When you can’t control, influence.
There are no doubt countless times when you have wanted to be in control of your food environment. Except you have friends in town and they are “foodies”, or you’re visiting home and your mother measures love in food consumed, or your partner isn’t making the same nutrition efforts as you right now (confluence of social support is another article for another day). These likely aren’t uncommon scenarios for anybody reading this. You can’t be in control, so what do you do?
“Go with the flow”. “When in Rome”. “Throw in the towel”.
Not the most useful maxims for behavior change, and it doesn't have to be that way.
When you can’t control, you can influence.
Garfield was the original food influencer.
You can’t, nor do you want, to not have friends in town or miss out on mum’s famous lasagne feast. Controlling might look like not having them come at all or just not going home to see mum right now. Neither of which are sustainable or necessary.
You don’t need to control everything. Control what you can. You can control;
Monday to Friday breakfast, lunch, and dinner
Your daily exercise regimen
8 hours of sleep (unless you have kids at which point I am way out of my depths on the sleep front here).
These are the things that you do 100% by yourself. You can make more controlled and measured choices here. Because trying to control everything is an almost sure-fire way to suffocate the rabbit by holding on too damn tight.
Influence on the other hand might look like this;
Get a large salad to share with your friends at the table at dinner (you still get pizza but you have options).
Going for a walk along the river after dinner (being outside is generally a nice thing, it aids digestion, and you increase your step count for the day).
Eating a filling lunch so you aren’t starving come dinner time at mum’s lasagna feast extravaganza
OR…and this might surprise some people, skipping lunch that day so you can really enjoy mum’s lasagna feast extravaganza with a big appetite and lots of love (tactically skipping a meal here and there is just a method. It likely isn’t one to be deployed all the time as there are consequences to going into meal times ravenous, namely overeating and digestive issues, but not eating lunch so as to really enjoy dinner is just fine.)
Influence is a form of control (you are shaping the process rather than directing the outcome) and though it maybe isn't as sharp a tool as complete control, it does allow you to make an impact in the pursuit of your goals while still living a life you value and enjoy.
People reach for complete control typically because they want results as fast as possible. But when it comes to behavior change, speed isn’t as important as direction.
