Getting Your Head Straight First

March 20, 2018 in Psychology of Food by Joyce Bunderson

It’s really fun when I find a story like the one I found on January 31, 2018. It’s the story that a young guy, Alex Lambert, put up on be yourself called How I taught myself to love healthy food.

He makes several excellent points that I decided to highlight here.

  • He was off to a great beginning when he took Tony Robbins to heart. People keep associating healthy food with pain and unhealthy food with pleasure. The great quote from Tony Robbins is: “In order for change to last, we must link pain to our old behavior and pleasure to our new behavior.”
  • Learning how to make healthy food delicious is a skill worth investing in. It’s amazing how wonderful good food can taste.
  • He took Robbins words to heart and set out to consciously associate the feeling of being unwell and sluggish with unhealthy food; he said that really helped him to link the unhealthy food with pain.
  • Be sure to read his article regarding his McDonald’s experience; he turned around the marketing pitch his society and advertizing was repetitively insisting. He switched it to his own idea that he was expressing his free will to not eat the advertisers way. On the pain side (or perhaps anger) he turned that to a new perception that McDonald’s is a company that manipulated him to love them so they could sell him food that was not good for him and they could make money.
  • He tells that it doesn’t really take discipline to eat veggies – because he’s changed his perspective.
  • It’s fascinating to watch a person, my husband, who at one time insisted on refined grains, fatty milk and eventually, found those foods unattractive; it was health and health changing for him.
  • I especially like how Lambert ended his article.
    • He says that he still eats pizza or a burger once in a while. I like that he doesn’t make it sound like if he ever makes a less than healthy choice it will end his whole new eating style.
    • He doesn’t keep sweets at his home to avoid temptation – controls his environment.
    • Now he’s using the same method to get going on an exercise program.
    • I also like that he admitted that it involved some work.

Yeah for Alex Lambert! Maybe his example is just what you need to realize that getting your head straight is the perfect place to start when you’re thinking about improving your nutrition or your exercise.