What Path Are You On?

Imagine with me that it is November 7th. Halloween has passed, and you look into your cupboard and notice the Ziplock bag with your son’s candy still hanging around.

You want to resist the temptation, but the KitKat is literally popping out of the bag, begging to be eaten.

How do you NOT eat the KitKat?

When it comes to change, there is a science behind what works and what usually doesn’t.

You could:

1) Think about the sugar in the KitKat and how poor it is for your health. That might work, for awhile.

2) You could appeal to your emotions. The more KitKats I eat, the less years I will have to spend with my family...emotions can be powerful, but probably too long term to make this change.

What if instead, you just changed your environment? What if you shaped your path to change by simply making small tweaks to your surroundings?

3) You could throw the bag of candy away. You could put the bag of candy out of sight. You could employ the Switch Witch (a fictional witch that takes your child’s candy in exchange for a toy...avoiding tears...deviously brilliant).

In other words, you could shape your path to change by altering your environment to make the change more likely.

There are countless ways to tweak your environment. Here’s 5 ideas to get you started:

Get rid of it - Precision Nutrition calls it Berardi’s First Law: “If a food is in your possession or located in your residence, either you, someone you love, or someone you marginally tolerate will eventually eat it.” Seems too simple, but it’s hard to eat a cookie that isn’t there.

Eat with smaller utensils - Slow yourself down.

Make meals ahead of time - Determine what you will eat before you are hungry.

Make healthy foods easily accessible - Have them ready to eat. Put them at eye level in the prime spot in the fridge or cupboard.

Carry a large water bottle you love with you to cue yourself to drink all day.

Do whatever you can to grease the path toward the change you want.

Do whatever you can to make it harder to do the behavior you don’t want.

These 5 are nothing special. Just examples to get you thinking. How could you tweak your environment today to shape your path to change?

If you are interested in how and why we change, I highly recommend reading Switch by Chip and Dan Heath.

Until next time, let’s change our environment, so we can change ourselves..one-minute at a time.