mindlessly eating lean

95% of Diets Fail – We know this.

So, what makes the 5% that Succeed?? Evidence suggests that it’s ingrained within our
habits (1).

The goal of any habit is for it to become mindless, effortless & autonomic. We simply do not
have to think about the process of how it is done or why it is so – it simply gets done.
Our self-image and our habits tend to go together. Change one and you will
automatically change the other. Therefore, the way you relate to yourself
and the identity you believe to possess will carry over into the daily actions
you complete without thought process.

The habits operating in your life, conscious or unconscious, “good” or
“bad”, are serving you in projecting your current self-image onto the screen
of your life. In other words, working deductively from effect back to cause, if
you look at your habits you can track them back to how you really feel
about yourself. This is true of both your good and bad habits (2).

Have you ever driven somewhere and forgotten the path you took to get there? You’ve done
the trip so many times that it’s as if your car and limbs simply know the way there without
conscious thought to (pun intended) drive you? This is an example of a mindless habit.
The more we repeat a behaviour pattern or sequence of action, the more we ingrain the habit
without our thought process. This is why breaking habits can be so hard. It’s not 21 days to
make a habit, no, studies suggest it’s more like 60 days! (3) That’s the repetition need to
change the myelin within our brain.

There certainly is hacks tips to optimising this but none of those will matter if you cannot
sustain the behaviour long term. This is why we use the phrase ‘The best diet for you, is the
one you can stick to’. That also means the best way of eating is one that supports your
lifestyle and goal physique to the point of becoming effortless.

One cannot simply go from poverty macros post ‘Cut’ or ‘Dieting phase’ to no food tracking
and simply eating whatever your palate or emotions/neurotransmitters desire. Whether that be
calorically or nutritionally. This is the whole reason behind the inability of clean eaters to
simply eat cleaner to get leaner. It doesn’t work like that. Going from Macro tracking a low-
calorie diet to ‘Intuitive eating’ is a sure-fire way to gain new fat cells rapidly and to increase
the fat cell size of those we already possess. Our body will prioritise the storage of fat in
order to prepare for the next food scarcity time. The more you yo-yo diet, the more you train
your body to add more fat mass. It is not starvation mode but rather pre-emptive planning on
your body’s part. It wants to protect you. You can see this in the studies generated by Layne
Norton in his Fat Loss forever books (4). The study in rats showed.

This is why the path to food freedom and long-term health in a leaner physique require
stepping stones. This is not only habit based but also palate based. It takes 10 days for a new
set of  tastebuds & 6 weeks for a new gut lining. The set-up of our gut as well as our tastebuds
heavily influence our food choices (5). This means periods of food elimination or (for lack of
a better word) ‘Eating Clean’ can help to set up your tastebuds to a more advantageous state
conducive to caloric control when not tracking i.e.” More fibre based, nutrient dense yet
calorically sparse foods that generally do not tip you over the edge of your TDEE.