How I Became Healthy Part 1 - A Psychological Approach

After writing two articles (Corn Oil for the 21st Century and Culprits of the Modern Plague) concerning the global food crisis and the obesity epidemic, respectively, I felt it prudent to change my own eating habits. Although I am not overweight, I have an extremely bad diet consisting mainly of greasy spoons, junk snacks and sugars (candy and soda). The worse part of my diet is not what I eat but what I don't eat - fruits and vegetables. Since I will be going from one end of the diet spectrum to the other, overhauling my diet will be very tough but I think I have come up with an interesting and novel approach to achieving this extreme diet makeover. I believe this method can be easily applied to those wanting to change their diet for weight loss, muscle building or health reasons.

Quick Note: When most people use the term "diet" they usually refer to something temporary to achieve their short term goals (summer beach body, upcoming competition, reach a certain desired weight, etc) but I want to emphasize that I will be changing my eating habits permanently so as to lead a healthier lifestyle. With 70% of adults over the age of 60 suffering from heart disease (Culprits of the Modern Plague), a healthy looking exterior does not always equal a healthy interior.

First step is to figure out how you want to change your diet. This is easy since there are a ton of resources recommending various foods, complete diet programs and nutritional statistics. Here are the guidelines for my new diet plan:

• Eat more nutrient dense foods but less calories (discussed in Corn Oil for the 21st Century) - a good list can be found at The World's Healthiest Foods website

• Completely stop eating deep-fried foods, candy and chocolate bars.
  

• For meats, eat very little pork and beef and stick to lean skinless chicken and turkey.

• Add a lot more fish (salmon, tuna, cod) and flax to my diet (Omega-3 fatty acid).
  

• Attempt to eat SIX meals a day about three hours apart with most meals containing some type of fruit and protein.

• Take a multivitamin

• Drink more water and a lot less soda and other artificial juices.

• Read nutrition labels of all foods and avoid foods with any trans-fat or saturated fats.
  

Remember this is my own personal diet plan customized for my lifestyle and may be completely different from other more publicized diet plans. I am not here to recommend any particular diet plan so do some research and choose a plan you like.

Now for the extremely hard part - Actually sticking to this diet and beating my addiction to unhealthy foods. Most people go from diet to diet hoping to find one to help them lose weight but very little people actually lose weight and keep it off. This is mainly because the popular approach to dieting is focused on the wrong things. Perhaps they are purposely designed to fail so dieters can keep the "dieting industry" in business by constantly buying into new products or fads. There are innumerable amounts of books, programs, pills, shakes and fat camps dealing with dieting. Almost all these items (I can't rule out exceptions) are constructed for failure because they are asking people who most likely don't have much will power and self control to use their will power and self control to change their eating habits. No wonder so many people fail. Even those that do have strong will power and self control eventually fail because pure motivation only takes you so far.

What a bleak outlook for my diet overhaul! Luckily I think I have found a new approach to all this dieting hoopla and it can be yours for $159.99 (just kidding!). Although if you find this approach useful, please help promote this site to everyone you know. So here goes:

Seemingly Useless Diet - A Psychological Approach

• A Brief History - This idea came to me as I recounted some of my least favorite foods since childhood - plain milk, fish (especially fish skin) and tofu. Even to this day I can not drink plain milk without some type of gag reflex, although if you mix that same milk with chocolate syrup it goes down just fine. Although I don't gag when I eat fish or tofu, I always try to steer clear whenever possible. What is interesting is that obviously I can drink milk (with chocolate) but somehow my body has a powerful automatic negative response when the milk is plain. This very real physical reaction to plain milk is a result of psychological trauma that I received as a small child. When I was in first grade, the public school I went to provided a small milk carton along with lunch everyday. I was always fine drinking plain milk until one day when I drank the milk and found some "solids" in the milk causing me to promptly heave my lunch. It was one of the most traumatizing food moments in my life and after that day, I refuse to drink milk altogether. It wasn't until high school that I began drinking some chocolate milk as an alternative to taking calcium pills. I have similar traumatizing stories for fish and tofu but I'll spare you the details. I am telling you this because psychological traumas have a very strong effect that is automatic and uncontrollable. This is the basis for the Seemingly Useless Diet.

• How and Why it Works - So by now you can guess that we will be using psychological means to achieve the eating habits that we want. The main focus of this approach is to psychologically traumatize you to unhealthy foods. This can be done very effectively through visual and auditory imagery. When you stop eating unhealthy foods, you will automatically eat healthier foods when you become hungry. The reason why we love unhealthy foods is because of all the marketing these snack companies do that have already programmed our subconscious to crave such junk (Oreos and Milk, Break me off a piece of that Kit Kat Bar, Doritos' many commercials). You rarely see a commercial for celery or other health foods. In addition, most diets focus on telling you what to eat while leaving unhealthy but tastier alternatives out there to tempt you. What this method hopes to accomplish is to not only remove all the unhealthy foods from your cravings inventory but to place them in your undesirable food list. The brain is a very powerful organ and using it the right way can achieve very effective results. My disdain for milk is testimony to the brain's effectiveness. Since that one childhood incident, despite many positive imagery for milk, I still try to avoid it if I can. It doesn't take any work for me to dislike milk, it is all subconscious and automatic.
  

• How to Apply this Method- Now that we've gone over the history and theory of this Seemingly Useless approach, here is the way to practically use this method:

• Choose one of your favorite unhealthy foods (Potato Chips)

• Choose something you find utterly disgusting (Cockroaches)

• Create a very detailed situation in your mind engaging all five senses where you associate your favorite unhealthy food with something disgusting (Imagine a scene where you are eating potato chips and suddenly you realize you were actually chewing on a cockroach -> imagine the crunching sound as the hard shell of the cockroach breaking apart (nasty...) -> then think about how the potato chip crumbs feel like cockroach body parts (Wow, I think I just quit potato chips just by writing this imagery out) -> think about how pasty your mouth feels filled with cockroach guts)

• Constantly review the image you just created and make the situation as detailed and senses oriented as possible. What might be more powerful is to actually eat the unhealthy food you want to quit while imagining your newly constructed highly traumatizing situation, then immediately spitting out the food or even forcing a gag reflex (not recommended). I think it is sufficient to just imagine the entire scenario in your head without having the actual physical stimulus. It'll also be more cost effective since you don't have to go spend money on food you're going to just throw away.

• Move on to your next favorite unhealthy food and repeat.
  

• If you achieve positive results, recommend this site and article to all your friends.

So far this method has really worked for me. The most important things to remember are to be VERY DETAILED, USE VIVID IMAGERY and to ENGAGE ALL FIVE SENSES. Get creative and really gross yourself out. Make sure to choose something that really makes you want to gag.

Here is another example: Imagine the cream filling of Twinkies actually coming from the liposuction surgery fat of obese people (Google Image Search- liposuction fat). Think about the texture of the cream filling and eating the Twinkie and vomiting all over the place. (Get the point?)

Now that you've associated most of your favorite unhealthy foods with very disgusting stories, it will be much easier to focus on the stuff you can eat when you do get hungry. Contrary to popular belief, there are very good tasting health foods out there. With a good list of healthy foods along with self inflicted "psychological trauma" on existing unhealthy cravings, we should be en route to reaching our desired eating habits. Good luck to the both of us.

I have included a new section on the sidebar of this blog called: Seemingly Useless' Healthy Alternatives where I will be taking my favorite unhealthy foods and finding the healthy alternative for that food. If you know of any healthy alternatives to popular junk foods, please post it in the comment section or email me at seeminglyuseless@gmail.com

Recommended Readings: The Grapplers Guide to Sports Nutrition by Dr. John Berardi and Michael Fry