Obesity-Proof Your Environment
Updated on July 28, 2007
You baby-proof your home when you have infants, toddlers, or preschoolers because they just can't help themselves. They are compelled to do things even when they know they shouldn't. They have no impulse control, NONE! They see something they want and they go for it without thinking through the consequences. Adults are not much different.
Impulsiveness
Humans have impulses, sudden urges to do things regardless of whether or not they should. It's a good thing. It's what helps our species progress. If we never felt compelled to venture into the unknown, we would never explore and invent. If we never felt compelled to return to the familiar, we would have never developed civilizations. The existence of compulsion is good.
Impulsiveness is built into us. It's the reason why toddlers reach for things immediately after we tell them "Don't touch!" It's the reason why we eat the bag of cookies when we know we shouldn't. We usually don't think about our impulses. We just do them: "I want that, so I take it." It is often after the fact or even during the act that we may realize what we are doing and judge whether or not it's a good idea. By then, the damage is done, and all we can do is feel guilty.
Environmental Triggers
Impulses rarely develop out of nowhere. They usually have a trigger.
You don't just wake up one day and say I'm going to eat an entire apple pie (most of the time). You end up encountering a trigger, and in this case, the trigger is probably an apple pie. You see it, smell it, hear it, read about it on the menu, talk about it, etc. It enters into your consciousness, and you suddenly feel compelled to eat it.
Avoiding Environmental Triggers
If you want to avoid triggers, you have to change your environment.
Imagine a drug rehab clinic that didn't have a no-drugs-allowed policy. How successful do you think the patients would be in overcoming their drug addiction if they knew that at any time they could just walk down the hall and get their fix? For successful treatment, the environment must be drug-proofed. When the patient goes home, his home is drug-proofed. Even his social circle is drug-proofed by changing the group of people he hangs around with (and it's difficult to break up relationships, but it must be done). The consequences of not drug-proofing the environment is relapse. The patient will fall right back into old habits, and in this case, those old habits are deadly.
Your obesity habits are deadly as well. You are not a drug addict, but you are a patient with a chronic disease. Like a drug addict, alcoholic, or tobacco user, you need to structure your environment to avoid relapse. Get rid of your triggers!
Trash Your Environmental Triggers
That stash of candy in your cabinet...trash it.
Those potato chips...trash them.
Get yourself a trash bag and fill it with everything in your home that's a trigger. Don't feel guilty about throwing out the food. If you were really worried about starving children, you would have given that food to them rather than eating it yourself. If you were really worried about wasting money, you wouldn't have bought the food in the first place (you lost money when you bought and you'll lose even more money in medical bills when you eat it, so you're actually saving yourself some cash).
Feel free to cry while you watch your ice cream melt in the sink, but don't lick it up. Don't worry, this doesn't mean that you'll never have these yummy treats again. It just means that you refuse to let these yummy treats kill you. You refuse to give up your power to a candy bar.
"But what about my family? I can't deprive them." They shouldn't be eating that junk either. By trashing your triggers, you are teaching your kids that treats are fine once in awhile, but they aren't supposed to be a daily part of their diet. You're also teaching them that it is important to control obesity. (After all, they probably have the obesity genes too.)
Get Started
Start at one end of your kitchen and go through each shelf, cabinet, and drawer. Clean it all out.
Go through your house. If you have any hiding spots for food, empty them out. If you keep food in little decorative bowls throughout the house as if it's artwork, dump those too. Fill them with something less edible.
Clean out your backpacks and glove boxes.
Stick it all in a trash bag and dump it.
Don't worry about what you'll eat instead. "If I throw out all of my triple-sized frozen dinners and chocolate chip cookies, what am I going to eat?" This is when you'll need to learn some new healthy eating habits, but you have to dump the junk first.
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