The behavior I wanted to change was eating healthier by using positive reinforcement. I started off the process by keeping a record of all the foods that I ate and drank for an entire week. I recorded every breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks and made notes of the fat, calories and other nutritional information. I took the record and used it to determine a plan for what to change, keeping in mind I wanted to make small changes every day. I then came up with a good, non food related reward system where I was allowed to either watch Netflix all afternoon or spend an afternoon reading a new book as a reward. I decided to switch which one each time so it didn't get boring. I decided operant conditioning, using a positive reinforcement was the method I would try for replacing junk food in my diet with healthier foods.

I found it at first annoying to keep a record of the foods I ate, but after the first few days, it became second nature and was easy. The record of foods gave me a clearer idea of what my diet consisted of before making any changes. Listing the nutritional information helped me determine how bad the foods I was eating were and how many things needed to change for my diet to be healthy. I discovered I ate a lot of burgers, drank sodas and energy drink and also had fried foods all much too often for my diet to be considered healthy. For the changes to be successful, I decided that each day I should replace an unhealthy food I would typically eat with a healthy alternative. For instance, if I would normally have a soda with lunch, I would replace that with water. If I would have a burger and fries for lunch one day I would replace the fries with a salad. Then on the next day, I would replace the burger with a whole grain lean chicken sandwich. All the changes would be gradual as to not shock my system and give me small levels of success.

Although I found the plan for changing my behavior to be quite successful, I may have avoided the positive punishment if I had stuck to the continuous reinforcement schedule for longer and I might have not been tempted to go back to the junk food. Once there was a longer time in between eating healthy and my reward, I found less motivation to stick with the plan than in the first week. Therefore if I had stuck with the first schedule of reinforcement, there may have been less chance of me having a back-slide during the process. Other than the schedule for rewards, I think the rest of the plan worked well and I have successfully changed my eating habits and have higher energy and feel better.