Happy New Year! following the excesses of the holiday season and a fresh start, now is a great time to create new healthy dietary habits that can lead to significant improvements in your overall health. Research shows that one way of forming lasting healthy habits requires two approaches (Wood & Neal, 2016):
- Initiate new behaviour – repetition of habit – habit becomes instinctive
- Identify unhealthy habit – change environment/develop alternative response – unhealthy habit broken
This may sound simple, but habit formation can be challenging, a complex psychological mechanism is required to produce an action on ‘autopilot’ (Gardner et al., 2012). A good example of this is brushing your teeth, an activity that requires minimal thought, repeated subconsciously on a daily basis by most of the population in order to achieve optimal dental health.
Over the coming weeks I will suggest a small habit for you to try and implement within your daily routine, today I’m suggesting you drink a glass of water before every meal (volume of choice).
Let’s break this behaviour down according to the approaches outlined above, firstly initiating the habit will entail drinking a glass of water with your next meal, repeat this action by perhaps putting a glass in an accessible place as a prompt and ensure you have adequate ice/fruit slices/cordial to make it palatable, keep repeating and it will eventually become instinctive. Identify an unhealthy habit for example drinking a sugary drink, change the environment by not buying sugary drinks and using cordial as an alternative, eventually this habit will be broken as you become less dependent on the high sugar content.
See how you get on and please share your experiences with me, it may surprise you how hard it is to make such small, seemingly simple changes into a habit.
References
Gardner, B., Lally, P., & Wardle, J. (2012). Making health habitual: the psychology of ‘habit-formation’ and general practice. Br J Gen Pract, 62(605), 664-666. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp12X659466
Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2016). Healthy through habit: Interventions for initiating & maintaining health behavior change. . Behavioral Science & Policy, 2, 71-83.
MLT Nutrition 