According to behavioral science the people who feel most conflicted about their food choices are often closest to changing them — because awareness always arrives before action does

I met a woman named Nadia at a farmer's market in Portland about a year ago. She was standing in front of a booth selling cashew-milk ice cream, holding a sample cup, and doing this thing I've come to recognize in people — hovering. Not committed, not leaving. Just standing there with this expression that sat somewhere between curiosity and guilt. She caught me watching her and laughed. "I keep coming back to this booth every Saturday," she said, "and I keep not buying anything. I don't even know why."

We ended up talking for almost forty-five minutes. Nadia was a veterinary technician in her mid-thirties who had spent her entire career caring for animals — dogs, cats, the occasional parrot — and had recently started having what she called "the quiet crisis" about the fact that she ate meat every single day. She wasn't looking for a lecture. She wasn't looking for permission. She was just sitting inside this discomfort and trying to figure out what it meant.

I told her I thought I understood. Not because I had the answers, but because I'd been exactly where she was.

The Psychology of the In-Between

There's a concept in behavioral science called cognitive dissonance, and if you've spent any time thinking about your food choices — really thinking, not just scrolling past a documentary trailer — you've probably felt it. The psychologist Leon Festinger first described it in 1957: the mental tension that arises when your beliefs and your actions don't align. You believe animals shouldn't suffer. You also just ordered a bacon cheeseburger. Your brain registers this contradiction, and it hurts — not physically, but in this low-grade, persistent way that most people either resolve or suppress.

Here's the thing Festinger found that matters for this conversation: people don't just tolerate dissonance. They're driven to reduce it. And they do that in one of two ways — they change the belief ("Animals don't really suffer the way we think they do") or they change the behavior ("I'm going to stop eating them"). The suppression option — just not thinking about it — works for a while. But awareness, once it arrives, is remarkably stubborn.

Nadia was deep in this. She could feel the gap between who she was at work — gentle, attentive, an advocate for creatures who couldn't speak — and who she was at dinner. And the more she tried to push that awareness away, the louder it got.

Awareness Is Not the Same as Action — But It's the Necessary Precursor

What I find genuinely fascinating is that most people interpret their own inner conflict as a sign of failure. Like they should either be all-in or completely at peace with where they are. The middle space — the conflicted, uncomfortable, slightly nauseating middle — feels like proof that something is wrong with them.

But the research says otherwise. James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente developed the Transtheoretical Model of Change in the early 1980s, and it maps out how people actually move through behavioral shifts. The stages go like this: precontemplation (not thinking about it), contemplation (thinking about it but not ready), preparation (getting ready), action (doing it), and maintenance (sustaining it). The critical insight — the one that changed how I think about everyone I meet at farmer's markets and potlucks and vegan food festivals — is that contemplation is supposed to feel terrible. That's the stage where you're holding two opposing truths in your hands and trying to figure out which one to set down. It's messy. It's contradictory. And it is the single most important stage in the entire model, because without it, nothing else happens.

The people who feel most conflicted are, by definition, the people who are paying the most attention. And paying attention — that uncomfortable, unwanted, can't-stop-once-you-start kind of attention — is what precedes every meaningful change I've ever witnessed.

When I Was the Conflicted One

I went through my own version of this. A few years back, before what I now sheepishly refer to as my "aggressive vegan phase," I spent months in the contemplation stage. I'd read something about factory farming and then order a turkey sandwich for lunch and feel sick — not from the sandwich, but from the knowing. I'd watch a friend's dog curl up on my lap and then go home and eat chicken and try not to connect the dots. My brain was doing backflips to keep those two realities separated, and it was exhausting.

The exhaustion is actually a feature, not a bug. Your brain has to actively block out empathy to maintain certain habits, and that blocking takes energy. The psychologist Melanie Joy calls this phenomenon carnism — the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat certain animals while loving others. Once you can see the system, you can't really unsee it. And that's where the conflict lives.

What I didn't know then — what I wish someone had told me — is that the conflict itself was progress. I kept thinking I was stuck. I was actually in motion.

The Discomfort Is Doing Something

Nadia told me something that Saturday in Portland that I've been turning over in my head ever since. She said, "The worst part isn't that I feel bad about eating meat. The worst part is that I feel bad about feeling bad. Like I should just pick a side and commit."

I think a lot of people experience this meta-guilt — shame about the shame itself. It's a uniquely modern problem, in some ways. We live in a culture that prizes decisiveness, that treats ambivalence as weakness. Social media doesn't help. You're either posting your acai bowl with the #PlantBased hashtag or you're defending your steak dinner. The algorithm doesn't reward nuance. The in-between doesn't get likes.

But the in-between is where the actual human work happens. It's where Nadia was. It's where — if we're being honest — millions of people are right now, quietly reconsidering their plates without announcing it. A 2023 survey by the food-analytics firm Innova Market Insights found that nearly one in three consumers globally were actively trying to reduce their meat intake — not eliminating it, just reducing. These weren't people who'd arrived at some clean, Instagram-ready conclusion. They were people in the messy middle.

And here's what behavioral science tells us about that messy middle: it's fertile ground. Prochaska's research showed that people in the contemplation stage are significantly more likely to move to action than people in precontemplation — obviously — but the key finding was about how they move. It's not usually a dramatic overnight conversion. It's incremental. It's one meal, then another. It's buying the cashew-milk ice cream on the seventh Saturday instead of the first. It's what researchers sometimes call "behavioral drift" — a slow, almost imperceptible lean toward alignment between what you believe and what you do.

Why Shaming People Out of the Middle Never Works

This is where I have to own something. During my aggressive vegan phase — and it really was a phase, thankfully — I made the mistake that a lot of well-meaning advocates make. I tried to rush people through the contemplation stage. I treated discomfort as a doorway that needed to be kicked open rather than walked through. I'd corner friends at dinner parties and fire off statistics about water usage and methane emissions and slaughterhouse conditions, and I could literally watch their faces close. Not because they didn't care, but because I was treating their process like an inconvenience rather than a journey.

What actually works in vegan advocacy — and this is backed by research from Faunalytics, an organization that studies animal-advocacy effectiveness — is meeting people where they are. Not where you want them to be. Where they are. The Faunalytics study on former vegetarians and vegans found that the number-one reason people abandoned plant-based diets was feeling unsupported and isolated in the transition. The conflict didn't disappear when they changed their behavior — it just shifted shape. And if nobody was there to normalize the ongoing messiness of it, they went back to what was familiar.

Which means the most important thing we can do — those of us who've already walked through the contemplation stage and out the other side — is make the middle feel less lonely.

What Happened to Nadia

I saw Nadia again about six months after our first conversation, at the same farmer's market. She was at the cashew-milk ice cream booth again, but this time she had a pint in her bag. She recognized me and waved me over.

"I'm not vegan," she said immediately, like she needed to get that out of the way. "But I've cut out a lot. Most days I'm plant-based at home. I still eat fish sometimes. I'm still figuring it out."

She said it like a confession, and I understood why. We live in a culture that doesn't have a good vocabulary for the in-between. You're vegan or you're not. You care or you don't. But people who are always curious, always questioning, always researching — those are the ones who end up building lives that actually align with their values. It just doesn't happen on anyone else's timeline.

I told her what I wish someone had told me years ago: that being in the middle doesn't mean you're failing. It means you're aware. And awareness — that restless, uncomfortable, sometimes unbearable awareness — always arrives before action does. Always.

She asked me what my own transition had looked like, and I was honest. I told her it was messy. That I'd eaten a cheeseburger three weeks after declaring myself vegan and felt like a fraud. That I'd eventually stopped framing it as a test I could pass or fail and started treating it as an ongoing negotiation between the person I was and the person I was becoming. That the culture around food is shifting in ways that make the transition easier than it was even five years ago — more options, more acceptance, more infrastructure for the curious.

She nodded. She didn't seem relieved, exactly. More like — recognized. Like someone had finally told her that the discomfort she'd been carrying wasn't a problem to solve but a signal to trust.

The Signal

If you're reading this and you feel that low-grade tension about what's on your plate — if you've been hovering at the booth, circling back every Saturday, not quite ready but not quite able to walk away — I want you to know something. That tension isn't a weakness. It's your value system waking up. It's the gap between what you believe and what you do, and the fact that you can feel it means the gap is narrowing.

You're not stuck. You're in the contemplation stage, and the contemplation stage is doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's softening the ground for what comes next.

Awareness always arrives before action. Always. And the people who feel most conflicted? They're the ones closest to the door.