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Struggling to stick to your goals? In the upcoming 6 Saboteurs of Self-Control Workshop, we’ll uncover the six hidden obstacles that sabotage your progress and teach you how to overcome them. From breaking free of autopilot habits to tackling self-doubt and emotional escapism, this live session offers practical tools and strategies to help you make better choices and stay aligned with your values. Join us on Sunday, January 12 at 12pm ET and take the first step toward lasting change.

In this episode, Michelle Segar explains the importance of understanding choice points for lasting changes in eating and exercise. She is an expert in sustainable behavior change for health and well-being and provides valuable insights and strategies for implementing consistent and lasting lifestyle changes. Michelle’s insights shed light on the complexities of habit formation, challenging conventional approaches and advocating for a more holistic and compassionate perspective.

Key Takeaways:

• Mastering the art of transforming unskillful behavior into skillful actions for lasting change
• Overcoming the motivation bubble to unlock the secrets of healthy habit success
• Unveiling powerful strategies for building and maintaining consistent exercise and eating habits
• Harnessing the role of executive functions in making healthy choices for a thriving lifestyle
• Embracing value-based decision making for sustainable and meaningful behavior change

Connect with Michelle Segar: Website | X

Michelle Segar is an award-winning researcher at the University of Michigan. She has been a sustainable behavior change scientist and health coach for almost 30 years. Her work investigates how to help people adopt self-care behaviors, like exercise and healthy eating, in ways that bring joy and meaning, and can survive the complexity and unpredictability of the real world. She has authored two popular books (No Sweat, The Joy Choice), advises the World Health Organization on their physical activity initiatives, and was selected as the inaugural chair of the United States National Physical Activity Plan’s Communication Committee. Her pragmatic work is being scaled to boost patient health, employee well-being, and gym membership retention.

If you enjoyed this episode with Michelle Segar, check out these other episodes:

Michelle Segar (Interview from 2016)

How to Meet Yourself with Dr. Nicole LePera

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Episode Transcript:

Chris Forbes  00:19

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michelle Seager, an award winning researcher at the University of Michigan with almost 30 years studying how to help people adopt healthy behaviors in ways that can survive the complexity and unpredictability of the real world. Michele’s first book, No Sweat was featured in The New York Times and won the 2015 Best Book Awards in the diet and exercise category. It also became the number one selling book in Amazon’s exercise and fitness category. When released today, Michelle and Eric discuss her new book, The Joy choice how to finally achieve lasting changes in eating and exercise.

Eric Zimmer  01:54

Hi, Michelle, welcome to the show.

Michelle Segar  01:56

Thank you. It is great to be here again.

Eric Zimmer  01:59

Yes, I am. So happy to have you on I was saying to you before we started that, I don’t remember when we talked to you, it’s probably at least four years ago, but the conversation really has stuck with me since then. It’s one of the things I reference a lot, which is the basic idea that you know, the key is just to move in any way. Anytime that you can, and that everything counts, you know, those things really, really left an impression on me. But you’ve got a new book out called The Joy choice how to finally achieve lasting changes in eating and exercise. And we’ll get into that a second. But let’s start like we always do with a parable. In the parable. There’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One is the Good Wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, thinks about it for a second and looks up at their grandparents and says, Well, which one wins. And the grandparent replies, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life. And in the work that you do.

Michelle Segar  03:08

I love that you started the podcast this way. It’s a profound, foundational thing, both I would say in my life and in my work. And this time around, I actually am going to tell you a quote that is so meaningful to me. And I think it has to do with this what you just read the parable. And it’s from Dan Siegel, who I’m sure your listeners know where our attention goes, neural firing flows, and neural connections grow. And so putting that parable within, you know, this essential neuroscience, which speaks to how important it is for us to feed the wolf that we really want to become, if you will, the virtues that we want to embody and live at. But I also I think it’s really important to bring the challenge to doing that it sounds logical to say, Well, if we feed the right wolves, then we’re going to live in the way we really value living. And again, I value this I believe in it. And it’s still challenging sometimes because and this is the thing because it takes conscious awareness before we feed the wealth and having conscious awareness number one enables us to see what we’re about to do and potentially to make a different choice to feed the Good Wolf, the one that again, represents what we aim to do.

Eric Zimmer  04:42

Yeah, I mean, so much of the quote unquote bad wolf behavior in our lives is completely unconscious, as you said, it’s just running on autopilot. It’s just the default behavior that we’ve either been conditioned into that we are left with after we deal with all our stresses and problems and busyness. The parable is a little dramatic, right? I mean, it’s, you know, good wolf and Bad Wolf. And, you know, I’ve always preferred the Buddhist terms of skillful and unskillful. Right. But as I’ve joked, many a time, a parable about an unskilful, Wolf just doesn’t work the same. But that’s really what we’re talking about. So most of our unskillful behavior is happening on autopilot. And we have to be able to bring things to conscious awareness in order to change them. And that is, at least half the battle.

Michelle Segar  05:31

I think when we first spoke about this five to seven years ago, I don’t know that I raised that issue. That’s why it’s so wonderful to have an opportunity to rethink. Well, what does it mean, to me today, that idea is so important to me that it is pasted on my wall right in front of me. So it’s hard to do when we have the intention. And when we practice, we get better at it.

Eric Zimmer  05:57

Yep, absolutely. So I want to pivot to the book. And I want to start with the idea that a lot of us who are listening, many, if not most of us have had significant challenges in building consistent exercise and eating habits. They are elusive for many, many, many people. And so a lot of this conversation where we’re going to start is trying to explore why that is. And then we’ll move into some of the ways we can solve that. But you start off by saying we initiate a change in eating or exercise in what you call a motivation bubble. Say a little bit more about what a motivation bubble is.

Michelle Segar  06:35

The motivation bubble, is a concept that just came to me when I was talking to a journalist about why we start and stop and start and stop endlessly. It’s because we’ve been taught to approach exercise, intentional eating in this way that focuses us on very aspirational goals. And of course, if we’re going to achieve aspirational goals, then we’ve got to do it right. And we have to do it precise in precise ways. And if you think about that, as a bubble, it’s this big thing. And we often don’t think of exercise or healthy eating. In the same way we think about parenting or our work or being a life partner with someone, it’s separate. And it’s over there. And we have to do it right. And I’m going to plan it. And it’s on a separate trajectory than everything else. It’s a bubble that is in a different orbit from the other life bubbles that we live in. And so because it’s so overinflated, by the moment, we make it whether it’s New Years, whether it’s leaving our doctor’s office, and we’re finally going to please them or do it right, or whatever it is, it bumps up against any other life area, and it just bursts. It’s fragile, because it’s overinflated.

Eric Zimmer  07:55

Yeah, I love that idea of how these bubbles rub up against the other areas of our life. And, you know, that’s a fundamental idea that runs through this book. And it’s a fundamental idea that I learned through coaching a lot of people over the years. And that idea, and you say it very well in the book, and in many different ways. The core idea, though, that you say is that habits require a stable context, to form. So that’s great. However, most of our lives are not anywhere near a stable context. If you have a demanding job, and you have children, and you have perhaps aging parents, and you have a social life, and I mean, our contexts are never stable, they’re always changing. And like I said, I really figured that out working with people where I’d be like, well, let’s just, you know, every morning at 10am, you’re gonna do X, right? And there’s a lot of benefit in some degree of specificity. And what do you do if 10 o’clock every day? You have no idea quite what’s going to be going on then? And so this idea of a stable context, share a little bit more about that.

Michelle Segar  09:03

Sure. And I want to say, I believe planning is very important. Yeah. So if we don’t plan something, it is unlikely to happen. So this concept that we’re talking about, it’s not mutually exclusive of planning. It’s actually what we have to do when our plans don’t work out. Yes. But before we go to that issue, I want to stay focused on your question about the stable context. So habit formation, which is doing something automatically without the need for cognition or effort or willpower is wildly popular. There’s been a lot of best selling books about it over well, quite a few years, but it’s become even more popular recently. Part of the reason it’s become more popular is because it is an easy way to develop apps. So if people are trying to develop fitness apps or different types of apps, it seems like oh, I’ll you Use the habit loop and I’ll create my app around, it’s very easy. And it makes sense. But the problem is, is that what works in theory doesn’t necessarily and often doesn’t work in reality. And so let’s go back to the stable context. habit formation is based on in academia, it’s discussed a little differently than, you know, the three steps of the habit loop, which is a context cue that is stable, it requires stability, then we’ve got to step to the behavior, let’s say, flossing, we associate that the cue is either putting our toothbrush down or walking in the bathroom at night, whatever that cue is that you’ve established. And then three is some type of reward with flossing, that could be a feeling of a clean mouth or accomplishment or whatever the reward is. Now, with a behavior like flossing that happens in the bathroom, often at night, after the kids are asleep, there’s not a lot of room for disrupting that context. But when we step out of the bathroom, into the realities of our full life context, and daily needs, like you introduced in the beginning, there are so many forces and unexpected things that we simply don’t know are going to happen. And the habit loop is based on the assumption that this context is going to remain stable. But when we’re talking about more complicated behaviors, that might have multi steps that might have a lot of resentment or ambivalence with them, like exercise, and intentional eating tends to have while those forces easily disrupt the context cue. And so that’s why the whole concept of habit formation, its value has been over generalized in the field of health promotion, because health promoting behaviors are much more complicated than a simple behavior, like flossing our teeth.

Eric Zimmer  12:03

Yeah. And it’s really interesting. You know, we’ve interviewed many of the leading proponents of the popular writing about habits, and there’s a lot of wisdom in there. And there is limitation in there. You know, let’s take BJ Fogg and tiny habits, right, a great method. But like, how do you scale from a tiny habit to a big habit? I mean, there’s some ways to do it. But there’s a point where it crosses over from something that can be automated to something that really can’t that’s and you know, I love what you just said there, because you pulled out two really important things, two things that are working against us. One is just the chaos of life. Yes, I plan to go to the gym this morning at 8am. And I woke up, my kid has a fever. Okay, well, not going to the gym. Right? Right. So we’ve got all these external things. And then you brought up the fact that we often have all this ambivalence inside of us around this. And when those two things collide, it’s a disaster, right? Because maybe I could overcome the internal ambivalence. If I can get just a routine going, you know, I often think I can’t make a habit out of exercise, but I can build momentum around it, you know, I can get some energy behind it, where it’s way easier to do than it used to be maybe when I was first starting the habit. So you’ve got these external things that rub up against the internal, we all would know this phenomenon, which is that like, Okay, we are supposed to be working out at 10am, we get a call from our boss at 10 o’clock. And at 1010, we’re done. And we don’t work out, right, we could. But that combination, we’ve got just enough excuse that is now rubbed up against our internal ambivalence, that it just comes off the rails.

Michelle Segar  13:40

And that’s why I don’t want to leave this conversation prematurely, because it’s so foundational to everything else we’re going to talk about, but that is why I call them decision disruptors and decision traps, because it’s that internal self talk. That, by the way, is not our fault. It does not derive from us, it derives from outside of us. We’ve internalized it through our socialization, through the education we’ve received in society and the media and research, you know, from our clinicians office, everything we’ve learned about exercise and eating has taught us to think about it in a very myopic, and really unhelpful way for most people. I mean, why is it that we think of exercise and healthy eating with this need for precision with this need to hit a bullseye? When all these other life areas, again, things that we want to sustain for life being parents, good parents, hopefully, but guess what, there’s ups and downs in our parenting. There’s ups and downs in our relationships, in our marriages, there’s ups and downs in our career, but we don’t bring that same sensibility and wisdom, yeah, to eating and exercise, but it’s again, it is not our fault as individuals. It is simply the way we’ve learned to approach it and I have To say some behavior change strategies cultivate a type of a precision thinking, which doesn’t help most people. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  15:07

there’s a world of difference between something that you can manage to sort of keep rolling for 30 days, versus something that you’re going to keep rolling for 30 years, nearly any relationship can survive 30 days. But very few can survive 30 years, and it’s a completely different orientation. And so we’ll get to orientation around exercise and eating like why our orientation is difficult there. But let’s stay for a couple of minutes on this idea of habits when they work. And when they don’t you talk about people being habitus or inhabiting. What does that mean? Sure.

Michelle Segar  15:45

Well, you know, I want to be clear that that was a playful concept that I created, to get us to think more critically about what we’ve been taught about how to change our behavior, whether it’s worked for us why it may or may not work for us why it may or may not work for other people. So as you know, in my book, I use my husband, as an example, a pure habit or, and while I contend in the book, and I’ve been doing a lot of talking about this recently, that habit formation is not going to work for most people, when it comes to complex health promoting behaviors. It does work for some people. And my husband is a great example of this, because He has created a frictionless experience, again, to create his context cue for his exercise habit in the morning, he sleeps in his exercise clothes, and I always say, thank goodness, he is a good laundry person. And his alarm goes off at you know, five 530 In the morning, I’m not sure exactly what time because I am still sleeping, and he goes into the basement, he’s already dressed gets on the bike, exercises, no one else in the house is up. And then he has a sense of satisfaction. So his reward and I have asked him about it, his reward is that he feels like he’s accomplished something. And it’s often the only thing he feels that way about. So some people can do that. But he’s a habit or in all areas of his life. And this isn’t necessarily true for everyone. But I have tended in my coaching to to see that people who succeed with a complex behavior, like exercise or healthy eating, often are quite disciplined, often structure their life so that it doesn’t have a lot of interruptions, they check off their to do lists most of it everyday because of who they are. And I believe that they represent a minority of the population. And they have that innate self discipline to push through even when they don’t want to do something.

Eric Zimmer  17:50

I want to pick up that for a minute, but I’m not going to we’ll come back around to it. Because I think there’s a lot in there. That is actually very interesting, because I think some of what he’s doing is sort of best practices, right for this. So some of it is he’s naturally oriented that way. And, you know, the other is, he’s figured out how to get up at the time that nothing else is going to get in the way. You know, it’s people often ask me like, Well, should I exercise in the morning or the evening? I’m like, Well, the first answer is, it totally depends on you. Right? The second answer would be assuming there’s not a strong preference for in your life, morning tends to be better. And the reason morning tends to be better as less things can get in your way in the morning, right? By the time six o’clock rolls around any number of emergencies could have occurred in your career in your family at 6am. There’s far less of them. So there is something to be said for he’s done that, but I think what you just pointed to is there’s a rigidity, yes, in that. And some people don’t want to make this agenda. But I have seen this where, particularly in child rearing families where the father is able to sort of get some rigidity, and the mother doesn’t because she’s the front line of the support. And so it’s not fair to compare those two people in that way. Because their context are very different.

Michelle Segar  19:08

That’s right. And you know, what you’re speaking to is the chapter on chaos. Yes, the fact that research does show that the more chaos in the house, and of course, the person who is primarily responsible for managing the chaos has a much less ability to stick to the plan. Yeah, right, which is the quote unquote, we’re not using the word rigidity in a negative way. It’s descriptive, right? Yes, there still tends to be a gender that is primarily in charge of child rearing and house management. And it does tend to be the female but it really any whichever parent is going to be primarily responsible for these issues. I mean, think about how much on an anticipated unexpected Yeah, there is in our life is singular individuals. And now add on top of that, 123 Kids Yeah, maybe a couple of That’s, and you know, whatever else that might be going on, and that exponentially increases the amount of interruption that our self care behaviors are going to have.

Eric Zimmer  20:12

Yep. So let’s explore a couple of assumptions underlying you know, why habits don’t work for inhabiting? Sure got a few different assumptions. I don’t think we need to hit all of them. But you want to hit a couple of them?

Michelle Segar  20:26

Sure. Well, one of them. We’ve already spoken about this. So I’m just going to check a box by literally saying one of the assumptions of successful habit formation is that it’s going to work equally well across behaviors, because the books talk about many different types of behaviors they generalize. And so we know that that isn’t true based on how you and I’ve just been talking about, and even in the habit literature, which is, you know, going to be the most precise discussion of habit formation in the academic literature. There’s even a nuanced new conversation going on in that literature about xi is habit formation really appropriate for a complex multi step behavior, like physical activity. And so they’re, they’re discussing it right now. But I think it’s important to point out that that is occurring, and it’s a more nuanced, important conversation. Another assumption I can check the box on really quickly is that it’s going to work equally well for everyone. While we already talked about certain roles and responsibilities, really make that a much heavier, if not impossible, lift. And in fact, the most popular study that gets quoted both I would say, in academia and in industry, is a 2010 study that assessed how long it takes to form habits. Do you know that study that I’m talking about, it gets talked about all the time, and it it basically says while there’s a huge variation between behaviors, and people from like, 18 days to 256, something in that range, so huge variation, which is so huge, that it’s almost, it’s basically meaningless. But the 66 day average still gets talked about, even though it’s an average of, you know, 18 days over 200. But the important thing about that getting it everybody is that the study was conducted among university students who are very have very different lives. And yet, even among a group of students who have a lot more flexibility, traditionally 50%, at least of those University participants did not achieve the automaticity status, that that 66 day average is about so we have to ask, if students who tend to not be juggling all these things that we’ve been talking about, can achieve automaticity Wow. Then how are people who are you know, have a few kids, you know, and work outside of the home and have aging parents? The third thing I want to say is that the assumption is that automating our choices about exercise, and healthy eating is the ideal because in theory, automating it, yes, I don’t want to have to use willpower, yes, I don’t want to have to use my cognition. It’s such a limited resource, but in lives that necessitate pivoting and being flexible, we need the exact opposite. So the assumption that automaticity is the gold standard, what we should all aim for, I think is false. Because of the reasons we’ve talked about already, if we are not optimally primed to pivot, with our exercise and healthy eating, then you know, as 40 years shows us, we won’t be successful sticking with it, or at least most people want,

Eric Zimmer  23:45

right? And we want automaticity because it sounds easier. And we know that when something becomes automatic for us, it’s easy to do flossing as an example. Or I was trying to think of a habit I’ve just developed recently, that I realized has become automatic, but it’s a very small thing. I can’t remember what it is. Now, I want

Michelle Segar  24:03

to say not only does do we want it because it sounds easy. It is a wonderful resource that our brains are structured to have. So yeah, it is beneficial. You know, a lot of times people drive places that they know, you know, on autopilot, I don’t want people to think that I’m anti habit, I’m absolutely not anti habit. What I am concerned about is the overgeneralization of the value of habit formation for complicated behaviors that people keep failing at. And I think one of the reasons is because as a field, we keep telling people to do things that are just not valid in their life context.

Eric Zimmer  24:43

Right, right. It’s not that automaticity is bad, or that we wouldn’t want it where we can have it but you don’t want to insist on an approach that’s simply not going to work. That’s right. You just keep bashing your head against the wall. So we sort of debunked that you’re probably assuming you are trying to form a habit that is a myth. multistep complex habit like eating well or exercising regularly. And you have a complex life, right? Your life is such that it has chaos. And so I’m going to say, we’re now talking about 90% of the people at this point, right? Some people, if you’re already exercising every single day for the last nine years, you can just tune Michelle and it out and move on to the next show. For everybody else, though, last,

Michelle Segar  25:23

let me interrupt in want to understand unless that person who does have it down, wants to understand why other people in their lives are struggle so much. Yeah. So I think it is valuable for the people who get it right, or not get it right as the wrong word, who have successfully figured out how to sustain and be consistent with these complicated behaviors. Yep.

Eric Zimmer  25:49

And I’m going to pause here and say that listeners do not despair, or not saying like, you’re doomed to never stick with eating right, or exercise. And this is not, you know, abandon all hope ye who enter here, right? We’re gonna get there. But we’re sort of taking down some of the myths before we get there. So let’s talk a little bit about you’ve got a section called Why We don’t just do it, you know, just do it be in quotes, right, that phrase, just do it. So what are some of the reasons that we don’t just do it? We’ve identified some of them. Yes. But now I think we’re moving from the external to the internal.

Michelle Segar  26:23

Exactly. Thank you. That is a perfect introduction. So we have learned to perceive approach and experience exercise and intentional eating. Again, while these ideas might generalize to other self care behaviors, the book is really explicitly focused on eating and exercise, because of the reason they are uniquely united, or under the umbrella of weight loss, and all of that really problematic things that brings between weight ism and shame and hating exercise, because it’s punishing, because you think you have to do it hard, or feeling deprived, not because you actually are but because you’re making a choice out of this external should I can’t eat that bad food, and it makes you feel resentful, or rebel. And here I am jumping into the four decision disruptors, which reflect the inner scripts, the inner things, the things we tell ourselves at these decision points. We’re at a party, we recently started eating plan that we felt really good about and have really been successful following. And we’ve noticed that we feel good, we go to a party. And there’s nothing on our plan there. And on top of that, there, there’s a glistening chocolate cake across the room that, you know, is seducing us with the look and the aroma and all the stuff. And instead of saying to ourselves, oh, geez, I you know, yes, chocolate cake is great, but I love this eating plan I’m on the internal script tends to be again, it’s not our fault is how we’ve learned to think about it. I can’t have that chocolate cake. I can’t have it. It’s not on my eating plan. What is one of the biggest disruptors it’s rebellion, because humans are wired to rebel against anything which takes away our freedom. So that’s this internal rebellion script that we play. And of course, what happens is, there’s all this energy to just take the thing we don’t think we should or can have. And we don’t even do it with a sense of Gosh, how much do I want of the cake? Do I need to eat the whole piece of cake? Often what happens at a rebellion is we eat three pieces of cake, because we are just taking that energy of I can’t. And it’s boomeranging into, you know, screw you I’m gonna eat as much as the cake is I want to so that’s one of the primary internal decision traps I’ve seen in my coaching. And you know, as a as a coach, I’m wondering if you recognize these decision disruptors that happen at the moment of choice. And this is why instead of thinking we need things to be precisely right, and automated. I mean, how was that decision like that at a party automated, we are outside of any context, we’ve established our eating habits around and we have this seduction occurring. And so if we don’t have the mental wherewithal to make a choice, that is the most adaptive choice that’s going to enable us to both stick with our greater goals, whatever those are, it doesn’t have to be precisely right. But also feel like we’re participating in our social lives with our families and our friends, which is among the most motivating things that human beings have is other people. So if our exercise and healthy eating inner dialogue reflects a conflict between participating with the people we feel most connected to. Well, that is an automatic setup to fail to, because we are for anything in human nature motivated to align with our families to participate. And then we’re talking about rebellion we’ve talked about another really common one is perfection, we can use the chocolate cake as an example. So looking at the chocolate cake, it’s not it’s a black or white, it’s, can I have it? Or can’t I have it? It’s the can’t, is a perfect world, I cannot have at all the cake, all or nothing. And then nothing in that situation is eating the whole thing, or more. And that sets us up. When we look at our choices. Am I going to run for 45 minutes or walk for 45 minutes? Like I planned all? Oh, gee, that phone call only gives me 35 minutes, why bother? Or nothing, I’m not going to do anything. So it works. This all or nothing. Really this black and white thinking which by the way, is a cognitive distortion. Yet it’s the way potentially the majority of people think about these two choices in the arena’s of exercise and eating. Another one is what I call commendation, which is really a bit outside of the topic of exercising and eating. But it is fundamental to the decisions people make in the moment, right? If someone’s needs, or our work needs, seem to be competing with our plan to exercise or our eating plan, because a dear friend just handed us a delicious chocolate chip cookie that she made. And we feel that we need to show her that we care about her and value this gift she just gave to us that instead of thinking about, well, gee, I’m eating this way that doesn’t include the chocolate chip cookie, or whatever it is, it could be a burrito for all I care, my need to validate her needs is more important than my need. And again, if it’s all or nothing thinking, then it’s the whole cookie versus something else or not at all. And these things are the internal part that disrupt the in the moment decision. It’s how our brain has learned to think about it. And that’s why the book, and the method is really about guiding people to notice, in the moment, it gets back to your pivotal parable, which is Which am I going to feed this old reaction and habit habitual way of thinking, which tends hasn’t served most people for many years, or do I want to feed a different wolf that’s going to give me a more adaptive long term result.

Eric Zimmer  33:14

I want to ask you a question about the perfectionism the all or nothing on the exercise side, it seems very clear to me right that all or nothing thinking is not helpful. Because if I can’t work out for an hour, I don’t work out at all versus working out for 45 minutes or five minutes even right? I think if there’s anything that has changed my ability with many of these things, particularly exercise, it has been a little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing. Right? Do something, you can do something. But I want to pivot this to things like eating and particularly things like eating sweets, because there are differing opinions out there. And I think the answer you’re gonna give me is it depends. But nonetheless, I’m still going to kind of walk through the question more about how you would think about it than what your answer is. And that is there are people who say, you know, when it comes to sweets, for me, I am an abstainer abstaining works best for me. I don’t have to figure out under what circumstances you know, I’m a recovering alcoholic or addict. So in this case, I’m an abstainer. Right? I often talk about the beautiful clarity of zero, right? It’s just simple. There’s no debate in there, right? But food is a different animal than drugs and alcohol. So there are some people who say look, I just I cut it out completely. And then there are other people who are looking to integrate it in in a way where they’ve got some degree of moderation around it. And there’s some people who think that you’re kind of one of those or the other, and determining which of those you are is really a wise thing to do and then come down that way. But how do you think about that challenge when it comes to eating?

Michelle Segar  35:22

Thank you for raising that that is a really important issue. So I want to say as you already said, Now, there are some people who feel that the issue on addiction versus not when it comes to eating, I would say has not been solved, there are just really poor people and doing research who claim both sides, but a more mundane, how we live our lives perspective, it is important for us to figure out now, challenges if people say, Well, I am the type of person? Well, no, I’m going to take a step back. Part of the problem is that we’re asking this question without explicitly shining a light on the context of the food choices, because people would say, Oh, I’m a zero person, I cannot do moderation. But really, it’s a false dichotomy. If people are making choices under shirts, and feeling like they’ve got to do something, or feeling that their bodies are there, they are bad or unattractive, or whatever it is, if all of that junk surrounds the eating choice, then I would say we can’t know if someone is truly moderation versus a zero person, because it’s all these other forces that are inside of our brain that we’ve learned to have thought we have to be aware that that’s going to be going on because it’s very hard to do moderation. If you’re going to have perfection and rebellion and other decision traps. Because those forces, they’re not going to let you be successful with moderation or for zero for that matter, because we’re always going to be reacting number one, I want to make sure that that issue is clear. Getting back to the moderation versus zero, there are for sure individual differences. But here’s something that most people may not know, the emerging research on this question suggests that it is the moderation approach, which is going to be more effective for more people. So there’s a couple of studies. One study is looking at a weight loss registry, and I’m not focusing on weight loss as an outcome, because I think it really sets people up to not stick with exercise and healthy eating for many of the reasons we spoke about five to seven years ago. But they wanted to know, in this group of people who had lost and were maintaining a substantial amount of weight, which strategy was going to be most effective with eating over a year is it coming to a weekend with you know, trying to stick to the plan, which would be a zero approach, right, I don’t do any of it, I’m gonna stick to the plan, no matter what, or is coming to the weekend, eating with something with a little more flexibility, which is technically in the literature called flexible restraint, which of those two eating strategies is going to be most adaptive for eating over time. And the research found in you’re not going to be surprised because of the way I’ve set this up, that it’s the flexible restraint errs, who had more adaptive eating and outcomes. So I believe it comes back to this core wisdom about how we live every other area of our life. We can’t hit a bull’s eye, every time we parent, we cannot hit a bull’s eye every time we engage with our partners in our work. And it’s that sensibility that it’s about a journey and an intention. We want to do things a certain way. But sometimes we can’t. I can’t do it today, okay. Or I have to make the perfect imperfect choice. Or I could make no choice but that isn’t gonna get me as far as the perfect imperfect choice. So I think the biggest issue is that we have come to believe that exercise and eating are different than these other lifelong journeys.

Eric Zimmer  39:23

Yeah, I like that idea of flexible restrainers. Like I mean, I think could I moderate drugs and alcohol, I probably would. It seems like the better choice right? At this juncture in my life. I’ve proved multiple times that doesn’t work. And the risk reward ratio is just stupidly out of whack. Right? It’s just, you know, it’s like, well, what would I get? Well, I’d be able to have a drink a couple times a week. What might I lose everything okay, not worth doing right? Yeah, piece of cake is a little more subtle. And, you know, I certainly know that Ginni and I have been on a I would say very good healthy eating journey, particularly since her mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I think we were healthy before and then we kind of upped it. Even from there, but it has not been rigid and restraining, you know, there is flexibility in there. And I think one of the important things is there are situations like you talked about where we find ourselves in a situation, and we have to be able to make a decision. And I want to get to that, because that’s really important. I also think that we can really do well with planned exceptions. Yes, a planned exception would be today’s Wednesday, November 23. Listeners, you are going to hear this in January. But for Michelle and I, that’s the day before Thanksgiving, I could make a plan exception tomorrow, that you know what, for Thanksgiving dinner, I’m just eating whatever. And I’m going to have one piece of dessert. And that’s it done right. Now, the problem for a lot of us is that if we’re all or nothing, right, the minute that we blow up with a Thanksgiving dinner, we think we’ll screw it. It’s Thanksgiving weekend, right? It’s the holidays, right? And the next thing we know, it’s January 1, so I found, you know, okay, let me be clear about what the rules are. And again, there’s some flexibility in them, but they’re rules that are designed to have flexibility. There’s lots of ways this can go wrong. You know, I’ve been in the only on special occasions. And the next thing you know, like Billy getting to see on his report card is a special occasion. And you know, being clear birthdays, or I’ve had other people who you know, I don’t think they have alcoholism issues. They said, I’m just not going to drink alone at my home yet in their life isn’t like they’re not out partying all the time for a college student. That’s a terrible thing. It’s not gonna make any difference. But for most adults, they just go look, if I’m out with friends, I’m gonna have a couple drinks. But when I’m home alone, nothing, right. So there are ways that we can have some flexibility, and also some clarity. It’s not all or nothing.

Michelle Segar  41:40

That’s correct. And I think inherent in the flexible approach and strategy that I’m teaching inherent in that is people are making intentional decisions. So that’s also the beauty of flexibility is it asks people to be in charge of their choices, not the inner scripts. Yeah, it’s about saying, Oh, I see you perfection, staring me down, or I see rebellions staring me down. But guess what, you’re the bad wolf. And I know that I’ve been feeding you for 30 years, and it doesn’t get me where I want to go. So I want to go in a different direction. And so I think, for me anyway, in my philosophy, and it sounds like we might align on this is that when you teach this flexible approach, it is inherently about the individual saying, Okay, this is what I care most about. This is how I want to participate in celebrations, it asks people to become very clear about what they value what they most want. And it asks people to critically think about, you know, if I’m going to stick with this, if I’m going to stick with a healthier eating lifestyle, just like a parent, and you know, a for a journey of 30 years, and the other side of the 30 years, what’s really gonna let me do that and rigidity, it works for some people. And like you said, when it comes to alcohol, being rigid is absolutely the solution. You know, it’s important for people to truly know what’s going to work for them. But again, if people don’t understand the societal context, around the meaning of eating, healthy eating and exercise, that has the potential to continuously fort, what people do, because it creates these inner dialogues, the forces that lead us to the bad wolf instead of the skilled Wolf, if you will,

Eric Zimmer  43:36

yeah, underlying a lot of what you’re saying here is reconnecting with our ability to choose, and our ability to decide what’s important to us and not doing that on autopilot. Right, not just following the scripts we’ve been given not doing this, because even because my doctor said I should, right. Like, I’m not saying we should just heedlessly ignore our doctors, it’s worth going when my doctor said that I should probably do this. And why would he have said that? It’s because if I don’t, this might happen, oh, if that happened, that would affect my relationship with my children. Like, we eventually get back to what matters to us. But reconnecting with our choice is the key piece.

Michelle Segar  44:13

Absolutely. Not just choice, conscious choice, which is the opposite of an automatic habit. Now, I do want to say something that I think is crucial. We’ve been talking about it in one way. But I think it’s really crucial to say it in this way, the value of any choice at a party. After work, the value of every single choice we make is determined by the context of the other choices and needs. If we’re not aware of that, and we’re not skilled at being able to pivot and compromise, find the creative compromise. I don’t have the 60 minutes to take the walk outside. I only have 15 minutes. But I care that it lifts my mood, you don’t have all these good things to do and I’ve got All this work that I’ve got to get done, but I have 15 minutes. So when we become skilled in being able to compromise and pivot, which is, of course, the joy choice, the perfect imperfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing. When we do that, then we can keep our momentum. If we don’t know how to successfully navigate those choices with intention, then they’re going to keep derailing us, which kicks us right off the path of lasting change.

Eric Zimmer  46:00

You actually say early in the book, what we’re talking about here are choice points, you and I had an interesting conversation about where that phrase comes from. And we realized I might have arrived at it from multiple different sources. But these choice points, I’m at a choice point, do I eat the chocolate cake? Do I not now I have a choice whether I work out whether I don’t work out, and you say I call these conflicts, choice points. And they are the real place of power for achieving lasting changes in eating and exercise. And I think that’s so much of what this is about is about learning to navigate choice points. You know, when I work with a coaching client, you know, we start off and I say, well, let’s put what structure we can put in place. Let’s put what plans we can put in place. Because you know, what, if we can get some of that in great, but you know what, at the end of the day, you’re still going to bump up against these choice points. And what we can learn to do is say what is happening inside me, when I make the right choice? And what is happening inside me when I make the wrong choice? Or the choice that I want to make or the choice I don’t want to make? Let’s non moralize it, right? The choice I want to make versus the choice I don’t want to make. And the value of a choice point, actually, is that it can narrow our window of focus to a moment, we can actually go, Oh, here’s what I was saying to myself, here’s what I was thinking, here’s what I was feeling. Okay, well, what might I say to myself next time, what might I do differently next time, it gives us a real, for lack of a better word, an actual specific point in time that we can look at. And it becomes less about, oh, I got to figure out my entire emotional makeup. Versus I have to figure out what’s going on inside me now.

Michelle Segar  47:36

That’s right. And inherent in choice point is choice. And as you know, from all of your work choice, is the epitome of what cultivates autonomy and self determination. And we know that high quality motivation is embodied in the idea that I’m in charge and I get to choose, and that is the antidote to all or nothing thinking, yeah, the all or nothing, thinking there’s only two choices, and I’m forced to choose between sticking to the plan 100%, or just tossing it all to the wind. But no, the choice point is, wait a sec, there are options here that give me freedom to align myself with the context of needs and options at the moment,

Eric Zimmer  48:21

let’s pivot to what can we do in choice points, and you talk about an executive functioning team, these are aspects of our brain that we can, and you correct me if I’m saying this wrong, but that we can call upon in choice points to help us make better decisions? Is that an accurate way of saying it?

Michelle Segar  48:38

I would say that choice points evoke our executive functioning team, okay, when we are at moments of decision making, when we’re at moments of problem solving, and potentially pivoting, that is the work of our executive functions. And, you know, as you know, in the book, I talk about three primary executive functions that are discussed in the literature on an eating especially in other areas of living like ADHD, sometimes they talk about seven executive functions. So there’s different ways of talking about it. But the bottom line when it comes to executive functioning, is it is our brains innate decision making self management problem solving. Goal striving apparatus. Yeah. And so why don’t we cultivate it, the three primary executive functions to so that we better set our brains up to help us make the skill choice.

Eric Zimmer  49:40

I want to go into those three in a second, but I want to just clarify a little bit of what we’re saying here. I think that what you’re saying is that step one is we have to recognize we are in a choice point. Yes. Right? Because so often we just slip off into not exercising, not eating right Right, without any real thought of what’s happening, you know, I often talk about the very first thing we have got to do is bring whatever is happening into consciousness. That’s right, recognize that I’m about to make a decision or a choice. It may not seem like I am, but I am about to. And I’m making it the way I traditionally have made it without thinking about it. So I first have to bring it up into recognizing, okay, I’m in a choice point. And now once I’ve done that, then I call in my executive functioning tools to help me make the right choice. And I

Michelle Segar  50:29

wouldn’t say I’m calling on because it’s that oh kind of happens automatically. What I’m saying is, the way we think about it is either going to force or support our executive functioning, right? Because the old reactions, the old decision traps that we’ve talked about the inner scripts, if you’re scripting, I can’t, I can’t or it’s gotta be all or nothing. You can see how that scripts that we tell ourselves, the narrative absolutely distracts us from the options. Yes. So how can our executive functions work effectively, when we’re going down a rabbit hole with the shoulds, and all the black and white thinking, so you are 100%? Right. And I think this is becoming more out there in mainstream, but behavior change is belief change, and different choice making. And we cannot do either of those things. If we are not conscious at the point of choice, so it isn’t as sexy as peloton or habit formation, being aware at a point of choice. But we cannot change the way we think, which is the precursor to changing what we do if we do not have conscious awareness at that point.

Eric Zimmer  51:48

Great. So let’s talk about the three executive functions that you think are critical for making healthy choices.

Michelle Segar  51:55

Okay, so the first primary executive function is called working memory. And this is the part of our brain that holds and processes information at the same time. And most people can only hold and process like 1 to 3 pieces of information. So you can see that if you’re focused on a narrative about I can’t, I can’t that sort of thing, or I’ve got to please her, or I want her to know, I love those kinds of thoughts that’s in your brain. So that kind of thinking has a huge potential to overwhelm our working memory. But working memory is the backbone of effective problem solving, because that is the space is not really, you know, I’m not calling it a literal space. But that’s where problem solving happens. And if we can’t hold the information in our brain, because we’re too focused on worrying of whether we’re going to make the right decision, then we won’t be able to problem solve and pivot. So that’s working memory. And we’ll talk about the decision tool that I created to clean up that space, if you will, then we’ve got cognitive flexibility or flexible thinking. Our brains are innately wired, to do flexible thinking, if we think about eating and exercise and more flexible ways, we are basically aligning this new thought process with this very important ability, mental ability that we have to pivot, like we do in all these other areas of our life. And then the third, primary working memory is referred to as inhibition. more popularly people think about this ability as self control. And so this has been the primary focus, changing our eating, we’re just going to inhibit ourselves, we’re going to stick to the plan. But in reality, I believe more people would be successful if instead of feeling like they have to inhibit all the time, they actually learn to think about choice points. And that being flexible is actually adaptive not having to do it perfect. But actually, you know what, just like all these other life areas, I’m going to do this perfectly imperfectly. So I stay the journey. So what is the joy choice? So there’s a technical definition, which I’ll say the joy choice is the perfect, imperfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing. This doesn’t just give us the momentum, we want to keep going forward on the path or journey of lasting change. There’s another really meaningful way to think about it. And that is that if our decision to take a part of that self care activity, a part of that exercise a part of our eating plan, and fulfill that we are doing it to take care of ourselves, to respect our greater goals, and in doing so, we are fueling ourselves for the people and projects we care most about. So it is not just about the formula for sustainability that you know, has science supporting it. It’s also about making a choice that lets us be our full selves, that harmonizes exercise choice, or our eating choice with the whole other parts of our lives and who we are, which includes our connections and loved ones. So that is why it’s called The Joy choice. It lets us harmonize exercise and eating within our full self.

Eric Zimmer  55:30

I love that. So let’s talk about the decision making tool. Is it is it pop? Is that the decision making tool? Okay, that’s what I thought I just want to make sure I’m referencing the right one. So this is a way to sort of navigate choice points.

Michelle Segar  55:44

Yes, yes. Our executive functioning is this innate brain system for pivoting and problem solving and long term cold pursuit? Like, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could support the three primary executive functions. And so this is a tool that I’ve developed and used with my coaching clients, and I call it POP.. Now I’m going to bring us back to the very beginning of our, our conversation, where you asked me about the motivation bubble. We talked about the fact that the motivation bubble is very vulnerable, and life bursts it, right, it bumps up against something in life burst the bubble, while with the pop decision to all instead of letting life burst our bubble in this passive way, where we’re kind of victimized by things. We are autonomous ly take charge and we pop it!  So it’s both a metaphor for us being in charge, we pop our plan, it’s not workable any longer. So we’re going to pop it in what we do when we pop it is then we open up the option. So that is the overarching metaphor, but it’s actually an acronym, which is really good for our working memory, recall remembering and recall. So pop stands for pause. And like we’ve talked about throughout this conversation, if we don’t take a moment to bring our consciousness to the choice, then our automated unskillful responses will just take over. So pause, introduces this intentional moment where we can say, ah, which wolf do I want to feed, I’m going to feed the one that’s going to really take me to where I want to go. So that’s the first P unpack the oh, I designed it to support working memory, because it enables us to clear away to name any of the traps temptation, rebellion, accommodation, perfection. Oh, I see you. But guess what? That’s the unskilled Wolf. I’m not gonna go there. Let me focus my attention, take a breath. And then go on to the second step in pap, which is the Oh, open up our options and play WoW. how better to cultivate flexible thinking then can consider it as an opportunity to play well, gee, there’s this awesome chocolate cake over there. I want some of it. What are my options here? What did I plan to eat? What did they plan to eat later? I think I could eat half of the cake. And I could do wiggle around tweak something else. I mean, it invites us to think in creative and playful ways about the choice point. And that is flexible thinking or cognitive flexibility in its essence. And now the second P and the ending of the path Decision Tool is P pick the joy choice. There’s no right or wrong answer here. The joy choice is the perfect imperfect option that lets us do something instead of nothing, giving us momentum and helping us harmonize our eating and exercise choice within our full self. So what POP does as an acronym is it makes it easier to recall, I want to say it doesn’t mean it’s going to be effortless, you still have to learn how to use it and you can put it as a contact in your phone. That’s one way people use it so that you can learn to memorize it. But it also strategically guides our attention away from the decision traps to play. I have options here. Let me open them up and then to picking the imperfect choice that for the past three decades, I haven’t given myself permission to do because I’m forced to stick to the plan, which then I just rebel against. So it guides the specific thought process in a way. We don’t need to inhibit ourselves. It’s not about harnessing self control. That’s not the conversation the conversation is given the choice point and my full set of needs and the value that choice has right now based on the full context of other things, which is the one I Don’t have to rebel against that question.

Eric Zimmer  1:00:02

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think that’s a very helpful acronym. And we do need some approach, because we’re often going to find ourselves at choice points. Also, in moments of stress. Yes, you know, that’s where the bubble tends to rub up against life in moments of stress. And we know that in moments of stress executive function tends to take a hike. So it’s really helpful to be like, have something as simple as pop, okay, here I am, what do I do, and walk through those things. And I love the joy choice, this idea of the perfectly imperfect, that allows me to do something rather than nothing in the context of everything I want to be eating, and exercise has changed. So fundamentally, for me, over the last decade, I would say, and it really has been in a complete reframing of it. And this is probably normal with age to some degree. But a reframing from vanity of reframing from shoulds. And into this is what I know supports me in being the person that I want to be in the world. You know, when I don’t exercise, I don’t make a good interviewer, I don’t make a good coach, I don’t make a good father, I don’t make a good dog owner, I’m not a particularly good partner. I’m very deeply unhappy within myself, you know, so for me with exercise, it’s just I just remind myself, like, you’re going to feel a certain way an hour from now, how do you want to feel in an hour? And I know, for me, the way I want to feel in an hour is the way I feel on the other side of exercise, proud of myself, energised, you know, and same thing with food, you know, how do I want to feel at the end of this meal? How do I want to feel and what supports me, in what matters to me, and you talk about this near the end of the book, which is really just the importance of value based decision making, right, the more we can be clear on what really matters to us, we have a much better chance of making good decisions, because there’s clarity there. But a lot of times, we don’t ever take the time to get that clarity. And so we’re making decisions in fog, about like, well, what really matters to me is this cake, man, you know, so. So I love that you sort of kind of near the very end sort of bring it back to that core idea.

Michelle Segar  1:02:11

Well, and the neuroscience, the emerging science directly supports that idea. I think that’s among the most exciting science on creating sustainable behavior change is the work showing that when we value when we believe that a choice aligns with who we are at our core, those brain regions light up. And also it’s predictive of people making decisions over time related to that healthy choice. So and the good news is, we can actually change a lot, some of your listeners might think, well, I don’t value exercise in that way, I don’t have those experiences, it feels like a should. So I mean, the beauty is, is that it’s actually quite easy to convert exercise from those shoulds and chores to feeling like a gift and that it’s a part of who you are. It’s reflecting your values. So I mean, I think that’s really important, because people might be feeling Gosh, I don’t know how to do that. The first step is to recognize whether you have been coming to your exercise and eating choice points with this feeling of should and rules and precision. And if you are that the first thing is to say, Gosh, has that worked for me or not? Yeah. And again, if it works for you, and it makes you a happy person, there’s no reason you have to pull away from that, right. Just like you said at the beginning, when we understand that our choices around what we eat, and how we move our bodies reflect who we want to be and our personal preferences and the realities the true realities of our daily lives. Yep, that’s the recipe for sustainable change.

Eric Zimmer  1:03:48

Indeed. Well, Michelle, thank you so much for coming on. It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. I found the joy choice, a great read and so much great wisdom in it. So thank you. Thank you

Michelle Segar  1:03:59

for having you again. It was so much fun to talk Thank you.

In this episode, Michael Easter defines the scarcity loop and its impact on human behavior, particularly in relation to addictive tendencies. Michael shares several compelling insights on how small changes can lead to big rewards.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Embrace the 2% mentality to unlock powerful daily habits and achieve long-term goals
• Discover the surprising benefits of choosing discomfort for sustainable personal growth and success
• Learn effective strategies for breaking free from the scarcity loop and cultivating abundance in life
• Uncover the remarkable impact of making small lifestyle changes on overall health and well-being

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