Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives (13 page)

The conduct of our lives is the true reflection of our thoughts.

—Michel de Montaigne,
“Of the Education of Children”

A
clean slate can prompt us to make sudden and profound changes in our habits, both for good and for ill. But I discovered another, unexpected way to achieve an abrupt change—when, to my astonishment, I experienced this kind of new beginning, myself. But I didn't move to a new city or start a new job or get a puppy. None of my outward circumstances changed. All I did was read a book, and that action unleashed an enormous force: the Strategy of the Lightning Bolt.

Discussions of habit change often emphasize the importance of repeating an action, over and over, until it becomes automatic, and such repetition does indeed help to form habits. However, it's also true that
sometimes we're hit by a lightning bolt
that transforms our habits, instantly. We encounter some new idea, and suddenly a new habit replaces a long-standing habit—without preparation, without small steps, without wavering—and we pass from
before
to
after
in a moment. The Strategy of the Lightning Bolt takes its power from knowledge, beliefs, and ideas.

The Lightning Bolt is a highly effective strategy, but unfortunately, it's practically impossible to invoke on command. Unlike all the other strategies, it's not a strategy that we can decide to follow;
it's something that happens to us
. In an instant, we quit cursing or become vegetarian or begin a prayer practice or give up alcohol or stop using plastic shopping bags.

A milestone event—a marriage, a diagnosis, a death, an anniversary, hitting bottom, a birthday, an accident, a midlife crisis, a long journey taken alone—often triggers a Lightning Bolt, because we're smacked with some new idea that jolts us into change.

I know a doctor who treats many patients who have problems with drugs, alcohol, nicotine, junk food, and bad relationships. He told me, “There's one thing that sometimes allows people to change their habits overnight. They may have tried for years, but this happens and—bam, they're done, no problem.”

“
What?
” I asked.

“Oh, you know it,” he teased. “Think about it.”

“I have no idea.”

“Pregnancy,” he said. “Over and over, I've seen a woman find out she's pregnant, and she's able to make a change. Not always, but sometimes. The idea that she's now a mother, and that the health of her baby depends on her actions, makes it possible.”

But while sometimes a big event triggers a Lightning Bolt, sometimes it's something small, such as a passage in a book, a scene from a movie, or a casual comment by a stranger. A friend told me that he broke up with his girlfriend, and quit the heroin they'd both been using for years, when someone toldhim, “You act like she's the smarter one of the two of you, the better-looking one, the cooler one. But she's not,
you
are.”

“But how did such a simple observation unleash such a huge change?” I asked, stunned.

“I'm not really sure,” he answered. “It's just that I knew that was right. And I knew it was time to change.” The Zen saying is eerily true: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

A friend who lost thirty-five pounds told me, “My weight has been a constant battle in my life. I was working out with a trainer who pushed me too hard, and I got tears in the meniscus in both knees, and I was in a lot of pain. When I asked the doctor, ‘What can I do about this?' he said, ‘Well, losing weight would help.' All of a sudden, it hit me. The pain will get worse; it won't get better unless I change.”

A new insight can inspire a flash change. A friend was chronically late dropping off her son at sports activities until he said, “You're always late dropping me off because it doesn't affect you, but you're always on time to pick me up because you'd be embarrassed to be the last parent at pickup.” She was never late again. Or change may be triggered by some small incident, as in the case of my friend who got in shape after he couldn't play touch football at his twenty-fifth college reunion.

The most surprising kind of Lightning Bolt is the bolt-from-the-blue change, which seems to lack any perceptible cause. A friend who smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for years quit smoking instantly. One night, on her way to meet someone for dinner, she was pulling a cigarette out of the pack when she thought, “Why am I doing this? Time to stop.” She threw the pack in the trash and never smoked again. The physical discomfort lasted for three months, but she never wavered. “I just wasn't a smoker anymore,” she told me. She hadn't planned ahead, she hadn't consciously been considering quitting, but she was hit by that Lighting Bolt.

A reader posted about a more modest change: “I dreaded my dentist appointment because I knew they'd ask how often I floss. It occurred to me that I could just floss every day, and then that question would never bother me. It puzzles me why the solution suddenly became so obvious and so easy in that moment.”

Because the Strategy of the Lightning Bolt violates the assumption that habits are most enduring when they accrue gradually, some people overlook or dismiss it. But if it strikes, the Lightning Bolt can be enormously powerful, so we should watch for it and take advantage of its effortless, instantaneous change whenever we feel it at work in our minds.

I experienced a Lightning Bolt when a new idea about food overturned my existing beliefs. I started a radical new habit almost on a whim, and since I started, I've never stopped.

I hadn't expected to make this change. When packing for a family beach vacation, I'd thrown in
Gary Taubes's book
Why We Get Fat
. I wasn't interested in reading the book to lose weight myself. While I was careful about what I chose to eat, I was pretty comfortable with my current weight. I was intrigued by the title, however, and when I'd flipped through the book, I'd noticed that it included an extensive discussion of insulin—a subject that has interested me ever since Elizabeth was diagnosed with diabetes.

I read the entire book in two days, and it hit me with the force of the Lightning Bolt. Taubes's book makes a compelling case for “why we get fat,” based on widely accepted facts about how the body works, observations of large populations, and a thorough review of the scientific research. It focuses on the effects of insulin, the hormone that's the main regulator of blood sugar and the use and storage of fat. There's no debate about the basic facts: a high insulin level causes the body to move glucose into fat cells to be stored, which means that the body will accumulate fat; a low insulin level causes glucose to be burned as fuel. And what causes a body's insulin level to be high or low? For the most part, diet. The more carbohydrates a person eats, and the easier these carbohydrates are to metabolize, the more insulin in the blood, and the more fat that accumulates.

Therefore, Taubes argues—and this is where controversy sets in—that
in order to lower insulin
and the body's tendency to accumulate fat, we should avoid eating easily digestible, high-carb food: sugar, bread, cereal, grains, pasta, potatoes, rice, corn, juice, beer, wine, soda. Taubes maintains that the
quantity and quality of carbohydrates
, not calories or exercise, chiefly accounts for why we get fat.

Taubes's heavily researched and carefully argued conclusions came as a shock to me. Since high school, I'd tried hard to eat healthfully. I ate almost no sugary foods and rarely drank alcohol. Oatmeal was one of my staples, along with thin-sliced whole-wheat bread, fruit, brown rice, and breakfast cereal with skim milk. For years, I'd made a hobby of eating the nonfat version of everything: nonfat yogurt, skim milk, egg whites only, turkey burgers. I almost never ate cheese or red meat.

I hadn't been planning to alter the way that I ate, but reading
Why We Get Fat
triggered a Lightning Bolt change in me. I saw my staple foods in a completely different way. Whole grains are carbohydrates.
Meat is fine
. Dietary fat, unsaturated or saturated, doesn't cause obesity or heart disease. Practically all processed foods are loaded with carbs. I put down the book, and overnight, I changed my entire approach to food.

Vacation was an excellent place to start. Because we were staying at a hotel, I didn't need to shop or cook different foods; I just ordered differently from the menu. With considerable trepidation, that first morning, instead of getting my usual hotel breakfast of bran cereal, skim milk, and fruit salad, I ate scrambled eggs and
bacon
.

Over the next several weeks, I continued to eat completely different foods from before, and the effect was dramatic. I was eating more calories than I had in years, I was never hungry between meals (which had been a real problem before), and pounds kept dropping off me until I stabilized at an all-time adult low, close to the bottom of my healthy weight range. I was convinced.

The Lightning Bolt gave me the passion of the new believer, and as a low-carb zealot, I became inspired to try to persuade others. My first real convert was my father. Eating healthfully is an important issue for him. He's in his mid-seventies, and he was always trying to lose some weight. He's taken statins and blood pressure medication for years. He's very focused on heart health because his grandfather died at sixty-four, and his father died at fifty-seven, both from heart attacks.

For me, a Lightning Bolt triggered the changes in my eating habits, but when my father changed his eating habits, it was due less to a sudden Lightning Bolt (though I'm sure that he was impressed by the abrupt transformation I underwent) and more to an appeal to his Questioner nature, through his exposure to a new arguments and data. I told him to read
Why We Get Fat
and
Good Calories, Bad Calories
, and he became entirely convinced by the research. Instead of making a dramatic, overnight change, as I'd done, he began by making a few simple substitutions—having a side of vegetables instead of potatoes and ordering steak instead of pasta. Getting good results convinced him of the validity of the low-carb approach, and over time he began to follow it more rigorously.

“I'm inching down toward two hundred pounds, and my weight just slowly keeps dropping,” he reported several weeks after he'd read the book. “I can eat this way forever.”

“But he's still drinking wine,” added my mother, who was also on the phone.

“Yes, that'd be the last thing to go,” he said cheerfully. “But I'm still seeing a good result.”

“Progress, not perfection,” I told him. “Even if you make exceptions sometimes, you're eating better than before.”

My father had read the book and embraced this approach with gratifying enthusiasm, but most people were skeptical. One friend, in particular, thought I'd lost my mind and quizzed me at length.

“You don't eat
fruit
?” he asked. (I've learned it's the fact that I don't eat fruit that makes many people decide I'm crazy.)

“Sometimes I eat berries,” I said. “Look, I know it sounds extreme, but it really doesn't feel that way.”

I knew how unlikely that must sound to him, but it was true. I read a book, and suddenly, effortlessly, I ate in a completely different way—it was as if those other foods were no longer edible. But that's the power of the Lightning Bolt.People raise valid environmental and humane concerns about eating meat, but I'm more focused on the aspect of nutrition and health.

Plus, as often happens with habits, the habit became self-reinforcing. Once I stopped eating carbs, I lost my taste for them. Whether or not people actually get “addicted” to sugar, the more I ate foods like bread, cereal, and sweets, the more I wanted them. Now I don't even think about them.

“So when do you go back to eating normally?” my friend asked.

“This
is
eating normally.” No finish line.

He shook his head. He had no interest in giving this approach a try.

After I'd adopted my new eating habits, I saw my friend, the hilarious writer A. J. Jacobs, at a reading for his book
Drop Dead Healthy
, at a hip indie bookstore in Brooklyn. Before his talk, I quizzed him about his decision, described in the book, to follow a mostly plant-based diet rather than a low-carb diet.

“But A. J.,” I said, “I can't believe you weren't convinced about the low-carb approach.”

He laughed. “There are a lot of scientists making arguments on the other side.”

“Yes, but I've read all the arguments, and these arguments are better. Plus I've tried eating this way myself, and I'm less hungry and weigh less.”

“But Gretchen, you're a data point of one,” he pointed out. Meaning the experience of just one person isn't scientifically valid.

“True, but I'm the only data point I care about. That's the
most persuasive data point
!”

The person I really wanted to persuade about eating low-carb was my sister, Elizabeth, but I wasn't sure how to broach it. Because she's a type 1 diabetic, I believed this way of eating might help her bring her blood sugar level down and decrease her need for insulin. But Elizabeth bristles at requirements, and she dislikes having to give things up, and her diabetes already demanded so much from her. She had to inject herself with insulin five times a day, wear a monitor on her stomach, visit the doctor frequently, and watch what she ate. In general, she kept an eye on insulin-jacking foods such as bread, sugar, and potatoes, but she “cheated” fairly often and dealt with it by increasing her insulin dosage.
Why We Get Fat
would make the case that she should take a far stricter approach to her eating, which I knew she wouldn't like, so I kept delaying the conversation.