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The Four-Pack Revolution: What sets off your snacking?

September 9, 2025

When it comes to unhealthy eating, what sets you off? Do you start focusing on everything that needs to get done and end up feeling stressed as a result? When you are bored, do you use food as a distraction? Or has eating become a hobby you share with friends? Almost every cue or trigger fits into one of the following five categories.

— “The Four-Pack Revolution” by Chael Sonnen

Alright so abs are made in the kitchen and all that.

I was tracking my food closely for a couple months… a couple months ago. So I basically haven’t been tracking.

I was losing 1-2 pounds a week for a couple months. You’ve probably guessed (correctly) that it was during those first couple months when I was tracking.

Still, even without tracking I know one thing for sure: I’m snacking too much. Even when I was tracking my food, one of the main benefits of doing it was that it gave me a nice hard signal at night that it was time to stop snacking.

Right now if I could magically remove all the snacking I’d guess I’d be under my goal of 1800 calories on some days, if not most days.

Here are the 5 categories of snacking cues/triggers Chael Sonnen lists and how they end up showing up in my life.

  1. Location: There’s free food at the office. The meals, totally fine. The snacks I pass by every time I walk to a meeting or go to the bathroom… it gets tough being tempted 20 times a day.
  2. Time: Even if I can make it through the work day, the breakdown can happen before or after dinner. If I ate clean during the day, I think my mind starts getting into “Well, I can reward myself now” mode. (One trick for stopping this: eat dinner immediately so there’s no snack before, then floss my teeth immediately because I don’t want to floss twice.)
  3. Emotional state: I’ve realized that the problem isn’t necessarily that I snack when I’m stressed—which I do. It’s that I also eat unhealthy when I’m feeling good and celebrating something. So basically I turn to food no matter what emotional state I’m in.
  4. Other people: One thing I noticed moving from New York to San Francisco—and this also is just me and the different friend groups getting older as well—is that people drink less. Now I’m rarely at a gathering where a majority of people are drinking. So that’s good. Though I don’t exactly have a food version of that because I really enjoy food and reading about food and watching videos aIbout food. And a bunch of friends here also share that interest. That said, it’s not like all of them struggle with overeating. They show restraint at the same gatherings. I don’t need to be the person finishing all the remaining food.
  5. Actions: I’ve heard a rule along the lines of, “Don’t eat standing up”. As mentioned, I snack between meetings. I grab a snack before getting to the desk. I snack when I get home. I snack to fit something in before I brush and get ready for bed.

So now that I’ve written all that above, what would uncle Chael recommend?

Break the cycle, replace with a new behavior, and condition the new behavior.

Gotta drill it. For like… 2 days I was replacing snacking with making tea. I can probably drill it a bit more. But also tea just might not be quite satisfying enough to replace snacking. I also tried baby carrots. Yes, I should probably replace it with something that isn’t going in my mouth.

But, hey, one step at a time. Hopefully a few weeks from now I’ll update you with the great replacements I chose and drilled.

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