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.
- 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.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.