The Health Habit with Dr Amantha Imber

0:04 This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. It is the start of a new year, and no doubt you have health goals you want to achieve. Despite all of my preaching not to set resolutions, I am sure that there are changes you want to make in your life to improve your overall health and wellbeing. The challenge we all face is knowing what are the key changes that will have the biggest impact, and once we've got that sorted, how do we actually sustain those changes so that they become our new healthy habits. Remembering that the more your behaviors become habits, the less you have to rely on things like willpower and motivation, which will always desert you when you need them the most. Well, my guest today has the answer to both of those questions in the form of her brand new book called The Health habit doctor. Amantha Imba is an organizational psychologist. She is host of the top rating podcast How I Work, and she is founder of behavioral science consultancy Inventium. She has worked with companies like Disney,

1:37 Apple and Google. She has a very long list of impressive accolades, including being named one of Australian Financial Reviews Top one hundred Women of Influence. Most importantly, she is not only super smart, she's loads of fund She's got plenty of fabulous advice to share with you today. So strap yourself in, grab a pen to take notes, and get ready. To change your life for the better. Here is Amanda. Amanda, Welcome to the Crappy to Happy Podcast. Such a pleasure to meet you. Oh so good to be here. I have been reading your latest book, and I think this is very, very timely because even though we are having this conversation in December, pretty sure this will be released in early January, just after Christmas, when everybody is in the throes of New Year's resolutions and how they're going to change their life in twenty twenty four. So this is perfect timing because, as we all know, many of us set goals determine that we're going to make changes in our life and our behavior improve our health, and then well doesn't always go to plan. So you have the solution to this? Can you tell me about how health habits is or what it's about, and how it's kind of different to other maybe self healthy kind of books.

2:51 Absolutely, so, how the health habit came about is that I am like a massive health nerd. I'm just always experimenting just for fun, even though my day to day work involves well, it involves behavior change, but really in the context of how we approach our work. And so health has always kind of been it's kind of obsession slash hobby on the side. And I've read so many health books, and I was thinking about just the number of health books that I've read and how those things work. At bookstores. It's like every month there's some new health fad, maybe it's a diet book or something like that, that we all go out and buy, and then we try it and nothing really sticks, and so we're back in the bookshop the next month buying the next healthy fad kind of book. And then in the meanwhile, there's this other section of the bookstore that's all about habit change.

3:46 Like how can you change your habits? How can you change your behavior? And as a psychologist, I love those books and I read them with interest. But I was having this thought one day as I was thinking, you know, what should I write about next? And I thought, wouldn't it cool if those two sections of the bookstore, those two kinds of books actually met and kind of had a book baby. And so in The Health Habit, what I do is I go through some of the most impactful but underutilized strategies to improve our health, so specifically looking at how we sleep, how we move, and how we eat. And then the second part of the book is all around how do you make those new health habits stick? And said NYA was the idea for the book.

4:29 It's genius, to be honest, like it really it's it almost like is how has nobody written this before? Because it's perfect. It's here's what you need to do, and then here is how you can make sure or give yourself the best chance of actually doing this now. I was really actually fascinated to read some of the research in the first part of the book, which is about the actual health habits. So I wanted to spend a bit of time touching on a few of these, and people can get the book and they can read them all, but there are some of these that are really interesting. So let's start with sleep, because the book opens with sleep critically important, obviously, and it's a topic that comes up all the time, especially you know amongst people that I talk to as well about struggling with sleep. Maybe they've got young children, or maybe they just have anxiety, stress, difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep. It's a big thing that comes up in the psychology world, obviously. So what are some of the things that people can do to give themselves the best chance of getting a good night sleep.

5:27 Well, one of the most important things that we can do is we can wake up at the same time every day, which sounds very simple, but it's generally not what people do. So what typically happens I find for adults that are working in a typical Monday to Friday nine to five kind of job is that they'll get up pretty early Monday to Friday, and maybe they've also got kids to look after, maybe they're doing the school run, so they're probably waking up at maybe six maybe seven am if they're lucky, and then the weekend comes and they're quite possibly sleeping in for an hour or two and going that's fine, and then getting back to the six or seven am wake up on Monday. But what's actually happening is really quite problematic. Now. I live in Melbourne, Australia, and I often have to travel over the sea to New Zealand, which is about a two hour flight away and also a two hour time zone difference. And whenever I go to New Zealand, I remember the two hour time zone difference, and I think that'll be fine, I won't even notice. But inevitably what happens is that I feel like breakfast when it's actually lunch or vice versa.

6:43 When it should be my bedtime. I'm wide awake or falling asleep a dinner, you know, depending on which way I've gone, and I'm always surprised by that. And then after I've adjusted after a few days, it's time to go back home, and I again mistakenly think I'll be fine, it's only a two hour time difference, but again my body clock is completely screwed. And this jetlag experience that we get even from a couple of hours difference in the time zone is pretty much what people are doing to themselves if they're having a bit of a sleep in on the weekend. So they're going I'll be fine, I'll have a sleep on the weekend, and you're feeling good because your body's getting an hour or two extra sleep.

7:25 But when you hit Monday and you're back to your six or seven am wake up, it's essentially like you're putting yourself into a state of jet lag, and then it takes you a few days to get over that jet lag. By the time it's the weekend, you're sleeping in, and then you're repeating that jet lag feeling when Monday comes around again. So waking at the same time will basically stop you from experiencing jet lag on a weekly basis. And I read that in your book and I thought, wow, that's so interesting because I now am doing some workover in Europe and there's a one hour time difference. It's a forty five minute flight hour time difference. You think it's nothing, but inevitably the night before so I'll get there the night before, I'm wide awake when I know I should be in bed because I actually have to be up an hour earlier. It'd according to my body, and it really throws you out. Just that one hour.

8:15 It can really mess you up. It's one hour. On the upside, like I just came home and I'm like waking up fresh as a daisy at five point thirty in the morning and going, actually, this is pretty good because I've adjusted to this one hour difference and i feel like I've got all this extra time now in the morning. But it does, it really does make a difference. It does. And look, another thing that we can do when it comes to sleep is very very simple. So I imagine casts that you through your work in psychology, you see a lot of people that are having a lot of stress and a lot of stressful thoughts, and often as stressful thoughts come to the forefront when it's time to go to sleep, because what happens during the dayly is yeah, is that we're on phones. We're distracting ourselves from stress by scrolling through Instagram or watching TikTok videos and keeping the stressful thoughts at bay. But then when you're lying in bed and you're trying to get to sleep, your brain suddenly has time to open up this door of stressful thoughts, and that can keep you awake and make it really hard to get to sleep.

9:21 So there was some really interesting research done and it looked at how can we actually calm our brain down. And they had one group of people write a essentially like a two done list. They wrote all the tasks that they'd completed that day, and then they had another group right a to do list, so they talked about all the tasks that they hadn't completed and had to do, and also thinking forward to the next few days, what were the things that they were going to have to do during their week. And they found that the group that completed the to do list so essentially got all these open loops, because something on your to do list is an open life that your brain is still juggling and holding. When they got it down on paper, it actually reduced their stress and help them have a better quality night's sleep. So in this particular study, they were only spending five minutes writing this list. So it's a really great hack. But if you know, half an hour before bed, you know, before your head hits the pillow, just take five minutes write yourself a to do list, and you'll actually sleep a whole lot better.

10:28 I think that is really good. And I was actually speaking to somebody just the other day. She said, whenever she wakes up during the night, Let's say she wakes up at two or three in the morning, and it might just be like just because she gets up to go to the toilet and she comes back to bed. If she finds that there is things on her mind, she has a notebook and she writes things down and puts it aside and goes to bed. So is it work as well, like if you wake up in the night, just write the things down, put it aside, go back your sleep. Look, you certainly could. I know that the researchers didn't look at that specifically, but certainly you know if you are having those middle of the night wake ups, the best thing to do if you can't get back to sleep, say, you know, within ten or fifteen minutes, because often we will just naturally go to sleep. We sleep in cycles of about ninety minutes, so every nineteen minutes, it's really normal that, you know, our brain will, you know, kind of wake itself up and pop around and check for danger, as it did in the olden days, and if there's no danger, it'll just send itself back to sleep. But if you're finding that you're kind of lying there at three in the morning in bed and you're just not getting to sleep. This is going to sound really counterintuitive, but the best thing that you can do is get out of bed. So the more time you spend in bed struggling to get to sleep, the worse your association with your bed becomes. It suddenly becomes a place where you don't sleep. And that's not what you want to feel about your bed. So if you're having that middle of the night wake up and let's just say you

11:59 haven't fallen sleep in fifteen minutes, ideally move yourself to a different room, or even just get out of bed, and you know, maybe if you've got say an armchair or something like that in your bedroom, just sit there and do a relaxing activity. So it might be a meditation, it might be reading a book that is not the latest John Grisham thriller, but perhaps something a little bit more relaxing, something passive, and inevitably. On your screen. Not on your screen, yes, yes, exactly, Cass. Don't get your phone, don't get that blue light in your eyes, because that will wake you up. But if you do that, eventually you'll catch another wave of sleep. When you feel that coming, go back to bed, and hopefully you'll fall asleep.

12:44 That's a great one. And the other thing I found really interesting that you highlighted is that there's a lot of misconceptions out there about sleep. Like you said, it's natural to wake up, you know, routinely through the night, and I guess most of us just don't even really remember it we go back to sleep, but sometimes we do. I know, There'll be once or twice during the night that I know that I'm awake, and then ideally, normally. I will quickly fall back to sleep. But even like people expecting to wake up feeling really refreshed, and this idea of eight hours sleep, like a lot of that is actually not one hundred percent accurate. Yeah, So in the health habit I do quite a lot of myth busting. Actually, so I interviewed a lot of professors from all around the world, a lot of other health experts around you know, what are some of these common misconceptions and in this case around sleep, and there's a lot, and they're ones that I definitely had.

13:37 Like I remember, one of the health experts I spoke to was this guy called doctor David Cunnington, and he used to run the Melbourne Sleep Disorders Clinic. And I was telling David how often I would wake up and I would still feel pretty tired, but I'd get out of bed because I had to because I had to be somewhere, I had to take my daughter to school, or there was some sort of obligation. But I would think to myself, Ah, I'm still pretty sleepy. I don't think I slept all that well. And then eventually i'd get on with the day and i'd be fine, but you know, in that first hour of the morning, I'd be quite critical of how poorly I had slept. And David told me something really interesting. He said that for ninety seven percent of us, our natural sleep wake cycle is actually longer than twenty four hours. On average, it's twenty four hours and twenty minutes. And what that means if your natural sleep wake cycle is more than twenty four hours, but you're waking at the same time every day as opposed to you know, sleeping in just a few minutes every day, you're always going to feel that sense of sleep inertia. Because if you do, like the average person, have a sleep wake cycle that's twenty four hours and twenty minutes long, unless you're sleeping in twenty minutes every single day, which would completely put you out of loop with you know, with the normal sort of of day night norms that we all live by, you're going to wake up feeling tired. So he said, the best way to judge whether you've had a good night's

15:08 sleep is how you're feeling a couple of hours after you've woken up. So if you wake up at say six thirty am, and you're doing all your morning duty's and getting yourself ready, maybe getting your kids ready, and then perhaps by eight point thirty or nine o'clock you're perhaps sitting at your desk and ready to start the work date. You know, if you're a desk based worker, see how you're feeling then, because if you're feeling okay, then you're probably getting enough sleep. That's so good to know, because so many people wake up feeling groggy, like you said, and then they're taking that as evidence that they've obviously not slept well. In actual fact, that's quite normal. Exactly. There you go. Everybody's normal. Everybody can calm down.

15:48 There are so many other really good sleep tips. But the one that I wanted to really highlight, which I thought was so important, was the negative impact of sleeping pills and why we should be trying to avoid them. I think that's really important because even I have been guilty of, well, maybe if sleep's really bad, given how important sleep is for every aspect of our health and well being as we now know, maybe taking some medication to make sure you're getting good sleep is actually not a bad thing in the short term. However, yes, however it is not a great solution. And look, I say this as someone who has taken sleeping pills at certain points. They're certainly really good as a jet lag hack when you're traveling across the world, like from Australia to Europe or to America and you're just using a brute force approach as I think of it, to get your body clock right back on track. But certainly, since reading and understanding the research around sleeping tablets, I've stopped taking them and I finalized just stuffer through jet lag.

16:57 Which is not ideal. But what the research says around sleeping pills is that even taking sleeping pills infrequently, let alone frequently, quite dramatically increases our chance of having an early death, So it increases mortality. It's quite significantly, you know that. There's not quite sure why it does that, but there's just been a lot of research to support it. So wherever possible, try not to resort to sleeping pills because they are not good for your long term health. Yeah, that's kind of scary. And is that just like things like I'm not a doctor, but relaxant type of medication or what about things like melatonin that often people will take.

17:42 Is that included in that? Yeah, I don't think malatonin is included in that, but yeah, certainly. I think that one of the biggest issues with malatonin is just the quality variance. It's very hard to know what you're actually getting in the little latone and pill. But no, I think in terms of the prescription sleeping pills, it's it's classified differently in terms of research. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Okay, there are so much to cover, So I'm going to move on from sleep and anybody who has difficulty with sleep. You've got so many really great, amazing tips, So I'm just going to refer people to the book. Now movement everybody's got, well, unless you're a real fitness junkie, and you're absolutely obsessed with going to the gym or your marathon runner. Like most of us have a bit of a love hate relationship, you know, it's the thing that we think that we should do.

18:30 We never feel like we're doing it enough. And I was so thrilled, so thrilled to read this forty second this forty second hack, I want you to share with listeners how little exercise you actually need to do to achieve positive changes. Yeah. Look, it's it's it's pretty insane. So yes, so I yeah. One of the one of the professors that I interviewed, Martin Gabbala, who's from McMaster's Universe, specializes in in exercise physiology and exercise science, and he's done some amazing research to basically go what is the minimum possible dosage for improving our cardiovascular fitness and what it turns out contrary to you know, a lot of the health advice that says, you know, make sure you're doing thirty minutes a day of moderate activity like going for a brisk walk. Well, actually, what we now know from science is that doing to twenty second all out intense burths of exercise with a rest in between, and also a warm up and a cool down will actually get you even better results, so doing that. So basically the protocol is do a warm up, warm up your body for a couple of minutes, then do twenty seconds of intense activity, which might be a sprint, it might be burpies, it might be going all out on an exercise bike. Then

20:03 just rest, do something sort of lower level for a couple of minutes, do another twenty second all out sprint and then cool down. We'll get give you equivalent cardio benefits of having gone on a forty five minute jog. That is amazing, it is, It is absolutely amazing. One company that I love actually in the UK, and I think that I was their first Australian user. Actually it's this company called Carol and they make exercise bikes that are essentially AI powered, that are based on these same protocols that have been published in the research. So I bought one of these Carrol bikes I think six or seven years ago, and it's essentially got these they called re rehitch is the kind of training they've got these protocols actually programmed into the bike and it's just it's it's brilliant, but it's by far the most time effective way to improve your cardiovascular fitness, quite dramatic, without having to carve out like thirty or sixty minutes to go to the gym or go for a big long walk.

21:06 Yeah, exactly. I can hear people rejoicing. They hear that you're telling me to twenty second bursts is all it takes. And okay, so how many times a week would they need to do that? Look, let's say ideally three times a week is enough to increase your VO two max which is the most reliable indicator of your cardiovascular fitness. So that all yeah to do. So that's for cardio vascular fitness, presumably, Like there are benefits also to things like lifting weights, doing strength training, right, so there's other things before we all get too carried away, there are other things that we ideally should be doing.

21:49 That's exactly right. So you also definitely want to do something you know, the research is call it musculo musculo skeletal fitness if you like. So that's basically like doing some thing to improve your strength and muscle mass, which is particularly important as we get older because the more successfully we've been able to build up our muscles, the more that protects us from doing things like having a fall or having you know, limited movement or limited ability to do the sorts of movements that a lot of us take for granted before we enter old age. But again, you know that there is a section around again what is the minimum viable dose if you like, for improving our muscles, muscle mass, and our strength. And you don't have to do all that much. So in the chapter about strength training or weight training, there's really just three movements that you need to incorporate into a strength workout.

22:51 One is a pushing movement, you know, which might be as simple as a push a push up, like a body weight push up. One is a pulling movement, so like a bent over row where you might have some weights or something heavy in your hands, like filled up water bottles or something like that. And then ideally some sort of a movement where you're hinging at the hip, like a squat for example. And again you can do a body weight squat, you know. And ideally if you start by just doing one set of each of those movements, if you're brand new to strength training, yeah, that is absolutely a great starting point and you will start to see gains. Obviously, when you start to plato, you want to add in, you know, some more training sessions and some more sets, but that is absolutely where where you can start to see some results.

23:36 I feel like this is just such good news. There are so many people who struggle to start. And I know we'll get to the psychology and the motivation and stuff in a minute, but there are so many people who struggle to start because it just feels like too much to have to do. So bringing this down to the bare minimum that you need to do makes it very achievable for the average person, the busy person. You know, there's loads of reasons why many of us are not getting you know, doing the exercise that we know that we need. And this is just music to our ears. I know what's music to mine. Hello hoo, I can do this, I can do that. So again, there's like loads of other little tips in there that people can go and read better. Want to move on because the other really important part of overall health is nutrition, and I think this is the one that people get really stuck on. There is just so much confusing information out there. You know, we should be like no sugar and cut out carbs. But then there's people who were just fully carnivore and then I don't know, just meat, like they just eat meat. Now that's what I keep hearing, Like we went from just be plant based and now like no, we don't need vegetables.

24:44 I'm like, what the hell? So what are some of the basics I guess when it comes to nutrition that we all need to you know, again, what's the minimum that we can all be doing to give ourselves the best chance of eating well? Yeah, And it is interesting because I think nutrition is where you'll find the least agreement between scientists and researchers. So this was probably the most challenging section of the book to write. It was asking the question, what are the things that are universally agreed on but are essentially not just teaching people to suck eggs. We all know that we need to eat vegetables, you know, like you can accept for the carnivals, yes they're like just just steak on my plate, please, But there are things that are universally agreed like, for example, you've probably heard about blood glucose or blood sugar levels, and what we eat has a huge impact on those What scientists will agree on is that the more stable we can keep up blood glucose or blood sugar levels, I use those terms interchangeably, the better our health will be. If we're getting massive spikes and then drops, that is not good and certainly increases our chance of getting diabetes. And also so just on a day to day level, feeling like rubbish, like if you're finding that your moody, if you're having like that, you know, three pm, mid afternoon energy slump, If you're just feeling like tired and grumpy or maybe hungry, you know,

26:14 soon after you've actually eaten a meal, chances are your blood glucose level is not stable. It's peaking, it's spiking, and then it's like dropping, and that is making you feel pretty crap day to day. So there are a few tips in the book and also in the movement section as well, around how can we stabilize our blood gluecose levels. Probably my like one of the most surprising things I found when I was researching this chapter is that the order in which we eat our food actually matters. So I reckon you know, I'm sure you're familiar with the marshmallow test, which you know in terms of a test of willpower in kids. And obviously, you know, there's it's debatable how how valid and reliable that research actually was.

27:00 But I think as a kid, like I know, I was pretty disciplined, I was pretty conscientious. I reckon I would have done well at the marshmallow test and just resisting that marshmallow. And certainly when I'm eating a meal, I find that I will just naturally adopt a save the best for last philosophy. So if there's vegetables on my plate and there's also potatoes or chips or something like that, I will always eat the vegetables first because I want to save the best for last. But it turns out there's science behind my eating philosophy. So there was some really interesting research that looked at, you know, your average meal that consists of vegetables, some protein like some chicken, for example, and some cabs like rice or pasta or something like that. And one group were asked to eat the vegetables first, then the protein and the fats like let's just say there was some olive oil or something like that, and then finally the cabs like the rice, and then another group were asked to eat it in the opposite ordering with the carbs and finishing with the vegetables. What they found is that the group that ate the vegetables first and the carbs last had significantly more stable blood gluecoase levels. So if you're having a meal where it is kind of segmented into those different sections, try to eat your vegetables first and try to eat the carbs last, and then have the protein and the fats in the middle. Obviously, that doesn't worry for every meal. If you're eating spaghetti bolonaise, you're going to look totally neurotic if you're trying to apply this philosophy.

28:31 But where you can, it's going to help you feel a lot better. Yeah, that's really interesting, And so I know that you talk to Jesse and Cholseby the Glucose Goddess for your book. I also have had her on the podcast, so just for listeners if they're interested in that, you can always go back and listen to that conversation with Jesse. And in fact, note to self, I think she's got a new like a recipe book out or something, so I should probably get her back on the show as well and get an update from her. But so interesting, and so speaking of that and the blood glucose levels, which I also think is just so interesting and really important. It really just brings it back to basics like never mind what you're eating, or what can you do to maintain those blood glucose levels? Because what Jesse also said was that, Yeah, the reason that Keito diets, for example, work is for that reason because they maintain a consistent blood glucose level. But if you can, you can eat those other foods, if you can just find a way to eat them so that you're still maintaining that stable kind of blood glucose, which again is music to many people's ears.

29:30 You don't have to cut them out completely. Just eat them last exactly exactly. So what about the. Blood glucose monitor, because you that's how Jesse got started, right, is by monitoring her tracking her own response to what she was eating. And I know you've used it to, haven't Your mathis? Can you talk about that and is that something that people generally you would recommend that you do, you know to just yeah, okay, let's hear that. One hundred percent. So I am a massive fan of experimentation and in the health habit I talk about just having the mindset of an experimenter, and with any of these health habits, try to adopt just a seven day experiment, like anyone can do anything for seven days. And you know, given that I do have this experimental mindset, something that I've always been interested in is how different kinds of foods that we eat have quite a different impact on our blood glucose levels. So what is really interesting in research is that like the media will give us these broad brush pieces of advice like eat whole meal bread, don't eat white bread because white bread is bad for us in inverted commas, and whole meal bread is always good.

30:41 But what we actually know is that people have a very individualized response to particularly how their body deals with carbohydrates. And so some people can eat white bread and their blood glucose will be completely stable, whereas other people it will have a massive spike and then a massive dip, and then they might have the effect with whole meal bread. And this got me really curious, and so I thought, I'm going to get one of those continuous blood glucose monitors or as CGM as they're cold continuous gluecose monitor. And I also bullied my partner into doing the same thing because I didn't want to be alone in this environment, and so we bought these devices. So in terms of what they look like, if you imagine like a table tennis ball squashed, it's kind of like sort of a round piece of plastic that's got a needle on it.

31:32 And like, as soon as I hear needle, I think, aultch, that sounds really scary. But don't be scared. Even though what is happening. This device is sitting kind of like where your tricep is at the back of your arm, and the needle is piercing through your skin. You don't actually feel it, and it doesn't actually much to my surprise, it doesn't actually hurt to put the blood glucose monitor on. So you stick it on and then it just stays there for two weeks with the brand that I was using. And then and you've got an app and you can scan the little blood glucose monitor with your phone and you'll get a reading of what your blood glucose levels are doing at any time of day. And so then what I did and what my partner did is we run a whole bunch of food experiments. So we'd put together, like all the different kinds of meals that we eat, and then we'd see what they did to our blood glucose levels. So there were some real surprises in there.

32:23 Probably the biggest surprise for both of us is that we both actually like porridge. And I would say most health experts would say porridge, that's a healthy food, Like, shouldn't we all be eating porridge for breakfast? But actually both of us had massive spikes from eating porridge. Wow, And so we've kind of stripped that out of our diet thanks to our enperiment. Because it's just straight carbs, isn't it Like it's just is that right? It's a big bowl of starch. Yeah, it is majority carbohydrates. But some other foods like that, our majority carbohydrates, like let's take a carrot for example, didn't have that impact. It's not so. Much that the majority in terms of the macro nutrients are carbohydrates. It's that that particular carbohydrate, that particular food just didn't really gel with my body in terms of providing me with a good type of energy. Instead, it gave me a big peak and a big trough.

33:18 That's so interesting. Are they very expensive? Do you just like hire it for we have questions. So the one that we used was about one hundred dollars. So it's not cheap. But also for the valuable data that you're getting from it, and you're getting two weeks worth of data, I think that it's money well spent. I mean, you could easily blow one hundred dollars on dinner out, and I think far better to get the data on what you should actually be eating you're going out for said dinner. I guess it's like being really intentional, isn't it, for that two weeks, Like you said, really track and monitor and make the most of that period of time. I'm going to look into that because I think that's really interesting.

34:01 I just wanted to for you to make one more tip about the nutrition side, and there's loads more as we know. Because I'm not necessarily a sweet tooth. I don't. I have a little bit of chocolate every now and again, but it's not something I really craved, Like I wouldn't say I have a sugar addiction, but I am a salt fiend. Like I salt and over salt to the point, like my husband says, oh, just. A few chips with your salt. Then like literally, chips are just like a vehicle to get more salt into my body. So this thing about highly palatable food, it's a phraser, a term I had not heard before, but I thought it was a very relevant one because I think this is most of our problem, right, It's the stuff that tastes really good that is our downfall.

34:45 So what is the solution? Yeah, so the section on hyper palatable food is interesting, and you know, look, it basically explains why it is really hard to say no to sweet things and salty things. So there's actually a formula scientists have worked out that determine whether something is defined as hyper palatable. In other words, highly addictive is essentially the outcome because it's activating the reward center of our brain. And basically it's about like the ratio of things like saltiness or the sodium amount that's in foods, and how much fat there is and then how much sugar there is. And there are some sort of magical formulas that don't exist in naturally occurring food, but certainly exists a lot with very processed foods. So what happens, like if we're eating normal food that hasn't been heavily processed or tampered with by food manufacturers. It sends the right kind of signals to our body, and our body is able to work out, and more importantly, our brain is able to work out when you've had enough, when your brain says I'm full, I'm going to stop eating, and so therefore you eat the amount that your body requires to fuel itself during the day. But if you're eating more of the hyper palatable foods, which are typically very processed, they're typically sweet, or they're typically very salty, like you know, anything from musibars to doughnuts and muffins to chips and fried bacon, those sorts of things, is

36:19 that our brain, it's like, our brain doesn't receive the signal that we've had enough. Instead, our brain is like, oh my gosh, my reward center is being activated. I must have more and more and more, and we become really bad at judging how much we need and that leads to over eating, which then leads to excess weight gain, which then can lead to a lot of health problems. So ideally we want to try to have ultra processed foods, you know, be only about ten percent of our diet ideal good tip. And then you also talk about like weaning ourselves off those some of those flavors, and I thought, hmmm, I might have to give that a crack. I might have to try to just less less salt, because you're right, your palette does it just doesn't it. If you cut something out for a while and then you go back to it, it tastes like super sickly sweet or just overly salty like, so it is just what we get used to. So we can wean ourselves off those things.

37:21 We absolutely can, And certainly several of the scientists and professors that I spoke to for the book said, look, it typically takes a few weeks, and I could certainly test to that myself. So you know, I've spent a lot of myself being a lot of my life being a massive sugar addict, Like I would require sweet treats, chocolate mix, ollies, you name it, several times a day. I was that addicted. And for me, it all culminated about ten years ago when my daughter was three months old. And I remember when I was pregnant, like I had a little ritual where I'd catch the train home from work and at the train station, there was a lolly shop that sold all these micked lollies, and I'd get a bag of lollies, you know, on the commute home every night and eat them. And then when my daughter was born and I was a very sleep deprived mum, there's no better source of energy than chocolate in my mind, so I eat a lot of it. And then one night, when she was three months old, I just put her to bed and I was in the kitchen and I needed like a hit of sweetness. And I looked in the fridge and there was like, there was nothing sweet in the fridge. It was all really boring, unprocessed foods.

38:37 The pantry there was nothing in the pantry. But what there was is there was a tupperware full of raw sugar. And I thought, that'll have to do, and so I got the tupawar out and I got a teaspoon and I started eating sugar from the tappaware. And at that point my husband is now my ex husband, not for this reason, but he saw me and he's like, what are you doing? Just said I just I needed something sweet, And at that moment I thought this has got too much. Here. I am at night spooning raw sugar out of tupple web, and so I ended up going cold turkey on sugar. Wow, I quiten And since then, for the last ten years, sugar is no longer and chocolate is no longer a daily habit for me, you know, through applying a lot of the strategies in the book. But what I do remember after being off sugar for a few weeks is how sweet things like carrots and pumpkin taste when you're not filling your taste buds with hyperpalatable foods that have been artificially designed to be intensely sweet and trick your brain into eating more.

39:44 Yeah, so you just got to get through that initial withdrawal and then it all stabilizes back to normal. I think that's really it's good for people to know that. Okay, the psychology of it. As much as we know what we need to do, and as much as this all sounds very doable, we know that human nature is that we start, we stop, we fall off the wagon. We find it really difficult to remain committed and motivated to some of these behavior changes. But you've got a whole second half of the book devoted to which we won't spend that much time but devoted to what we can do to give ourselves the best chance of success. And I think this is going to be really interesting to people too. So Amantha, do you just want to give us some ideas about what some of those things are.

40:27 I'll just throw it over. To you to to give listeners some ideas about, you know, what are the things that might help. Yeah. Absolutely so. I think what's really important to recognize when you're trying to make a new habit stick, and in the case of the health habit, their habits around your health. But you know, really with any habit, what's important is that you first identify what's the biggest barrier in the way of you making a successful change. And it's different for different people. So, for example, when COVID hit a few years ago and I in Melbourne, which I think is the lockdown capital of the world, well yeah, yeah, we had the most days in lockdown, not a title that we're proud of, but what we could do is that we were allowed to leave the house for one hour a day during lockdown. And I had two friends during this time that were trying to create a walking habit to improve their health, and one of my friends thought, I'm going to I'm going to do the walk in the morning, get it out of the way, and so for the first week she went for a one hour walk every morning. My other friend thought, I'm going to do it at the end of the workday, and so for the first week she stuck to that walking habit every day after work. But then in the second week they both ran into problems, but they were quite different.

41:44 So my morning walker friend, what she found is that because she was going quite early for these walks and she was making a bit of noise when she was getting into her walking gear, her partner started waking up and getting a little bit grumpy. And when you're lockdown with someone twenty four to seven, you kind of don't want any additional conflict, and so she just thought, oh, this is all too hard. I'm going to stop the walks because I don't want to create conflict with my partner. My other friend, who was walking in the evening, she in that second week got hit with a massive work project and she found that she was just in back to back zoom meetings all day and then she was at her computer until the way hours of the morning, and so outwent her walking habit because she was just too exhausted and also too busy, So the exact same health habit, but two really different things that were getting in the way. So for my early morning walk friend, we call that a relational barrier, where it's about the people around you and the social norms that are sometimes getting in the way of you making a change. But for my evening walk friend, it was around just that cognitive barrier of just being too exhausted to make a change.

42:52 There are two other kinds of barriers as well that I talk about in the book. There's motivational barriers, where you feel like you have to make a change, maybe your doctor has said you need to make this change, or your partner has said you need to change, but you don't really want to make that change, so it's sort of have two versus one two, so motivations lacking. And then there are environmental barriers. This is about the physical environment that we find ourselves in. So for example, we're talking about hyper palatable foods, and if your pantry is full of chocolate bars and various other chip packets and crackers and all those sorts of things, then there's probably going to be some environmental barriers standing in your way to reducing hpfs. So the book firstly helps you diagnose what is the main barrier standing in the way, and then it's a bit choose your own adventure. You go to the section that relates to your barrier.

43:45 That's so helpful because it is a really personalized approach, isn't it like it's you've really laid it out so that you can kind of work out what's getting in the way and then find a strategy that will overcome that. I was very pleased to see the inclusion of what I call a star chart because that is something that I recommend to people all the time. What's yours called our streaks straight toward Yeah, let's talk about a streek board for a second. Absolutely, So streekboard is really great if you have got a motivational barrier in the way. So what a streekboard is is it is some kind of visual representation that when you do your habit, let's say it's one that you're doing every day, that you give yourself a star or a tick on this streek board. And what happens over time is that just psychologically we don't want to break the streak now there are a lot of different apps that have used this idea of the sort of the street board psychology really well. Like if you've ever tried to learn a new language and you've used duo lingo for example, you'll have seen me streat.

44:52 That's my husband. He's like up to six hundred and something days wow, without a break, and he is so committed to continuing. That's it is really fascinating. I mean, it's quite impressive. It is very motivating. I know when I was working on the manuscript for the Health Habit, I had a street board up in my home office and I had a wordcam goal. Every day I was writing a thousand words that I could feel proud of. And if I did that, I got to put a little smiley face on my streetboard. And that is what got me through, certainly the initial six weeks when I was trying to turn my writing into a habit to submit the manuscript on time.

45:32 The other reason I always recommend that one too is because the people that I have worked with and I've involved in an online fitness community for several years, is that this all or nothing thinking takes over as soon as they eat a bad meal or skip a day of workout, and so for me, it's like, well, it really helps to keep it in perspective. If you've got this visual. Representation of all the times that you've done the right thing, then that one bad thing instead of going into that negative, self critical and such a failure, I never stick to anything. It really helps to keep it in perspective. It definitely does. The other thing that I noticed also works for me, and I noticed it was also in the book is what you call temptation bundling.

46:14 That is, do you tell you telling me what that is? Yeah, this is This is a big favorite of mine, and certainly when when I'm trying to change a habit and my motivation is lacking, because again this is a really good one. If motivation is the barrier standing in the way, what you want to do is you want to make the change desirable. That is that of the overarching strategy. But this is how temptation bundling works. So in my life, I mentioned that I've got an exercise bike, the Carrol Bike, and while I don't need to spend a long time on it, I still just don't enjoy it. And sometimes I do do sort of longer workouts on it, but I just I find it miserable. I find exercise bikes utterly boring. What I do like is that I have and I'm about to lose all credibility. I think with listeners is that I have a very unhealthy obsession with The Bachelor, and the Bachelor at reality TV has to be the US series because that really very specific, the bitchiest and lowest common denominator one. I think love it.

47:11 So anyway, I love it, but I feel intense guilt when I sit on the couch to watch the you know, the particular TV series. And so what I decided is to pair bike riding and the Bachelotte together. So when I am on the Carrol bike, I get my iPad and I balance it on the screen on the bike and I watch the Bachelor. And what it does is that it makes the bike riding so much more enjoyable. And it also means that what was a very guilty pleasure watching the Bachelor or Bachelorette is that it's now just a pleasure. So temptation bundling is taking the thing that you really don't want to do, where your motivation is low, and pairing that with something that brings you a lot of pleasure and enjoy, so bike riding and The.

47:58 Bachelor and I do the same sum time with podcasts, but the kind of podcasts that are almost like a series, you know, like a story that continues. I'm listening to one at the moment and I say, oh, I'm going to listen to that while I go for a walk or walk the dogs or something like that, and it just motivates me, like I can't want to get out of the house, yes, to find that thing of my ears and have my time to listen to that. I am exactly the same cast. I divide my podcasts into two types of podcasts. There's one that are pure joy and entertainment, and then there are ones that are educational. And I listen to my you know, you know, purely for fun and joy and entertainment when I'm doing things like generally related to exercise. But when I'm say in the car and I'm like, well, you know, being in the car, it's fine, I'm going to listen to my educational podcasts.

48:49 Yes. I think that's a really good point too, Like, don't if it's something that you feel like one of those half do things like listening to something that's educational, then don't pair it with something else. You have to fix them up so that you're doing you're actually adding something that's fun to something that you don't necessarily feel like doing exactly exactly. There's so many others. I think that those are really useful as a starting point. The book is called The Health Habit. Everybody can go out and get it. I think it's a perfect time of year to go and bye and let me tell you like I was fully engaged, like I was powering through that book, going this is so interesting. There are so many, really, as a psychologist, interesting psychological studies, and you know the research.

49:33 It makes for a really good read, and it's also. Just really practical, super helpful. So thank you so much for your time today, Amanda. It's just been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Kat, thank you