15
Day 8: Design
The 10-Day Detox Diet was an eye-opening and life-changing experience for me, to say the least. The plan provided me with just what I needed: a solid blueprint for how to get my health back. There’s no word I can think of to describe it other than “miraculous.” I lost nine pounds and three inches. My heart isn’t pounding out of my chest when I walk up a flight of stairs. My hair doesn’t seem to be falling out in big clumps anymore. I have my energy back. I can run and play with my twin toddlers without needing a break. And I can get out of bed in the morning without having to roll out of it!
My husband has been in the army for twenty years and was recently deployed again, and he noticed a change in my voice when he called to check in. He said he’s proud of me—that might be the best part of this process. I spend so much time being proud of him for what he does every day, and for him to say the same about me means so much.
How do you thank someone like Dr. Hyman for offering you the opportunity to change your life like this? What can you do to show your appreciation for the new life he’s given you? All I can come up with is to continue on this path… to stay healthy and bring your family along on the journey… to continue on with the practices and be a testament to this program. The best thank-you I can think of is to make the most of this gift every day of my life, and that’s just what I’m going to do.
—JENN WIELGOSZINSKI
Morning:
Take your measurements and record your results in your Detox Journal or online tracking tool. Also record how many hours of sleep you got the night before and the quality of that sleep.
Begin the day with thirty minutes of brisk walking or other exercise.
Just before breakfast, take 2.5 to 5 grams of PGX fiber: 3 to 6 capsules or ½ to 1 scoop of the powder in 10 ounces of water.
Take the rest of your supplements with breakfast.
Make your Breakfast Detox Shake (see menu plan below).
Optional: Enjoy a midmorning snack (see menu plan below).
Afternoon:
Just before lunch, take 2.5 to 5 grams of PGX fiber with water.
Eat lunch (see menu plan below).
Optional: Enjoy a midafternoon snack (see menu plan below).
Evening:
Just before dinner, take 2.5 to 5 grams of PGX fiber with a glass of water.
Take the rest of your supplements with dinner.
Eat dinner (see menu plan below).
Spend fifteen minutes recording your experience in your journal. Write down everything you ate and did today, how you feel, any improvements or changes in your energy and focus, and how these changes make you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Practice the Take-Five Breathing Break for 5 minutes.
Take your twenty-to-thirty-minute UltraDetox Bath.
Get seven to eight hours of sleep.
Today’s Meals (see Chapter 21 for recipes):
Breakfast: Detox Shake
Midmorning Snack (optional): 10 to 12 nuts (almonds, walnuts, pecans, macadamia nuts)
Lunch:
Core Plan: Soup with protein or Dr. Hyman’s Super Salad Bar with protein
Adventure Plan: Arugula, Avocado, and Grilled Snapper
Midafternoon Snack (optional): Dip or spread of your choice with fresh vegetables
Dinner:
Core Plan: Grilled Pepper Steak
Adventure Plan: Chicken Breast Stuffed with Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto, with Sautéed Spinach
Today’s Focus: Design
Over the past few days, we have examined ways to become healthy from the inside out by addressing your feelings, thoughts, and limiting beliefs. Now it’s time to focus on bringing the outside in: on how to design your external environment to support your health so you can continue to make healthy choices easy and automatic beyond these ten days. Changing your behavior is much easier if you set up cues all around you. The less you have to think about it, the easier it is to do. If all you have in the house are raw nuts or crudités for snacks, that’s all you will eat. If I was tired or stressed and I had a bag of my favorite chocolate chip cookies in the cupboard, I would eat the whole bag (even though I know better). But if I have to drive ten miles to get it, I won’t! It’s really as simple as making the defaults in your environment work for you rather than against you. That can be a challenging task when there is a processed-food and junk-food carnival at every corner, but today I’m going to show you how you can set yourself up for success.
In 2009, longevity expert and bestselling author of Blue Zones Dan Buettner came to a small town in Minnesota with the purpose of changing the structural design of people’s lives to automatically create healthier behaviors. He did this by weaving opportunities to become healthier into the fabric of the community—into schools, workplaces, homes, restaurants, grocery stores, and neighborhoods. He brought together town and community leaders and other experts to rethink the whole problem of health. It was a community-based solution, all about creating simple changes in the environment that led to big changes in health.
Experts on mindless eating (or the study of how unconscious eating habits make us fat and sick) got people to replace their standard-size plates at home with smaller ten-inch ones. Buettner got people to move the junk food up to hard-to-reach shelves in their homes (or to get rid of it entirely) and place fruit and nuts within easy reach. He convinced grocery stores to label and feature foods that helped promote health and longevity. He encouraged businesses to replace donuts, candy, and soda with healthier snacks. Restaurants added healthy options to their menus. Transportation experts designed a sidewalk loop around a lake in the middle of town and encouraged “walking school buses” by getting grandparents to walk their grandchildren to school. Dan and his team of experts encouraged people to form moais, the Japanese word for groups of people who support one another for life (see Day 10: Connect), and walk or exercise together in person instead of “connecting” on social media.
Dan didn’t tell people to exercise more, or tell them what to eat. He simply changed their immediate environment. In other words, he restructured the town in such a way as to make it easy for people to do the right thing. As a result, the town saw a 28 percent reduction in health care costs. Kids were no longer allowed to eat in classrooms or in the hallways at school; overall, they saw a 10 percent decrease in body weight. Dramatic changes happened just by altering the infrastructure. It was a groundbreaking experiment that proved the powerful transformational effect of designing your environment for success.
The key to changing habits is to understand how change really occurs. And for the most part, it occurs by design, not by accident or by wishful thinking. It occurs by transforming the unconscious choices we make every day, shifting them so that the automatic, easy, default choices become healthy choices, not deadly ones.
Stanford professor and social scientist BJ Fogg specializes in creating systems to change human behavior. He calls this behavior design. Fogg explains that in order to change behavior, you need three things: the motivation to change, the ability to change, and the trigger to change. If you want to eat a protein-filled breakfast for energy, then you have the motivation. Now you need the ability and a trigger.
For ability, you need to have the ingredients for the breakfast in your cupboard or fridge ready to go and easy to prepare. You might want to measure out the dry ingredients (nuts, seeds, or protein powder) and even put them in the blender the night before. Think low-friction behavior change, so easy you don’t even notice it.
Next, you need a trigger. Maybe you put the recipe for a protein shake on your fridge, with a big headline: “EAT THIS FOR BREAKFAST.” Maybe you get rid of all the other breakfast options in your house, or put them out of sight so that your hunger becomes the trigger. The point is, you need a catalyst for your new, chosen behavior. You need a built-in nudge that gets you moving in the right direction.
Here’s another example: If you are motivated to do chin-ups but never remember and don’t have a place to do them, they won’t happen. To build in the necessary ability and trigger, you might first purchase a chin-up bar and then install it in your bathroom or bedroom doorway so you see it every time you walk by. With this automatic ability-and-trigger set right in front of you, you will naturally fit in more chin-ups.
Today we’re going to focus on redesigning your environment to make it easy to do the right thing and create health. Our world is a hostile health environment (we live in a world of Double Gulps and Big Macs at every turn), so we need to create our own “health bubble.” I want you to discover how to sync up your motivation, your ability, and the environmental triggers to make doing the right thing automatic. We’re going to design your world to sustain your weight loss long after these ten days are up.
Where is your environment set up to help you stay on track and where does it trip you up? What can you do to make your actions automatic around food, exercise, and stress reduction? Let’s take the obstacles out of being healthy and fit!
Below, I’ve combined the Strategies and Journal Questions sections to help you uncover the obstacles and design your life for optimal health and weight loss. I encourage you to write the answers and plans down in your Detox Journal to cement your intention into commitment. Don’t skip this important step—it’s the key to your continued success.
Strategies for Healthy Life Design
Organize your kitchen for healthy meal preparation. You’ve already done a cupboard and fridge makeover for your 10-Day Detox, and that’s a great start. Now take a look around the rest of your kitchen—what would make it easy for you to continue to prepare and eat healthy meals forever? Perhaps you could:
Clean out your drawers and cabinets so they are free of clutter.
Make sure you have or buy all the cooking utensils you need to succeed.
Arrange your pots and pans for easier access.
Get smaller plates.
Refresh your supply of spices, condiments, oils, vinegars, and sauces so you can cook anything, at any time, without having to run out to the supermarket.
Find new recipes online or in cookbooks (such as The Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook) and put them in an easy-to-access place so they are ready when you need them.
Identify three things today that would help make your kitchen a source of healthy, nourishing meals. Write your plan for organizing your kitchen, including how and when you will do so, in your Detox Journal as a commitment to yourself. Be as specific as you can—the clearer your plan is and the more accountable you are to a timeline, the more likely you are to make it happen. Your written plan might look something like this:
| My Healthy Kitchen Fixes | My Strategy | How/When I Will Make It Happen |
| Make it easier to find and use my cooking utensils | Organize my pots and pans | This Saturday afternoon |
| Use smaller plates | Buy an inexpensive set of 8- or 10-inch dishes | Order these online tonight |
| Find some new recipes that my family likes | Read The Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook | Make one new recipe for family dinner on Friday night |
Stock your kitchen with the right stuff. After the detox, continue to fill your cabinets and fridge with all the ingredients and foods that promote health and well-being. You will inevitably open the fridge looking for something when you are hungry, tired, or stressed. So make sure the choices there are going to help you, not hurt you. Arrange the foods so that the healthiest ones are the most accessible and appealing. Cut up veggies and fruit and have them in little glass containers stacked for easy access. Stock healthy snacks (such as nuts, seeds, or grass-fed or organic turkey, beef, or buffalo jerky) so that they are easy to grab on the go when you’re in a hurry. Write a list of your favorite healthy go-to foods and snacks in your Detox Journal and commit to keeping them on hand from Day 11 onward.
Make your bedroom a sanctuary. Compared to your kitchen, your bedroom might not strike you as an influential area for your health and weight loss efforts, but it is. Is your bedroom designed to be a peaceful, stress-free environment that promotes rest? What prevents you from getting a good night’s sleep? Look around your bedroom and identify three things you can do to make it a place of rejuvenation. Options might include clearing away clutter, getting blackout shades, getting earplugs or an eye mask, or committing to reading instead of watching television before bedtime (see here for more of my favorite tips for winding down and getting to sleep easily). Record in your Detox Journal these three ideas for designing your restful bedroom and write a detailed plan for how and when you will implement them. Remember, be as specific as you can. Your written plan might look something like this:
| My Bedroom Adjustments | My Strategy | How/When I Will Make It Happen |
| Remove clutter | Clean off my nightstand | Saturday afternoon |
| Make it quieter | Get noise-reducing curtains | Measure my windows and go to the store next Sunday |
| Not falling asleep with the television on | Watch the evening news in the living room only | Every night this week |
Plan your food in advance. Think ahead! The goal is to prevent yourself from ending up in a food emergency in which the only thing open is a fast-food restaurant or convenience store. When do you typically get into that type of situation? Is it at 5 p.m. when you’re too tired to make dinner? When you’re pressed for time between daily commitments and on the run? Identify your top three “trouble time zones” and record in your Detox Journal a corresponding strategy to have food on hand to head off each. Be specific: What foods can you buy or make ahead of time to avert your common food emergencies? How, when, and where will you purchase or prepare these foods? You can also assemble what I call an Emergency Life Pack (see here) to carry with you to ensure you’re never stuck without healthy options. Your Detox Journal plan might look something like this:
| My Trouble Time Zones | My Strategy | How/When I Will Make It Happen |
| Mornings when I am rushing to get to work | Make breakfast in advance | Assemble the ingredients for my Breakfast Detox Shake tonight to have ready for tomorrow morning |
| Sunday late afternoon when I am too tired from weekend activities to make dinner | Prepare a bigger dinner Friday and Saturday nights so I have leftovers on Sunday | This Friday, I will cook ____, Saturday I will make ____, and Sunday we will enjoy the leftovers |
Make grocery shopping a weekly ritual. This goes hand in hand with planning your meals ahead of time. Keep a shopping list at the ready so you can add to it as the week goes along. Choose a specific day and time when you’ll shop each week so it becomes an ingrained ritual. Write your plan for weekly grocery shopping in your Detox Journal.
Plant healthy snacks in your environment. Put raw nuts or other healthy snacks in your glove compartment, desk drawer, purse, or backpack so they are within easy reach and allow you to safely bypass the vending machine or drive-through when you’re hungry. Write your specific plan in your Detox Journal for where, when, and what healthy foods you will plant in your environment. Your plan might look something like this:
Steer clear of your danger zones. If the drive-through you pass each morning on your way to work calls out to you like a siren song, chart another daily route. If the aroma from the bakery you walk past on your way to work is irresistible to you, walk down a different block. Put yourself—literally—on a path to health rather than temptation! Record in your Detox Journal your top danger zones and create a chart like this one:
| My Danger Zone | How I Will Avoid It | When I Will Implement My New Plan |
| The vending machines in the copy room at work | Make my copies on the floor below, where they have no vending machines | Next time I need to use the copy machine |
| The concession stand at the field where my child plays soccer | Set up my chair on the opposite side of the field, away from the concession stand, and bring my own drinks and snacks so I am not tempted | This Saturday |
Protect your health bubble in social situations. When and with whom do you find yourself feeling pressured or tempted to eat or drink things that work against your health goals? At work when they bring in platters of food and soda for lunch? When you are out with friends? At holidays with family? Identify your top three temptation zones (ideally ones that are current or immediately upcoming) and write in your Detox Journal your specific plan to protect yourself in those situations. Strategies include bringing your own food to events, telling your family about your eating plan so they are on board and supportive of your efforts, or eating some raw veggies and dip before you go out to dinner with friends so you are not so hungry and at the mercy of the bread basket. Your chart might look something like this:
| My Temptation Zone | My Strategy | How/When I Will Make It Happen |
| Dinner parties | Offer to bring one healthy dish I will eat | In three weeks, when we are going to the Smiths’ house for dinner |
| Out to dinner with my family | Ask my family to support me in my weight loss efforts (and respect my decision not to share desserts with them). Or pick the restaurant myself and find one with healthy options | This Friday night |
| Friday lunch meetings at work | Bring my own lunch so I am not tempted by the platters | Prepare lunch in advance every Thursday night |
Make exercise easy. Identify the top three obstacles that get in the way of your daily exercise. Is it having the clothing you need, clean and easy to access? When the weather is bad? Make a backup plan for your daily walk if the weather is bad (use the treadmill at a gym, try a workout DVD, etc.). Think about systems you can put into place to trigger you to do the right thing. For example, I hate push-ups, but I like showers, so every day before I get in the shower I do thirty to forty push-ups (I could only do ten when I started!). Write your specific plan in your Detox Journal for making exercise automatic and enjoyable. Other examples include:
| My Exercise Obstacle | My Strategy | How/When I Will Make It Happen |
| Inclement weather | Use the treadmill at the gym | Next rainy day |
| Lack of time | Build a thirty-minute exercise routine into my daily schedule as a permanent commitment | Input this into my electronic calendar so the time is automatically blocked off. (Use the seven-minute workout at the end of Day 4 as a back up.) |
| Boredom | Try a new fitness class | Register today for a Pilates class next Tuesday night |
Keep your supplies for self-nurturing practices at the ready. What three things can you do to keep your relaxation practices going? Ideas might include keeping your bathroom cabinet stocked with extra Epsom salts, baking soda, and lavender oil, so you always have what you need to take an UltraDetox Bath. Set a timer to remind you to do your meditation awareness practice. Think about what gives you peace and triggers your relaxation response, then set up your defaults so you can do those practices often. Create a chart in your Detox Journal like the following:
| Relaxation Practice I Will Continue | How I Will Make It Easy and Automatic to Do So | When I Will Implement My Plan |
| Take-Five Breathing Break before every meal | Put a note in my silverware drawer, so when I reach for a utensil to eat I am automatically reminded | Tonight |
| Meditation practice | Put a daily alert on my phone to go off each evening at 8 p.m. | As soon as I am done with this journal entry |
| Walking with my best friend on Saturday mornings | Every Friday night, check in with my friend to confirm we are on for the following morning | This Friday night |