I was delighted to hear from Tesco yesterday in response to my campaign to change the labelling of breakfast cereals in supermarkets. Three letters and a few tweets have finally borne fruit, and Tesco are following Sainsbury’s lead by removing the misleading signs from all their stores. If you have not been following my campaign against the concept of “Children’s Cereals” then you can follow the story in the blog here, here and here. I was even more pleased when I had cause to visit my local Sainsbury’s later that day to find that their signs have indeed disappeared as promised.

It is comforting to know that I will now be able to venture into both stores without having my blood pressure challenged in the cereals section, but this is only a small part of a wider public debate on how we treat our children: If we believe that children will only eat food that is coated in sugar or high in saturated fat, then the chances are that they will grow up wanting to eat food that is coated in sugar or high in saturated fat. It is a debate that we must keep in the public domain, and a war that must be waged on many fronts.
It struck me that there is a parallel with many seemingly insurmountable health problems here, and that this has been a helpful lesson in the immense value of breaking down problems into bite-sized chunks. My overwhelming problem is the challenge society faces with the frightening increase in childhood obesity – surely it is impossible for me to impact this and it seems ridiculous to try. Even if I break it down to the role of the supermarkets and how food is marketed to children I am still defeated into a state of inactivity, believing I cannot succeed. Reduce it further to the issue of two small signs in the cereal aisle and I am starting to think about action – still not confident that I will succeed, but willing to give it a go. And it turns out that it was possible after all. I haven’t changed the world, my problem has not gone away, but I have changed something, and perhaps I can now change something else.
So too with health problems. Maybe I feel crushed by my failure to lose weight, cannot consider how to face the week without the comfort of a bottle of wine or am overwhelmed by anxiety every time I consider venturing from my home. The scale of my problem is so great that my spirit is broken from the start, and I tolerate the status quo for months, even years, because I cannot even imagine any other way. The way forward has to be to imagine a different future, look at the problem in a new light and find a bite-sized chunk that I know I can break off, where I have some confidence that in a small way I can succeed.
So with weight loss – to set the challenge of losing a certain amount of weight in a set time often sets us up to failure – but perhaps it is not so unrealistic to aim to make one small change: maybe the biscuit with your coffee becomes an apple, maybe three potatoes becomes two, or the lift is exchanged for the stairs. The lover of wine might not be able to contemplate cutting down to recommended limits just yet, but perhaps they can consider having one day a week that is alcohol free; and the person with anxiety may not be ready to book a holiday to Venice, but could they find a friend to help them and venture somewhere new just a little outside their comfort zone?
When we break things down it is vital that we are careful how we measure our success. If I were to measure my campaign against the level of childhood obesity in the UK I would clearly see no impact at all and might berate myself for trying. In the same way, if you challenge yourself to change a biscuit to an apple, assess your success on just that – have you kept your promise to yourself and are you eating fewer biscuits? It is unfair to measure your success only in terms of the bathroom scales – that will come in time, but we need minor victories along the way to win the war. Success is empowering, and we need to practise it if we are to overcome the more intransigent problems, both in our own health and in society.