As a skills-based eating coach who’s in school studying psychology, here are the skills I give my clients.
One client, when we first started working together, said, “I know what to eat, I just can’t stop eating at night.”
She was a successful executive, had a great family, and was on top of her workouts. Eating was the one thing that she couldn’t quite pull together. She’d tried tracking calories and macros dozens of times, but eventually she’d find herself eating after dinner again, being way over her numbers, and qutting. It was super frustrating, because it was the one thing in her life she couldn’t ever pull together.
Of course, another set of macros to track wasn’t going to help. We had to go a level deeper.
I’m an eating behavior change expert who works with busy executives, lawyers, and software engineers who want to lose weight, but just can’t make diets stick.
Here are the three things we worked on:
1. Pausing before getting an after dinner treat
She’d told me that getting a treat just felt automatic. It was mindless. Sometimes it was like she “woke up” and had already eaten.
So, the first step was putting a pause in between wanting and eating. We started with setting a ten minute timer. We outlined practice times so she was looking out for that moment where she got up to go back to the kitchen.
Then, when she found herself jumping up out of her chair to get dessert, she’d set that ten minute timer.
Important point: She could choose to get dessert, or not, after that 10 minute timer, but first we needed to put in enough time that she could make a mindful choice.
This is the one tip of the three that I didn’t pull from research, it’s a component that I created as a structure for practicing the other two parts, which are evidence based. It’s been one of the most impactful practices I’ve seen with my clients.
The other two are pulled directly from research, and #2 is the one that makes the biggest difference…
Read more on Substack:
https://joshhillis.substack.com/p/the-three-best-strategies-for-beating
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