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Recently there has been a spate of newspaper columns about dieting (As there always is.) I am pleased to discover that an attitude towards eating that I promoted years ago in my book “The Stuff Yourself Diet” is becoming conventional wisdom, to wit: a successful diet does not depend on calorie counting or frequent weighing, it depends on eating the right foods. Yet, the fact that there is an unending concern about obesity and dieting, it seems that it is not so easy to develop proper eating habits. There is much to say about this: variations on the Mediterranean diet leads to a longer and healthier life. That diet is a lot of vegetables, fish, rather than meat, olive oil, rather than butter. Alcohol is permissible. No food should be absolutely off limits because it then becomes enticing. Also, a diet that leaves someone hungry will not work in the long run. I think, though, that there is a psychological fact of life that does not get much attention. It takes months, (but not years) for people’s tastes to change so that they want to eat proper foods and no longer want to eat the foods they have grown used it.
This idea is not commonly accepted. Most people cannot imagine not liking the foods they have grown up with (for example, pasta and hamburgers); and they cannot imagine liking other foods (such as sushi or, even more unthinkable, insects.) Yet these foods are preferred by whole populations. The question is, can someone change? The reason that most people would say “no,” is that they do not realize that changing takes time. I know from my own experience that learning to like sushi takes three to four months of eating sushi regularly. I love it now. I see no health reason in learning to like termites, and so I have not tried to do so. But I’m sure I could. Certainly, I have had patients who told me they could no longer eat beef stew or chocolate cake despite being virtually addicted to these foods in the past
Similarly, as I say in my book, I have never known anyone who can maintain a proper weight without exercising. Exercising does not appeal to most people initially, but just walking into any gym will convince anyone that people do, indeed, learn to like to exercise. I think this too takes four or five months of exercising regularly. One reason given often for not exercising is the lack of time. Time expands with practice. Routine makes possible exercising, and doing chores, in general, effortlessly. Most readers are not going to believe that either, once again because they are not patient enough to enter into these activities for a number of months. Those months are a drag.
At the age of 39, I developed coronary artery disease. At the time I had a busy family with three adolescent kids, a job which required my working 50 plus hours a week; and I was writing books. Suddenly, my life depended on my exercising every day, Up until then, I never exercised. Jogging soon became a routine and after doing it daily for a couple of years, I settled into doing it four days a week--. and continued at that rate for the next thirty years. Needing to do it made finding time to do it possible. I grew to like jogging and gave it up only in the wake of developing back problems.
The good news is that these changes are reliable, given enough time. Just how much time is different from one person to the next, but change is possible.
What I have said above about eating properly and exercising applies to many other things in life. People develop the habit of being punctual, and then coming on time becomes effortless. Household chores, if attended to regularly, become effortless. After years of working at a difficult job, that job becomes routine and requires no more effort than getting dressed in the morning.
Am I overstating this tendency to adjust to the varying demands of life? Perhaps some. But the ability of habit to determine our lives is hard to exaggerate.
The lack of confidence in achieving these changes in eating and exercising grows out of a still larger belief we all have about ourselves to some extent: we think we have been poured out of a mold. This is the ways we have always been, and this is the way we will be forever. It is a central problem in psychotherapy which is, after all, directed to the necessity of change.(c) Fredric Neuman, Author of "Come One, Come All."
