I must admit I didn’t really believe the research when I first read about it, but I was having trouble losing weight, so I felt that it was worth a try to give up the diet sodas. There was no way I was going to drink water, so I searched the supermarkets for a diet drink that didn’t contain Aspartame. It wasn’t easy, but I finally found a diet cordial that contained a different artificial sweetener. I found, to my surprise, that I felt more satisfied for longer after meals where I drank this cordial instead of Diet Coke (or any other aspartame-sweetened drink).

Since discovering that aspartame makes me hungry, I’ve also cut out aspartame-sweetened foods such as diet jellies, ice-creams, hot chocolates and desserts. Sadly, I haven’t been able to find substitutes sweetened with other sweeteners. What I do now is to go without, or have a smaller portion of the real, sugar-sweetened thing. What I’ve realised is that the aspartame-sweetened versions never did satisfy me: they’re never as good as the real thing and I still feel hungry after I’ve eaten them.

There are still some questions about aspartame: not everyone reacts the same way to it. In fact, some people have quite nasty reactions to it. So it may be that not everyone’s appetite is stimulated by it, either.

However, at the end of the day it’s probably best not to rely on aspartame-sweetened food to lose weight, even if they don’t make you hungry. If, when you go on a diet, all you do is replace sugar-sweetened treats with artificially-sweetened treats, then you haven’t retrained your eating habits at all. So when the diet is over, you’ll go right back to the sugar-sweetened treats (because they taste so much nicer) and the weight will go straight back on.

Photo courtesy of Beau B on Flickr.

The human brain has an enormous amount of work to do. It has to keep your body running, as well as dealing with all the challenges you throw at it every day. “Habits” are the brain’s way of coping with that enormous workload. Think of an airline pilot: when the plane is cruising at altitude in empty sky, he will put the plane on autopilot so he can do other things. Your brain is the same. To your brain, eating seems an obvious thing to put on autopilot – it knows what you like, and it knows you need to shovel the food into your mouth to keep alive. Why waste valuable brainpower on that?

So when you try to put effort into thinking about food, your brain gets annoyed that you’re wasting it’s time, focussing on what it thinks should be an easy, routine task – so it tries to reinforce your old habit, and make you go back to it. So you see, it’s not your fault when you fall off the diet wagon – your own brain is sabotaging you!

The good news is that if you can fight that reaction and stick to your new way of eating for long enough, your brain will give up and accept it as a new habit. Unfortunately I can’t tell you how long is long enough – the time differs for each person. You may be able to set up a new habit in two weeks, or it may take a month or so. The trick is to find a way to survive those few weeks, until your new habit has formed – then you will find losing weight miraculously easier.

One trick is to change one small habit at a time – slip it under your brain’s radar!

For instance, I broke one bad food habit by going on the Carbohydrate Addict’s diet. This diet is a bit like the Atkins diet – it allows you to eat as much as you like during the day (but NO carbohydrate). For dinner, you can eat ANYTHING YOU LIKE, but

(a) you must start with a green salad and
(b) you only have one hour to eat your whole dinner. As soon as the hour is up, you must stop and can’t have anything else till tomorrow morning.

So you see, this diet didn’t ask me to give up very much – all I had to do was survive the day, and I could pig out in the evening.

I didn’t always manage to eat the right things during the day but, because I knew I had the evening to look forward to, I usually came close. I wish I could say the same about dinner: I can’t tell you the number of times I “forgot” to make a green salad, or over-ran the hour by a few minutes – well, OK, half an hour – or had a late-night snack. So I didn’t lose a whole lot of weight. But a funny thing happened, which set me on the path to successful weight loss.

I lost my sweet tooth. Really. I don’t mean that I learned to resist eating sweet things, I literally didn’t find them so appealing any more. I still enjoy chocolate and cakes as an occasional treat, but only in small doses and I certainly don’t crave them all the time.

Why? Because I made one new habit. I used to eat muffins for breakfast, sweets for snacks, sugary sodas, and biscuits with afternoon tea, so my brain decided I needed them all the time, and kept asking for them. During the diet, I only ate those things at dinnertime, and my brain got used to having only one serving of sweet things in a day – so now, it thinks that’s what I need, and that’s all it asks for.

I still eat other foods that I shouldn’t, but changing that one small habit has made the difference between steadily gaining weight and keeping it stable. As I retrain other habits – like exercising! – I will turn the corner and start to lose weight without having to “diet”.

So, what have you learned?

1. Work out what your bad habits are
2. Think of strategies to change them
3. Remember you can’t “break” a habit, you must form a new habit to replace it.
4. Because habits are such strong instincts, concentrate on one small habit at a time.
5. Be patient – habits can take several weeks to change!

Photo courtesy of Mr. Thomas on Flickr.