Speaker 1: 0:39

The more I tried to restrict my eating, the harder I was making it for myself. One of the biggest reasons people will falter on their goals and their habits is they're trying to change goals that are too big. Setbacks are part of the journey. It's not if we fall. It's when we fall. These setbacks will happen and life does life.

Speaker 2: 1:02

That's when I'm like, okay, what I actually need to focus on is my bounce back strategy being able to modulate your physical environment means you can kind of take away the importance, the reliance on willpower right, and make it just a little bit easier, a little bit gentler and kinder to yourself. Relying on willpower is like relying on your cat to wake you up for an important meeting. Hello, hello, my friends, and welcome to this week's episode of the no Wellness Wankery podcast. I'm your host, lindy Koeh, and dietitian nutritionist and someone who's constantly working on better habits and adopting new things and trying new things and these little experiments to make my life a little bit better.

Speaker 2: 1:51

I am deeply interested in the research behind this, which is why I'm so excited to bring you today's guest, dr Gina Cleo. Oh, what can I say? She's so good. I think you're going to love her. She originally started as a dietitian. She's going to share a little bit about her story as a dietitian, how she got started, but then she kind of realized, you know what? We're not just the kind of people who are going to follow through with anything, because we are complex humans and the real answer to creating better health is through knowing how to adopt habits that actually stick around longer than a celebrity marriage. And so this is what she wrote her PhD on how she became Dr Gina Cleo and now she runs the Habit Change Institute, where she provides evidence-based strategies for helping other people become habit coaches, habit masters to help transform their lives and the people who they help. So welcome to the show, dr Gina Cleo. Dr Gina Cleo, gee, it is so good to have you on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 2:49

Lindy, finally, it's so good to be with you. Thank you.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Well, we are kindreds and I feel like it's wild to me that we've never met, because if you are listening to this podcast and you're a fan of the work I do, then you're definitely going to love Dr Gina Cleo. You are very much focused on habits and habit formation, because you know, like the rest of us, we're not robots. We're not, and so sure we might know exactly what we should be doing, but we find it really hard to stick to it. In fact, you ended up doing what you say is your PhD in habits, so can you tell me a little bit about what that means?

Speaker 1: 3:24

So I started my career as a dietitian, yeah, and I found that we did not have a knowledge deficit. You know, people for the most part know what makes them feel good. They know, like the lifestyle that they might want to lead. But we had a behavior problem in that I have all these ideas of what I want my nutrition to look like and my lifestyle to look like, but this is what I'm actually doing and there's a gap in those things. And I became really fascinated with the brain, like why we do the things we do. Why is it that I say I'm going to get up and exercise and I end up scrolling on Facebook marketplace for two hours instead? Like why do these things happen? And also, I, you know, I would be finishing a day of clinic and then polishing off a packet of tin tams on my way home before dinner and feeling really out of control. So I wanted to learn about the brain and habits and landed it up doing a PhD because I'm a curious soul and needed all the answers.

Speaker 2: 4:23

And, in addition, it sounds like you have learned experience of going. You know, I know what it's like to feel out of control of food. Can you talk to me about your relationship with food growing up? Where was it and where is it now?

Speaker 1: 4:34

Yeah, I mean I would say that I started, I guess, a disordered eating when I was probably around 16. When I hit puberty, my body was changing. Very typical story, right. My mom also had her own eating issues from a really young age. So I was modeled this unhealthy behavior where essentially it was just binging, purging, mostly binging, and feeling just so guilty and like horrible about it. And it didn't really get better until I was in my mid-20s when I started learning about habits and understanding more about the limitations of my brain. And actually, the more I tried to restrict my eating, the harder I was making it for myself and I was perpetuating the very cycle that I was trying to work so hard to get out of. And my eating now is, oh my God, I love food, like I am the biggest foodie in the world and I feel so free around food and it's been the most liberating journey that I've ever been through in my life.

Speaker 2: 5:41

What you say there is so interesting to me because you're talking about the idea of we try so often to control our habits and to try harder and we put all these like controls in to try and force things to happen. Of course some habits are easier to form than others, but what are some ways that we can form better habits without feeling like we have to white knuckle it and just like persevere because we know that doesn't seem to stick nearly as well as a gentler approach, right?

Speaker 1: 6:09

Yeah, and the gentle approach is exactly it, and it's hard for people who tend to be all or nothing or like go hard or go home mentalities, because we want to achieve all our goals yesterday, and I totally get that. The slow and steady is boring and tedious. It's just like not what the fads are promising. So how can we apply ourselves to this slow and steady, gentle approach, which might work long-term, but it's not going to help us right now. Actually, one of the biggest reasons people will falter on their goals and their habits is they're trying to change goals that are too big or they're trying to change too many things at one time. Our brain's only capable of making up to three changes at one time, and when the goals are too big, our brain goes into hyper arousal, which is a state of fight or flight, and we procrastinate. We give up on ourselves. So really we want to just start so small we feel like we can't say no to doing it and then build on that from there.

Speaker 2: 7:09

Can you give me some examples of that? So let's get. We know we've got three habits we can change. We can't overload ourselves. Is starting a new exercise regime? Does that count as one, or is that a few ones? Because we need to book ourselves in, go and get motivated, all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1: 7:25

Yeah, I guess it depends on where your starting point is.

Speaker 1: 7:28

If you're someone who hasn't done any movement for a really long time, that would probably be the only thing that I would suggest that you start with.

Speaker 1: 7:35

Just start moving. And for some people, their starting line is going to be putting on my shoes. I'm just going to find my active wear and I'm going to wear that for a week. I'm going to just like get up and the first thing I do is I'm going to put on my active wear, I'll just walk around the house and that might be it, whereas for someone else, their starting point might be a 20 minute walk or a yoga class or something like that, and building it up from there is going to feel like when that starts to feel automatic and a bit more natural and like smoothly part of your day, then you can add to the intensity or the frequency of it. So do more than one class a week or, instead of just putting on your active wear, step outside to your letterbox or go down the road and back and so on until it starts to feel automatic, and then you build again.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Oh, you speak my language, and I think this is just another reason why we shouldn't be using weight as our metric for how we're tracking our success, because if you're doing little micro habits and we're building them in, you're not going to see a visible difference on the scale, especially if you're weighing yourself as frequently as I was doing when I was in my diet days. So please can we step off the scale and kind of get a new way of tracking our success. And I think one of the things that can derail us where we feel like, oh, I've messed up today, I've fallen off the bandwagon, and we kind of throw all of our little successes that we've had and go well, it doesn't really count, I had to start from scratch. What would you say to someone who was kind of stuck in that mindset of thinking like I've, I've ruined it, I have to start, and I'll start again on Monday as opposed to I'll start right now.

Speaker 1: 9:10

Oh my gosh, this was. I was like the queen of this mindset, like I would have like one thing out of place, like one thing I didn't plan on having, literally like one wafer, and I'd be like, oh, ruin the day, and I would have a binge for the rest of the day and be like have to start on Monday and I'd be like already Monday, so I have to do like a whole week. I'm just going to have a terrible week, a whole week. It was so bad.

Speaker 1: 9:34

But what I learned is that setbacks are part of the journey. It's not if we fall, it's when we fall. Changing our habits is a process of two steps forward, one step back, and that step back is part of it. So expect it to happen. And when I really believed that, that I'm not superhuman, that these setbacks will happen and life does life, that's when I'm like, okay, what I actually need to focus on is my bounce back strategy. What am I going to do now? And it became instead of I'm going to start on Monday. It's all right, gina, you've just had something that you didn't want to have and that's okay. That's going to happen from time to time, but the very next meal can look different time.

Speaker 2: 10:24

But the very next meal can look different. And that self-compassion was a game changer. It's almost like we think if we yell at ourselves, we're going to motivate ourselves to try harder and do better. But I think about all the teachers I've had in my past growing up at school, and it was always the ones who, yes, expected a lot of me, but they definitely had some compassion and kindness there. So it's trying to be that good teacher to yourself as well. And you mentioned this idea of almost saving the day, right. So you know, sometimes we think, well, we've ruined it already, but very much like that next meal, you can save the day in the next meal. You can save the day just by getting to sleep a little bit earlier. It's never too late to save the day. Um, as opposed, which is the direct opposite of the like well, screw it, I've messed up already.

Speaker 1: 11:05

Yeah, so true, it's getting rid of that all or nothing thinking and you mentioned before, lindy, you know, using another scale. That's not the scale, like using another measure. And I really love the idea of a habit tracker because, no matter how small the habit is, you can still tick it off. If the habit that you're trying to create is movement and you start by just putting on your active wear, you can still give yourself a tick that you've done that because that was your goal for the day. And then you get that dopamine hit, that sense of achievement and accomplishment. It reinforces the habit again and you can feel good for yourself, like for the smallest things, and it's really empowering.

Speaker 2: 11:44

I really love that. I think there is a way to track things without it becoming obsessive, and I think sometimes people get stuck in this trap of being like there has to be a what's the word? Where you get quite a few in a row. Oh, like a streak. Yeah, people get obsessed with trying to get a streak and getting everything in a row and if I mess up my streak then I've I've screwed up already. But, as you said, it's like expecting that the you don't need a streak, you don't need a strike. You can kind of just like expect that you're going to have days where you don't take it off, and that's okay, cause tomorrow is always tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 12:17

Totally love that Lovely Like, just like. Soft, gentle approach is so much more effective than, yeah, trying to scold ourselves into being good. Amen.

Speaker 2: 12:28

Amen. Can we talk about? Let's say, I've got, I've got a client and she's 60. She's like listen, I'm going through menopause. I have been dieting since I was 10. I have spent my life in these habits that are not serving me. Is it too late for me? Am I? Am I fixable? Can I learn to think differently about food? Or, you know, is it even worth bothering?

Speaker 1: 12:51

What would you say to someone like that? The good news is that our habits are malleable throughout our entire life and you can teach an old dog new tricks. If you think of the brain, neurons that fire together, wire together and neurons that fail to link are out of sync. So what that means is the more you think in a certain way, the stronger you reinforce it in your life. But the minute that you decide to think in a different way, to rewire that brain, you start to then think differently and that becomes your new normal. We can do that our entire life. When we've had habits for a really long time 50 plus years it feels like they're part of our identity. It's who we are, it's how we exist, and it can feel like we're victims to them, but we're not. We're simply just reinforcing them because we continue to repeat them and all we need to do is just make a choice to do it differently.

Speaker 2: 13:46

I feel like that's very sobering, lovely, humbling, to hear that there's never a time when we can't make an action. Inside Binge Free Academy, which is my binge eating program, what we talk about a lot is the thoughts that really drive the habits, because we realize we can change those thoughts and sometimes those thoughts can be so hardwired and so default. But having comebacks for those thoughts to help us rewire them is so important. So what you're saying is there is a real big importance in becoming aware of the thoughts that underpin the habits, or do the habits come first and then the thoughts tend to change? What's your thought on that?

Speaker 1: 14:21

I think it depends. I think it depends on the habit, where it started, how long we've had it, how mindful we were at the time. I think the thing that underpins our habits more than our thoughts is the triggers, is what triggers those habits. So, for example, with binge eating, for me it was always the thought that I'm not enough, that I'm not good enough or my body is not a certain way that it should look, and that thought and the emotion that came with that is what triggered my binge eating. When I changed that cycle, you know, when it became I am enough and I'm okay and I'm lovable and acceptable, then I took away the trigger. And now the habit fell away, the binging fell away because the trigger was no longer there. So what you're?

Speaker 2: 15:11

saying is it's the trigger. Thought, eg, oh, it's my daughter's wedding coming up soon. I've got 12 weeks to lose 12 kilograms. Yeah, that thought, the urge to diet and the thoughts that surround that of my body isn't good enough. That is the trigger and that's the thing you need to be really aware of, because that's what's going to throw you in to that disordered eating state right, exactly right, I think.

Speaker 1: 15:34

When we have unwanted habits, we focus so much on the habit that we want to change. We're like I'm going to go home, I'm going to be good, those cookies are dead to me. I am just like going to eat clean. And then we get home and we're triggered and what happens is like two cookies in your mouth at once, and now you're like elbow deep in a packet of chips, and it's because we we didn't address the trigger.

Speaker 1: 15:56

When our brain, when that habit is triggered, it's really hard to go against it because your entire physiology starts to move you towards that habit, cause your brain's like hey, I know what happens next when I feel like this. This is what I do to feel good. And so when I'm feeling like I'm not enough, I binge eat, and it makes me feel better, and so that's what we do. And so, of course, you're going to have the urges to do that. But if we can focus on the trigger, what happens when you're having the urge to have a binge? Think to yourself in that moment where am I? What time of day is it? How am I feeling? Who am I around? What have I just done beforehand? What are the thoughts and feelings consuming me right now. What am I running away from? That is going to be your superpower. It's just taking a moment with the discomfort of that sitting with that. That's where the magic lies, in that moment. That does sound like a superpower.

Speaker 2: 17:27

Gee, I love you. I love everything you do. Can you talk to me about the Habit Revolution, the book that you wrote? Why'd you write it and who's it for?

Speaker 1: 17:37

I wrote the Habit Revolution. Well, I was really coerced into writing it.

Speaker 2: 17:43

People are like. We need to know what you know. You must share it with us, Don't gatekeep.

Speaker 1: 17:50

No, I found that. You know there are some great Haber books out there, but I wanted to bring an evidence-based, practical approach that spoke both to men and women, that can handhold someone through a difficult journey. I didn't want to sugarcoat what the journey of change looked like, because change is hard, and I also wanted to share as someone from my perspective. You know I've had disordered eating, I've gone through a traumatic experience. These things have shaped who I am now, and now I live a life of like my habits are by design and my life is lived by design, and I'm so thrilled with that.

Speaker 1: 18:33

And it was through the tools that I learned through my habit change. You know research and studies, and so I really wanted to help people experience that level of freedom and that's why I wrote the book. Also, my agent was like you have to write a book for like years. So I was like, oh my gosh, the only way to make you shut up is to write a book. But I'm so, so glad I did. It's now being translated in Chinese and Korean. It's on audiobook, like it's. It's helped so many people and I get emails every day of people sharing how it's changed their life and it's been the most rewarding thing I've ever done.

Speaker 2: 19:13

Well, that sounds, sounds like something we all need to read and I'm so glad you got coerced into writing it, thank you, thank you, agent. So you know, you mentioned now that you're in a really healthy, happy place with your food, with your life. It sounds like your habits are mostly in order, but even though you are the expert on the subject matter and a dietitian, I'm sure there are habits that you're always like. I'd love to tweak this, improve that. Give me an example. You don't have to give me a clear example, but just let's say there's a habit in your life You're like oh, I'd like to work on that. What's your process for going? What am I going to do? How am I going to modulate it? Can you talk me through a Dr Gina Cleo kind of insight?

Speaker 1: 19:53

Do you want me to talk about how I'd like to create, or one I'd like to break? Sure?

Speaker 2: 20:02

Hmm, hmm, hmm, both Greedy, I'm greedy, I'd like both.

Speaker 1: 20:04

Okay, but creating one's easier for me. Well, actually no, I think the system is easier. So what I do is I think of the habit that I want to create. So, let's say, more recently, it's been to add like mobility work into my movement. I'm like, all right, getting a bit creaky in my knees, I need to do some mobility. I've resisted this for a long time. I'm like, all right, I really got to do it now. I don't like mobility, I find it boring. You know I've got a background of powerlifting, so I'm like give me that hundred kilo deadlift and mobility feels tedious, but my body loves it. And so first thing I do is I remind myself why it's important, why it's going to benefit my life, and I really like pump up my intrinsic motivation. What will life look like if I did this consistently for five years? One year? What will life look like if I don't do my mobility work? And that is like enough to go. Oh yeah, I now want to create a plan to add this into my life.

Speaker 2: 21:09

So you have a vision in your mind, you're imagining what you look like, what your life looks like, imagining that lifestyle in the sliding doors moment, with or without.

Speaker 1: 21:19

Yeah, exactly, and that's how I build intrinsic motivation, because I've tried for a really long time to consciously go. Mobility is a good idea and it did nothing. I had to feel it, I had to experience it and see it in my mind's eye and how it impacted my life, and that was motivating.

Speaker 2: 21:40

So being all practical about it and being like cool, what does all these benefits? And being all clinical, that's not as effective as being emotive and going listen, how am I going to make, how is it going to make me feel? And just creating that really clear vision for yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:53

Yeah, we're much more driven by our emotions than our thoughts. There's no point throwing facts at people. It's it's kind of interesting, interesting, but it's not inspiring enough. It has to feel relevant to the person.

Speaker 2: 22:07

I love that. I think that's really very useful, and then you go about breaking it down into like a bite size.

Speaker 1: 22:13

Yeah, I plan like cool, I'm gonna add five minutes of mobility at the end of my workout and I've just like got an app make it really super easy. I only do the mobility work that I enjoy. The others I'm like skip, skip, skip. That's fine. That's just where I'm at right now. I'm only starting with it and then, with time, I'll probably add a little bit more.

Speaker 2: 22:35

Yeah. So once again that gentle. It's got to be enjoyable. It's got to give you that dopamine hit. If you're making it too hard, straight off the bat it's going to crumble. So you're finding that like lower bar to entry.

Speaker 1: 22:47

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 22:48

And then, what about getting rid of a habit that you're like, oh, you're not serving me anymore. See ya, bye, okay.

Speaker 1: 22:55

I have this unwanted. I'm not a scroller. I don't actually really like social media a lot. Not a scroller, like I don't actually really like social media a lot. I'm not someone who just finds that very interesting. But my confession here is I love a good phone game Like give me Tetris any day. There's a game called Spell Tower and like I can play Spell Tower for eight hours a day and it's like my escape, right. But it's also a distraction from nature, from looking up and experiencing life and being present, and I used to play it. You know a lot more than I would like to. So to break that habit, I tried keeping the app on my phone and just like putting boundaries around it. That didn't work. I just had to delete the whole thing.

Speaker 2: 23:46

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 23:49

Take away the. You know the actual I can't. I don't have a choice. I can't play spell tower, it's not on my phone anymore, so that worked. But I, you know, if it's another sort of, if it's a habit that I want to break, I just make. I create barriers and we are creatures of habit and we also love the path of least resistance. If you create a barrier for the habit that you want to break, it makes it so much easier to break it. So if that's say, you want to drink less wine, put the wine in a really hard to reach shelf that you've got to get a step ladder for and create those barriers, and that in itself gives you enough time to have mindfulness. It's like just enough time to go. Do? I actually want to do that, and that is a really helpful strategy for me to use.

Speaker 2: 24:39

Oh, I love that. So if you want to break the habit of weighing yourself as frequently as you do and you're not ready to throw out your scale, go and put the scale in the garage or a very high it's hard to reach place just because you got to get the ladder out to get it. It's such an inconvenience and then you put it right back there. If you do ever use it that way, you kind of have the options. But what you're talking about is environmental cues, creating an environment that supports us to be healthier.

Speaker 2: 25:02

I was recently in America and one of the things I noticed is I was in Utah, there were no sidewalks in the suburb that I was walking in and it was so incredibly hard for me to go on a safe walk with my children where the cars really rained the roost and it just is a reminder of your environment so deeply influences your ability to be healthy, the social determinants of health, and being able to modulate your physical environment means you can kind of take away the importance, the reliance on willpower right, and make it just a little bit easier, a little bit gentler and kinder to yourself, yes, so true, because willpower is a fleeting resource.

Speaker 1: 25:41

We don't have unlimited amounts of it, so it's not a resource we can depend on. So I love that our environment drives our behavior, so we can create an environment that fuels our healthy habits. Oh, we make it so much easier for ourselves.

Speaker 2: 25:55

Spot on. I always think that relying on willpower is like relying on your cat to wake you up for an important meeting. Like it could happen, but it like it probably won't. And it's just like sure. Let's think of better systems.

Speaker 1: 26:09

That's just a really faulty system to rely upon. I love this. I used to say I describe it as the friend who will ghost you. Like they might go, but I like the cat. I'm going to use the cat analogy from now. Do cats even wake people up? Don't know.

Speaker 2: 26:20

Well, don't have a cat sometimes yes, but sometimes no, and that's the conundrum we have. But yes, the ghosting friend, the, the unloyal friends, because that's exactly what it is. It makes you think that it can be depended on and then when you you really need it, it's gone, it's disappeared. It's chatting up the guy at the at the bar and you're like dude, we came together, I thought you, I thought you, I thought you had my back, but you did not. And now you actually help people, teach other people about habits. So you're kind of like the master, the habit master. And can you tell me a little bit about what you do with the Habit Change Institute?

Speaker 1: 26:56

Yeah, thank you, lindy. I created the Habit Change Institute because I felt like I needed to clone myself. I didn't have enough capacity to coach people one-on-one because I do a lot of corporate work and a lot of like online courses. So the Institute was birthed out of this desire to impart this knowledge that's generally hidden behind paid walls and medical journals and really hard to determine and decipher medical research. So I just distilled it all down, I made it really easy to understand and implement and I created the Habit Practitioner course and that's really designed for health professionals or coaches or educators or anyone who works with someone where behavior is involved, and it's a self-directed online course. I'm available anytime for questions during that time and there's also alumni training. So there's ongoing training that alumni will get forever, essentially because habit research is always evolving and there's a beautiful community worldwide now of habit practitioners and advanced practitioners from every continent, apart from Antarctica. I'm yet to hit Antarctica, so if anyone's listening, antarctica, come do my course.

Speaker 2: 28:16

And so the ideal person to do your course would be someone who's currently a practitioner already maybe a coach or a personal trainer, a a nutritionist, someone who's already seeing clients.

Speaker 1: 28:27

Exactly. Yeah, I've got school teachers, nurses, doctors, even like health and safety managers who want to help, like their staff members be more safe around a yard. It's really like anybody who works with somebody else.

Speaker 2: 28:42

Okay, I love this. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today. Can I ask you if there was one thing you wanted everyone to know about habit formation, breaking habits, one tip you can leave us with that you think's a pearler. What would it be?

Speaker 1: 28:59

I think it's actually that you are not stuck with your brain, that, no matter whatever habits, whatever your habits look like right now, they don't have to look like that tomorrow or the day after that. You can design your life exactly how you want it to be through consistent habit change, and it's all about consistency, not intensity. Start small really really really small and know that you can change any of your habits.

Speaker 2: 29:31

I'm such a fan of yours.

Speaker 1: 29:32

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2: 29:35

Thank you for having me. Let's do coffee sometime. Everyone, thank you. Thank you for listening to today's episode. We'll see you next week.