Factors that promote a better diet
Given the massive benefits of eating better, why don’t most Australians (and Americans) eat a healthy diet? What distinguishes people who change their diet for the better and maintain those changes over the long term? Researchers in Western Australia recruited and interviewed 20 residents who self-reported significant positive changes in their diet and who maintained these changes for at least 2 years.
Five themes emerged from 23-72-minute semi-structured interviews. The themes included 1) a desire to feel better, 2) investigation and learning, 3) helpful habits, 4) benefits, and 5) values. The authors noted that more information—simply telling people about the benefits of eating better or the downsides from eating junk food—usually does not lead to better eating.
Desire to feel better
Participants wanted to feel better and thought that dietary changes might help them resolve or at least improve health and weight issues. Desires to improve overall health, reduce body weight, and improve appearance fell in this category. Participants presumably had some degree of dissatisfaction with their current situation that they could rectify by eating a better diet.
Investigation and learning
Investigation and learning refers participants finding information that led them to consider dietary change. Previously, participants often didn’t think much about what they ate, but finding a key piece of information often led participants to realize that what they ate might influence how they felt. While this statement might seem obviously true, some studies suggest that people who eat an unhealthy think that their diet is, in fact, reasonably healthful.
Helpful habits
Participants adopted healthy habits that made healthy eating easier. For example, participants mentioned meal planning, cooking a big pot of stew for multiple meals, eating at home more often, and eating out less often.
The conventional wisdom holds that people with high self-control are more likely to eat a healthy diet because they usually resist temptations, such as overcoming the urge to buy a carton of ice cream at the grocery store. Recent evidence suggests that people with high self-control have developed adaptive habits that largely avoid situations in which they would purchase or consume unhealthy foods.
Researchers in the Netherlands conducted a study in which 77 young, normal-weight Dutch adults (nearly all women) kept a food diary in which they recorded the amount of snacks they consumed over one week. In addition, the researchers evaluated participants’ self-control and habit strengths of eating unhealthy snacks. As predicted, as self-control increased, unhealthy snack consumption and unhealthy snacking habits decreased. In addition, habit strength mediated the relation between self-control and unhealthy snack intake. Thus, developing adaptive habits, such as avoiding the ice cream aisle at the grocery store, may promote a healthier diet more effectively than relying on will power.
B. J. Fogg at Stanford University developed a comprehensive approach to developing new desired habits and jettisoning old undesired habits. His book, Tiny Habits – The Small Changes That Change Everything, focuses on the optimal mix of motivation and ability where behaviors can be habituated with the aid of well-considered prompts. I found the book to be highly readable and practical.
Benefits
Participants started to realize the benefits of eating better, such as improved health and greater mental clarity. Apparently, realization of the benefits of healthy eating likely arose from an awareness of feeling better and linking the perceived benefits to better eating.
Values
Motivation to continue healthy eating reflected a set of values aligned with better health, including participants regarding healthy eating as a new way of life. Values may extend more broadly to ethical concerns related to confined animal feeding operations and the potential environmental downsides of eating lots of feedlot-finished red meat.
Self-determination Theory
The findings of these studies align with three basic aspects of Self-Determination Theory. Richard Ryan and Edward Deci at the University of Rochester in New York spent 30 years developing this body of research. Ryan and Deci have identified three basic human needs that must be met for optimal growth and behavioral regulation. These needs include 1) feeling competent (as opposed to incompetent) to make behavioral changes, 2) having a sense of personal autonomy that we are in charge of our own lives (as opposed to being controlled by others), and 3) feeling connected to other people (as opposed to feeling socially isolated or alone).
According to Ryan and Deci, those of us who have attained these three basic human needs can change our behavior (such as eating better) due to intrinsic motivation (arising from within us) rather than extrinsic motivation (arising from the outer world). Ideally, a person who wants to eat better would feel that his motivation to do so comes from within as a consequence of feeling that he is able to make better dietary choices, that he is in charge of what he eats, and that he is meaningfully connected to and supported by other people.
A lifetime of research by Ryan, Deci, and others suggests that people who live in an atmosphere of autonomy and relatedness and who develop feelings of competence are more likely to be predisposed to make healthy choices and experience a life of well-being than those who live in an atmosphere of external control, social isolation, and feelings of incompetence.
