. I don't want people to think that I'm anti-habit. I'm absolutely not anti-habit. What I am concerned about is the overgeneralization of the value of habit formation for complicated behaviors that people keep failing at. And I think one of the reasons is because as a field, we keep telling people to do things that are just not valid in their life context. Right, right. It's not that automaticity is bad or that we wouldn't want it where we can have it, but you don't want to insist

on an approach that's simply not going to work. You just keep bashing your head against the wall. So we sort of debunked that you're probably assuming you are trying to form a habit that is a multi-step complex habit, like eating well or exercising regularly. And you have a complex life, right? Your life is such that it has chaos in it. So I'm going to say we're now talking about 90% of the people at this point, right? Some people, if you're already exercising every single day for the last nine years, you can just tune Michelle and I out and move on to the next show. For everybody else though- Unless, let me interrupt. Unless you want to understand, unless that person who does have it

down wants to understand why other people in their lives are struggling so much. So I think it is valuable for the people who get it right, or not get it right is the wrong word, who have successfully figured out how to sustain and be consistent with these complicated behaviors. Yeah. And I'm going to pause here and say that listeners do not despair. We're not saying like you're doomed to never stick with eating right or exercising. This is not, you know, abandon all hope ye who enter here, right? We're going to get there, but we're sort of taking down some of the myths before we get

there. So let's talk a little bit about, you've got a section called why we don't just do it, you know, just do it be in quotes, right? That phrase, just do it. So what are some of the reasons that we don't just do it? We've identified some of them, but now I think we're moving from the external to the internal. Exactly. Thank you. That is a perfect introduction. So we have learned to perceive, So we have learned to perceive, approach, and experience exercise and intentional eating. Again, while these ideas might generalize to other self-care behaviors, the book is really explicitly focused on eating and exercise because of the reason they are uniquely united

or under the umbrella of weight loss and all of the really problematic things that brings between weightism and shame and hating exercise because it's punishing because you think you have to do it hard or feeling deprived, not because you actually are, but because you're making a choice out of this external should I can't eat that bad food. And it makes you feel resentful or rebel. And here I am jumping into the four decision disruptors, which reflect the inner scripts, the inner things, the things we tell ourselves at these decision points.

We're at a party. We recently started an eating plan that we felt really good about and have really been successful following. And we've noticed that we feel good. We go to a party and there's nothing on our plan there. And on top of that, there's a glistening chocolate cake across the room that, you know, is seducing us with the look and the aroma and all this stuff. And instead of saying to ourselves, oh, geez, I, you know, yes, chocolate cake is great, but I love this eating plan I'm on. The internal script tends to be, again, it's not our fault. It's how we've learned to think about it. Oh, my God, I can't have that chocolate cake. I can't have it. It's not on my eating plan.

What is one of the biggest disruptors? It's rebellion because humans are wired to rebel against anything which takes away our freedom. So that's this internal rebellion script that we play. And of course, what happens is there's all this energy to just take the thing we don't think we should or can have. And we don't even do it with a sense of, gosh, how much do I want of the cake? Do I need to eat the whole piece of cake? Often what happens at a rebellion is we eat three pieces of cake because we are just taking that energy of I can't and it's boomeranging into, you know, screw you. I'm going to eat as much of the cake as I want to. So that's one of the primary internal decision traps I've seen in my coaching.

And, you know, as a coach, I'm wondering if you recognize these decision disruptors that happen at the moment of choice. And this is why instead of thinking we need things to be precisely right and automated, I mean, how is that decision like that at a party automated? We are outside of any context. We've established our eating habits around and we have this seduction occurring. And so if we don't have the mental wherewithal to make a choice that is the most adaptive choice

that's going to enable us to both stick with our greater goals, whatever those are, it doesn't have to be precisely right, but also feel like we're participating in our social lives with our families and our friends, which is among the most motivating things that human beings have is other people. So if our exercise and healthy eating inner dialogue reflects a conflict between participating with the people we feel most connected to, well, that is an automatic setup to fail too because we are, for anything in human nature, motivated to align with our families, to participate. And then we're talking about rebellion. We've talked about another really common one is

perfection. We can use the chocolate cake as an example. So looking at the chocolate cake, it's not, it's a black or white. It's, can I have it or can't I have it? It's the can't or can't I have it? It's the can't is a perfect world. I cannot have at all the cake, all or nothing. And the nothing in that situation is eating the whole thing or more. And that sets us up when we look at our choices. Am I going to run for 45 minutes or walk for 40 minutes like I planned all? Oh, gee, that phone call only gives me 35 minutes. Why bother? Or nothing. I'm not going to do anything. So it works. This all or nothing, really this black and white thinking, which, by the way, is a cognitive distortion, yet it's the way potentially the majority of people think about these two choices in the arenas of exercise and eating.

Another one is what I call accommodation, which is really a bit outside of the topic of exercising and eating, but it is fundamental to the decisions people make in the moment, right? If someone's needs or our work needs seem to be competing with our plan to exercise or our eating plan because a dear friend just handed us a delicious chocolate chip cookie that she made and we feel that we need to show her that we care about her and value this gift she just gave to us, that instead of thinking about, well, gee, I'm eating this way that doesn't include the chocolate chip cookie or whatever it is. It could be a burrito for all I care. My need to validate her needs is more important than my need. And again, if it's all or nothing thinking, then it's the whole cookie

versus something else or not at all. And these things are the internal part that disrupt the in-the-moment decision. It's how our brain has learned to think about it. And that's why the book and the method is really about guiding people to notice in the moment. It gets back to your pivotal parable, which is, which am I going to feed? This old reaction and habitual way of thinking, which hasn't served most people for many years, or do I want to feed a different wolf that's going to give me a more adaptive long-term result? long-term result. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to ask you a question about the perfectionism the all or nothing on the exercise side. It seems very clear to me right that all or nothing thinking is not helpful because if I can't work out for an hour, I don't work out at all versus working out for 45 minutes or five minutes even, right? I think if there's anything that has changed my ability with many of these things, particularly exercise, it has been a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing, right?

Do something. You can do something. But I want to pivot this to things like eating and particularly things like eating sweets because there are differing opinions out there. And I think the answer you're going to give me is it depends. But nonetheless, I'm still going to kind of walk through the question more about how you would think about it than what your answer is. And that is there are people who say, you know, when it comes to sweets for me, I am an abstainer. Abstaining works best for me. I don't have to

figure out under what circumstances, you know, I'm a recovering alcoholicer. Abstaining works best for me. I don't have to figure out under what circumstances, you know, I'm a recovering alcoholic or addict. So in this case, I'm an abstainer, right? I often talk about the beautiful clarity of zero, right? It's just simple. There's no debate in there, right? But food is a different animal than drugs and alcohol. So there are some people who say, look, I just, I cut it out completely. And then there are other people who are looking to integrate it and in a way where they've got some degree of moderation around it. And there's some people who think that you're kind of one of those or the other and determining which of those you are is really a wise thing to do and then come down on that way. But how do you think about that challenge when it comes to eating? Thank you for raising that. That is a really important issue.

So I want to say, as you already said, now there are some people who feel that the issue on addiction versus not when it comes to eating, I would say, has not been solved. There are just really core people on doing research who claim both sides. But a more mundane how we live our lives perspective, it is important for us to figure out now. The challenge is if people say, well, I am the type of person. Well, no, I'm going to take a step back. Part of the problem is that we're asking this question without explicitly shining a light on the context of the food choices. Because people would say, oh, I'm a zero person.

I cannot do moderation. But really, it's a false dichotomy. If people are making choices under shoulds and feeling like they've got to do something or feeling that their bodies or they are bad or unattractive or whatever it is, if all of that junk surrounds the eating choice, then I would say we can't know if someone is truly a moderation versus a zero person because it's all these other forces that are inside of our brain that we've learned to have. We have to be aware that that's going to be going on because it's very hard to do moderation if you're going to have perfection and rebellion and other decision traps because those forces, they're not going to let you be successful with moderation or for zero

for that matter, because we're always going to be reacting. Number one, I want to make sure that that issue is clear. Getting back to the moderation versus zero, there are for sure individual differences, but here's something that most people may not know. The emerging research on this question suggests that it is the moderation approach which is going to be more effective for more people. So there's a couple of studies. One study is looking at a weight loss registry. And I'm not focusing on weight loss as an outcome because I think it really sets people up to not stick with exercise and healthy eating for many of the reasons we spoke about five to seven years ago. they wanted to know in this group of people who had lost and were maintaining a substantial amount

of weight, which strategy was going to be most effective with eating over a year? Is it coming to a weekend with, you know, trying to stick to the plan, which would be a zero approach, right? I don't do any of it. I'm going to stick to the plan no matter what. Or is coming to the weekend eating with something with a little more flexibility, which is technically in the literature called flexible restraint. Which of those two eating strategies is going to be most adaptive for eating over time? And the research found, and you're not going to be surprised because of the way I've set this up, that it's the flexible restrainers who had more adaptive eating and outcomes. So I believe it comes back to this core wisdom about how we live every other area of our life.

We can't hit a bullseye every time we parent. We cannot hit a bullseye every time we engage with our partners and our work. And it's that sensibility that it's about a journey and an intention. We wanna do things a certain way, but sometimes we can't. Eh, I can't do it today, okay. Or I have to

make the perfect and perfect choice. Or I could make no choice, but that isn't going to get me as far as the perfect and perfect choice. So I think the biggest issue is that we have come to believe that exercise and eating are different than these other lifelong journeys. different than these other lifelong journeys. Yeah. I like that idea of flexible restrainers. Like, I mean, I think, could I moderate drugs and alcohol? I probably would. It seems like the better choice, right? At this juncture in my life, I've proved multiple times that doesn't work. And the risk reward ratio is just stupidly out of whack, right? It's just, you know, it's like, well, what would I get? Well, I'd be able to have a drink a couple times a week. What might I lose? Everything. Okay, not worth doing, right? Piece of cake's a little more subtle. And, you know, I certainly know that Ginny and I have been on a,

I would say, very good healthy eating journey, particularly since her mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I think we were healthy before, and then we kind of upped it even from there. But it has not been rigid and restraining. You know, there is flexibility in there. And I think one of the important things is there are situations like you talked about where we find ourselves in a situation and we have to be able to make a decision. And I want to get to that because that's really important. I also think that we can really do well with planned exceptions. Yes. A planned exception would be today is Wednesday, November 23rd. Listeners, you are going to hear this in January, but for

Michelle and I, it's a day before Thanksgiving. I could make a planned exception tomorrow that, you know what, for Thanksgiving dinner, I'm just eating whatever and I'm going to have one piece of dessert and that's it. Done. Right? Now, the problem for a lot of us is that if we're all or nothing, right, the minute that we blow up with a Thanksgiving dinner, we think, well, screw it. It's Thanksgiving weekend, right? It's the holidays, right? And the next thing we know, it's January 1st. So I found, you know, okay, let me be clear about what the rules are. And again, there's some flexibility in them, but there are rules that are designed to have flexibility. There's lots of ways this can go wrong. You know, I've been in the only on special occasions. And the next thing, you know, like Billy getting a C on his report card is

a special occasion. And, you know, but being clear birthdays, or I've had other people who, you know, I don't think they have alcoholism issues. They said, I'm just not going to drink alone at my home. And their life isn't like, they're out partying all the time. For a college student, that's a terrible thing. It's not going to make any difference. But for most adults, they just go, look, if I'm out with friends, I'm going to have a couple of drinks. But when I'm home alone, nothing. Right. So there are ways that we can have some flexibility and also some clarity. It's not all or nothing. That's correct. And I think inherent in the flexible approach and strategy that I'm teaching, inherent in that is people are making intentional decisions. So that's also the beauty of flexibility is it asks people to be in charge of their choices, not the inner scripts.

It's about saying, oh, I see you perfection staring me down, or I see you rebellion staring me down, but guess what? You're the bad wolf. And I know that I've been feeding you for 30 years and it doesn't get me where I want to go. So I want to go in a different direction. And so I think for me anyway, in my philosophy, and it sounds like we might align on this, is that when you teach this flexible approach, it is inherently about the individual saying, okay, this is what I care most about. This is how I want to participate in celebrations. It asks people to become very clear about what they value, what they most want. And it asks people to critically think about,

you know, if I'm going to stick with this, if I'm going to stick with a healthier eating lifestyle, just like a parent and, you know, for a journey of 30 years on the other side of the 30 years, what's really going to let me do that? And rigidity, it works for some people. And like you said, when it comes to alcohol, being rigid is absolutely the solution. You know, it's important for people to truly know what's going to work for them. But again, if people don't understand the societal context around the meaning of eating healthy, eating and exercise, around the meaning of eating, healthy eating and exercise, that has the potential to continuously thwart what people do because it creates these inner dialogues,

the forces that lead us to the bad wolf instead of the skilled wolf, if you will. Yeah, underlying a lot of what you're saying here is reconnecting with our ability to choose and our ability to decide what's important to us and not doing that on autopilot, right? Not just following the scripts we've been given, not doing this because even because my doctor said I should, right? Like I'm not saying we should just heedlessly ignore our doctors. It's worth going. Well, my doctor said that I should probably do this. And

why would he have said that? It's because if I don't, this might happen. Oh, if that happened, that would affect my relationship with my children. Like, we eventually get back to what matters to us. But reconnecting with our choice is the key piece. Absolutely. Not just choice, conscious choice, which is the opposite of an automatic habit. Now, I do want to say something that I think is crucial. We've been talking about it in one way, but I think it's really crucial to say it in this way. The value of any choice at a party, after work, the value of every single choice we make is determined by the context of the other choices and needs. If we're not aware of that and we're not skilled at being able to pivot and compromise, find the creative compromise, I don't have the 60 minutes to take the walk outside. I only have 15 minutes, but I care that it lifts my mood. You know, I have all these kid things to do and I've got this work that I've got to get done, but I have 15 minutes. So when we become skilled in being able to compromise and pivot, which is, of course,

the joy choice, the perfect imperfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing, when we do that, then we can keep our momentum. If we don't know how to successfully navigate those choices with intention, then they're going to keep derailing us, which kicks us right off the path of lasting change. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts his stuntman reveals the answer and you never know who's going to drop by mr brian cranson is with us how are you hello my friend wayne knight about jurassic park wayne knight welcome to really no really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

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It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You actually say early in the book, what we're talking about here are choice points. You and I had an interesting conversation about where that phrase comes from, and we realized I might have arrived at it from multiple different sources. But these choice points, I'm at a choice point. Do I eat the chocolate cake? Do I not? Now I have a choice whether I work out, whether I don't work out. And you say, I call these conflicts choice points, and they are the real place of power for achieving lasting changes in eating and exercise. And I think that's so much of what this is about, is about learning

to navigate choice points. You know, when I work with a coaching client, you know, we start off and I say, well, let's put what structure we can put in place. Let's put what plans we can put in place. Because you know what? If we can get some of that in, great. But you know what? At the end of the day, you're still going to bump up against these choice points. And what we can learn to do is say, what is happening inside me when I make the right choice?

And what is happening inside me when I make the wrong choice? Or the choice that I want to make or the choice I don't want to make? Let's non-moralize it, right? The that I want to make or the choice I don't want to make? Let's non-moralize it, right? The choice I want to make versus the choice I don't want to make. And the value of a choice point actually is that it can narrow our window of focus to a moment we can actually go, oh, here's what I was saying to myself. Here's what I was thinking. Here's what I was feeling.

Okay, well, what might I say to myself next time? What might I do differently next time? It gives us a real, for lack of a better word, an actual specific point in time that we can look at. And it becomes less about, oh, I've got to figure out my entire emotional makeup versus I have to figure out what's going on inside me now. That's right. And inherent in choice point is choice. And as you know, from all of your work, choice is the epitome of what cultivates autonomy and self-determination. And we know that high quality motivation is embodied in the idea that I'm in charge and I get to choose. And that is the antidote to all or nothing thinking.

The all or nothing thinking, there's only two choices and I'm forced to choose between sticking to the plan 100% or just tossing it all to the wind. But no, the choice point is, wait a sec, there are options here that give me freedom to align myself with the context of needs and options at the moment. Let's pivot to what can we do in choice points? And you talk about an executive functioning team. These are aspects of our brain that we can, and you correct me if I'm saying this wrong,

but that we can call upon in choice points to help us make better decisions. Is that an accurate way of saying it? I would say that choice points evoke our executive functioning team. When we are at moments of decision making, when we're at moments of problem solving and potentially pivoting, that is the work of our executive functions. And, you know, as you know, in the book, I talk about three primary executive functions that are discussed in the literature on eating, especially in other areas of living like ADHD. Sometimes they talk about seven executive functions. So there's different ways of talking about it. But the bottom line when it comes to executive functioning is it is our brains innate decision making, self-management, problem solving, goal striving apparatus. And so why don't we cultivate it, the three primary executive functions, so that we better set our brains up to help us make the skill choice. I want to go into those three in a second, but I want to just clarify a little bit of what we're saying here.

I think that what you're saying is that step one is we have to recognize we are in a choice point. Yes. Right? Because so often we just slip off into not exercising, not eating right, right, without any real thought of what's happening. You know, I often talk about the very first thing we have got to do is bring whatever is happening into consciousness. That's right. Recognize that I'm about to make a decision or a choice. It may not seem like I am, but I am about to. And I'm making it the way I traditionally have made it without thinking about it. So I first have to bring it up into recognizing, okay, I'm in a choice point.

And now once I've done that, then I call in my executive functioning tools to help me make the right choice. And I wouldn't say I'm calling on because that kind of happens automatically. What I'm saying is the way we think about it is either going to thwart or support our executive functioning, right? Because the old reactions, the old decision traps that we've talked about, the inner script, if you're scripting, I can't, I can't, or it's got to be all or nothing, you can see how that script that we tell ourselves, the narrative absolutely distracts us from the options. Yes.

So how can our executive functions work effectively when we're going down a rabbit hole with the shoulds and all the black and white thinking? So you are 100 percent right. And I think this is becoming more out there in mainstream. But behavior change is belief change and different choice making. And we cannot do either of those things if we are not conscious at the point of choice. So it isn't as sexy as Peloton or habit formation, being aware at a point of choice, but we cannot change the way we think, which is the precursor to changing what we do if we do not have conscious awareness at that point. Great. So let's talk about the three executive functions that you think are critical for making healthy choices. Okay. So the first primary executive function is called working memory. And this is the part of our brain that holds and processes information or I've got to please her or I want her to know I love, those kinds of thoughts, that's in your brain.

So that kind of thinking has a huge potential to overwhelm our working memory. But working memory is the backbone of effective problem solving because that is the space. It's not really, you know, I'm not calling it a literal space, but that's where problem solving because that is the space. It's not really, you know, I'm not calling it a literal space, but that's where problem solving happens. And if we can't hold the information in our brain because we're too focused on worrying of whether we're going to make the right decision, then we won't be able to problem solve and pivot. So that's working memory. And we'll talk about the decision tool that I created to clean up that space, if you will. Then we've got cognitive flexibility or flexible thinking.

Our brains are innately wired to do flexible thinking. If we think about eating and exercise in more flexible ways, we are basically aligning this new thought process with this very important ability, mental ability that we have to pivot like we do in all these other areas of our life. And then the third primary working memory is referred to as inhibition. More popularly, people think about this ability as self-control. And so this has been the primary focus, changing our eating. We're just going to inhibit ourselves. We're going to stick to the plan. But in reality, I believe more people would be successful if instead of feeling like they have to inhibit all the time, they actually learn to think about choice points and that being flexible is actually adaptive, not having to do it perfect,

but actually, you know what? Just like all these other life areas, I'm going to do this perfectly, imperfectly, so I stay the journey. So what is the joy choice? So there's a technical definition, which I'll say the joy choice is the perfect imperfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing. This doesn't just give us the momentum we want to keep going forward on the path or journey of lasting change. There's another really meaningful way to think about it. And that is that if our decision to take a part of that self-care activity, a part of that exercise, a part of our eating plan and fulfill that, we are doing that to take care of ourselves, to respect our greater goals. And in doing so, we are fueling ourselves for the people and projects

we care most about. So it's not just about the formula for sustainability that, you know, has science supporting it. It's also about making a choice that lets us be our full self, that harmonizes exercise choice or our eating choice with the whole other parts of our lives and who we are, which includes our connections and loved ones. So that is why it's called the joy choice. It lets us harmonize exercise and eating within our full self. I love that. So let's talk about the decision-making tool. Is it, is it pop? Is that the decision-making tool? Okay. That's what I thought. I just want to make sure I'm referencing the right one. So this is a way to sort of navigate choice points? Yes.

If our executive functioning is this innate brain system for pivoting and problem-solving and long-term goal pursuit, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could support the three primary executive functions? And so this is a tool that I've developed and used with my coaching clients. And I call it POP. Now, I'm going to bring us back to the very beginning of our conversation where you asked me about the motivation bubble. We talked about the fact that the motivation bubble is very vulnerable and life bursts it, right? It bumps up against something and life bursts the bubble. Well, with the pop decision tool, instead of letting life burst our bubble in this passive way where we're kind of victimized by things, we autonomously take charge and we pop it. So it's both a metaphor for us being in charge.

We pop our plan. It's not workable any longer. So we're going to pop it. And what we do when we pop it is then we open up the options. So that is the overarching metaphor, but it's actually an acronym, which is really good for our working memory recall, remembering and recall. which is really good for our working memory recall, remembering and recall. So PAP stands for pause. And like we've talked about throughout this conversation, if we don't take a moment to bring our consciousness to the choice, then our automated unskillful responses will just take over. So pause introduces this intentional moment where we can

say, ah, which wolf do I want to feed? I'm going to feed the one that's going to really take me to where I want to go. So that's the first P in POP. The O, I designed it to support working memory because it enables us to clear away, to name any of the traps, temptation, rebellion, accommodation, perfection. Oh, I see you, but guess what? That's the unskilled wolf. I'm not going to go there. Let me focus my attention, take a breath, and then go on to the second step in POP, which is the O, open up our options and play. Well, how better to cultivate flexible thinking than to consider it as an opportunity to play? Well, gee, there's this awesome chocolate cake over there. I want some of it. What are my options here? What did I plan to eat? What did I plan to eat later?

I think, hmm, I could eat half of the cake and I could do, wiggle around, tweak something else. I mean, it invites us to think in creative and playful ways about the choice point. And that is flexible thinking or cognitive flexibility in its essence. And now the second P and the ending of the POP decision tool is P, pick. The joy choice. There's no right or wrong answer here. of the POP decision tool is P, pick, the joy choice. There's no right or wrong answer here. The joy choice is the perfect and perfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing, giving us momentum and helping us harmonize

our eating and exercise choice within our full self. So what POP does as an acronym is it makes it easier to recall I want to say it doesn't mean it's going to be effortless you still have to learn how to use it and you can put it as a contact in your phone that's one way people use it so that you can learn to memorize it but it also strategically guides our attention away from the decision traps to play. I have options here. Let me open them up. And then to picking the imperfect choice that for the past three decades, I haven't given myself permission to do because I'm forced to stick to the plan, which then I just rebel

against. So it guides the specific thought process in a way we don't need to inhibit ourselves. It's not about harnessing self-control. That's not the conversation. The conversation is given the choice point and my full set of needs and the value that choice has right now, based on the full context of other things, which is the one I don't have to rebel against that question. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think that's a very helpful acronym and we do need some approach because we're often going to find ourselves at choice points also in moments of stress. Yes. You know, that's where the bubble tends to rub up against life in moments of stress. And we know that in moments of stress, executive function tends to take a hike.

So it's really helpful to be like, have something as simple as pop. Okay, here I am. What do I do? And walk through those things. And I love the joy choice, this idea of the perfectly imperfect that allows me to do something rather than nothing in the context of everything I want to be. Eating and exercise has changed so fundamentally for me over the last decade, I would say. And it really has been in a complete reframing of it. And this is probably normal with

age to some degree, but a reframing from vanity, a reframing from shoulds and into this is what I know supports me in being the person that I want to be in the world. You know, when I don't exercise, I don't make a good interviewer. I don't make a good coach. I don't make a good father. I don't make a good dog owner. I'm not a particularly good partner. I'm very deeply unhappy within myself, you know? So for me with exercise, it's just, I just remind myself, like, you're going to feel a certain way an hour from now. How do you want to feel in an hour? And I know for me, the way I want to feel in an hour is the way I feel on the other side of exercise, proud of myself, energized, you know, and same thing with food, you know, how do I want to feel at the end of this meal? How do I want to feel and what supports me in what matters to me?

And you talk about this near the end of the book, which is really just the important of value-based decision-making, right? The more we can be clear on what really matters to us, we have a much better chance of making good decisions because there's clarity there. But a lot of times we don't ever take the time to get that clarity. And so we're making decisions in a fog about like, well, what really matters to me? Is this cake? So I love that you sort of kind of near the very end

sort of bring it back to that core idea. Well, and the neuroscience, the emerging science directly supports that idea. I think that's among the most exciting science on creating sustainable behavior change is the work showing that when we value, when we believe that a choice aligns with who we are at our core, those brain regions light up. And also it's predictive of people making decisions over time related to that healthy choice. So, and the good news is we can actually change a lot. Some of your listeners might think, well, I don't value exercise in that way. I don't have those experiences. It feels like a should. So, I mean, the beauty is,

is that it's actually quite easy to convert exercise from those shoulds and chores to feeling like a gift and that it's a part of who you are. It's reflecting your values. So, I mean, I think that's really important because people might be feeling, gosh, I don't know how to do that. The first step is to recognize whether you have been coming to your exercise and eating choice points with this feeling of should and rules and precision. And if you are, the first thing is to say, gosh, has that worked for me or not? Yeah. And again, if it works for you and it makes you a happy person, there's no reason you have to

pull away from that, right? Just like you said at the beginning, when we understand that our choices around what we eat and how we move our bodies reflect who we want to be and our personal preferences and the realities, the true realities of our daily lives. That's the recipe for sustainable change. Indeed. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for coming on. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. I found The Joy Choice a great read and so much great wisdom in it. So thank you. Thank you for having me again. It was such fun to talk. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.