Reading time: 6 min.
Below you will find a concise summary of our conversation with Hella Van Laer. The full episode can be listened to via Spotify & Apple Podcasts.
About Hella Van Laer
Hella Van Laer holds a licentiate degree in nutrition and dietetics (KU Leuven) and is a recognized dietitian, nutrition coach, and weight loss consultant. She previously wrote the book ‘Break with How You Eat’. She has just released her latest book ‘Diet Differently’, in which she explains how to avoid diet pitfalls, break bad eating habits, and motivate yourself and stay motivated! This is not just another diet book, but a book that gives you insights into how our brain works, how we can change our behavior, and how to maintain this in the long term.
Why eat healthier?
Healthy nutrition and a healthy lifestyle in general not only affect how we feel. They also have a huge impact on many lifestyle-related conditions. Think of obesity and overweight, insulin resistance that can develop into type 2 diabetes, the risk of cardiovascular diseases, and the risk of certain types of cancer.
Motivating oneself to adopt a healthy lifestyle preventively to avoid conditions that you do not yet feel or see is difficult for many people.
But everyone wants to grow old in a happy and healthy way, and that is ultimately what we strive for.
In these Covid times, health is the most important thing in everyone’s life, and paradoxically, we do not always act accordingly.
Our cupboards are full of cooking and diet books, yet we do not always manage to live healthier consistently. Why is that?
Making the switch
Despite many good intentions and initiatives, people often get stuck in a pattern of dependence on certain foods or even uncontrolled eating behavior. They fail to maintain it in the long term. They are caught in a vicious circle of eating sugary snacks that give an instant good feeling in our brain and trigger eating even more unhealthy things.
To make the switch to truly change their eating behavior in the long term, a kind of turning point is needed, a moment when people genuinely realize that something really needs to change now.
There is no quick fix in the long term; fundamentally changing your eating behavior requires the necessary time, motivation, and effort.
And that only succeeds with a clear, concrete plan. Without it, things often go wrong because people do not take certain pitfalls and the workings of our brain into account. People then unknowingly fall again into the trap of temptations lurking around every corner and relapse into deeply rooted unhealthy habits.
Two of the biggest pitfalls are chronic sleep deprivation and chronic stress, which disrupt your hormones.
Under the influence of hormones, not only does our metabolism work less efficiently, but the urge to eat becomes much greater (especially sugars or fatty unhealthy foods).
You can try many diets, but disrupted hormones send a very strong signal that is very hard to resist. However, you can arm yourself against these pitfalls by first gaining insight into how our brain works.
Reptilian brain
Our brain consists of three major parts, and our reptilian brain is one of them.
It houses all our unconscious actions, instinctive and impulsive behavior, things we do without thinking, as well as our habits.
Of course, we are not reptiles, so we also have a rational, human brain. That is where all our information and planning about healthy nutrition, for example, reside, and it is also where our brakes are located.
So why does our reptilian brain take over so often?
Nowadays, we all tend to rush ourselves. Work hard, play hard.
After a hard day exposed to a lot of stress and on top of that sleep deprivation, our rational brain and thus our brakes no longer work well. That is the moment when many people break down and impulsively reach for all kinds of unhealthy, sugary options.
Moreover, sugar actually does something to your brain; it stimulates a certain reward center in our brain, giving us an instant good feeling. Eating sugary snacks triggers a whole bunch of hormones that cause the well-known sugar crashes, which in turn lead to more eating. Your reptilian brain takes over and makes us easy prey.
That is why it is important to be aware of this mechanism to arm yourself against your pitfalls.
Behavior change in the workplace
The key to success in maintaining your healthy lifestyle in the long term is to create as clear a plan as possible yourself to better arm yourself against impulsive temptations. By making your own plan with healthy habits that you already have and know, you increase your chances of maintaining changes in the long term.
Also, simply make sure temptations are not available. Don’t buy unhealthy snacks so you are less tempted and provide healthy alternatives.
Employers also have an important role to play here. We spend a large part of our time at work, and it is important that employers get as many people as possible on board with healthy habits through concrete actions. Nice messages do little if unhealthy snacks remain easily available.
Employers can make a big difference in the health of all their employees, including those who were previously not so focused on health, by offering tasty, satisfying, and healthy snacks.
Snackification
Nowadays, many young people have an eating pattern where they continuously eat small bites throughout the day, also called snackification. There is nothing wrong with that, provided those snacks consist of nutrients that are good for your body, such as vegetables, healthy fats, fibers, quality proteins, …
If you snack all day on foods that cause sugar spikes, you have insulin peaks all day long, which can lead to insulin resistance and, in the long term, type 2 diabetes.
So choose snacks that truly nourish your body. A good example is nuts, which contain many good fats. Our body needs healthy fats, and they even protect you against cardiovascular diseases.
Of course, even with healthy snacks, you shouldn’t binge all day long. If you sit still behind your desk all day, it is certainly not a good idea to eat masses of fats, even if they are healthy fats. Also, with healthy snacking, common sense applies, and we must learn to listen to our body when it signals that it is full.
Conclusion
Some concrete tips to take control of your own eating behavior and try to avoid pitfalls are:
- Arm yourself with insights about eating behavior and how our brain works
- Make sure you have a clear plan
- Be honest with yourself and look where your pitfalls lie
- And finally: start small but start for real
Every day is a good moment to start a healthy lifestyle, but you just have to do it! Start with small steps and realize that it will be a long process with ups and downs, for a fantastic long-term result.