My quality of life, part 5

My previous post talked about how I went about teaching myself patience, which I felt was a missing ingredient in my quest for improved health. Today I'm going to wrap things up with a few final words on revisiting an old habit (one of my worst,) deconstructing it, and how I went about replacing it with a new one.

Culture of completion

As with many people I know, I was raised to eat all of the food on my plate. "There are starving children in some 3rd world country!" These were common and well-intentioned words, but for me became rote. I obeyed. And like many things long-practiced, they pass out of consciousness and into habit. Unfortunately, habits are seldom devoted rational thought. Much like learning to speak, to play a musical instrument, or to drive a car, you memorize most of the rules so that, to a large degree, you can forget them. Soon the rules are "in your bones" and you act on them without effort. For me, this meant that I dutifully carried out the habit of finishing everything on my plate regardless of the amount I took or was given. The habit knew nothing of volume. It ate what existed. My eyes told me when I was finished. And therein lies the disconnect. Some people have performed interesting studies on eating habits like this, so I won't bother with belaboring too many details. I will say that it became a point of pride to finish my plate, partly because our "familial culture" was happy and status quo when I did so, and disdainful if waste was produced. I'm not casting blame, but simply recognizing that little thought entered into it. Cooking for many begat big meals begat many servings begat exhortation to finish begat finishing. Much like prolonged exposure to very high volume music can cause deafness (desensitization to sound,) prolonged force-feeding can cause obesity (desensitization to nourishment.) Through my habit, I had lost my "ear for eating." It no longer mattered even if I tried to listen. What I heard was unclear. If my ear for eating had grown deaf, I needed to rely on other tools to get me to the place I wanted to be.

Hearing aids?

Being mindful of how the plate cleaning rule had affected me was an important step. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Having answered these questions, it caused me to begin to pause and think before meals. I began to pay attention. Before, I had been mechanically shoveling food to complete a task, and my plate was one unit of work. Now I was thinking, and always questioning whether the work really needed to be done. Making the analogy with sound helped me to treat these pauses before meals sort of like a dial for volume. What if I just served myself a little bit less than normal? I don't have to crank it full blast to enjoy it, and the next meal is always right around the corner. Put another way, you will eat again, in your life, you know. By applying this same tactic over and over (discipline and patience ever-present,) I reduced my intake little by little. I ritualized the visualization of that volume dial. My prior habit had been finishing the entire plate so I decided to make it my new habit to "cleverly" serve myself just a little bit less, or eat everything on my plate except the last little bit. I feel like part of the reason this worked for me is that I shifted the focus from that of a show of strength to a show of skill. It became a matter of whether or not I had the chops to sustain such a simple behavior.

• Was I able to stop myself from eating that last little bit?
• Could I brave the ridicule by wasting some of each meal?
• Would I cave to peer and familial pressure?

It was my own personal inner game.

Kicking it to the curb

Changing old habits is hard. But if you take the time to reason about and understand how they were formed, you can turn big, impenetrable, and forbidding habits into what they really often are: reasonable outcomes due to specific circumstances or experiences. Once you know what the circumstances and experiences are that have contributed to your habits, you can set out to change them and create new ones, respectively. You can develop strategies against and do battle with each of them individually and eat the elephant one bite at a time. ...but don't eat him all in one sitting.