Understanding Choice Points for Lasting Changes in Eating and Exercise with Michelle Segar

trust in ourselves. But it doesn't have to stay that way. In my upcoming free workshop, the Six Saboteurs of Self Control, we'll explore what happens at these choice points, why they're so hard to navigate, and most importantly, how to approach them differently. This isn't about willpower or trying harder. It's about understanding the hidden forces that lead to making the wrong choices and learning the tools to rebuild your confidence

one choice at a time. Imagine trusting yourself again, knowing that when you say you'll do something, you actually follow through. That's what this workshop is about. Join me and let's turn your choice points into moments of strength. Go to Good Wolf dot me slash self control. That's Goodwolf dot me slash self control to register for this free workshop.

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. Thanks

for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michelle Seger, 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 t 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 discuss her new book, The Joy Choice, How to Finally Achieve Lasting Changes in Eating an Exercise.

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 the 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 grandparent and says, well, which one wins, and the grandparent replies, 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.

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 Parable, and it's from Dan Segall, who I'm sure your listeners know where our attention goes Neural firing flows and neural connections grow, and so putting that parable within 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 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.

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.

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.

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 then 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 over inflated 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 over inflated.

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, let's just you know, every morning at ten am you're going to 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.

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 will power, 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 apps or different types of apps, it seems like, oh, I'll use the habit loop and I'll create my app 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 queue

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

accomplishment or whatever the reward is. Now, with a 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 resons, sentiment or ambivalence with them, like exercise and intentional eating tends to have while those forces easily disrupt the context Q. And so that's why the whole concept of habit formation its value has been overgeneralized in the field of health promotion, because health promoting behaviors are much more complicated than a simple behavior like flossing

our teeth.

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's And you know, I love what you just said there because you pulled out two really important things, two things that are work against us. One is just the chaos of life. Yes, I planned to go to the gym this morning at eight am, and I woke up with 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 are internal ambivalence that it just comes off the rails.

our clinician's 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 bullseye, 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 yeah to eating and exercise but it's again, it is not our faults as individuals. It is simply the way we've learned to approach it. And I have to say, some behavior change strategies cultivate a type of a precision thinking, which doesn't help most people.

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 eyes exercise clothes, and I always say, thank goodness, he is a good laundry person. And his alarm goes off at you know, five five point thirty 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 reward, 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.

going to get in the way. You know. As people often ask me, like we 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 rear, in 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, yes, in that and some people I don't want to make this a gender thing, yeah, 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 context are very different.

word rigidity in a negative way. It's descriptive. Right. Yes, there still tends to be a gender that is primarily a 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 unanticipated unexpected there is

in our life is singular individuals. Now add on top of that one to three kids, maybe a couple pets, 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.

And even in the habit literature, which is going to be the most precise discussion of habit formation, and the academic literature, there's even a nuanced new conversation going on in that literature about gie is habit formation really appropriate for a complex, multi step behavior like physical activity? And so 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 it 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 a twenty ten 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 basically says, while there's a huge variation between behaviors and people from like eighteen days to two hundred and fifty six something in that range, so huge variation, which is so huge that it's almost it's basically meaningless. But the sixty six day average still gets talked about, even though it's an average of you know,

eighteen days to over two hundred. But the important thing about that getting at everybody is that the study was conducted among university students who are have very different lives, and yet even among a group of students who have a lot more flexibility traditionally, fifty percent at least of those university participants did not achieve the automaticity status that

that sixty 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 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. It's 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 health eating, then you know, as forty years shows us, we won't be successful sticking with it, or at least most people won't.

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.

So I'm going to say we're now talking about ninety percent of the people at this point. Right, some people, 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.

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.

have learned to perceive, approach, and experience exercise and intentional eating. Again, while these ideas might generalized 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 weadism 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 disruptors, 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 an 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 listening chocolate cake across the room that you know is seducing us with the look and the aroma and all the stuff. And instead of saying to ourselves, oh, geez, 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 disruptors. 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 boomeranging 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 coach, I'm wondering if you recognize these decision disruptors 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 that at 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 participating 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 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 nothing in that 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 minutes 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. This 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 commendation, 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

in 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 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 habitual way of thinking, which Tens 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.

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 going to 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 ratic, 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.

and then come down in that way. But how do you think about that challenge when it comes to eating?

I'm going to take a step back. Part of the problem is that we're asking this question 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 dichotomy. If people are making choices under shoulds and feeling like they've got to do something, or feeling that their bodies or 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. 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 an 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 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 stategies 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've 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 bullseye every time we parent, we cannot hit a bullseye 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 a 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.

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. Yes, a planned exception would be today is Wednesday, November twenty third. Listeners, you are 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 first. 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 specials 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. Yes, 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 going to make any difference. But for most adults, they just go, Look, if I'm out with friends, I'm gonna have a couple 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.

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 individual 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 asks 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 thirty 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.

It's because if I don't, this might happen. Oh well, 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.

find the creative compromise. I don't have the sixty 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've got 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 let's 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.

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.

percent or just tossing it all to the wind. But no, the choice point is wait a sack, there are options here. They give me freedom to align myself with the context of needs and options at the moment.

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 so that we better set our brains up to help us make the skilled choice.

to do is bring whatever is happening into consciousness. That's right, 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 choice.

from the options. Yes, so how can our executive functions work effectively when we're going down a rabbit hole with the shoulds and all the black and white thinking. So you are one hundred percent right, and I think this is becoming more are 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 habit 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.

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 about whether we're going to 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 an exercise in 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 going to 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 learn 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.

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 that 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 has science supporting it.

It's also about making a choice that lets us be our full self that harmonizes exercise choice or our 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.

asked me about the motive 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 bursts 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 option. 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 it throughout this conversation, if we don't take a moment to bring our consciousness to the choice, then our automated, un skillful responses will just

take over. So pause introduces this intentional moment where we can say, Ah, 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, 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 O open up our options and play well. How better to cultivate flexible thinking than to consider it as an opportunity to play? Well? Gee, there's this awesome chocolate cake over there. I want some of it. What are my options here? What did I plan to eat? What did I plan to eat later?

I think hmm, I could eat half the cake, and I could do to wiggle around, tweak something else.

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.

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 sholds 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

important 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 a fog about like, well, what really matters to me is this cake?

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 is that it's actually quite easy to convert exercise from those shoulds and chores to feeling like a gift, and that it's a part of who you are, it's reflecting your 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 rule and precision, and if you are, 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 realities the true realities of our daily lives. Yep, that's the recipe for sustainable change.

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