5 Top Tips to Help You Take Back Control of Your Eating

Below are five top tips to help you take back control of your eating. This can feel especially difficult after the holiday season, but can be true for any time of the year. So use the strategies below to feel like you are on top again. these strategies will help you understand why you you eat, or why some situations or people may trigger you to lose your balance.

1. Use a food diary

The single most effective tool in helping you to understand and mange your eating habits better is to keep a food diary. A food diary will most definitely, help you to take back control of your eating. Whether you use an app on a phone, or a small notebook in your kitchen doesn’t matter. The important thing is to capture what you eat,  when you eat it. No discussion. If you don’t capture the eating immediately  studies show you will forget, and you impact your ability to influence change.

Food diaries will help you discover patterns of eating. Most people have situations, times and activities that stimulate eating. These events become paired with eating, so the event makes you feel hungry. For example, you may eat biscuits while watching TV. So watching TV makes you feel like eating biscuits. By separating eating from other activities we remove the ability of those activities to stimulate eating, freeing you to respond to actual physiological hunger.

2. Do nothing else while eating

Carrying out other activities e.g. reading, writing, working, watching TV brings 2 distinct disadvantages when it comes to eating. Firstly, as mentioned above, the activity becomes paired with  eating, so eating is stimulated during the activity. Secondly, the activity distracts you from eating, so you get all the calories but only part of the pleasure. In this scenario, we mindlessly over-consume. We are half way through the packet of biscuits before we realise.

Calories should be tasted not wasted : )  Eating should be a pure experience and if you love food, like me, try not to contaminate it with other activities.  Sounds heavy I know, but if you find it difficult to just concentrate on eating by itself, this technique offers you an opportunity to help you change your relationship with food, to one which offers more joy.

3. Follow an eating schedule

Using a food diary will help you uncover  times when you are more likely to over or under consume. By keeping to a schedule of eating you will always know when you are next due to eat. This helps us to hang on for a little longer, or perhaps even supports eating sooner than you might normally, but the overall achievement is feeling in control. Use your home or work pattern to figure out when you most like or need to have meals and breaks, and schedule accordingly. This will help you to not only take back control of your eating but also optimise the use of the different macronutrients you are consuming.

Following an eating schedule helps you to move you from  constant or regular snacking, to a routine that supports your body  physically, physiologically and psychologically.

4. Eat in one place

Some people can eat anywhere. Standing up, laying on the sofa, driving the car, walking, generally on the go.  Eating is possible everywhere. Try and select one place in the home, or work situation where you will eat. Do your eating there, but nothing else.  For those of us working from home at the moment who may have to multi-purpose a kitchen table. If this is you then use different seat places for eating and working. This way sitting in the one seat and place at the table carries the eating association, but when you move to the other seat, well that’s where you work.

5. Leave something behind on your plate

Another evidence based helpful strategy to learn control over what you consume is leaving something behind on your plate. It doesn’t matter how much – 2 lettuce leaves, 6 peas, a mouthful of curry. If we can learn to exert control in this way it helps to emphasise our abilities to not always respond to the sights and smells of food.  We do not have to follow the ‘clean your plate’ mantra, which we may have learned as children. Instead we learn to cherish our bodies, cherish the food we put on our plates, and cherish a more sustainable way of cooking, eating and living.

If you are  finding it tricky to implement these strategies, just get in touch and let’s work together to change that.