Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve read about and experimented with numerous nutrition strategies. And I’ve learned more than a few things, both nutrition-related and otherwise, by doing so. One particularly useful lesson was gleaned from a strategy that I briefly practiced in college: the “cheat day”.
From Monday through Saturday, I’d stick to a fairly regimented eating plan that included fruits, veggies, lean meats and other protein sources (e.g. cottage cheese, supplemental protein), nuts and seeds, and complex carbohydrates like potatoes, rice, and whole grain bread. Then on Sunday I’d eat pretty much whatever I wanted: ice cream, cookies, donuts, pizza, candy, chips, you name it.
In the moment, Sundays were awesome! The only problem was that I always felt terrible—tired, sluggish, and bloated—from Sunday night through about Wednesday morning. Wednesday afternoons through Fridays I’d feel good. And then by Saturday I’d usually be looking forward to splurging again on Sunday.
Looking back now, I realize those desires to splurge were probably due to not eating quite enough for my level of activity during the week. But while a few of those extra calories on Sunday may have provided my body with some benefits, the huge excess of sugar and trans fats that was dumped into it over the course of roughly 14 hours every weekend produced significantly more effects that were less than desirable.
The timing of outcomes after taking action matters
Changing our actions is fairly easy when the negative consequence of an action occurs immediately afterward. If you touch a hot stove and burn your finger, you very quickly learn to be more careful around objects that could be hot.
But it’s often far more challenging to change our actions when the negative consequence of an action occurs after some longer period of time, especially if there’s a seemingly positive consequence that occurs in the interim. If you eat a delicious bowl of ice cream when you’re hungry, you get a boost of energy from the surge of glucose (sugar) that enters your bloodstream shortly thereafter, not to mention the little hit of dopamine your brain receives almost immediately from having done something enjoyable. But when you feel crappy a few hours later because your blood-sugar drops again and you’re lactose intolerant, it’s almost like your subconscious brain forgets what may have caused the issue even though you consciously know the exact action that produced it.
In a nutshell, that’s what happened to me during and after my “cheat days” in college—although I’m not lactose intolerant. The foods I would eat on Sundays during that period were delicious, simultaneously pleasing my palate and my body’s need for a few extra calories. But they also made me feel like trash for a few days afterward.
I don’t remember if I didn’t make the connection between the splurge-fest and the ensuing multiday sluggishness or if I just didn’t care at first. What I do remember is that when I finally did make the connection and decided that two to three days of less than optimal performance wasn’t worth the day of hyper-flavored “goodness”, I very quickly dropped the cheat day and adopted a different strategy.
The main point I want to emphasize here is that making the change was easy to do after I consciously connected the action with the negative consequence and decided I didn’t want to experience the negative consequence anymore. When I consciously connected “feeling terrible” to “a full day of gluttony”, just thinking about partaking in another such full day made me begin to feel nauseas, which subsequently made it easy to not do.
And that leads me to today’s tip: If you’ve been struggling to change a certain action, first practice mentally connecting that action to the negative consequence it produces. You’ll still have more to do afterward to create a new habit—for example, running through a WOOP loop—but the immediate feeling you’ll get when you think of taking the action should cause you to pause long enough to remember your desire to do something different.
Putting it into practice
Holidays and weekends can be great times to make observations since our actions often differ from what we do on typical weekdays, making the outcomes of those actions more obvious.
So after celebrating Independence Day today, think back on the exercise and nutrition choices you made. Then notice how you feel tomorrow.
If you discover that you’re fairly happy with today’s actions and their delayed outcomes, rock on! Those fireworks tonight are for you!
If you discover that you have some work to do, welcome to the club. 🙂 But now that you’ve consciously made the mental connection between your actions and their delayed outcomes and tied a subtle feeling of displeasure to those actions, you’re a step closer to freeing yourself from habitually repeating them.