Habits — they have a powerful hold over us!  How can we break the cycle that keeps us in failure?

In our last post we talked about the pattern of cue — routine — reward.  One way to break the cycle is to change the cue.  If the sight of the vending machine at work always prompts you to buy a candy bar, avoid walking past the vending machine.  If you are always tempted to eat something sugary in the middle of the afternoon, plan something else you enjoy to keep you busy during that time.

If driving past the fast food restaurants is a cue to stop and buy dinner, change your route so you don’t go past them.  If you have to that heavily buttered, salted, and processed popcorn when you go to the movie theater, stay home and watch a dvd.  You can make popcorn yourself in a healthy way with real butter and Himalayan pink salt.

The availability of unhealthy foods often trigger overeating. If you don’t have cookies in the cabinet, you aren’t going to pig out on them. So don’t buy them.  Your kids might complain, but they don’t need to eat them, either. I’ve read some studies that say that high fructose corn syrup, the main sweetener in processed foods, actually lowers the IQ.  Not to mention the fact that childhood obesity is heading toward epidemic levels.  Keep healthy snacks like raw fruits  and vegetables and nuts on hand for both you and your kids. They will thank you for it later.

Figure out what causes you to fall, and change things up so you can avoid the tempting cues that lead you into old bad habits.

But what about things you can’t change?  We’ll look at those in the next post in this series.

Eating to live and living for Christ,

Susan Jordan Brown