“We ate this growing up and we were fine.”
I hear this all the time.
Except there’s one rather important problem:
What we ate then and what is being sold under the same name now can be VERY different things.
Chocolate is still called chocolate.
Bread is still called bread.
Cheese is still called cheese.
Ham is still called ham.
Crisps are still called crisps.
Orange juice is still called orange juice.
Yet look at what can now sit between the front of the packet and the food you thought you were buying.
More processing. More additives. Different fats. Different farming practices. Different preservation methods. Longer supply chains. And ingredient lists our grandparents simply wouldn’t recognise.
Even the way much of our food is grown, raised, processed and stored has changed.
So when someone says:
“We’ve always eaten this…”
My question is:
Have we?
Or have we kept the name while completely changing what’s underneath it?
This is about paying attention to what you’re actually buying.
Turn the packet over.
Read the ingredients.
Ask where it came from.
Choose the simplest version you can reasonably afford.
We can’t keep pretending our food environment hasn’t changed enormously while wondering why our approach to health might need to change too.
Modern problems sometimes require modern solutions.
Or perhaps, in this case…
some very old-fashioned ones.
You don’t need another year of knowing what you should be doing.
You don’t need more frustration, more overthinking, more promises to yourself that “this time I’ll do it differently.”
If you genuinely want one thing, but repeatedly find yourself doing the very things that take you in the opposite direction, there’s a reason.
And it’s probably not because you’re lazy, weak or lacking willpower.
Much of our behaviour is being driven by patterns and associations below our conscious awareness.
So we can KNOW what we want.
We can KNOW what would be better for us.
We can even KNOW exactly what we should do next…
…and still not do it.
That gap between knowing and doing is where so much of my coaching work happens.
Once you begin to understand what’s actually driving the behaviour — and learn how to give your subconscious something different to work with — change stops being a constant battle with yourself.
This is what I teach my private coaching clients.
Not endless analysing.
A clear set of tools to help you recognise the pattern, interrupt it, create a different response and build new evidence — tools you can then apply to your health, relationships, work, money, confidence and the decisions you make next.
If you’ve spent long enough saying “I know… so why do I keep doing this?”, perhaps it’s time to find out.
See the pattern. Change the behaviour. Reclaim your choices.
My private 1:1 coaching is now open to a limited number of new clients.
Limited spaces. By application.
Comment CHANGE or head to the link in my bio to find out more.
Acceptance? Resistance? An immediate “Yes, but…”? "No, but..."
That reaction is information in itself.
Don't fight it. Don't justify it. Just sit with it for a moment and get curious about WHY you reacted that way.
Sometimes the patterns we most need to recognise are the ones we're quickest to defend.
If this resonates, I think you'll LOVE my latest Coffee Chat, where we explore the gap between knowing what's wrong and actually doing something differently.