How to Make Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise with Michelle Segar

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. M thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michelle Seeger, an award winning researcher at the University of Michigan with almost thirty years studying how to help people adopt healthy behaviors in ways that can survive the complexity and unpredictability of the real world. Michelle's first book, No Sweat, was featured in The New York Times and won the two thousand and fifteen Best Book

Awards in the Diet and Exercise category. It also became the number one selling book in Amazon's Exercise and Fitness category when released. Today, Michelle and Eric discussed her new book, The Joy Choice, How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating an Exercise. Hi, Michelle, welcome to the show. Thank you. It is great to be here again. Yes, so, I'm so happy be to have you on. I was saying to you before we started that I don't remember when

we talk to you. It's probably at least four years ago, but the conversation really has stuck with me since then. It's one of the things I reference a lot, which is the basic idea that you know, the key is just to move in any way any time that you can, and that everything counts. You know, those things really really left an impression on me. But you've got a new book out called The Joy Choice, How to Finally Achieve

Lasting Changes in eating an Exercise. And we'll get into that a second, but let's start, like we always do, with a parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, well, which one wins, And the grandparent applies the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I love that you start the podcast this way. It's a profound foundational thing both I would say,

in my life and in my work. And this time around, I actually am going to tell you a quote that is so meaningful to me, and I think it has to do with this what you just read the paraball and it's from Dan Seagull, who I'm sure your listeners know where our attention goes neural firing flows and neural connections grow, and so putting that parable within you know, this essential neuroscience which speaks to how important it is for us to feed the wolf that we really want

to become, if you will, the virtues that we want to embody and live. But I also I think it's really important to bring the challenge to to doing that. It sounds logical to say, well, if we feed the right wolf, then we're going to live in the way we really value living. And again I value this, I

believe in it. And it's still challenging sometimes because and this is the thing, because it takes conscious awareness before we feed the wolf, and having conscious awareness number one enables us to see what we're about to do and potentially to make a different choice to feed the good wolf, the one that again represents what we aim to do. Yeah, I mean, so much of the quote unquote bad wolf behavior in our lives is completely unconscious. As you said,

it's just running on autopilot. It's just the default behavior that we've either been conditioned into that we are left with after we deal with all our stresses and problems and dizziness. The parables a little dramatic, right, I mean, it's you know, good wolf and bad wolf. And you know, I've always preferred the Buddhist terms of skillful and unskillful, right, But as I've joked many a time a parable about an unskillful wolf just doesn't work the same. But that's

really what we're talking about. So most of our unskillful behavior is happening on autopilot, and we have to be able to bring things to conscious awareness in order to change them. And that is at least half the battle. I think when we first spoke about this five to seven years ago, I don't know that I raised that issue. That's why it's so wonderful. They have an opportunity to rethink, well, what does it mean to me today? That idea is so important to me that it is pasted on my

wall right in front of me. So it's hard to do when we have the intention, and when we practice, we get better at it. Yep. Absolutely, So I want to pivot to the kind. I want to start with the idea that a lot of us who are listening, many if not most of us, have had significant challenges

in building consistent exercise and eating habits. They are elusive for many, many, many people, and so a lot of this conversation where we're going to start is trying to explore why that is, and then we'll move into some of the ways we can solve that. But you start off by saying, we initiate a change in eating or exercise in what you call a motivation bubble. Say a

little bit more about what a motivation bubble is. The motivation bubble is a concept that just came to me when I was talking to a journalist about why we start and stop and start and stop endlessly. It's because we've been taught to approach exercise intentional eating in this way that focuses us on very aspirational goals. And of course, if we're going to achieve aspiration no goals, then we've got to do it right, and we have to do

it precise in precise ways. And if you think about that as a bubble, it's this big thing, and we often don't think of exercise or healthy eating in the same way we think about parenting or our work or being a life partner with someone. It's separate, and it's over there, and we have to do it right, and I'm going to plan it, and it's on a separate trajectory than everything else. It's a bubble that is in a different orbit from the other life bubbles that we

live in. And so because it's so overinflated by the moment we make it. Whether it's New Year's whether it's leaving our doctor's office and we're finally gonna please them or do it right, or whatever it is, it bumps up against any other life area and it just bursts. It's fragile because it's overinflated. Yeah. I love that idea of how these bubbles rub up against the other areas

of our life. And you know, that's a fundamental idea that runs through this book, and it's a fundamental idea that I learned through coaching a lot of people over the years. And that idea, and you say it very well in the book and in many different ways. The core idea, though, that you say is that habits require a stable context to form. So that's great. However, most of our lives are not anywhere near a stable context.

If you have a demanding job, and you have children, and you have perhaps aging parents, and you have a social life, and I mean, our contexts are never stable. They're always changing. And like I said, I really figured that out working with people where I'd be like, well, it's just um, you know, every morning at ten am, you're gonna do X, right, and there's a lot of benefit in some degree of specificity. And what do you do if ten o'clock every day you have no idea

quite what's going to be going on then? And so this idea of a stable context. Share a little bit more about that, sure, And I want to say I believe planning is very important. So if we don't plan something, it is unlikely to happen. So this concept that we're talking about, it's not mutually exclusive of planning. It's actually what we have to do when our plans don't work out. But before we go to that issue, I want to

stay focused on your question about the stable context. So habit formation, which is doing something automatically without the need for cognition or effort or willpower, is wildly popular. There's been a lot of best selling books about it over well quite a few years, but it's become even more popular recently. Part of the reason it's become more popular is because it is an easy way to develop apps.

So if people are trying to develop fitness, say apps, or different types of apps, it seems like, oh, I'll use the habit loop and I'll create my ap around. It's very easy and it makes sense. But the problem is is that what works in theory doesn't necessarily and often doesn't work in reality. And so let's go back to the stable context habit formation is based on in academia, it's discussed a little differently than you know, the three steps of the habit loop, which is a context que

that is stable. It requires stability. Then we've got to step to the behavior, let's say flossing. We associate the queue is either putting our toothbrush down or walking in the bathroom at night, whatever the que is that you've established. And then three is some type of reward with flossing. That could be a feeling of a clean mouth or

accomplishment or whatever the reward is. Now, with the behavior like flossing that happens in the bathroom, often at night after the kids are asleep, there's not a lot of room for disrupting that context. But when we step out of the bathroom into the realities of our full life context and daily needs, like you introduced in the beginning, there are so many forces and unexpected things that we

simply don't know are going to happen. And the habit loop is based on the assumption that this context is

going to remain stable. But when we're talking about more complicated behaviors that might have multi steps that might have a lot of resentment or ambivalence with them, like exercise and intentional eating, tends to have while those forces easily disrupt the context que And so that's why the whole concept of habit formation its value has been over generalized in the field of health promotion, because health promoting behaviors are much more complicated then a simple behavior like flascing

our teeth. Yeah, and it's really interesting. You know, we've interviewed many of the leading proponents of the popular writing about habits, and there's a lot of wisdom in there, and there is limitation in there. You know, let's take b. J. Fogg and tiny habits, right, a great method, but like, how do you scale from a tiny habit to a big habit? I mean, there's some ways to do it, but there's a point where it crosses over from something

that can be automated to something that really can't. And you know, I love what you just said there because you pulled out two really important things, two things that are working against us. One is just the chaos of life. I plan to go to the gym this morning at eight am, and I woke up my kid as a fever. Okay, well,

not going to the gym, right. So we've got all these external things, and then you brought up the fact that we often have all this ambivalence inside of us around this, and when those two things collide, it's a disaster, right, Because maybe I could overcome the internal ambivalence if I

can get just a routine going. You know, I often think I can't make a habit out of exercise, but I can build momentum around it, you know, I can get some energy behind it where it's way easier to do than it used to be, maybe when I was first starting the habit. So you've got these external things

that rub up against the internal. We all would know this phenomenon, which is that like, okay, we are supposed to be working out at ten am, we get a call from our boss at ten o'clock and at ten ten we're done, and we don't work out, right, we could, but that combination, we've got just enough excuse that is now rubbed up against our internal ambivalence that it just comes off the rails. And that's why I don't want to leave this conversation prematurely because it's so foundational to

everything else we're going to talk about. But that is why I call them decision disrupters and decision traps, because it's that internal self talk that, by the way, is not our fault. It does not derive from us. It derives for outside of us. We've internalized it through our socialization, through the education we've received in society and the media,

in research, you know, from our clinicians office. Everything we've learned about exercise and eating has taught us to think about it in a very myopic and really unhelpful way

for most people. I mean, why is it that we think of exercise and healthy eating with this need for precision, with this need to hit a bulls eye, when all these other life areas again, things that we want to sustain for life, being parents, good parents, hopefully, But guess what, there's ups and downs in our parenting, there's ups and downs in our relationships, in our marriages, there's ups and downs in our career. But we don't bring that same

sensibility and wisdom to eating an exercise. But it's again, it is not our fault, as individuals. It is simply the way we've learned to approach it. And I to say, some behavior change strategies cultivate a type of a precision thinking, which doesn't help most people. Yeah, there's a world of difference between something that you can manage to sort of keep rolling for thirty days versus something that you're going

to keep rolling for thirty years. Nearly any relationship can survive thirty days, that's right, good fight, But very few can survive thirty years. And it's a completely different orientation. And so we'll get to orientation around exercise and eating, like why our orientation is difficult there? But let's stay for a couple of minutes on this idea of habits when they work and when they don't. You talk about

people being habitters or unhabitors. What does that mean? Sure? Well, you know, I want to be clear that that was a playful concept that I created to get us to think more critically about what we've been taught about how to change our behavior, whether it's worked for us, why mayor may at work for us, Why it may or may not work for other people. So, as you know, in my book, I use my husband as an example

a pure habitter. And while I contend in the book, and I've been doing a lot of talking about this recently, that habit formation is not going to work for most people when it comes to complex health promoting behaviors, it does work for some people. And my husband is a great example of this, because he has created a frictionless experience again to create his context queue for his exercise habit.

In the morning, he sleeps in his exercise clothes, and I always say, thank goodness, he is a good laundry person, and his alarm goes off, you know, five in the morning. I'm not sure exactly what time because I am still sleeping, and he goes into the basement, he's already dressed, gets on the bike, exercises, no one else in the house is up, and then he has a sense of satisfaction.

So his rule word, and I have asked him about it, His reward is that he feels like he's accomplished something, and it's often the only thing he feels that way about. So some people can do that, but he is a habitter in all areas of his life. And this isn't necessarily true for everyone. But I have tended in my coaching too, to see that people who succeed with a complex behavior like exercise or healthy eating often are quite disciplined. Often structure their life so that it doesn't have a

lot of interruptions. They check off their to do list most of it every day because of who they are, and I believe that they represent a minority of the population and they have the innate self discipline to push through even when they don't want to do something. I want to pick it that for a minute, but I'm not going to will come back around to it because I think there's a lot in there that is actually very interesting, because I think some of what he's doing is,

you know, sort of best practices right for this. So some of it is he's naturally oriented that way, and you know, the other is he's figured out how to get up at the time that nothing else is going to get in the way. You know. As people often ask me, like what should I exercise in the morning or the evening, I'm like, well, the first answer is it totally depends on you, right. The second answer would be, assuming there's not a strong preference for in your life,

morning tends to be better. And the reason morning tends to be better is less things can get in your way in the morning. Right by the time six o'clock rolls around, any number of emergencies could have occurred in your career and your family at six am, there's far less of them. So there is something to be said

for he's done that. But I think what you just pointed to is there's a rigidity in that and some people, I don't want to make this agenda thing, but I have seen this where, particularly in child rearing families, where the father is able to sort of get some rigidity and the mother doesn't because she's the front line of the support. And so it's not fair to compare those two people in that way because their contexts are very different. That's right, And you know what you're speaking to is

the chapter on chaos. The fact that research does show that the more chaos in the house, and of course the person who is primarily responsible for managing the chaos has much less ability to stick to the plan, right, which is the quote unquote, And we're not using the word rigidity in a negative way. It's descriptive. Right, There's still tends to be a gender that is primarily in

charge of child rearing and house management. And it does tend to be the female, but it really any whichever parents is going to be primarily responsible for these issues. I mean, think about how much anticipated unexpected there is in our life is singular individuals. Now, add on top of that one to three kids, maybe a couple ats, and you know whatever else that might be going on, and that exponentially increases the amount of interruption that our

self care behaviors are going to have. So let's explore a couple of assumptions underlying you know, why habits don't work for un habit ors. We've got a few different assumptions. I don't think we need to hit all of them, but you want to hit a couple of them, sure, well one of them. And we've already spoken about this, so I'm just gonna check a box by explicitly saying one of the assumptions of successful habit formation is that

it's going to work equally while across behaviors. Because the books talk about many different types of behaviors, they generalize and so we know that that isn't true based on how you and I have just been talking about, and even in the habit literature, which is you know, going to be the most precise discussion of habit formation, and the academic literature, there's even a nuanced new converse station going on in that literature about she is habit formation

really appropriate for a complex, multi stuff behavior like physical activity? And so they're they're discussing it right now. But I think it's important to point out that that is occurring and it's a more nuanced, important conversation. Another assumption I can check the box on really quickly is that it's going to work equally well for everyone. While we already talked about certain roles and responsibilities really make that a

much heavier, if not impossible lift. And in fact, the most popular study that gets quoted both, I would say, in academia and an industry is study that assessed how long it takes to form habits? Do you know that

study that I'm talking about. It gets talked about all the time, and it it basically says, while there's a huge variation between behaviors and people from like eighteen days to two fifty six something in that range, so huge variation which is so huge that it's almost it's basically meaningless. But the sixties six day average still gets talked about, even though it's an average of you know, eighteen days

over two hundred. But the important thing about that getting it everybody is that the study was conducted among university students who are they have very different lives, and yet even among a group of students who have a lot more flexibility traditionally, at least of those university participants did not achieve the automaticity status that that sixties six day average is about. So we have to ask if students who tend to not be juggling all these things that

we've been talking about can achieve automaticity. Wow, then how are people who are you know, have a few kids, you know, and work outside of the home and and have aging parents. The third thing I want to say is that the assumption is that automating our choices about exercise and healthy eating is the ideal because in theory automating it, yes, I don't want to have to use willpower, Yes I don't want to have to use my cognition as such a limited resource. But in lives that necessitate

pivoting and being flexible, we need the exact opposite. So the assumption that automaticity is the gold standard. What we should all aim for. I think is false because of

the reasons we've talked about already. If we are not optimally primed to pivot with our exercise and healthy eating, then you know, as forty years shows us, we won't be successful sticking with it, or at least most people want right and we want automaticity because it sounds easier, and we know that when something becomes automatic for us, it's easy to do flossing as an example. Or I was trying to think a habit I've just developed recently that I realized has become automatic, but it's a very

small thing. I can't remember what it is now. I want to say, not only does do we want it because it sounds easy, it is a wonderful resource that our brains are structured to have, so it is beneficial. You know a lot of times people drive places that they know, you know, on autopilot. I don't want people to think that I'm anti habit. I'm absolutely not anti habit. What I am concerned about is the over generalization of the value of habit formation for complicated behaviors that people

keep failing at. And I think one of the reasons is because as a field. We keep telling people to do things that are just not valid in their life contacts. Right, Right, It's not that automaticity is bad or that we wouldn't want it where we can have it, but you don't want to insist on an approach that's simply not going to work. You just keep bashing your head against the wall.

So we sort of debunked that. You're probably assuming you are trying to form a habit that is a to step complex habit, like eating well or exercising regularly, and you have a complex life, right, Your life is such that it has chaos, And so I'm going to say we're now talking about of the people at this point, right, Some people like, if you're already exercising every single day for the last nine years, you can just tune Michelle and I out and move on to the next show.

For everybody else, though, less let me interrupts you want to understand unless that person who does have it down wants to understand why other people in their lives our struggle so much. So, I think it is valuable for the people who get it right or not getting right is the wrong word, who have successfully figured out how to sustain and be consistent with these complicated behaviors. And I'm gonna pause here and say that listeners do not despair.

We're not saying like you're doomed to never stick with eating right or exercising. This is not, you know, abandon all hope you who enter here, right, We're going to get there, but we're sort of taking down some of the myths before we get there. So let's talk a little bit about You've got a section called why we don't just do it? You know, just do it? Being quotes right that phrase just do it? So what are some of the reasons that we don't just do it?

We've identified some of them, Yes, but now I think we're moving from the external to the internal exactly. Thank you. That is a perfect introduction. So we have learned to perceive, approach,

and experience exercise and intentional eating. Again, while these ideas might generalize to other self care behaviors, the book is really explicitly focused on eating an exercise because of the reason they are uniquely united or under the umbrella of weight loss and all of the really problematic things that brings between weight ism and shame and hating exercise because it's punishing because you think you have to do it hard, or feeling deprived, not because you actually are, but because

you're making a choice out of this external should I can't eat that bad food, and it makes you feel resentful or rebel. And here I am jumping into the four decision desrupters, which reflect the inner scripts, the inner things, the things we tell ourselves at these decision points. We're at a party. We recently started eating plan that we felt really good about and have really been successful following, and we've noticed that we feel good. We go to

a party and there's nothing on our plan there. And on top of that, there there's a glistening chocolate cake across the room that you know is seducing us with the look and the aroma and all of the stuff. And instead of saying to ourselves, oh jeez, I you know, yes, chocolate cake is great, but I love this eating plan I'm on, the internal script tends to be again, it's not our fault. That's how we've learned to think about it. Oh my god, I can't have that chocolate cake. I

can't have it. It's not on my eating plan. What is one of the biggest disrupters, It's rebellion because humans are wired to rebel against anything which takes away our freedom. So that's this internal rebellion script that we play. And of course what happens is there's all this energy to just take the thing we don't think we should or can have, and we don't even do it with a sense of gosh, how much do I want of the cake? Do I need to eat the whole piece of cake?

Often what happens out of rebellion is we eat three pieces of cake because we are just taking that energy of I can't and it's boomerang into you know, screw you. I'm gonna eat as much as the cake as I want to. So that's one of the primary internal decision traps I've seen in my coaching, and you know, as a as a coach, I'm wondering if you recognize these

decision disrupters that happen at the moment of choice. And this is why instead of thinking we need things to be precisely right and automated, I mean, how is that decision like they had a party automated. We are outside of any context. We've established our eating habits around and we have this seduction occurring and So if we don't have the mental wherewithal to make a choice that is the most adaptive choice that's going to enable us to

both stick with our greater goals, whatever those are. It doesn't have to be precisely right, but also feel like we're participating in our social lives with our families and our friends, which is among the most motivating things that

human beings have is other people. So if our exercise and healthy eating inner dialogue reflects a conflict between participate painting with the people we feel most connected to, while that is an automatic setup to fail too, because we are, for anything in human nature, motivated to align with our families to participate. And then we're talking about rebellion. We've talked about another really common one is perfection. We can

use the chocolate cake as an example. So looking at the chocolate cake, it's not it's a black or white, it's can I have it or can't I have it? It's the can't is a perfect world. I cannot have at all, the cake all or nothing, And then nothing in the situation is eating the whole thing or more. And that sets us up when we look at our choices. Am I gonna run for forty five minutes or walk for forty like I planned, all, oh gee, that phone

call only gives me thirty five minutes, Why bother? Or nothing? I'm not going to do anything, So it works because all or nothing really this black and white thinking, which, by the way, is a cognitive distortion, yet it's the way potentially the majority of people think about these two

choices in the arenas of exercise and eating. Another one is what I call accommodation, which is really a bit outside of the topic of exercising and eating, but it is fundamental to the decisions people make in the moment.

Right if someone's needs or our work needs seem to be competing with our plan to exercise or our eating plan, because a dear friend just handed us a delicious chocolate chip cookie that she made, and we feel that we need to show her that we care about her and value this gift she just gave to us that instead of thinking about, well, gee, I'm eating this way that doesn't include the chocolate chip cookie or whatever it is.

It could be a burrito, for all I care. My need to validate her needs is more important than my need. And again, if it's all or nothing, thinking. Then it's the whole cookie versus something else or not at all. And these things are the internal part that disrupt the in the moment decision. It's how our brain has learned to think about it. And that's why the book and the method is really about guiding people to notice in

the moment. It gets back to your pivotal parable, which is which am I going to feed this old reaction and habit habitual way of thinking, which tends hasn't served most people for many years, or do I want to feed a different wolf that's going to give me a more adaptive long term result. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to

your life. It's free, and listeners have told me that these texts really helped to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text for me during your day to day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them for me to you. So, if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text. Go to one you feed dot net

slash text and sign up for free. I want to ask you a question about the perfectionism, the all or nothing. On the exercise side, it seems very clear to me right that all or nothing thinking is not helpful, because if I can't work out for an hour, I don't work out at all versus working out for forty five minutes or five minutes even right, I think if there's anything that has changed my ability with many of these things, particularly exercise, it has been a little bit of something

is better than a lot of nothing. Right, do something, you can do something. But I want to pivot this to things like eating, and particularly things like eating sweets, because there are differing opinions out there, and I think the answer you're gonna give me is it depends. But nonetheless I'm still gonna kind of walk through the question more about how you would think about it than what your answer is, and that is there are people who say, you know, when it comes to sweets, For me, I

am an abstainer. Abstaining works best for me. I don't have to figure out under what circumstances you know, I'm a recovering alcoholic radic. So in this case, I'm an abstainer. Right. I often talk about the beautiful clarity of zero. Right, it's just simple, there's no debate in there. Right. But food is a different animal than drugs and alcohol. So there are some people who say, look, I just I cut it out completely, and then there are other people who are looking to integrate it and in a way

where they've got some degree of moderation around it. And there's some people who think that you're kind of one of those or the other, and determining which of those you are is really a wise thing to do and then come down in that way. But how do you think about that challenge when it comes to eating? Thank you for raising that that is a really important issue.

So I want to say, as you already said, now there are some people who feel that the issue on addiction versus not when it comes to eating, I would say has not been solved. There are just really core people on doing research who claim both sides. But a more mundane how we live our lives perspective, it is important for us to figure out now challenges. If people say, well I am the type of person, well, no, I'm

gonna take a step back. Part of the problem is that we're asking this question gin without explicitly shining a light on the context of the food choices, because people would say, oh, I'm a zero person, I cannot do moderation.

But really it's a false psychotomy. If people are making choices under shoots and feeling like they've got to do something, or feeling that their bodies are there they are bad or unattractive or whatever it is, If all of that junk surrounds the eating choice, then I would say, we can't know if someone is truly a moderation versus a zero person because it's all these other forces that are inside of our brain that we've learned to have that we have to be aware that that's going to be

going on, because it's very hard to do moderation if you're going to have perfection and rebellion and other decision traps, because those forces they're not going to let you be successful with moderation or for zero for that matter, because we're always going to be reacting number one. I want to make sure that that issue is clear. Getting back to the moderation versus zero, there are for sure individual differences.

But here's something that most people may not know. The emerging research on this question suggests that it is the moderation approach which is going to be more effective for more people. So there's a couple of studies. One study is looking at a weight loss registry, and I'm not focusing on weight losses and outcome because I think it really sets people up to not stick with exercise and healthy eating for many of the reasons we spoke about

five to seven years ago. But they wanted to know, in this group of people who had lost and were maintaining a substantial amount of weight, which strategy was going to be most effective with eating over a year. Is it coming to a weekend with you know, trying to stick to the plan, which would be a zero approach, right, I don't do you any of it. I'm going to stick to the plan no matter what. Or is coming to the weekend eating with something with a little more flexibility,

which is technically in the literature called flexible restraint. Which of those two eating strategies is going to be most adaptive for eating over time? And the research found and you're not going to be surprised because of the way I set this up that it's the flexible restrainers who had more adaptive eating and outcomes. So I believe it comes back to this core wisdom about how we live

every other area of our life. We can't hit a bull's eye every time we parent, we cannot hit a bull's eye every time we engage with our partners and our work. And it's that sensibility that it's about a journey and an intention. We want to do things as certain way, but sometimes we can't. I can't do it today, okay. Or I have to make the perfect and perfect choice, or I could make no choice, but that isn't going to get me as far as the perfect and perfect choice.

So I think the biggest issue is that we have come to believe that exercise and eating are different than these other lifelong journeys. Yeah, I like that idea of flexible restrainers. Like, I mean, I think could I moderate drugs and alcohol, I probably would. It seems like the

better choice right at this juncture in my life. I've proved multiple times that doesn't work, and the risk reward ratio is just stupidly out of whack, right, It's just you know, it's like, well, what would I get well, I'd be able to have a drink a couple of times a week. What might I lose? Everything? Okay, not

worth doing right? A piece of cakes a little more subtle, and you know, I certainly know that Jenny and I have been on a I would say, very good healthy eating journey, particularly since her mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. I think we were healthy before and then we kind of upped it even from there. But it has not been rigid and restraining. You know, there is flexibility in there.

And I think one of the important things is there are situations, like you talked about, where we find ourselves in a situation and we have to be able to make a decision. And I want to get to that because that's really important. I also think that we can really do well with planned exceptions. A planned exception would be today is Wednesday, November twenty three. Listeners, you were going to hear this in January, but for Michelle and

I it's a day before Thanksgiving. I could make a planned exception tomorrow that you know what, for Thanksgiving dinner, I'm just eating whatever, and I'm going to have one piece of dessert and that's it done right now. The problem for a lot of us is that if we're all or nothing right, the minute that we blow up with a Thanksgiving dinner, we think, well, screw it. It's Thanksgiving weekend, right, it's the holidays, right, And the next thing we know, it's January one. So I found you know, okay,

let me be clear about what the rules are. And again, there's some flexibility in them, but they are rules that are designed to have flexibility. There's lots of ways this can go wrong. You know, I've been in the only on special occasions and the next thing, you know, like Billy getting to see on his report card is a special occasion, and you know, but being clear birthdays or I've had other people who, you know, I don't think

they have alcoholism issues. They said, I'm just not going to drink alone at my home and their life isn't like they're not out partying all the time. For a college student, that's a terrible thing. It's not gonna make any difference. But for most adults, they just go, Look, if I'm out with friends, I'm gonna have a couple of drinks. But when I'm home alone, nothing right. So there are ways that we can have some flexibility and also some clarity. It's not all or nothing. That's correct.

And I think inherent in the flexible approach and strategy that I'm teaching. Inherent in that is people are making intentional decisions. So that's also the beauty of flexibility is it asks people to be in charge of their choices, not the inner scripts. It's about saying, oh, I see you perfection steering me down, or I see you rebellion steering me down. But guess what, You're the bad wolf. And I know that I've been feeding you for thirty years and it doesn't get me where I want to go.

So I want to go in a different direction. And so I think for me anyway and my philosophy, and it sounds like we might align on this is that when you teach this flexible approach, it is inherently about the individuals saying, Okay, this is what I care most about.

This is how I want to participate in celebrations. It asks people to become very clear about what they value, what they most want, and it asked people to critically think about, you know, if I'm going to stick with this, if I'm going to stick with a healthier eating lifestyle, just like a parent, and you know, for a journey of thirty years on the other side of the third years,

what's really going to let me do that? And rigidity it works for some people, and like you said, when it comes to alcohol, being rigid is absolutely the solution. You know, it's important for people to truly know what's

going to work for them. But again, if people don't understand the societal context around the meaning of eating healthy eating and exercise, that has the potential to continuously thwart what people do because it creates these inner dialogues, the forces that lead us to the bad wolf instead of

the skilled wolf, if you will. Yeah, underlying a lot of what you're saying here is reconnecting with our ability to choose and our ability to decide what's important to us, and not doing that on autopilot, right, not just following the scripts we've been given. Not doing this because even because my doctor said I should write like, I'm not saying we should just heedlessly ignore our doctors. It's worth going when my doctor said that I should probably do this,

and why would have said that. It's because if I don't, this might happen oh, if that happened, that would affect my relationship with my children. Like we eventually get back to what matters to us, but reconnecting with our choice is the key piece. Absolutely, not just choice, conscious choice, which is the opposite of an automatic habit. Now, I do want to say something that I think is crucial. We've been talking about it in one way, but I think it's really crucial to say it in this way.

The value of any choice at a party after work, the value of every single choice we make is determined by the context of the other choices and needs. If we're not aware of that, and we're not skilled at being able to pivot and compromise, find the creative compromise. I don't have the sixteen minutes to take the walk outside. I only have fifteen minutes, but I care that it

lifts my mood. You know, I have all these kid things to do, and I have at this work that I've got to get done, but I have fifteen minutes. So when we become skilled in being able to compromise and pivot, which is of course the joy choice, the perfect and perfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing. When we do that, then we can keep

our momentum. If we don't know how to successfully navigate those choices with intention, then they're going to keep derailing us, which kicks us right off the path of lasting change. You actually say early in the book, what we're talking about here are choice points. You and I had an interesting conversation about where that phrase comes from, and we realized I might have arrived at it from multiple different sources. But these choice points. I'm at a choice point. Do

I eat the chocolate cake do I not? Now I have a choice whether I work out, whether I don't work out, And you say, I call these conflicts choice points, and they are the real place of power for achieving lasting changes in eating an exercise. And I think that's so much of what this is about is about learning

to navigate choice points. You know, when I work with a coaching client, you know, we start off and I say, well, let's put what structure we can put in place, let's put what plans we can put in place, because you know what, if we can get some of that in great, But you know what, at the end of the day, you're still going to bump up against these choice points.

And what we can learn to do is say, what is happening inside me when I make the right choice, and what is happening inside me when I make the wrong choice or the choice that I want to make, or the choice I don't want to make. Let's non moralize it, right, the choice I want to make versus the choice I don't want to make. And the value of a choice point actually is that it can narrow our window of focus to a moment we can actually go, Oh, here's what I was saying to myself, here's what I

was thinking, here's what I was feeling. Okay, Well, what might I say to myself next time? What might I do differently next time? It gives us a real, for lack of a better word, an actual, specific point in time that we can look at, and it becomes less about Oh, I've got to figure out my entire emotional makeup versus I have to figure out what's going on

inside me. Now. That's right and inherent in choice point is choice, And as you know from all of your work, choice is the epitome of what cultivates autonomy and self determination. And we know that high quality motivation is embodied in the idea that I'm in charge and I get to choose, and that is the antidote to all or nothing thinking. All or nothing thinking, there's only two choices, and I'm forced to choose between sticking to the plan or just tossing it all to the wind. But no, the choice

point is way to sack. There are options here. They give me freedom to align myself with the context of needs and options at the moment. Let's pivot to what can we do in choice points? And you talk about an executive functioning team. These are aspects of our brain that we can and you correct me if I'm saying this wrong, but that we can call upon in choice points to help us make better decisions. Is that an

accurate way of saying it? I would say that choice points evoke our executive functioning team when we are at moments of decision making, when we're at moments of problem solving and potentially pivoting. That is the work of our executive functions. And you know, as you know in the book, I talk about three primary executive functions that are discussed in the literature on eating, especially in other areas of living like a d h D. Sometimes they talk about

seven executive functions. So there's different ways of talking about it. But the bottom line when it comes to executive functioning is it is our brains innate decision making, self management, problem solving, goal striving apparatus, And so why don't we cultivate it the three primary executive functions too, so that we better set our brains up to help us make the skilled choice. I want to go into those three in a second, but I want to just clarify a

little bit of what we're saying here. I think that what you're saying is that step one is we have to recognize we are in a choice point, yes right, because so often we just slip off into not exercising, not eating right right, without any real thought of what's happening. You know, I often talk about the very first thing we have got to do is bring whatever is happening into consciousness. That's recognize that I'm about to make a

decision or a choice. It may not seem like I am, but I am about to and I'm making it the way I traditionally have made it without thinking about it. So I first have to bring it up into recognizing, Okay, I'm in a choice point. And now once I've done that, then I call in my executive functioning tools to help me make the right choices. And I wouldn't say I'm

calling on because it's that kind of happens automatically. What I'm saying is the way we think about it is either going to thwart or support our executive functioning right because the old reactions, the old decision traps that we've talked about, the inner script. If you're scripting, I can't, I can't, or it's got to be all or nothing. You can see how that script that we tell ourselves,

the narrative, absolutely distracts us from the option. Yes, So how can our executive functions work effectively when we're going down a rabbit hole with the shoulds and all are the black and white thinking? So you are right, and I think this is becoming more out there in mainstream. But behavior change is belief change and different choice making, and we cannot do either of those things if we are not conscious at the point of choice. So it isn't as sexy as peloton or have it formation being

aware at a point of choice. But we cannot change the way we think, which is the precursor to changing what we do, if we do not have conscious awareness at that point. Great, So let's talk about the three executive functions that you think are critical for making healthy choices. Okay, so the first primary executive function is called working memory, and this is the part of our brain that holds

in processes information at the same time. And most people can only hold in process like one to three pieces of information. So you can see that if you're focused on a narrative about I can't, I can't that sort of thing, or I've got to please her, or I want her to know I love those kinds of thoughts, that's in your brain. So that kind of thinking has a huge potential to overwhelm our working memory. But working memory is the backbone of effective problem solving because that

is the space. It's not really you know, I'm not calling it a literal space, but that's where problem solving happens. And if we can't hold the information in our brain because we're too focused on worrying of whether we're gonna make the right decision, then we won't be able to problem solve and pivot. So that's working memory. And we'll talk about the decision tool that I created to clean up that space. If you will then we've got cognitive

flexibility or flexible thinking. Our brains are innately wired to do flexible thinking. If we think about eating and exercise and more flexible ways. We are basically aligning this new thought process with this very important ability mental ability that we have to pivot like we do in all these other areas of our lives. And then the third primary working memory is referred to as inhibition. More popularly people think about this ability as self control, and so this

has been the primary focus changing our eating. We're just going to inhibit ourselves. We're gonna stick to the plan. But in reality, I believe more people would be successful if, instead of feeling like they have to inhibit all the time, they actually learned to think about choice points and that being flexible is actually adaptive not having to do it perfect. But actually, you know what, just like all these other life areas, I'm going to do this perfectly imperfectly, so

I stay the journey. So what is the joy choice? So there's a technical definition which I'll say the joy choice is the perfect and perfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing. This doesn't just give us the momentum we want to keep going forward, on the

path or journey of lasting change. There's another really meaningful way to think about it, and that is that if our decision to take a part of that self care activity, a part of that exercise, a part of our eating plan and fulfill that we are doing it to take care of ourselves, to respect our greater goals, and in doing so, we are fueling ourselves for the people and projects we care most about. So it's not just about the formula for sustainability that you know has science supporting it.

It's also about making a choice that lets us be our full self that harmonizes exercise choice or are eating choice with the whole other parts of our lives and who we are, which includes our connections and loved ones. So that is why it's called the joy choice. It lets us harmonize exercise and eating within our full self. I love that. So let's talk about the decision making tool? Is it? Is it? Pop? Is that the decision making tool? Okay, that's what I thought. I just want to make sure

I'm referencing the right one. So this is a way to sort of navigate choice points. Yes, if our executive functioning is this innate brain system for pivoting, and problem solving and long term coal pursuit, Like, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could support the three primary executive functions? And so this is a tool that I've developed and used with my coaching clients, and I call it POP. Now, I'm going to bring us back to the very beginning of our our conversation where you asked me about the

motivation bubble. We talked about the fact that the motivation bubble is very vulnerable and life bursts it right, it bumps up against something and life burst the bubble. While with the POP decision tool, instead of letting life burst our bubble in this passive way where we're kind of victimized by things, we autonomously take charge and we puppet. So it's both a metaphor for us being in charge. We pop our plan. It's not workable any longer, so we're gonna pop it. And what we do when we

pop it is then we open up the options. So that is the overarching metaphor. But it's actually an acronym which is really good for our working memory, recall, remembering, and recall. So POP stands for pause. And like we've talked about throughout this conversation. If we don't take a moment to bring our consciousness to the choice, then our automated, unskillful responses will just take over. So pause introduces this intentional moment where we can say, Uh, which wolf do

I want to feed? I'm going to feed the one that's going to really take me to where I want to go. So that's the first PM POP the OH. I designed it to support working memory because it enables us to clear away to name any of the traps temptation, rebellion, and accommodation perfection. Oh, I see you, but guess what that's the unskilled wolf. I'm not going to go there.

Let me focus my attention, take a breath, and then go on to the second step in POP, which is the oh, open up our options and play well, how better to cultivate flexible thinking that to consider it as an opportunity to play. Well. Gee, there's this awesome chalky cake over there. I want some of it. What are my options here? What did I plan to eat? What did they plan to eat? Later? I think I could eat half the cake, and I could do to wiggle

around tweaks something else. I mean, it invites us to think in creative and playful ways about the choice point. And that is flexible thinking or cognitive flexibility in its essence. And now the second P and the ending of the POP decision tool is P pick the joy choice. There's no right or wrong answer here. The joy choice is the perfect and perfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing, giving us momentum and helping us harmonize.

Are eating an exercise choice within our full self. So what POP does as an acronym is it makes it easier to recall I want to say. It doesn't mean it's going to be effortless. You still have to learn how to use it, and you can put it as a contact in your phone. That's one way people use it, so that you can learn to memorize it. But it also strategically guides our attention away from the decision traps

to play. I have options here, let me open them up, and then to picking the imperfect choice that for the past three decades I haven't given myself permission to do because I'm forced to stick to the plan, which then I just rebel against. So it guides the specific thought process in a way we don't need to inhibit ourselves. It's not about harnessing self control. That's not the conversation.

The conversation is given the choice point and my full set of needs and the value that choice has right now based on the full context of other things, which is the one I don't have to rebel against that question. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think that's a very helpful acronym, and it we do need some approach because we're often going to find ourselves at choice points also in the

moments of stress. Yes, you know that's where the bubble tends to rub up against life in moments of stress, and we know that in moments of stress, executive function tends to take a hike. So it's really helpful to be like, have something as simple as pop, okay, here I am, what do I do? And walk through those things.

And I love the joy choice, this idea of the perfectly imperfect that allows me to do something rather than nothing in the context of everything I want to be eating an exercise has changed so fundamentally for me over the last decade, I would say, and it really has been in a complete reframing of it. And this is probably normal with age to some degree, but a reframing from vanity, a reframing from shoods and into this is what I know supports me in being the person that

I want to be in the world. You know, when I don't exercise, I don't make a good interviewer. I don't make a good coach, I don't make a good father, I don't make a good dog owner. I'm not a particularly good partner. I'm very deeply unhappy within myself, you know. So for me, with exercise, it's just I just remind myself, like you're going to feel a certain way an hour from now, how do you want to feel in an hour?

And I know for me, the way I want to feel in an hour is the way I feel on the other side of exercise, proud of myself, energized, you know. And same thing with food, you know, how do I want to feel at the end of this meal? How do I want to feel? And what supports me in what matters to me? And you talk about this near the end of the book, which is really just the

importance of value based decision making. Right. The more we can be clear on what really matters to us, we have a much better chance of making good decisions because there's clarity there, but a lot of times we don't ever take the time to get that clarity, and so we're making decisions in fog about like, well, what really

matters to me is this cake? You know? So, so I love that you sort of kind of near the very end, sort of bring it back to that core idea while and the neuroscience, the emerging science, directly supports that idea. I think that's among the most exciting science on creating sustainable behavior change is the work showing that when we value, when we believe that a choice aligns with who we are at our core, those brain regions light up. And also it's predictive of people making decisions

over time related to that healthy choice. So, and the good news is we can actually change a lot. Some of your listeners might think, well, I don't value exercise in that way. I don't have those experiences it feels like it should. So I mean the beauty is that it's actually quite easy to convert exercise from those shoods and chores to feeling like a gift, and that it's a part of who you are, it's reflecting or values.

So I mean, I think that's really important because people might be feeling gosh, I don't know how to do that. The first step is to recognize whether you have been coming to your exercise and eating choice points with this feeling of should and rules and precision, and if you are that, the first thing is to say, gosh, has that worked for me or not? And again, if it works for you and it makes you a happy person, there's no reason you have to pull away from that right,

just like you said at the beginning. When we understand that our choices around what we eat and how we move our bodies reflect who we want to be and our personal preferences, and the reality is the true realities of our daily lives, that's the recipe for sustainable change. Indeed, Well, Michelle, thank you so much for coming on. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. I found The Joy Choice a great read and so much great wisdom in it, So thank you, Thank you for having a again, it

was such fun to talk. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support,

and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of the one you Feed community. Go to when you feed dot net slash Join the One You Feed podcast. Would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.