Useful Terminology

• Habit Loop: A behavioural pattern composed of a cue, routine and reward. The cue triggers the behaviour, the routine is the behaviour itself, and the reward reinforces the pattern so that it becomes more automatic over time.
• Cue: A trigger that initiates a habitual behaviour. In eating behaviour, cues may include internal sensations such as hunger or food noise, external cues such as seeing palatable food, emotional states, time of day, social context or preceding routines.
• Reward: The reinforcing consequence that makes a habit more likely to recur. Rewards may be obvious, such as taste pleasure from salty or fatty foods, or subtle, such as relief, distraction, completion or a small dopamine-mediated reinforcement signal.
• Food Noise: Persistent cognitive salience, anticipation or intrusive attention related to food. In this context, food noise refers less to physiological hunger alone and more to the background mental pressure that makes food cues difficult to ignore.
• Habit Window: A proposed period during GLP-1 use in which cues and rewards may become less dominant or more malleable, making it easier to build new behavioural patterns. This is a useful conceptual framing, but the precise timing, mechanisms and durability are not yet fully established.
• Keystone Habit: A behaviour that changes self-perception and then influences other behaviours indirectly. Exercise is a common example because it can alter identity-related beliefs, which may subsequently affect eating, productivity or other health behaviours.
• Stated Preference: A consciously expressed goal or value, such as wanting to lose weight or improve health. Stated preferences may not translate into behaviour if existing habits and environmental cues remain unchanged.
• Revealed Preference: The pattern inferred from repeated behaviour rather than stated goals. Habit change often requires shifting revealed preferences so that daily actions begin to support the identity or outcome a person consciously wants.

Habits as “Cue–Routine–Reward” Systems

Habits are not merely repeated decisions. Once a behaviour becomes habitual, it can be initiated with little conscious deliberation. This helps explain why knowledge alone often fails to change behaviour: a person may know what they would prefer to do, while automatic patterns continue to operate through learned cues and rewards.

• The cue–routine–reward model provides a practical way to analyse health behaviours.
  • A cue initiates the behavioural sequence.
  • The routine is the behaviour itself, such as eating a particular food, drinking alcohol, exercising,