From rules to trust: using COM-B to build health that lasts

In my last post I introduced the COM-B model of behaviour change. This week I’m zooming in: how does COM-B help us move toward body acceptance and away from diet culture? If you want to go deeper, I’ll cover this in my free online masterclass at the end of the month - reserve your free spot here.

Capability: can you do the behaviour?

Capability means the skills, knowledge and mental bandwidth to act. When we leave diet culture and try an intuitive approach, we’re often starting from scratch: we’ve been following external rules for years, so listening to internal cues can feel unfamiliar. Do you feel confident in knowing when you’re a little hungry, and when you’re full? How about listening to what your body actually wants to eat?

This is something I really struggled with when I initially shifted to eating intuitively - and often still do. Sometimes I don’t realise I’m hungry until I’m absolutely ravenous. For a long time, I had a habit of always having a bar of chocolate in the evening - I thought because I loved chocolate and needed the comfort, but it turned out it was because I wasn’t listening to my body and feeding it enough (especially carbs) throughout the day. 

It takes time to “learn” this skill of listening to your body - but it’s possible (it’s probably how you ate as a child!). I found it useful to simply pay more attention - taking the time to notice how hungry I felt, and pausing while eating to notice how full I felt. Sometimes simple rules help - for example, I usually try to eat something at least every 4 hours, as I know once I get to this mark, I tend to start getting hangry. Also ensuring that (most) meals contain some carbs, some protein, some fats, and some veggies. Doing these things and noticing how they felt in my body has helped me to trust myself more.

Note on neurodivergence: If you’re neurodivergent, “interoception” (listening to your internal signals) can feel more difficult. Focus instead on eating regularly and eating enough, rather than stressing too much about your internal signals. There’s a great post on this here. 

It’s also important to note that while listening to your internal signals is important, intuitive eating shouldn’t become “the hunger and fullness diet”. Sometimes we eat when we’re not hungry, sometimes we overeat until we’re uncomfortably full - and this is totally fine. Listening to our internal signals just helps us to be more conscious and intentional about these things. 

Opportunity: what in your environment helps or blocks you?

Opportunity is about your physical and social environment - and diet culture is a huge blocker. From adverts to casual comments and “good/bad” food rules, the environment constantly nudges us toward shame and restriction.

This might be about body image expectations, and fatphobia. These influences can cause us to feel shame and negativity about our bodies - which isn’t really the best place to start when working on taking care of yourself better. I wrote about how I worked on challenging these issues in this previous post. 

A big influence here is food rules. We get messages all the time about foods being “good” or “bad” - just think, when was the last time you said something like “Oh I can’t have that, I’m trying to be good” or “Oh it’s cheat day, I can have naughty foods today”. The thing is, these food rules are often setting us up to fail. Research shows that when things are “forbidden”, we’re more likely to crave them, and more likely to overeat when we do have them (I talked about this in my post about biscuits). Furthermore, if we’re hungry (quite likely if we’re following rules about how much, or how little, to eat in a day), we’re much more likely to be drawn to the foods we see as “naughty”. These external rules start early - many of us were encouraged to clear our plate as children (even if we’re already full), or maybe that we had to “endure” eating all our vegetables, in order to gain access to “treats” like dessert. It’s no wonder we grow up internalising these rules. 

It can take a lot of time to “unlearn” these rules, and instead focus on listening to your body, and how foods actually make you feel. When I was just getting started on this journey, I initially found it helpful to just notice when food rules crept in - it’s surprising how often you see them in advertisements and marketing, or hear them in people talking about food, and even how much they arise in your own thoughts. 

Motivation: what do you feel and believe?

Motivation can be driven by external pressures (“I should,” “I must”) or by intrinsic reasons (“this feels good,” “this helps me live the life I want”). 

Similarly to the opportunity and capability challenges, often with motivation we often focus on those external pressures, rather than looking inside. We tend to think about what we “should” do, and try to motivate ourselves with external expectations like what our doctor wants, or to get the body that means other people will find us attractive. 

But these motivators will always be external to us - it’s about following rules, or getting approval from others. When we’re using these motivators, we’ll always be fighting against what we really want - the intrinsic motivators.

The good news is that moving towards more intrinsic motivators can make healthy behaviours feel like less of a battle. If we do something because it feels good, we tap into that “automatic” motivation, and it can feel like less of a fight. For me, this was about taking time to enjoy all foods, from broccoli (my favourite!) to chips, and about finding exercise which feels good in my body. I now crave the things I previously labelled as “good” as much as the things I labelled as “bad”!

How to apply this to your own life

Take 10 minutes this week: pick one behaviour you’d like to change and ask yourself, “which COM-B barriers are in the way?” Pick one small action from the tips above and try it for a week.