In an ideal world, we would be surrounded by healthy food and our environment would encourage us to eat well but unfortunately, the reality is far from that. Wherever we turn we see calorie-dense, nutrient-poor and unethically and harmfully produced food. This makes it incredibly difficult to diet or change your lifestyle for the better. It raises the question on how to deal with the constant temptation of cheap and tasty but junk food, if we want to eat healthy, ethically produced food. We can decide just to trust our self-control but we also have the choice to avoid the things we don’t want to eat.

We live in an obesogenic environment that not only refers to the available food but our physical, economic, social and political environment (1). We experience it every day when our environment forces us to use the car because we live in a non-walkable neighbourhood, when people with worse economical status can’t afford healthy and ethical food, when policies make unhealthy food more available and when even the people around us push us to just eat the junk food for pleasure. Unfortunately, these are environmental factors that are hard to change but it is possible on a personal micro-level.

Why is it so difficult to take temptation?

This environment keeps us in constant temptation to skip our diet or new lifestyle and just go with the flow eating easily available food. Just imagine yourself walking in the supermarket after a long day hungry and as crossing the sweets section, it can feel almost impossible not to take down the chocolate from the shelf. Or as a vegan, you haven’t prepared enough food for yourself and you are getting hungry, but vegan food is not available. After a while, you will take the temptation and just eat the food served. It takes a lot of self-control and self-regulation to resist our impulses especially if we are hungry or tired.

Standards are our values and beliefs directing our decision. If our goals are conflicting (eg.: I want to be vegan, but I love the taste of cheese) it already makes it incredibly difficult to resist the temptation. On the other hand, we all have a strong desire to feel good, therefore when we are distressed feeling better becomes the leader of our actions.

Monitoring our actions is the second ingredient of self-control that is very vulnerable. Imagine you are on a diet and you don’t want to eat any cookies but you are in a café where you eat just one cookie and because of this you might already decide that your diet is ruined for the day and just lose control over your eating. If someone can restore their monitoring and get in focus again one mistake doesn’t ruin the whole diet.

Our capacity to change is also limited, as we have limited energy for the day. Therefore, when we go to do our shopping after a tiring day it is much harder to resist temptation. During the day we needed to make many decisions taking away a lot from our mental energy leaving less for being able to hold back our impulses in the evening. This is called “ego depletion” as a limited resource we have is depleted. On the other hand, this is also like physical strength because practice makes it easier to hold back our impulses.

Furthermore, taking temptation costs a lot of mental energy that we can use for better, therefore there must be a better solution. That would be the absolute avoidance of the stimuli we want to resist and reducing the daily decision making by forming habits.

The solution: changing your food environment

Changing our food environment also costs energy at the beginning but on the long term it is much more energy sufficient. Changing our food environment helps us to avoid situations where we are meeting with the tempting food we want to avoid and also promotes habit formation making it effortless later on. This results in the retention of our mental energy for other important things (3).

1.      Self-monitoring

For changing our food environment first we need to analyse our current habits and weaknesses. For example, if you want to have a plant-based diet first you need to analyse when you are eating meat and dairy products and where you get them. Furthermore, you also shouldn’t forget about eating out, take a look at the places where you used to get food that you like but want to avoid now. Another important thing to realise when our weak moments are. Maybe you are usually tempted to eat meat when you are having a night out with your friends or if you want to avoid junk food maybe you are much more likely to eat them when you are watching a movie. If you know your weaknesses than you can also plan for “emergencies”.

2. Planning and changing

After we identified our current habits and weaknesses, we can start planning how to make it possible to avoid the tempting food we don’t want to eat. First, we want to change the food supply in our homes. If we don’t have the food in our house that we don’t want to eat, than after a while we simply forget about it so our mental energy can be spent on something else.

Maybe it is possible to still do shopping in the same supermarket just change our route, so we avoid the shelves where the tempting foods are. Maybe it is not enough because our impulses are too strong, so we need to find another store that is more suitable for the goal (eg.: vegan store, health food store). To go back to the previous example if we like to snack during movies, it would help a lot to find an alternative healthy snack and make junk food disappear from our house. We need to determine the foods we want to cut out or change and plan what to buy instead. If this is all planed than we took care of our everyday food supply promoting our new lifestyle or diet.

On the other hand, there might still be hidden traps that makes it important to examine our weaknesses. For example, you would like to cut out sweets but on your morning route to your workplace you pass by a café with cakes and you are just tempted to buy one. In this case to avoid the temptation you can re-plan your root so you don’t have to worry in the morning.

As I mentioned before to plan all this takes energy, but this is an investment for the future so we can concentrate on more important things. If we manage to cut out all these tempting situations from our day, we spare our mental energy for more important tasks and our lifestyle or diet also has a better success rate. We are fallible people and we cannot trust only on our self-control and regulation to do the job.

References:

1. Kirk, S. F., Penney, T. L., & McHugh, T. L. (2010). Characterizing the obesogenic environment: the state of the evidence with directions for future research. Obesity Reviews, 11(2), 109-117.
2. Baumeister, R. F. (2002). Yielding to temptation: Self-control failure, impulsive purchasing, and consumer behavior. Journal of consumer Research, 28(4), 670-676.
3. Phillippa Lally & Benjamin Gardner (2013) Promoting habit formation, Health Psychology Review, 7:sup1, S137-S158, DOI: 10.1080/17437199.2011.603640