While this may sound obvious, the following rule is almost always broken when you’re struggling to lose weight or improve your nutrition.
Don’t keep Red Light Foods in the house.
John Berardi, the founder of Precision Nutrition, has a First Law of Food that states “if a food is in your house or possession, either you, someone you love, or someone you marginally tolerate, will eventually eat it.”
The good news is that the First Law of Food applies to healthy foods. The bad news is that this really applies to Red Light Foods.
You might be wondering exactly what constitutes a Red Light Food.
The concept of Red Light Foods comes from the Traffic Light Eating Method.
Green Light Foods can be eaten at anytime or anywhere. You’re able to eat them normally and in reasonable amounts. Single ingredient whole foods are typically in this category.
Yellow Light Foods are those foods you might eat occasionally but with some degree of caution or mindfulness. Maybe they trigger a bit of indigestion or they are foods you’ll only eat at a restaurant when it’s prepared a certain way.
Red Light Foods aren’t inherently good or bad. These are just foods you don’t intend to eat most of the time for one of the following reasons:
- They don’t help you achieve your goals
- You always overeat them
- You’re allergic to them
- You can’t easily digest them
- You just don’t like them
Red Light Foods are often ultra-processed foods since once you start eating them, you find it difficult to stop.
Do you remember the Lay’s potato chip marketing campaign? “Betcha Can’t Eat Just One.”
Or maybe Jay Leno with Doritos. “Crunch all you want. We’ll make more!”
Food manufacturers know the three things we can’t resist with our foods – the sweetness of sugar, the luxurious mouthfeel of fat and the sharp savory of salt.
They also know that combining two of those three things (stimuli stacking) creates a hyperpalatable food. If you wanted to design a food for increased consumption, two flavors are better than one and three flavors is a trifecta (like a salted chocolate brownie or French fries with ketchup).
Food scientists use the “Big 5” to formulate these hyperpalatable foods:
- Calorie dense – high in sugar and/or fat
- Intensely flavored – strong flavor profile
- Instantly delicious – inspires love at first taste
- Easy to eat – no effortful chewing
- Easily consumed – almost melts in your mouth allowing for quick eating and overconsumption
The Traffic Light Eating Method helps to make you aware of the foods you should keep on hand (Green Light Foods) and those you should keep OUT of your house (Red Light Foods).
You can use Precision Nutrition’s Red Yellow Green Foods Worksheet to help you clarify these categories for yourself.
For example, my wife can have ice cream in the house and not feel tempted. This is a Yellow Light Food for her.
However, ice cream is most definitely a Red Light Food for me because I struggle to control myself around this frozen addiction when it’s available.
Unless it’s that weird Neapolitan ice cream with strawberry in the middle. Who eats that? Given the possibility that the strawberry could contaminate the deliciousness of both the vanilla AND the chocolate, I’m perfectly fine with this anti-dessert in the freezer.
Keeping fresh fruit in the house and keeping chips and chocolate out of the house helps keep me on track. This gives me a degree of control over my environment, so I don’t stray off course if I find myself stressed, tired or seeking an edible distraction.
Regardless of your goals, you’ll want to set yourself up for success…especially in your own household.
This is where the difference between willpower and discipline come into play.
Willpower requires you to walk by the cookies without eating them.
Discipline is recognizing the flawed logic and not letting the cookies into your environment.
