How to build a better breakfast habit with Prof. Ben Gardner

Why do so many of us eat a "healthy" breakfast like cereal or muesli, only to feel hungry, tired, and foggy by 11 am? And why is it so hard to break this routine, even when we know it’s not working?

They explore the science behind why our breakfast routines are broken, how they set us up for a daily blood sugar rollercoaster, and what to do to fix things. 

Tim breaks down the latest science on common breakfast foods, explaining why most cereals, muesli, fruit juices, and "high-protein" options are failing us, leading to energy dips and mood changes.

Ben explains the psychology of why we're stuck. He reveals why bad habits run on autopilot, why our environment is more powerful than our willpower, and busts the persistent "21-day" myth, explaining how long it really takes to form a new habit.

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Transcript

Jonathan Wolf: Welcome to ZOE Science and Nutrition, where world-leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health.

Benjamin Gardner is a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey. Over the last 15 years, he's published over 180 papers and book chapters on habits and behavior change. His work has been cited over 18,000 times, including more than 200 policy documents. 

Professor Tim Spector is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists. A professor of epidemiology at King's College London and my scientific co-founder here at ZOE for many years, Tim has studied the impacts of food choices on our metabolic health and our gut microbiome.

Ben, thank you for joining me today. 

Benjamin Gardner: Thank you. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, thanks for being here. 

Tim Spector: Great to be here too. 

Jonathan Wolf: So Ben, we have a tradition here at ZOE where we always start with a quick-fire round of questions from our listeners. Are you willing to give it a go? 

Benjamin Gardner: I will give it a go. 

Jonathan Wolf: Excellent. And we have some quite strict rules: very hard for professors, you can say yes or no, or you have to a one-sentence answer. 

Okay. I'm going to start with Tim, so you get the hang of it. Tim, can good breakfast habits reduce your long-term disease risk? 

Tim Spector: Yes. 

Jonathan Wolf: Ben, does building a new habit take 21 days? 

Benjamin Gardner: No. 

Jonathan Wolf: Tim, can a poor breakfast influence your energy levels for the rest of the day?

Tim Spector: Definitely. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Ben, what's the biggest myth that you often hear about behavior change? 

Benjamin Gardner: That it takes a certain amount of time to make or break a habit. 

Jonathan Wolf: That's not true. 

Benjamin Gardner: No. Breakfast is the meal that generally we have the most control over as we're usually at home. But so many of us just eat exactly the same thing every day, and probably eating something that some big food company has convinced us is a good choice.

Jonathan Wolf: So Tim, I mean, first off, is breakfast the most important meal of the day? 

Tim Spector: It depends how you define breakfast really. Most people think of breakfast as something you eat shortly after waking up, and if that's the definition, it's no longer true. 

Although in most government health guidelines, it's still there in black and white: breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It's what our mothers told us, and it's what advertisers tell us as well. 

But if you think of breakfast as the first meal of the day, that can be when I eat it, 11 o'clock, it is still probably the most important one. I've found in this new way of thinking about food and how to be healthy.

What we've discovered is that the standard breakfast of eating half an hour after waking up is not for everybody. It used to be said that it was really harmful if you skipped it, your kids would fail at school. You'd be fainting by the time you got to lunch, and that's absolute rubbish.

There have been a dozen studies now comparing people who skip their breakfast or just have nothing before lunch or the other way around and real, no negative effects and some benefits, but it's not for everybody. 

And we've done some studies to actually look at this in people who've delayed their breakfast and most people are able to delay their breakfast until 11 without any problems actually feel better.

Whereas there are some people like yourself, it's the worst thing you could do is to not have your breakfast early on. So it's much more variable and more personalized than we believed. 

But coming back to your point: it's still also the time where, generally, you are in more in control of what you're eating. You are generally not at work, you are not out on the road. 

So in that respect, it does set you up properly. And it also, if you pick the wrong breakfast, it can set you up really badly so that you end up in a spiral of sugar spikes and highs and lows with energy dips.

This is what I noticed when I changed my diet the most is I had the classic English breakfast, which I thought was healthy, which was a standard muesli with low-fat milk. I might have a bit of toast, marmalade, have a small bit of orange juice. 

I'd have that at eight o'clock and by 11 o'clock I'd be hungry. I'd be having an energy dip. I'd be looking for some chocolate biscuit to go with my coffee to keep me going. I was in this cycle of highs and lows and with major energy dips.

And so for me, it was a revelation over a decade ago when I switched and moved away from those high-carb breakfasts onto something much healthier for me. 

Jonathan Wolf: Why was that bad? Why was it causing these dips that you're talking about? 

Tim Spector: Well, because for me, I'm sensitive to sugar in the food, and carbohydrates.

Naturally, when you are having these processed foods, they release sugar into your bloodstream really fast, and you have orange juice that does the same thing. Early in the morning, you get this big sugar rush, you then end up two hours later having a sugar dip. So you go below your levels. 

We've done studies associating that with drop in energy levels and a drop in mood and an increase in hunger.

So what you're effectively doing is making yourself hungrier by satisfying a sort of sugar lust earlier in the day. So having these ups and downs for most people is actually upsetting for your metabolism. 

I also found it affected my brain. So a little bit of brain fog crept in that I really wasn't having this clarity. I once spent 24-hours just eating Sarah Berry's famous muffins, which everyone who's had them knows the high sugar, high fat.

I was having two of these every four hours for 24 hours, and my sugar spikes were going through the roof because I had a glucose monitor on at the time. 

This is in the early days of ZOE, we were trying to work out how to personalize these things and I was recording my energy, my mood. 

I was trying to write a book at the time, that day was a write-off. I couldn't do anything and I just felt sick inside. My energy levels were low, but my brain wasn't functioning because of these major shifts in the glucose levels. 

So this is an exaggeration of what many people I think are having when they have their traditional breakfasts, which are what the food companies want us to eat.

This is why they're overeating in their next meal at lunch and why they're also seeking out sugar, and we're having these energy and mood dips. 

Jonathan Wolf: So are you saying that sort of the breakfast choice, the choices I'm making for my first meal are having this big impact, not just for how I feel, maybe in the next couple of hours, but sort of setting up not just how my blood sugar is going through the rest of the day, but even how my mood and my hunger is going through the rest of the day?

Tim Spector: Absolutely, yes. We've shown this quite clearly in our studies and even showed that it has an effect even the next day. 

So when we analyzed the Predict studies, we showed that the breakfast you had the day before also influenced your sugar levels the next day and your choice of food. 

It's like continually just shifting what your body thinks it needs, and so you're more likely to keep picking those sweet, sugary foods if you've started with it a day ago. So there's a bit of a residual effect in your body. 

All of this points to really how important it is to change that starting point. 

Jonathan Wolf: Tim, I was brought up that you should have cereal at breakfast. That was just the way that human beings were supposed to start their breakfast, which I guess is a sign that Kellogg's has been around for a really long time and they've done some brilliant marketing.

So you put cereal in a bowl with milk and that is what your breakfast should be. Is that what our breakfast should be? 

Tim Spector: Only if you're a shareholder of Kellogg's. I think for everyone else, it's actually a really bad decision to eat these highly processed foods that have no nutritional value at all other than these very cheap vitamins that they add to it afterwards.

They will produce this sugar rush and leave you feeling hungrier than you would do. And they will often contain a mixture of salt and sugar, very little fiber, nothing to really fill you up, and you get this sensation that you've had something decent to eat, but a couple of hours later you'll be hungry again.

There are some exceptions that do contain some fiber, but the vast majority are setting us up for failure. 

Jonathan Wolf: So Tim, I think you've done a brilliant job of sort of painting this picture for how bad breakfast habits can negatively affect us through the rest of the day. 

And I think also touched on the fact that many of us might actually just have this habit about breakfast that we've had since we were children. And so it's a very strong habit and a default way of thinking about what we eat, which I definitely had pre-ZOE as well. 

I had two choices: which was either cereal or a piece of toast. And in my mind, those were the only things you could eat for breakfast. 

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I remember the first time I went to Asia and realized that people ate all these different things for breakfast, and I was like, this is mad, don't they know you're supposed to eat cereal? Which I now recognize might be more my issue than theirs. 

I'm really excited to have Ben here. You're a professor of psychology at the University of Surrey, and you've studied the psychology of behavior change, I think for more than 15 years now. 

So I'd really like to explore with you how our breakfast routine can actually have a knock-on effect on our habits for the rest of the day, and really look into this question of habits. 

Because I think everybody listening knows it's really easy to say, Oh, I just listened to this thing, I want to do it differently. I think we've all experienced how hard it is to go from saying we want to do something healthier to actually being able to do it. 

Why do bad habits start, Ben? 

Benjamin Gardner: Okay. So habits, as psychologists understand them, are not exactly the same as habits in the way that the general public understands them.

So the word habit is often used in everyday discourse to mean something that people do frequently or repeatedly, and in a kind of consistent and pattern-stable way. 

But to a psychologist, a habit is an association that we have in our minds between a cue or an aspect of our environment, and a behavior that we do in response to that environment.

So something like eating breakfast, for example. I am someone who eats cereal. I have a wheat-based breakfast with a banana each day. What happens is when I get into my kitchen, that's the trigger for me to go and get the cereal out of the cupboard, get the milk out, put the banana in. 

And so that particular behavior, that habitual behavior, is underpinned by that association that I have between getting into the kitchen at a certain time of day and my response to it, which is having that particular breakfast.

So it is about acting automatically. It's about doing something without thinking about what you're doing. 

Jonathan Wolf: Does that explain the experience I've definitely had where sometimes I might walk into the kitchen and I'm really thinking about something else, and I suddenly realize I've got all of breakfast sort of made in front of me and I haven't even realized. 

Which occasionally, you know, not often, I realize I don't even want, because for some reason, I woke up in the middle of the night and I've already eaten. Like it's almost automatic. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yes, it's exactly that. 

The habits are really useful for us because we can't stop and think about all the decisions that we have to make each day. If we had to do that, it'd be really debilitating. Imagine you wake up and you think, What do I have to do? Now you go into the bathroom and think, What am I supposed to do now? 

We have these habits precisely because they help us to lock in to our everyday routines, the things that we need to do so that we can do them automatically without thinking about what we're doing.

Now, that's really useful, where that behavior is something that continues to serve your goal s. So if I want to carry on eating cereal for breakfast, it's great that I can do that out of habit. I can think about something else. 

At the same time, where these habits become bad is when you are doing a behavior that you no longer want to do, and you're doing it on autopilot. So you're doing it automatically.

So you might say to yourself, for example, Oh, I've got to meet a friend today for breakfast. So you don't actually want to eat cereal, yet I might find myself in the kitchen, opening the fridge, getting the milk out, and so on. 

This is what makes a bad habit bad: it doesn't serve our goals anymore, but we still find ourselves doing it.

Jonathan Wolf: And so why does that habit persist even when it doesn't benefit us? You think you could just be like, Oh, I'm going to stop smoking, or whatever it is. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah. I think a lot of the time, starting doing a behavior kind of means that you become committed to finishing it off. 

And so, I mean, with something like cereal, you could get the cereal out and then think, Oh, I should stop doing that. 

There was a study that was done around the time of the smoking ban in the U.K. in 2007, at which point it was no longer legal to smoke in pubs anymore, and people were asked about their habits before this ban. 

Those people who had strong habits for smoking while they were drinking alcohol after the ban, they were asked about this and they said that they didn't intend to smoke while they were drinking alcohol anymore, so they didn't intend to flout that ban. But still they found themselves getting a cigarette out and about to light it up, and they had to stop themselves from doing it.

So going back to the cereal example, you know, I think when you've poured the milk over your cereal, for example, that's where you've committed yourself to doing the action. 

And what are you're going to do, you're going to throw it in the bin. So this is where it becomes problematic, where once you've started, it's very difficult to stop or it's kind of not worth stopping.

Jonathan Wolf: I think you said to our research team there's an experiment around popcorn that might be relevant. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, so this was a really interesting study. This was a study that was done where participants were recruited to what they thought was a study about the relationship between personality and preferences for upcoming movies, upcoming films.

And so what happened was, they were given a box of popcorn and some water and told, We'd like you to just sit there in the cinema and watch these 15 minutes of trailers. And then they had to rate them afterwards. 

Now unknown to the participants, it was actually a study of habits and it was a study of popcorn eating habits.

The researchers had actually given each of the participants exactly the same amount of popcorn. So they'd weighed the popcorn. So there was a set amount of popcorn there. 

And then after they had completed these ratings, they had to give the popcorn back so they could weigh the popcorn and find out how much each person had eaten.

Now, they also had to fill in a questionnaire about how much they wanted to see these films, their personality traits, and how frequently they eat popcorn when they watch movies. 

Now also unknown to the participants, some of these participants were given popcorn that was fresh, whereas other participants were given popcorn that was stale.

The point of this study was to say, among those people who frequently eat popcorn in a cinema, in other words, they have habits, are they going to be attuned to the fact that some of this popcorn is stale? 

And actually, what was found was that the participants who were given stale popcorn but had said they have strong habits for eating popcorn in the cinema, they ate just as much popcorn as people who'd been given fresh popcorn.

And afterwards, when they were asked about how much they enjoyed the popcorn, the people who were given the stale popcorn said they didn't like it, so they're not acting in line with their goals. 

If they had been acting in line with their goals, they wouldn't have eaten it. But nonetheless, because they were distracted, they were paying attention to these trailers and they had habits, they were acting in line with their habits and not in line with their goals.

I think what we learned from this is that we have habits for doing things in certain situations. And in fact, there was a variant of this study where participants were given popcorn and they watched trailers, but they watched these in a meeting room, so not the normal cinema environment, and they didn't eat stale popcorn as much.

So it's something about the environment that you're in. So it's the environment that triggers your habits. 

Actually what we can learn from that then is that a lot of the time we do act habitually when our attention is directed elsewhere. So if we want to overcome our bad habits, we really have to try and pay attention at the right moment to the thing that we're doing that we feel we shouldn't be doing and that we want to change.

Because if we don't, then we'll find ourselves a lot of the time doing that behavior, despite the fact we don't want to do it because we have a habit for doing it. 

Jonathan Wolf: Does that mean that the trigger, as you describe it, is incredibly important for what we're doing? 

So you described that when I go into the kitchen, then I make this particular breakfast, or when I go into the movie theater, then I eat the popcorn. I need to think somehow about the trigger if I want to change the habit? 

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Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, absolutely. You need to recognize that our habits are based on the situations that we do them in, the environments that we do them in. 

So just that understanding of what the triggers are to some of your behaviors that you don't want to do, that's really empowering because it gives you insight into the things that you're doing.

As I mentioned, one of the good things about having a habit is that you can do something without thinking about it, but because you end up doing something on autopilot, you might not even really be aware that you've done it. 

You might not be aware that there's a link with the environment. So I think yes, it's really important to try and develop that understanding of what are the situations that trigger you to do particular behaviors.

That information is going to be really important in empowering you to think about how to act differently in that situation rather than just in general. 

Tim Spector: That might be like a family watching TV after their meal when they're having snacks and things like this, that suddenly that's all their unhealthy eating happens in that moment, and people aren't associating it at the moment.

They don't think about it in that way. So it's a way different way of thinking about this sort dangerous environment that needs to be thought of differently. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, exactly. I think part of the problem is we like to think of ourselves as always acting out of conscious choice. If I did something, it was because I wanted to do it, so we feel like we're in control of what we do.

But actually, the habit perspective, it tells us that actually a lot of the time it's our environments that are triggering us. 

So rather than thinking I just need to become more motivated, it's more of a case of I need to work out what situations are causing this kind of non-conscious impulse for me to do this thing I don't want to do and then think about how we can overcome that particular response. 

Jonathan Wolf: Could you tell me something about this fresh start effect? 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, the fresh start effect is a really interesting phenomenon and it's essentially where, at the start of what people perceive to be a new kind of period, whether that's a new day, a new month, a new year, or maybe someone's just started in a new job. 

At the start of these new periods, people seem particularly motivated and energized and eager to make changes to their behavior. 

It's been shown in studies, for example, that Google searches for the word diet peak at the start of the year, they peak at the start of a month. It's been shown again that gym attendance is always highest in January, and it's all down to this fresh start effect.

I mean, to understand the fresh start effects, we've got to understand how people try to change their behavior and their kind of experiences of successes and failures. 

If you want to change your behavior, you need to not only have a goal and a motivation to achieve that goal, but you need to feel that you are able to achieve that goal.

You need to feel that you can change that behavior, and you need to feel that achieving that goal or trying to change that behavior would be something that's worthwhile to you. 

But what often happens is that people try to change their behavior. Then they're unable to do it for some reason. There's some kind of failure, some kind of setback. And what that does is it damages people's sense of confidence, their sense of control over whether they can continue and it makes another failure more likely. 

So the next failure happens, then that dents someone's self-confidence even further. And over time, not only do they lose self-confidence, they start to feel like this probably isn't worth pursuing because I'm not very good at doing it.

But the fresh start effect is really important because at the start of a new period, whether it's a day, a month, a year or whatever, this is when for a lot of people, they feel like they're wiping the slate clean. 

Those past failures are in the previous accounting period. And so they can start again.

So this is why fresh start is so important, and this is why the start of the day can be so important from a behavior change perspective. Because if you can do something that you want to do at the start of the day that inspires confidence. It gives you that boost, and so it sets you up for the rest of the day.

Jonathan Wolf: That's fascinating. 

I think we often see people, Tim, where maybe they say, Well, I've eaten something bad today, so it sort of doesn't matter. I'm just going to go and eat all sorts of junk. 

And I think we're like, that doesn't make sense, don't stress, you ate something that's not so good, but it's fine. Everything you eat that’s good is going to be good for your gut health. The rest of it, don't worry.

I think if I understand rightly, Ben, you're saying that's something deep in our psyche about feeling like, Well, if I've broken it, it's no good and I need to get to a restart point before I can start again.

Benjamin Gardner: Yes, it's exactly that. It's getting to the point where you feel like, Right, it's a new start. Now whether that's at the start of the day or you know, having moved house, whatever it is, these kinds of changes to the status quo or a new kind of temporal period are opportunities to start trying to do something that will help your kind of health and wellbeing and so on.

And to really do it in a way that's more likely to stick. 

Jonathan Wolf: And is this just a sort of universal part of being human? This isn't just specifically because we've grown up in the West with New Year's resolutions? 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah. I don't think it's specific to New Year's resolutions. 

A universal principle here is that people have this tendency, this need to segment time into particular chunks. 

So I think what is fundamental here is that this notion of a new start, when it is a new day, when we feel like the past period has finished, this is when people are going to feel most motivated and most able to make those changes. 

Jonathan Wolf: It's really exciting. So you want somehow to believe I'm in a fresh start place because that's going to allow me to say, Okay, I'm going to have a try at a new habit. I need to try this new thing enough for it to become this automatic habit that you were talking about. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yes, exactly. 

Jonathan Wolf: I've also heard about this idea of keystone habits. What are those? 

Benjamin Gardner: I mean, it's probably better thought of as keystone behaviors. If you want to change your behavior, you need to recognize that the behavior that you want to do kind of sits within a system of other behaviors as well.

So if you want to eat a healthy breakfast, let's say you do want to eat fruit with breakfast, for example, you want to eat a banana. Now that's the target behavior, the thing that you want to do, but actually you've got to recognize there are other behaviors that surround that. 

One of which is you need to actually go and buy yourself bananas so that you can do that. So the idea of a keystone habit is finding the crucial behavior in a particular system of behaviors where if you do that behavior, it's more likely that the target behavior will occur. 

I mean, for something like going to the gym, for example, one of the keystone habits there that we need to form is packing the gym bag and putting it in an accessible place so that at an opportune moment when you can go to the gym, you're all ready to go.

So keystone habits are about keystone behaviors really, and making those behaviors habitual so that you put yourself in a better position to do the thing that you want to do. 

Jonathan Wolf: I remember we did this podcast with the author behind Atomic Habits and he talked about the gym as the most important habit is actually just opening the gym door.

Because if you open the gym door, you're probably going to go and do some gym. And if you get into the habit of doing that, it doesn't even matter if you do very little to start with, you're going to build up. 

So with that being an example of what you're describing almost as keystone habit is going there and then the rest of the stuff will happen.

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah. I think we can see it as that. 

What I and my colleagues have done is differentiated between two different ways in which a habit can come into any behavior. You can essentially, habitually start doing something, then you can habitually do it. 

Let's say doing a workout routine in the gym, what I call the instigation habit or the habit of deciding is kind of where habit gets you over that decision point and commits you to going to the gym. So it kind of kickstarts that sequence by automating the first step in that sequence. 

Then there's habitually performing where you have lot a series of kind of mini habits that people work through to actually finish that behavior off. So if it's a workout routine, it might be, for example, you start by lifting weights and then finishing that habitually triggers you to go and run on the treadmill or whatever, so you kind of go through this sequence.

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But yes, by far the most important thing is that habit of instigating, the habit of starting the sequence off.

And in fact, what's interesting is when it comes to the execution, certainly for things like going to the gym, it's often good to vary what you do. But the most important thing for getting that habit up and running, like you said, is getting through the door, doing the first step in that sequence because that unlocks the rest of the sequence.

Jonathan Wolf: I don't love doing the gym, but I feel really good if I've done it afterwards, which I think is quite a common experience. 

My first step is to do some stretching and interestingly, if I start doing that, I never thought about this before, but if I start doing that, I will always do a gym session. I can't think of any time when I don't do the rest somehow, because I've started it, I feel like I'm committed. I'm in the pattern of it, and I'm just going to do the rest. 

Tim Spector: It's like opening the fridge and getting the cereal out, isn't it? You end up finishing the cereal even if you don't want it, or you've realize you're going to eat later. 

So this initiation is obviously very crucial. Is the reverse true? Can you do the same, break a bad habit? 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, the notion of breaking a bad habit is really interesting because there are lots of different ways in which you could be said to break a bad habit. 

The way to understand it is you have a habit association, so you go into a situation where you normally do something that triggers an association, that then triggers an impulse or a kind of non-conscious urge for you to do something, and on the basis of that, you then do the behavior.

So, breaking a habit can be done in lots of different ways. One is that you can intervene or try and stop yourself when you've been triggered. So you just watch out for what that trigger is and stop yourself from doing it. 

I mean, that's quite difficult. It takes a lot of self-control, but if you're aware of when the trigger is going to occur in what situation, then that puts you in a good position.

The other thing you can try and do is just avoid the trigger altogether. Or you could make the behavior harder to do in that particular situation. And what in theory should be the best way to change the behavior is that you stop yourself from doing the bad behavior and you do a good behavior instead in response to that particular situation, so that you set up a new association.

So, because there are lots of different ways to break a habit it is difficult to say, is it simply the opposite of forming a habit? 

It's that actually we've got to recognize there are lots of different ways to do this, and actually which way is going to be best will depend on the person, and the situation, and the behavior that they're trying to change.

Jonathan Wolf: You are saying through science, something that I guess I've learned just practically, which is the easiest way to not just eat a biscuit at three in the afternoon is to no longer have the biscuit in the house. 

If it's not there anymore, I can't do it automatically, and then it becomes more conscious and I'm like, Well, but I don't really want to go and buy a biscuit. I'll go and do something else. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, exactly that. I mean, that's one of the ways to break a habit is to make it more difficult to do the behavior. Because even if you don't have biscuits in the house, there's nothing stopping you from going to the supermarket or wherever it is you need to go to get biscuits.

The point is, it interrupts this kind of flow of autopilot mode, and it makes you consciously think, Right, do I want to do this behavior? And if so, am I willing to put the effort in? 

Jonathan Wolf: So I'd like to come back actually to breakfast, as I'm listening to this. 

So you are saying I need to be more mindful that that's really important. And this thing about a keystone habit, the thing that starts right? Like packing my gym kit or, or going to the gym. 

Could we use breakfast as a keystone habit for sort of healthy eating throughout the day?

Benjamin Gardner:  Yeah, definitely. I think we should capitalize on breakfast or at least the first meal of the day as an opportunity to get things up and running.

If you've got, say, a healthy diet goal, then getting your first win on the board, you know, as it were, by eating that healthy breakfast really sets you up. 

Because the opposite of that would be if you find yourself eating something unhealthy, possibly out of habit, well, you've immediately undermined your goal, and so this is where you might feel like, right, well, there's not, it's not worth continuing anymore. I need to start again tomorrow. 

So yeah, breakfast is a great opportunity to get that success and then that inspires confidence for you to get other successes throughout the day. 

Something else that's important, of course, is that one of the things that we need in order to change our behavior is adequate self-control.

And self-control can be depleted if we're hungry or we're tired. And so actually having a good breakfast, one that stops you from feeling hungry and craving sugar or whatever it is, having that means that you're more likely to be able to control your behavior throughout the day. 

Jonathan Wolf: So my takeaway from this is that breakfast is a really great opportunity to build new, healthy behaviors. Because if you set yourself up there, it's sort of setting you up for the rest of the day. And equally, if you're not eating a healthy breakfast, it's almost like you've already gone wrong at the start of the day, so it's going to be much harder.

Before we go on to how we can build those new habits, Tim, I'd like to get some actionable advice on what we should eat for breakfast to support our day. You told us about your terrible breakfast a decade ago. What are some better breakfast options? 

Tim Spector: Well, an example of a better breakfast is what I have is my go-to breakfast called my breakfast bowl, which is full fat Greek yogurt mixed with a milk kefir, which is like a super yogurt. I like to have three fermented foods a day, so that gives me two of them. 

And then I get some frozen berries from the freezer, so I maybe get three different fruits added to that and mix nuts or I'd pick the ZOE Daily 30 and just put a scoop of that on top and I'd have that with a black coffee. You know, I definitely wouldn't have any fruit juice or anything else like I used to in the old days. 

That would be my fairly standard one. I will vary that and sometimes have sourdough rye bread, which is high in fiber, and I'd have some avocado on that and I might again put another ferment, whether it's sauerkraut or, or whatever onto that.

But I also weekends might have, some eggs. And I know other people like things like peanut butter, which, in this country isn't a common breakfast, but, actually would be much healthier than marmalade or jam or anything else. And, and sometimes I'll have cheese as well. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim why is that better than the sort of cereal and low-fat milk that you were talking about having in the past?

Tim Spector: Well, most people don't respond well to having just a massive amount of refined carbohydrates and sugar in their diet because of this problem of the sugar spike, which has this knock on effect for the rest of the day, causing lack of energy, mood changes, and hunger. 

And it also sets you up long term for getting type two diabetes and putting on weight. 

So moving away from these highly refined breakfasts to real food with real plants, real nuts, real seeds, things that have a structure in them, means that everything is absorbed much more slowly, much more naturally. The way it was before highly processed foods came on the market.

And you know, again, picking full fat yogurts rather than low fat yogurts because we want to have the minimum amount of ingredient ingredients and we know that fat fills us up as well. 

So these meals will actually make sure that you can get through to lunch without having a desperate urge for snacks. 

Everyone's going to have a slightly different version of this, and there are some breakfast cereals you can have like Weetabix or things that do have a lot of fiber in them and are relatively aren low in processing risk. 

So I would just advise people to, you know, keep it plain and simple and definitely avoid the refined sugars. 

Jonathan Wolf: I had lots of questions from listeners about high protein breakfast cereals, which are clearly being promoted everywhere.

Would that be a good thing to switch onto?

Tim Spector: Most of them are rubbish and you are just wasting your money. 

I know there's a big marketing surge here, knowing that if they put high in protein on the cover of anything, at the moment, they'll sell more of it. But there's no scientific evidence that most of us need that extra protein.

Generally, these are highly processed, risky foods that the protein is just masking the poor quality of the rest of it. Whether it's a protein snack bar or it's in a cereal or it's in a drink. 

Generally these are high risk foods that are not going to give you anything like the benefits of a natural food breakfast. So most of us are not deficient in protein. We are deficient in fiber. 

So we really need to start building that fiber up early on in the day so that we can get our 30 grams of fiber in and we don't need extra protein because we just pee it out or it turns to fat. 

Jonathan Wolf: The other thing I had a ton of questions on, because apparently you created a storm on social media, is something that's popular here in the U.K. a spread called Marmite, which if you're not in the U.K., you'll be like one Earth is that, is Marmite healthy?

Tim Spector: There is some evidence it is healthy. It contains dead microbes, dead yeast, brewer's yeast, and there are some studies showing that this can be beneficial for your health. 

Very early, very small studies, but I think we need to give it a different category to fermented foods and Marmite is actually a fermented food and these always have some other benefit and we have to look at that balance very carefully.

So I think having something that's really non sweet is probably good for generally the palates and for setting your thresholds through the rest of the day as well. 

So I don't particularly like Marmite myself, but I can see why some people do and it's probably a healthier option than most of the ones we are having for breakfast at the moment.

Jonathan Wolf: That's funny. I grew up with Marmite and peanut butter in a sandwich, which is something that my dad taught me, which I have to admit, I haven't eaten now for a long time and I can see the look on Ben's face.

But I love the idea that maybe that was healthy. It might have balanced a lot of the other things I ate.

So just to wrap up, Tim, if you were going to create maybe some very simple principles for thinking about what made a healthy breakfast, what would those principles be? 

Tim Spector: Well, first workout, what's your first meal of the day? The less hungry you are, the more you can actually think about it more logically, and you're not driven by those massive urges.

I think we need to go for real foods that aren't highly processed. That's probably the first thing we should be looking for. 

So you're going for things that contain natural amounts of fats, they're not low fat, they don't have additives, they don't have artificial sweeteners in them, and you should be avoiding these highly processed breakfast cereals that are low in fiber and just high in sugars.

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, when you talk about sugars, I just want to make sure often you're also thinking about foods which are sort of high in these carbs that get turned into sugars very fast. 

Tim Spector: Yeah, so what we call refined carbohydrates, these are highly processed foods. Like your Corn Flakes or your Rice Krispies or your Frosties that they claim to have come from some amazing grain, but everything's been stripped away from it. 

So that what you're left is only the tiny middle bit, which is the starchy sugary bit. All the goodness has been stripped away and it's been repurposed to again, look like food again. 

So it's the fake foods you need to avoid, and that's where we have a lot of our fake foods in this country, is that first breakfast meal, particularly in children. So they're getting really the worst of the deal.

Jonathan Wolf: And my toast I found was also quite a lot like this. 

Tim Spector: Yeah, so bread is another one. So most of the bread we buy is highly processed, very sugary. It releases the sugar into your bloodstream very quickly and we should be looking for the high fiber breads. 

Just looking at the fiber content of the bread on the back is really important.

And you know this will narrow down your search a lot and when you've got that bread, rather than putting jam or marmalade on it, you should be looking to put fats on it, whether it's cheese, that's another good fermented food. 

You can add cream cheese is actually good, or you're putting avocado or eggs, which are high in protein and fats as well.

So again, moving away from these refined carbs, having more fats, having more protein. We see this as fending off hunger. So you are less hungry later in the day and you're getting all the good nutrients. 

And again, you're building good habits. Because you are thinking I'm going to have a healthy breakfast. Therefore, sets you up as Ben's been saying for the rest of the day.

And avoid things like smoothies and juices, which are just waste to generally get lots of sugar into your system far too quickly. And that will result in two or three hours later you being hungry. 

So we can avoid all that just by rethinking your breakfast, which is for many people, quite a big shock. 

For me, it was the most important thing I did when I changed my diet.  

Jonathan Wolf: I actually feel like that's a brilliant place to now hand over to Ben. So like we've got this idea of this new breakfast you'd like to have, but Tim's also saying that's hard. It's like a big shock because I've got this habit.

Can you help us with practical advice on how we might try and change our habits and I'm tempted to link that back to the quickfire question at the very beginning where we said like, is it true it takes 21 days to change a habit? 

Benjamin Gardner: Okay, I'll answer the 21 days thing first. It is a myth that it takes 21 days to form a habit.

Several years ago now, I looked into the source of this and I tracked it down to a book by an American plastic surgeon called Maxwell Moltz. And he observed in his book that among his plastic surgery patients. It took them around three weeks to get used to their new appearance. And then he said, it tends to take me three weeks to get used to living in a new house.

I don’t know how many times he moved, but the point is that's the sole evidence base for 21 days to form a habit. I mean, that's not even habit formation. As psychologists understand it, that's habituation getting used to something. 

What the real scientific evidence tells us: there was a classic study done now about 15 years ago that found that among people who were recruited on the basis that they wanted to make a change to their diet or to drinking water. 

It took them an average of 66 days to get to a point where this behavior was something that they were saying felt automatic to them. 

Now, the key thing to point out here is that 66 days was just a middle point among the data. And in fact, some people reached their habit peak after just 18 days. One person didn't reach their peak at all during the 12 week period, and it was forecast that if they kept going, they'd get there in 254 days. 

So this is a massive range, and in fact, what we think is that how long it takes to form a habit is going to depend on the behavior that you are trying to do, the situation that you're trying to do it in, and properties of you as an individual.

So some of the things that we can do to increase the likelihood that we will form a habit: first of all, choose a behavior that you find kind of intrinsically motivating, something that you are going to enjoy doing. 

If we're talking about breakfast, don't think of something that you know is healthy, but you're not really going to enjoy eating. It has to be something that you are going to want to eat each day. 

If we're talking about replacing an old habit, then I think try and find something essentially fills the hole that will be left by the old thing that you are replacing. 

Also, when it comes to the individual, we think that it's probably going to be more likely that people who have a strong need for routine, they're more likely to be able to build these habits.

And also when it comes to the situation, I think one of the things that can help us is kind of piggybacking on existing habits that we already have. This has been called habit stacking by some people, whereby you form a new habit in a situation in which you already have a particular routine.

Jonathan Wolf: So how might you apply that to breakfast? 

Benjamin Gardner: So, practical advice for forming a habit for breakfast, I mean, it might be worthwhile experimenting for a while. Try and work out what works for you. Which foods do you find pleasant, as well as meet the criteria for being healthy. 

Once you've determined what those foods are, then what you need to do is make sure that you have enough supply of that food and you actually form a habit for buying that food as part of your regular shop. 

And then just each time it's breakfast, make sure that you eat that food and you can make that more likely by, again, making the behavior accessible, making the food options accessible to you.

But I think it's really about consistency, so making sure that you do that each day that's going to form into a habit. 

Now, I mentioned a study about habit formation and how long it took and one other interesting finding from that study was that the odd missed opportunity here and there, you know, the failure to do it on one or two days doesn't really seem to be that detrimental.

So don't worry if you don't manage to keep it up every single day. The key thing that you need to aim for is consistency. 

So choose a food that you will enjoy eating, make sure you've got enough supply of it, make sure you try to eat it each day and be consistent. And if you do that, then over time you should find that it's starting to become something that's automatic to you.

It's starting to become something, a part of what you do, and you no longer have to think about doing it. It's just become a habit. 

Jonathan Wolf: So let's say we were trying to get you off your banana and cereal onto something that Tim's telling us would have like a better impact on your blood sugar in the morning.

Maybe talk us through how you might approach that. 

Benjamin Gardner: I would see this as kind of, there'd be two periods to this. The first period would involve me experimenting with other foods that are healthier, finding what works for me, finding possibly a range of food that works for me.

And then making sure that I add it to my weekly shop so that I have it accessible to me. And possibly stop buying that particular cereal that I eat. And then that sets up everything in my environment that I need in order to start that new habit. 

Because I have a breakfast routine, as I mentioned, you know, I get downstairs and then I start preparing the same breakfast in the same way each time, it means I can piggyback on that structure and just swap in the healthier breakfast and take out the unhealthy breakfast. 

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Jonathan Wolf: I'm really interested by this piggybacking because I think about my own habits. So Tim mentioned this Daily 30. So I take this Daily 30 supplement every day, and I take it on my breakfast because I've got the habit where it just naturally goes on.

And if I for some reason miss my breakfast, then I forget to take it that day. Like it doesn't happen. But I'm convinced about it. Could you explain to me what's going on inside me? 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, that's really interesting. So this is a bit of a double-edged sword. You've got the structure already in place, whereby when you eat your breakfast, so that's your kind of trigger, then you will add in this particular supplement. 

So that's great in that it's an easy thing to add into what you already do. But the flip side of that, of course, is that if you are not triggered by the eating of the breakfast in the first place, then you may fail to do that. 

I mean, personally what I do, in these kind of situations is I will set a reminder on my phone to do certain things and a lot of the time I will be able to tick it off because I do that at the start of the day. 

But if I don't, well, I know that I've still got to do it later. So people have written about this concept of what's been called backup habits. So if you don't manage to act in line with your habit, what's your backup plan? 

So I think that's really important, you know, recognizing that habits are really useful for increasing the likelihood that you'll do something. But at the same time, if you don't do it, what's your backup plan? 

If someone's doing something once a day, every day, it tends to take them around two weeks to start to feel like it's becoming a habit. 

One thing that we haven't even talked about is this notion of habit is not really a dichotomy. You don't just have a habit or don't have a habit, and it's not the case that if you're doing something every day on one day, it's suddenly automatic in the day before it wasn't. 

So actually habit strength varies on a continuum. Habits can become stronger or they could possibly become weaker.

It's typically around two weeks before people really start to subjectively experience that automaticity. It can still get stronger after that, but two weeks seems to be critical. 

Jonathan Wolf: That's really interesting. I think you've definitely painted this picture that I can do this through step-by-step change. So let's say someone is listening to this, they've been completely sold on Tim's pitch about changing your breakfast and Ben, yours, that you've got to create a habit to sort of make this happen.

If I asked you to say what are the three steps or the three things that they can try and do now if they want to start to make a change to their breakfast habits? Ben, what would you tell people to do? 

Benjamin Gardner: First step experiment. Try and find foods that work for you and that are healthy. Secondly, once you've decided on what those foods are, make sure you've got them in plentiful supply. And thirdly, make sure that you consistently eat those foods each morning as part of your breakfast. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Tim, if there's one thing that you were going to focus on really trying to get out of breakfast that was going to be there, what would you be saying to people? 

Tim Spector: I think it's a fantastic opportunity to get fermented foods into your diet. Throughout the day, you want to be getting your 30 plants a week. 

So again, some diversity in what you're eating, but generally fermented foods, they're coming from your fridge generally. So it's a really good time to get the cheese, the yogurt, the kefir, put on some sauerkraut. That's the time really to get the ferments in so you can get your three a day.

And if you can do a mixture of those, that plant diversity and those fermented foods, you're really on the way to success. 

Jonathan Wolf: Amazing. 

I would love to try and sum up here, and I think it's been really fun to combine both what you want to change about what you eat and how you might do it. 

So the first thing that springs to mind is that most of us are eating a breakfast, we're on this sort of blood sugar rollercoaster, I think you said, Tim, where you know you're eating something maybe like smoothies or juices or cereals which are just leading to this massive spike in blood sugar, then this collapse, so then you're really hungry at 11 and everything starts to go wrong and you're eating the wrong things.

And so what you want to do is choose something that is going to remove all of that blood sugar rollercoaster and give you all this good stuff like lots of plants and like the fats and protein that keep you stable. 

And Tim, of course, the fermented foods, if you can add that on top.

Then I think what I'm hearing is like what would it actually take to change and make a habit?

And the first thing I think you said, Ben, which sounds really obvious, is you need to actually decide for a new breakfast that you're going to want to eat. Because if you already start by saying, I don't really want to eat this, I'm thinking about my dad, like it's rabbit food or it tastes like cardboard, you're never going to stick with it. 

So you actually have to start by experimenting and finding something you're like, Oh actually, I could eat this. I think for a lot of people would be surprised that a lot of this stuff that is healthy and might actually taste, because you could start by experimenting. 

It can take you a few days to do that. And certainly with fermented foods, it can take a week or so to get used to it. So don't give up just on day one. I think that's the other point in some of these foods. 

Jonathan Wolf: Brilliant. So experiment, don't give up right away, but find something you're like, actually I can do this, it's not horrible.

And then you've got to go and create the situation that's going to make it work.  I think, Ben, what I'm understanding is, habit is so driven by what's automatic. So you have to create something that's going to make that happen. 

So firstly, it needs to be in the house in plentiful supply. So you need to have that to create a habit that it's going to be in the house every day.

So you need to rethink sort of what you're doing in the supermarket and you need to probably remove the thing that you would eat otherwise. Because that's going to make it so much easier.

Tim Spector: Get rid of all those cereals, Ben

Jonathan Wolf: Get the new breakfast. Get rid of the old breakfast. Make a decision, that's what you want to do.

And then the third thing you said after experimenting and having a plentiful supply is consistency. So you need to do this every morning so that it becomes a new habit so that you just walk into the kitchen and start doing it automatically. 

It will take time. You said on average about two weeks to start to feel a habit, which is not as long I think as I was expecting you to say.

You will miss it from time to time, and the key thing here I think you talked about is it's very easy to give up, but actually you need to say it's okay to miss it once, but I need to get back into the habit in order to make that happen. And then it starts to suddenly switch from being hard to easy because it's automatic. 

I'm remembering this popcorn experiment you described where I can end up in the situation, well, I will eat the disgusting stale popcorn because it's what I would have. You're sort of saying, well actually it just becomes so natural for breakfast that I will just eat it. 

I think the final thing I take away is there is something really special about breakfast because it can be the sort of keystone habit you're describing. It's like the starting point in the day. 

So if I can shift my breakfast towards something better, actually there's real science that this can set me up for the rest of the day. Just like if I get breakfast wrong, then somehow it can set me up in a bad way because as a human being, we have this sort of thing about where you start with and this fresh start.

So if you start well, everything will go well. But if I somehow get pushed off course, it's very easy to be like, Oh, I'm just a failure, it doesn't work. And I almost have to wait till the first of the next month to start again. 

Benjamin Gardner: Yeah, that's correct. I mean, you don't have to wait until the start of the next month. It could be the next day. But the point is the next day could be the point at which you're wiping the slate clean. So yeah, just stick at it.

Tim Spector: The first day of the rest of your life. 

Benjamin Gardner: Exactly.