Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (14 page)

Finally, on the phone, she gave me the opening I'd been waiting for.

“What's this new way of eating you have?” she asked. “Mom said you and Dad have lost weight without dieting.”

“Yes!” I said with relief. “I read this book about nutrition, and I really think you should read it too.” And with that, I told her about the argument that it's the insulin caused by carbohydrate consumption that makes people gain weight.

I couldn't tell from her reaction whether she was interested. A few weeks went by, then I got an email.

From: Liz

I told my doctor this morning that I'm officially starting a new low-carb lifestyle today. It's time. I've only read about 10 pages of the book so far, but I get it. On so many levels, this must be done.

I was thrilled that she was willing to give it a try, and also glad that she'd checked with her doctor. After her email, I periodically called to check in with her, to see how it was going.

A few weeks in she told me, “I'm getting used to it. It's not as bad as I expected.”

This wasn't a wildly enthusiastic endorsement, but she seemed game to keep trying.

After eating low-carb for about six months, my father got a blood test, and I was anxious to hear the results. It was one thing for me to undertake this low-carb experiment, but how were these new eating habits affecting my father? Sure, I believed in the validity of this new way of eating, but I wasn't a doctor or a scientist.

He called to tell me his results. “I just got my blood work back,” he reported, “and my numbers are
extraordinarily
good. Everything has improved.”

“Really?” Relief flooded through me. “What do the tests say?”

He started rattling off his numbers. For years, all his numbers—for his weight, LDL, HDL, and other markersl—had been inching in the wrong direction, but now they'd suddenly changed course. “I haven't even been perfect,” he added. “This period covers Thanksgiving, Christmas, our trip with friends to Phoenix. And the best thing is, I feel I can eat this way
forever
.”

After Elizabeth had been eating low-carb for a few months, she went to the doctor for an A1C test, which measures glycated hemoglobin and is used to track average plasma glucose concentration over the past three months. This test, along with her monitor's constant tracking of her blood sugar levels, helps her manage her diabetes.

“I feel very different,” she said. “My A1C hasn't dropped as much as I would like—though it's trending in the right direction—but I feel much better. I don't have those crazy spikes and drops anymore. After a meal, I don't fall into a stupor.”

Elizabeth had made a good start going down the low-carb path, but soon it would be time for her to leave for Budapest to film the pilot for a TV show.

“I'm worried,” she told me. “I'll be there for five weeks, and it's going to be tough to eat healthy there. Foreign country, no kitchen, working around the clock, and a giant amount of stress.”

And sure enough, while she was there, she found it impossible to stick to this way of eating—though, as she said, she did better than she'd be doing if she weren't trying. Finally, at the end of her trip, I got this message:

From: Liz

Last night of shooting. I totally broke down the last week. No fries but tons of bread and cookies. I was just so worn down. Middle of the night, snowing, raining, freezing,
no
normal coffee. I lost it. Back to my low carb life in LA!

But when Elizabeth got back home, she found it very hard to return to the low-carb approach.

“How's it going?” I asked after she'd been back for a few weeks.

“It hasn't been easy. I'm doing better, but I'm not where I was before. I'm at about 85 percent.”

“Why do you think it's harder?”

“I'm not sure. It's just not coming easily. Partly because I'd forgotten how much I like certain foods, like Goldfish crackers. But when I started eating them, I remembered. So now it's hard to give them up.”

“Like getting an hour of free time back in your schedule if you skip an exercise class,” I answered.

“Right.”

This was exactly what I had noticed about the “stopping” aspect of First Steps. When we try a new habit for the first time, it feels full of promise, even if it's arduous. But most of that excitement is gone the second time, and the habit's drawbacks are more apparent. Plus, there's the discouraging feeling of having lost ground, of going backwards.

“Hang in there,” I said. “It's hard to change your habits.”

I'm sure that eating low-carb is easier for me than it is for many people, partly because while I like to eat, I don't
revel
in food. I have an unadventurous palate. I don't love going to restaurants or trying new flavors. I wish I enjoyed the whole world of food, which gives so many people such pleasure, but it's never been particularly interesting to me. But it turns out that this limitation, which has always made me a little sad, has some benefits. Be Gretchen.

Also, I was certain, eating low-carb came easier to me because of my embrace of the next strategy in my framework: the Strategy of Abstaining.

W
e want good habits—but we also want to make life easier and more pleasant. Because these aims often clash, this section encompasses many strategies. The Strategies of Abstaining, Convenience, and Inconvenience examine how we can shape our habits by adjusting the amount of effort involved. Safeguards, Loophole-Spotting, and Distraction address the challenges of failure and temptation. Reward, Treats, and Pairing focus on exploiting pleasure to strengthen our good habits. By guarding against excuses and justifications, and by making our habits as enjoyable as possible, we help ourselves succeed.

It is well to yield up a pleasure, when a pain goes with it.

—Publilius Syrus

O
ften, we know we'd be better off if we refused a temptation, but it's hard to resist that extra glass of wine, that impulse purchase, that last hour of TV.

When I was in high school, the seniors sold doughnuts every Friday morning to raise money for the prom, and my friends and I took turn making the early-morning pickup. LaMar's Donuts was a modest place, housed in an old gas station, but the doughnuts were legendary throughout Kansas City. Whenever I was on pickup duty, these doughnuts bedeviled me. I'd be sitting with several heavy boxes in my lap as we drove back to school, and first I'd take a bite of one doughnut, then I'd eat a quarter, then half, then … why not just finish it? And then another. I ate the doughnuts in pieces, so I never knew how many I'd eaten (the phenomenon of avoiding monitoring). It was always the same—the temptation, the giving in, the promise of moderation, and then the slide into overindulgence.

For dealing with this kind of temptation, we're often told, “Be moderate. Don't indulge every day, but don't deny yourself altogether, because if you do, you'll fall even further off the wagon.” For a long time, I kept trying this strategy of moderation—and failing. With LaMar's doughnuts, and so many other things.

Eventually I learned to reject this advice. Somehow, I figured out that it was easier for me to resist certain temptations by never giving in to them. I kept hearing advice from experts that this strategy was bound to backfire, however—so why did it work?

I came across the answer in a casual remark made by one of my favorite writers, the eighteenth-century essayist Samuel Johnson. When a friend urged him “
to take a
little
wine
,” Dr. Johnson explained, “I can't drink a
little
, child; therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is as easy to me, as
temperance
would be difficult.”

That's me
, I realized, with a sudden thrill of identification.
That's exactly how I am
.

Like Dr. Johnson, I'm an Abstainer: I find it far easier to give up something
altogether
than to indulge
moderately
. And this distinction has profound implications for habits.

Within the study of habits, certain tensions reappear: whether to accept myself or expect more from myself; whether to embrace the present or consider the future; whether to think about myself or forget myself. Because habit formation often requires us to relinquish something we want, a constant challenge is: How can I
deprive myself
of something without feeling
deprived
? When it comes to habits, feeling deprived is a pernicious state. When we feel deprived, we feel entitled to compensate ourselves—often, in ways that undermine our good habits.

I realized that
one way to deprive myself without creating a feeling of deprivation is
to deprive myself totally.
Weirdly, when I deprive myself altogether, I feel as though I haven't deprived myself at all. When we Abstainers deprive ourselves totally, we conserve energy and willpower, because there are no decisions to make and no self-control to muster.

“Abstainers” do better when they follow all-or-nothing habits. “Moderators,” by contrast, are people who do better when they indulge moderately.

Abstaining is a counterintuitive and non-universal strategy. It absolutely doesn't work for everyone. But for people like me, it's enormously useful.

As an Abstainer, if I try to be moderate, I exhaust myself debating: How much can I have? Does this time “count”? If I had it yesterday, can I have it today? In Oscar Wilde's novel
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, a character remarks, “
The only way to get rid
of a temptation is to yield to it,” and it can be a relief to give in, to end the tiresome mental chatter about whether and why and when to indulge. But, I'd discovered,
abstaining
cures that noise just as effectively. I'm not tempted by things I've decided are off limits. If I
never
do something, it requires no self-control to maintain that habit. If only I'd known to abstain from LaMar's doughnuts! I'd tried to eat just a few bites, and that was my mistake. It's a Secret of Adulthood: By giving something up, I gain.

I once talked to a guy who explained how he'd used abstaining to change his eating habits. He was young and lean, so I was surprised when he told me that until recently, he'd been very overweight. “Oh yeah, fat camp as a kid, the whole thing,” he explained. But by the time I met him he had successfully kept his weight off for years.

“First, I gave up dairy,” he explained. “That didn't seem too hard. No milk in my coffee, no ice cream. Then I gave up rice. Then bread. Each time I had to decide that I would give it up
forever
. But it never seemed very hard to stop eating a particular thing, and then I never thought about it again.”

A blog reader agreed: “Much easier to say no to something
once
and be done with the whole issue than to go back and forth endlessly. Abstinence takes
zero
mental effort.” That was my experience. For instance, in the past, I'd worked hard to keep sweets out of the apartment, so I wouldn't have to resist eating them. Now that I abstain, the presence of sweets doesn't bother me, and my family is happier.

Many people aren't Abstainers, of course. Moderators, for their part, find that occasional indulgence both heightens their pleasure and strengthens their resolve; they get panicky or rebellious at the thought of “never” getting or doing something. They do better when they avoid strict rules. They may even find that keeping treats near at hand makes them less likely to indulge, because when they know they can have something, they don't crave it. One Moderator posted: “By allowing myself an occasional splurge, I don't feel like I'm missing out on something … Tell me ‘no' and I just want it more.” In fact, from what I've seen, Moderators shouldn't try to abstain; if they try to deny themselves, they can become very preoccupied with indulging.

A Moderator friend told me, “When I'm supposed to fast for Yom Kippur, I end up eating a huge amount of food by 9:00 a.m on that first morning. Every other day, I can go for hours in the morning with no food, without even noticing it, but when I'm supposed to fast—I have to eat.” His wife added, “He eats more on Yom Kippur than any other day of the year.”

Abstainers and Moderators can be surprisingly judgmental of each other. A Moderator nutritionist once gave me the familiar mainstream advice, “You're making a mistake by denying yourself all the time. Follow the 80/20 rule, and be healthy 80 percent of the time, and indulge within reason 20 percent of the time.” When I tried to explain about being an Abstainer, she couldn't believe that a 100 percent rule might be easier for people like me. (Side note: every nutritionist I've ever met is a Moderator.) Moderators often make disapproving comments to me like “It's not healthy to be so rigid” or “It would be better to learn how to manage yourself.” Ironically, I feel much less rigid, and far more relaxed, now that I use Abstaining to maintain some habits. On the other hand, my impulse is to say to Moderators, “You can't keep cheating and expect to make progress” or “Why not just go cold turkey?” But there's no one universal answer. It's a matter of what's better for a particular person.

Abstainers and Moderators behave very differently. A Moderator told me, “Every month or so, I buy some bars of really fine chocolate. Every afternoon, I eat one square of chocolate.”

“You're never tempted to eat more?”

“No, I just want the one square,” he said.

It would be impossible for me to eat one square of chocolate a day. For the rest of the day, I'd be thinking about that bar of chocolate. In fact, I discovered that the question “Could you eat one square of chocolate every day?” is a good way to distinguish Abstainers from Moderators. All Moderators seem to keep a bar of chocolate stashed away to eat one square at a time. (Maybe this explains the mystery of why chocolate bars are divided into squares.)

A conversation with a Moderator friend revealed another telling distinction. “I got a sundae from my favorite ice-cream store,” she told me, “and it was delicious. But after a while, I could hardly taste it. I let a friend finish it.”

“I've never left ice cream unfinished in my life,” I said.

For Moderators, the first bite tastes the best, and then their pleasure gradually drops, and they might even stop eating before they're finished. For Abstainers, however, the desire for each bite is just as strong as for the first bite—or stronger, so they may want seconds, too. In other words, for Abstainers, having something makes them want it
more
; for Moderators, having something makes them want it
less
.

As an Abstainer, I've learned not to succumb to the “one-bite” argument: “What difference does one bite make?” “I just want a taste, that's all.” Hah! As La Rochefoucauld wrote, “
It is much easier to extinguish
a first desire than to satisfy all of those that follow it.”

Abstaining can serve well outside the context of eating; it works whenever we feel that moderation is too difficult to manage. For instance, many people use the Strategy of Abstaining to control their use of technology. A friend loves the word game Ruzzle, and she had the habit of playing it on her phone every night before bed.

“I had to quit it,” she told me. “Between work and the kids, the only time I have to read is before bed, but I was using that time to play Ruzzle. I was addicted. I adore reading, and I bought four books to read on vacation, and I thought—I'll never read these books unless I stop playing Ruzzle.”

“Are you going to start playing again eventually?”

“Nope. I deleted the app from all my devices.”

“Couldn't you limit yourself to twenty minutes, or just a few times a week?”

“Absolutely not.”

A guy told me ruefully, “I wish I'd tried giving up video games in grad school. I'm a hundred percent confident that my playing made me need an extra year to write my PhD thesis. I was always trying to play for ‘just a little while.' ”

A blog reader posted: “When my husband and I lived in Rome in student poverty (which is not real poverty), we literally were counting every lira. There's a high-end fashion street near the Spanish Steps, and I never enjoyed window shopping so much—I knew I couldn't afford anything, so I just enjoyed strolling and admiring the beauty. No questions to ask, decisions to make, or even entertain—I was forced to be an Abstainer.”

Some Abstainers are like me, and abstain very strictly from whatever we're trying to resist. Other Abstainers aren't quite so punctilious. Like my father. He
mostly
abstains. After he had been on the low-carb diet, mostly, for some months, I asked him, “You have dessert sometimes, and you drink wine and scotch. Do you worry that you'll gradually lose your healthy eating habits?” I knew I wouldn't be able to pull off this approach myself.

“No, really, I know I can eat this way forever,” he said, as he'd told me many times before. “I allow myself a few exceptions, and any time I eat something that isn't low-carb, I just go right back to my usual choices at the next meal. It's not hard.” Self-knowledge will enable us to use the approach that works for us—which may also mean ignoring the advice of people who insist that their way is the right way.

In fact, a person might be both an Abstainer and a Moderator, depending on the context. A friend confessed, “Mac and cheese is my Kryptonite. If I have a single bite, I eat it
all
. But with something like potato chips, I don't have trouble stopping after a few handfuls.” Another friend said, “I can have no wine, or three glasses of wine. I can't have one or two glasses of wine. But I can eat half a slice of cake, and my wife can never do that.”

Abstainers and Moderators alike are sometimes able to invoke “consumption snobbery” to avoid feelings of deprivation. One friend buys only the most expensive wine he can afford. “If it's cheap, I gulp it down,” he said. “If it's expensive, I take my time, I enjoy every sip. And I don't open bottle after bottle.” Another friend said, “I used to buy a crazy number of books, and my apartment was getting too crowded. But I didn't want to give up book buying, which I love. Now I only buy first editions, so I get the pleasure of buying them, but in much smaller quantities.”

Also, it's true that for Abstainers and Moderators alike, there can be a kind of “Lent pleasure” in abstinence, in relinquishment, for a limited time. As Muriel Spark observed, “
The sacrifice of pleasures
is of course itself a pleasure.” We sometimes enjoy choosing to give things up temporarily, for fasts, cleanses, technology breaks, retreats, or religious observances. And when abstaining is tied to a transcendent value, in actions such as observing the Sabbath, keeping kosher, or shopping locally to support independent businesses, it's far more meaningful, and therefore sometimes more enjoyable, or at least more sustainable.

Lent pleasure is a gratifying exercise in self-control; we set an expectation for ourselves, and we meet it. Also, giving up something for a short time reawakens our pleasure in it. A friend who works in fashion did a “color cleanse” and wore only neutrals for a week. Temporarily to give up color, or coffee, or a credit card makes us appreciate it much more. Alternatively, temporarily giving it up may help us to see that we're happier when we permanently drop it from our stock of habits.

After Elizabeth had been trying to follow the low-carb approach for a while, I had the chance to ask her about it in person when I stayed at her house during a work visit to L.A. The first morning, as we poured ourselves more coffee, I asked for the latest report on her eating habits.