In Skinny Rules I offered lots of simple strategies for implementing some of my twenty “nonnegotiable principles for getting to thin”: putting a glass of water by your bedside so it’s the first thing you drink when you throw your legs over the side of the bed each morning, or placing the healthiest snacks at the front of your refrigerator or at eye level in your cabinets so they’re the easiest things to reach for when you go snack hunting. These are small but really meaningful ways to make common behaviors (getting up in the morning, eating whatever you see first) work in your skinny favor. They are ideas for reengineering your immediate surroundings in ways that support your efforts to stay on the rules. (They can also be phrased as if/then contingency plans to support your goals to follow the rules.)
But the idea of reengineering your environment to get or stay healthy and trim needs to go beyond simple tricks to set yourself up for success. Actually, the idea of environment is what we need to expand on here.
Am I talking about clean air? Ozone protection? Global warming? All important civic concerns, and all obviously have an impact on the health of the planet, the atmosphere, your hemisphere, and the little patch of local land you call home. And ultimately, of course, a healthy environment in the global sense has a positive impact on your physical health as well. But while I’m sure there are a lot of thin environmentalists out there, being “green” isn’t what I’m referring to here. (Just saying: there are a lot of not-so-thin environmentalists, too.)
In the context of the behavior that thin people have made a habit, I use the word “environment” to refer to two important aspects of your world: your social environment and your built environment. Think of these two environments as the scaffolding in your life; the architecture of your day, they comprise the people you see and interact with and the things you see, say, and do. And remember, the things you see, say, and do repeatedly have a significant impact on the architecture of your brain: they create neural pathways that make your thoughts and behavior into habits. So you see where I’m going with this, right? If you were paying attention to the chapter heading, you’ve made this leap in logic already: thin people manipulate their environment to create patterned behavior (aka habits) that supports their weight goals and/or their achieved thinness. They reengineer their surroundings to reinforce healthy habits.
Your social environment is made up of the people you hang out with and the things you do together socially. Your built environment is composed of the physical things around you, both macro and micro in nature—from the color of your room to the number of fast-food restaurants near your work to the placement of your refrigerator or snack drawer at home.
Whom do you live with? Who are your closest friends? What about the people you work with—what are they like? These people, and the things you all do together, are the substance of your social environment. These people influence you (with and without your knowledge) and impact your weight and your ability to control your weight more than you might have ever considered.
Try this little assessment about how healthy your social environment really is: What do you and your friends or family do together with your common downtime?
Do you…
Exercise?
Go clubbing?
Cook?
Sit quietly and read books?
Binge-watch television shows while eating ice cream?
Drink heavily?
Bottom line: Do you consider that you’re good influences or bad influences on each other?
I know what you’re thinking: no one has friends and family members who are always one or the other, always a good or bad influence. Instead, you probably have people in your life who are a little of both. The same person who claims to support your attempts to lose weight and is willing to do things that will make both of you healthy is sometimes more than happy to drive you to the convenience store for more chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream at 11 P.M. and/or order another round of shots (without paying!). No one is always either an angel or devil on your shoulder.
But for purposes of adopting healthy Skinny Habits, you need to start looking at your relationships a little more critically. When you do, you’ll start to see patterns of collective behavior: Your wild clubbing/drinking nights are most often with your buddies Eric and Tom. You and Sheri tend to bring out the pig-out-and-binge-watch-TV thing in each other. Funny, but now that you think of it, it’s Michael and Joanne you tend to pair with to walk the dog. And when it’s Jen coming over for dinner, you find yourself trying a new recipe from Skinny Meals instead of making your grandma’s fettuccine Alfredo with cream and loads of cheese and breadsticks (Eric and Tom get that meal).
Still don’t completely believe that your buddies impact your health and still need convincing to reengineer your social surroundings? Consider this: believe it or not, scientific evidence is now mounting that obesity can be transmitted, kind of like a contagious disease! Yes, spending time with heavy people can make you heavier yourself.
If this were a movie, you would have just done a double take and the soundtrack would have been the squealing brakes of a car, right? But it’s true. Read on.
In 2007, a group of Harvard researchers became very interested in how social networks—from family to coworkers to good friends—factor into the obesity epidemic we were then (and still are) experiencing in this country. Reviewing data collected for the famed Framingham Heart Study—three decades’ worth of health information kept on a huge group of people who had volunteered to be studied for heart health research—the researchers started to see patterns and correlations that they had not originally been looking for. The Framingham data not only collected health information every year on the people being studied but also incidentally asked each person to report on the general health (including weight) of their siblings and spouses over time as well.
What they found was remarkable: a person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who had become obese. If a person’s sister or brother was or became obese, the person was 40 percent more likely to become obese as well. For spouses, the number was a tiny bit lower, but still significant: 37 percent.
Of course, there’s no blood test or MRI that can tell us exactly why this phenomenon occurred, but one explanation was offered: we take on the behaviors and/or the mindset of the people we spend time with.
Forgetting the off-the-charts-wacky couple of friends that each of us has (you know you do!), you probably think your friends are pretty normal, right? And not counting crazy Uncle Joe and your family’s particular nuttiness, you likely think your family is the norm as well, yes? The logic goes that if those friends or family members are obese, and you are around them a lot, you are likely to consider being fat not only as acceptable, but as normal since it’s all around you.
Even if we don’t think their weight is “normal” and we don’t want to look like them, we often unwittingly take on the behaviors that made that friend or family member obese in the first place: overeating together or being too sedentary when you hang out. Either way, it seems that our friends and family are our visual and behavioral cues. Or, as the Harvard researchers concluded: “People are connected, and so their health is connected.”
Does this mean you are doomed to be or stay fat if your social network is fat? No, but it does mean making some changes. It means that you need to also have strong emotional bonds with people who have Skinny Habits. You must make more consistent relationships with healthy people doing healthy things to offset the less-than-healthy influences of others.
If you want to get or stay at a healthy, happy weight—the weight that makes you proud to strut your stuff and the weight that makes you comfortable in your own skin—you’re going to have to get your head around this: the people you surround yourself with have an amazing impact on your weight and weight control.
Meet Danny Cahill. I first met Danny on the set of season eight of The Biggest Loser. He was 430 pounds then and, understandably, pretty depressed about his weight and his health. As he recounted later, “I remember feeling hopeless, like a person with a $100,000 debt and a $40,000-a-year job.”
Danny ended up winning that year, getting himself down to about 191 pounds (a loss of 239 pounds!).
And Danny kept most of that weight off for about a year by continuing the good eating and exercise habits he’d learned on the show. A year or so after returning home, however, the going got tough. There were the endless responsibilities of his business, his family, and his service commitments. It wasn’t that he was surrounded by people who were necessarily bad influences on his desire to keep his weight off, but he was surrounded by an atmosphere that hampered his ability to do and choose healthy things.
As he put it: “I struggled with the stress environment.”
As I put it: his social environment was weighing him way down (and rocketing his weight way up).
But then things went from tough to worse: his father died, and he was devastated. In the weeks and months that followed his father’s passing, he let go of any remaining healthy eating and exercise routines. He went back up to 290 pounds and “was back to filling my soul with food. I realized I had to do something.”
Danny understood that exercise is both a good way to burn calories and a great stress buster, so he knew he could kill two birds with one stone if he could find a way to get back into an exercise routine. He knew from his experience on The Biggest Loser that seeing some positive results on the scale through exercise would spur him to eat better and better, too. He later did a few things in his physical/built environment to cue healthy living (more on those strategies shortly), but at the time and with all he had on his plate, he just couldn’t seem to get an exercise routine going again on his own. At his lowest point he realized, “I had to reach out. I realized I couldn’t do it myself.”
He had to reach out. That’s such a telling statement to me. He needed to get back to the atmosphere of teamwork and camaraderie he felt while on The Biggest Loser. While there he’d been with other people trying to reach similar goals and he’d been supported in reaching his own; he had been on a team and was spurred on daily by the sense of being in the competition together.
So, what did Danny do to reengineer his social environment? “I re-created some of that sense of urgency I’d had on the set. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I made myself a deal. I took out a six-month membership at a gym. I’d be wasting it if I didn’t use it.” That’s what did it—he joined a gym to be around others who wanted to be healthy. He joined a gym even though the expense was a pinch on his budget. He actually used that budget discomfort to spur his attendance. Kind of brilliant. And so simple.
Reengineering a healthy social environment boils down to this: you must make more consistent relationships and bonds with healthy people doing healthy things.
Joining healthy people doing healthy things also helped my friend Mark Kruger. Mark has lost 120 pounds—he looks amazing! But one of the things he discovered quickly was that he needed to “take away the excuses” that might lead to regain. There was one classic thought pattern/excuse that could cause him problems: the old everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I? logic. Or, as he put it: “All my friends do it; how do you expect me to resist?”
Looking at this from a reengineering perspective, I hope you see what I see: Mark had put his finger on what was going to trip him up (spending time with people who didn’t want or didn’t have to resist unskinny habits) and that led him to one uncomfortable conclusion: “I couldn’t go back to the same people who enabled my bad habits.”
But having the epiphany didn’t necessarily mean Mark had to cut those friends out of his life. They may have been bad influences in some respects, but they were still his friends! Instead, Mark shifted his schedule a bit and spent more time with a group of friends who espoused better weight and fitness ideals.
“I got into a workout group that met in the morning. You’ve got to show up if people are there waiting for you. It’s not fair for you to sleep in while they’re waiting. So I get up. I know they’re there. Being around like-minded people and keeping the routine: that’s the key.”
Or, like the Harvard guys said: “People are connected, and so their health is connected.”
Relax: reengineering your social environment doesn’t require divorcing your spouse or de-friending your drinking buddies! Sometimes the best fix is to add friends (not take them away) or just have a change of scene. Look at the Habit Homework on this page for ideas that will help you assess your roadblocks and temptations and then reengineer your personal solution!
Take a minute to think about how often you have to make a decision about food on a given day. It’s not just at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but all the hours in between: what to put in your shopping cart for this week’s meals; tall, grande, or venti at the coffee shop; what time to meet your mom for brunch, where to sit when you get there, and what you’ll order off the menu. But that’s just the obvious stuff! Would you believe that on average, you make 250 food-related decisions every day? It’s true! Though you might not be aware of it, you never really stop having to think about what to put in your mouth and how you’ll do it (volume, speed, heat, spice…so many decisions!).
Unfortunately, your physical surroundings—both the big, structural things (macro surroundings) and the small details (micro surroundings)—undercut Skinny Habits and healthy decisions in very subtle ways all the time. Part of the reason for this is that your built environment is often built by people and companies that want to sway you one way or another! Supermarket managers, food manufacturers, restaurant designers, refrigeration experts, and even lighting technicians have all influenced the food-related decisions you’ve made today. And will make tomorrow. Maybe you’ve heard about the standard supermarket practice of putting common household items all the way at the back of the store so that you have to walk by lots of tempting and more expensive items to get your milk. That’s a good example of the forces at hand to influence your built environment (their motivation is to make you stay longer in the store and spend more money, but it often leads to more crap food in your cart), but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the attempts to influence you are out of range of your day-to-day radar. But I’m here to enlighten you and improve that radar!
To appreciate how much is going on just outside your awareness when it comes to food decisions, you’ve got to know all about Brian Wansink, a former comedian turned professor (now at Cornell), researcher, and author who has done all the seminal studies of the ways in which our built environment impacts the food choices we make (yes, even the ones we’re sure we’re making of our own free will!).
When Professor Wansink first started thinking about why we eat too much, conventional wisdom about the relationship of eating to environment consisted of two main theories:
1. The macro environment drives most unhealthy behavior. That is, the combined impact of things like the number of parks in your neighborhood, your proximity to fast-food chains and cheap soda, and a lack of nutritional education was considered to be the chief negative influence on health and wellness. This became known as the “obese-o-genic” environment theory.
2. People always act rationally when their self-interest is at stake. Given the choice between something that is obviously really good for you and something that is obviously bad for you, most people will most often choose the thing that’s good. This was kind of an evolutionary-theory-based line of thought, since our survival as a species depends on making smart and good-for-us decisions, right?
The obese-o-genic theory is clearly rational and true to a degree: it’s true that more green spaces and fewer Golden Arches near your home can have a positive impact (so long as you use the parks and don’t go out of your way to find the Arches). And better food labeling and nutrition education in schools gives you the tools to understand the decisions you are making (but you have to use those tools).
But what about the second theory? It’s kind of absurd. If it were always true, people wouldn’t smoke cigarettes anymore. And they wouldn’t text and drive. And they would consistently opt for veggies instead of French fries when offered the choice. And they’d always serve themselves a bowl of cut fruit instead of standing in the long line at the ice cream sundae bar.
A man ahead of his time, Professor Wansink looked around and could see that the conventional wisdom was at the very least incomplete, if not outright wrong. For starters, he could see what you and I do: people often don’t act rationally. And he wondered if perhaps micro environmental cues would influence everyday decisions more than the macro ones (the big structural things that are less in our control).
To test whether people listen to their appetite or take their cues about eating from the way it’s presented to them, he devised a sneaky experiment called the Soup Bowl Study. He brought sixty students into his lab/cafe for a free lunch, but what half of the diners didn’t know was that the bowl of soup set before them was being continually refilled by a cleverly hidden system under the table. They were eating from a subtly bottomless soup bowl!
Guess what happened? People eating out of the bottomless soup bowl ate 73 percent more soup than those eating from an unrigged bowl. And those overeaters didn’t report feeling any more full! How could they be full, they explained; they still had half a bowl of soup left to eat.
The lesson? We get full when we finish what’s served; we eat with our eyes, not with our stomachs!
Need more proof? Professor Wansink has done many eye-opening experiments over the years. Here’s another one: Do you think the shape of the glass you use affects how much you drink? Wansink gave eighty-nine adults who were eating breakfast either short or tall drinking glasses (different shape, but same volume capacity). He then gave them containers of juice and had them pour their own servings.
The finding: people poured 19 percent more juice in the short, wide glass (6.8 ounces) than in the tall glass (5.7 ounces). They mistakenly perceived that they had poured less into the wide glasses than into the tall glasses. Seventy-nine percent of the adults given the short, wide glasses underestimated how much they poured, as compared with 17 percent of those given tall glasses.
The more experiments he did, the more convinced Wansink became about one implication: when it comes to eating, small things make a huge difference.
In other words, maybe even more than things in our macro environment, it’s the things in our micro environment that warp our ability to make good decisions. But the good news is that micro issues are ones you can control. You can’t single-handedly convert a fast-food chain into a green park, but you can make micro changes!
More things I’ve learned from Brian Wansink and his amazing books:
• You will eat less if you transfer food from its packaging to a serving plate or bowl. The key is being able to see the size of your serving. So if you think you’re saving yourself cleaning time by just eating directly out of that gallon of ice cream, think again. Go ahead and dirty that dish!
• What’s on your kitchen counter has a direct correlation to the number on your scale: “If there’s a box of cookies or bag of potato chips, occupants weighed nine pounds more than the norm. If cereal was visible, they weighed 21 lb. more. Any soft drink—even one can of diet cola—and they weighed 25 lb. more. If they had a fruit bowl, on the other hand, they weighed eight pounds less.”
• When you serve white pasta on a white plate, you’ll serve 18 percent more than you would if you used a colored plate. Break out your Fiestaware!
• Where you sit in a restaurant matters: you will eat more if you sit in a dark booth, near the TV, or near the bar. Ask the hostess to put you at a table away from the sports fans!
• And this one, which just floors me: you are 80 percent more likely to order vegetables if you sit near a window at a restaurant. As Wansink explained in an interview, “It could be that sitting next to a window cues the mind to freshness; in a back booth, it’s out-of-control indulgence.”
So how do we use all this scientific insight to fight weight gain and increase our individual chances for creating healthy habits? Obviously, understanding the forces that drive you to eat too much is key. Be aware of the tricks that the supermarket is playing and the ways in which lighting and plate choice and glass size influence your food decisions. That’s the first step: awareness.
But then you can reengineer your own little world. Use your newfound understanding to create a world where making the healthy choice becomes easier and, eventually, unconscious.
Remember Danny Cahill? Joining a gym where he could enjoy a social network of like-minded “losers” was a critical first step, but even the most dedicated gym-rat can get sidetracked, and Danny soon discovered that he had to get his healthy lifestyle cues closer to home as well. He put a treadmill in front of his TV. “I made myself another deal: you want to watch TV, you go on the treadmill.” (Note: this is also a good example of Habit 1—it’s an if/then tactic!)
As he looked around his home, Danny started seeing other things he could do to change his micro built environment. “I needed that feeling of changing for the better, and I realized I had to make things look different from the way things looked when I was fat. I put in a new floor. I have two grills outside the door now. My refrigerator is even different!” Danny now maintains a healthy 240 pounds.
OH, BEHAVE!
Oh, the dreaded buffet—whether it’s the all-you-can-eat one at your favorite restaurant or the office party, we’re all kind of afraid of it. Or, better put: we’re afraid of losing our control around it! Fear no more. Brian Wansink has studied how thin people behave around buffets (yes, it is possible to behave around a buffet!). Here is what his research shows:
• Thin people tend to sit about sixteen feet farther from food than heavy people.
• Thin people are three times as likely to face away from food.
• Seventy-one percent of thin people scout the food, walking around before picking up a plate.
Danny was consciously acting on an important part of Brian Wansink’s insight: engineering small visual cues—at home and away—can bring about big changes. That’s why I want you to pay special attention to the Habit Homework below. Habit 1 got you thinking about contingency planning for new behavior. Habit 2 armed you with a pushback plan to guard against negative thinking and defeatism. Now you’ve got to get your house in order to make healthy habits automatic—literally part of your life!
Change the architecture of your social environment:
• Make a list of the things you do that you know are unhealthy and another list of things you consider to be supportive of your thin maintenance or goals. Now write down the names of the people with whom you most often engage in each kind of behavior. See a pattern emerging? That awareness is half the battle.
• Now that you have identified the people who are not so good for you (in the skinny sense), brainstorm how you can either change the dynamic of the relationship or start to spend more time with people with whom you’re more likely to do healthy, Skinny Habits–supporting things. Maybe suggest to your afternoon cookie run buddy that you walk instead of drive from now on. Or better yet, that you swap the cookie for coffee instead.
• Reconsider the who/what/when of your food-shopping routine. Do you shop with someone (your sugar-loving kid, perhaps?) who leads you down the processed-foods aisle every time? Do you shop after work toward the end of the week when you’re inevitably tired and hungry (and needing to “treat yourself” to something that rewards all your hard work)? How about leaving Junior at home next time and shopping after eating a good breakfast on Saturday? I’ll bet you can make healthier decisions about what goes home with you if you don’t have your usual cues and distractions.
• If you don’t already have a workout group or buddy, make a list of people you know who might be interested. Put their phone numbers next to their names. Call at least one person on that list within one week of reading this book.
• Make a date to get together for some kind of physical exertion: walk the dog together, go for a hike, go to that crazy spin class you’ve been afraid to try alone.
• If you already have a workout group or buddy, but you’ve been less than consistent in getting together, pick one member of the group as your workout sponsor and make a deal with him or her: I’ll call you the night before if I can’t make it. No surprise cancellations. (This is another if/then contingency plan!)
Change the architecture of your built environment:
• Walk around your home and try to identify every possible cue or “fat trap,” as Professor Wansink calls them, in the place. You’re looking for the obvious things that either trigger fat habits behavior or hinder Skinny Habits behavior: the cabinet filled with sugary treats, the beer fridge within reach of your reclining chair, your reclining chair (!), the way your treadmill is hidden under your dry-cleaning pile. And you’re looking for the not-so-immediately obvious: the massive coffee mugs that more often than not are filled with hot cocoa and not coffee, the collapsible trays that make it easy to eat in front of the TV, the really disorganized workout-clothes drawer.
• Walk around your office and do the same kind of inventory: note where the vending machines are and how you’ve made them a stop on your regular route to the bathroom. Don’t have vending machines at work? I’ll bet there’s someone in the office who has a dangerously delicious bowl of candy on their desk, and I’d be willing to bet that you just happen to pass that desk regularly.
• Now that you’ve identified the things that trip you up or stand in your way at home and at work, brainstorm ways to reengineer your patterns in both places. You can start by cleaning out that snack cabinet—toss out the junk food and stock up on healthier snacks. Move on to setting up your kitchen or dining room to make it conducive to use (or make the couch in front of the TV less conducive). Maybe put out some candles? Cloth napkins? Or how about just making sure the table is cleared off and clean?! If your recliner has your butt print on it, consider giving it away. Organize that workout-clothes drawer so you don’t have any excuses not to dip into it. Go one step further and lay a workout outfit at the foot of your bed so that you have to make an active decision not to put it on in the morning!
• Apply your if/then muscles to your reengineering efforts. “If Carol wants to go to the food trucks for dumplings, I’ll suggest we go the other way around the block and head toward the farmer’s market. And if Carol convinces me to go to the trucks anyway, I’ll get a small order of the veggie dumplings instead of the large pork ones!”
Don’t get overwhelmed by this habit. You don’t have to do everything at once! Here are a few simple things you can do today. They’ll get you on your way to creating a fitter environment for yourself. Feel free to innovate!
• Grab a big trash basket and fill it with any and all food items that you and your family should never eat. You know.
• Put your sports bra, running shoes, and shorts next to your bed. (Men can forgo the bra unless required.)
• Set your alarm clock on “loud” and put it in another room so you have to get up to shut it off before deciding to go back to sleep rather than go for your morning walk.
• Buy an inexpensive guide to the caloric content of all food; make sure it covers all convenience foods. Put one copy in your car and one copy in the kitchen.
• Read the above book—any part of it!—for just five minutes before you go grocery shopping.
• Buy some apples and put them in a bowl on your desk at work.
• Put a blank calendar next to your desk; make a black checkmark on it every day you exercise.
• Do an online search of healthy restaurants near work. Print out a list and pin it next to your calendar.
• If you work for a large (or progressive enough) company, check out what fitness benefits it offers. You can usually find this information easily and quickly through your human resources department.
• Put a pair of running shoes and an absorbent towel in your desk drawer.