The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body's Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast (46 page)

Over the past few days, we have examined ways to become healthy from the inside out by addressing your feelings, thoughts, and limiting beliefs. Now it’s time to focus on bringing the outside in: on how to design your external environment to support your health so you can continue to make healthy choices easy and automatic beyond these ten days. Changing your behavior is much easier if you set up cues all around you. The less you have to think about it, the easier it is to do. If all you have in the house are raw nuts or crudités for snacks, that’s all you will eat. If I was tired or stressed and I had a bag of my favorite chocolate chip cookies in the cupboard, I would eat the whole bag (even though I know better). But if I have to drive ten miles to get it, I won’t! It’s really as simple as making the defaults in your environment work for you rather than against you. That can be a challenging task when there is a processed-food and junk-food carnival at every corner, but today I’m going to show you how you can set yourself up for success.

In 2009, longevity expert and bestselling author of
Blue Zones
Dan Buettner came to a small town in Minnesota with the purpose of
changing the structural design of people’s lives to automatically create healthier behaviors. He did this by weaving opportunities to become healthier into the fabric of the community—into schools, workplaces, homes, restaurants, grocery stores, and neighborhoods. He brought together town and community leaders and other experts to rethink the whole problem of health. It was a community-based solution, all about creating simple changes in the environment that led to big changes in health.

Experts on mindless eating (or the study of how unconscious eating habits make us fat and sick) got people to replace their standard-size plates at home with smaller ten-inch ones. Buettner got people to move the junk food up to hard-to-reach shelves in their homes (or to get rid of it entirely) and place fruit and nuts within easy reach. He convinced grocery stores to label and feature foods that helped promote health and longevity. He encouraged businesses to replace donuts, candy, and soda with healthier snacks. Restaurants added healthy options to their menus. Transportation experts designed a sidewalk loop around a lake in the middle of town and encouraged “walking school buses” by getting grandparents to walk their grandchildren to school. Dan and his team of experts encouraged people to form
moai
s, the Japanese word for groups of people who support one another for life (see Day 10: Connect), and walk or exercise together in person instead of “connecting” on social media.

Dan didn’t tell people to exercise more, or tell them what to eat. He simply changed their immediate environment. In other words, he restructured the town in such a way as to make it easy for people to do the right thing. As a result, the town saw a 28 percent reduction in health care costs. Kids were no longer allowed to eat in classrooms or in the hallways at school; overall, they saw a 10 percent decrease in body weight. Dramatic changes happened just by altering the infrastructure. It was a groundbreaking experiment that proved the powerful transformational effect of designing your environment for success.

The key to changing habits is to understand how change really
occurs. And for the most part, it occurs by design, not by accident or by wishful thinking. It occurs by transforming the unconscious choices we make every day, shifting them so that the automatic, easy, default choices become healthy choices, not deadly ones.

Stanford professor and social scientist BJ Fogg specializes in creating systems to change human behavior. He calls this behavior design. Fogg explains that in order to change behavior, you need three things: the motivation to change, the ability to change, and the trigger to change. If you want to eat a protein-filled breakfast for energy, then you have the motivation. Now you need the ability and a trigger.

For ability, you need to have the ingredients for the breakfast in your cupboard or fridge ready to go and easy to prepare. You might want to measure out the dry ingredients (nuts, seeds, or protein powder) and even put them in the blender the night before. Think low-friction behavior change, so easy you don’t even notice it.

Next, you need a trigger. Maybe you put the recipe for a protein shake on your fridge, with a big headline: “EAT THIS FOR BREAKFAST.” Maybe you get rid of all the other breakfast options in your house, or put them out of sight so that your hunger becomes the trigger. The point is, you need a catalyst for your new, chosen behavior. You need a built-in nudge that gets you moving in the right direction.

Here’s another example: If you are motivated to do chin-ups but never remember and don’t have a place to do them, they won’t happen. To build in the necessary ability and trigger, you might first purchase a chin-up bar and then install it in your bathroom or bedroom doorway so you see it every time you walk by. With this automatic ability-and-trigger set right in front of you, you will naturally fit in more chin-ups.

Today we’re going to focus on redesigning
your
environment to make it easy to do the right thing and create health. Our world is a hostile health environment (we live in a world of Double Gulps and Big Macs at every turn), so we need to create our own “health bubble.” I want you to discover how to sync up your motivation, your ability, and the environmental triggers to make doing the right thing automatic.
We’re going to design your world to sustain your weight loss long after these ten days are up.

Where is your environment set up to help you stay on track and where does it trip you up? What can you do to make your actions automatic around food, exercise, and stress reduction? Let’s take the obstacles out of being healthy and fit!

Below, I’ve combined the Strategies and Journal Questions sections to help you uncover the obstacles and design your life for optimal health and weight loss. I encourage you to write the answers and plans down in your Detox Journal to cement your intention into commitment. Don’t skip this important step—it’s the key to your continued success.

Organize your kitchen for healthy meal preparation.
You’ve already done a cupboard and fridge makeover for your 10-Day Detox, and that’s a great start. Now take a look around the rest of your kitchen—what would make it easy for you to continue to prepare and eat healthy meals forever? Perhaps you could:

Identify three things today that would help make your kitchen a source of healthy, nourishing meals. Write your plan for organizing
your kitchen, including how and when you will do so, in your Detox Journal as a commitment to yourself. Be as specific as you can—the clearer your plan is and the more accountable you are to a timeline, the more likely you are to make it happen. Your written plan might look something like this:

  
Stock your kitchen with the right stuff.
After the detox, continue to fill your cabinets and fridge with all the ingredients and foods that promote health and well-being. You will inevitably open the fridge looking for something when you are hungry, tired, or stressed. So make sure the choices there are going to help you, not hurt you. Arrange the foods so that the healthiest ones are the most accessible and appealing. Cut up veggies and fruit and have them in little glass containers stacked for easy access. Stock healthy snacks (such as nuts, seeds, or grass-fed or organic turkey, beef, or buffalo jerky) so that they are easy to grab on the go when you’re in a hurry. Write a list of your favorite healthy go-to foods and snacks in your Detox Journal and commit to keeping them on hand from Day 11 onward.

  
Make your bedroom a sanctuary.
Compared to your kitchen, your bedroom might not strike you as an influential area for your health and weight loss efforts, but it is. Is your bedroom designed to be a peaceful, stress-free environment that promotes rest? What prevents you from getting a good night’s sleep? Look around your bedroom and identify three things you can do to make it a place of rejuvenation. Options might include clearing away clutter, getting blackout shades, getting earplugs or an eye mask, or committing to reading instead of watching television before bedtime (see
here
for more of my favorite tips for winding down and getting to sleep easily). Record in your Detox Journal these three ideas for designing your restful bedroom and write a detailed plan for how and when you will implement them. Remember, be as specific as you can. Your written plan might look something like this:

  
Plan your food in advance.
Think ahead! The goal is to prevent yourself from ending up in a food emergency in which the only thing open is a fast-food restaurant or convenience store. When do you typically get into that type of situation? Is it at 5 p.m. when you’re too tired to make dinner? When you’re pressed for time between daily commitments and on the run? Identify your top three “trouble time zones” and record in your Detox Journal a corresponding strategy to have food on hand to head off each. Be specific: What foods can you buy or make ahead of time to avert your common food emergencies? How, when, and where will you purchase or prepare these foods? You can also assemble what I call an Emergency Life Pack (see
here
) to carry with you to ensure you’re never stuck without healthy options. Your Detox Journal plan might look something like this: