Do you ever walk in the door and seem to just start eating?

You’re tired. You don’t want to think about one more thing. So you start grab-assing food.

One bite here. A handful there. A few tastes while cooking.

Before you know it, you’re full, and dinner’s not even on the table yet. But you sit down and eat dinner anyway because it would be weird not to, right?

There’s a good reason you go to food after a long day. And once you know that reason, you can stop the after-work eating that’s killing your weightloss.

It's what I'll help you with in today's podcast. Because you can’t lose weight eating two meals most nights!

The fix isn't hard. In fact, it’s pretty simple once you hear it.

And once you do, I bet losing weight gets a little easier. So don't wait, listen now.

Okay, let's talk about how to break the mindless eating that you might be doing when you get home and while you're cooking. So if you walk in the door and you start eating or maybe you eat while you cook, then this is perfect for you. So what happens is you are probably caught in what we call a habit loop. Coming home is your trigger or your cue. The habit loop is always you're triggered or queued. You have some type of action that you do and then you have a reward. So for this habit loop coming home is your trigger or cue and your habit is to start eating right away or you may wait until you're making dinner and you eat through making dinner by tasting and trying and doing things like that. And then the reward is either you solve hunger or you make transitioning coming home easier for you.  

Sometimes this eating is mindless, but it's also just a distraction and a way to go from the high stress of go, go all day to kind of getting into a rhythm. I want you to think about when we eat eating is rhythmic and very often we are using food to eat to get into a rhythm of calm so that we can now wind down for the rest of our day. So the habit loop is not bad, it's just an automatic cycle that we get into in life and all automatic cycles can be changed and usually habit loops like this can be changed pretty easily. So this matters for your weight loss because mindless snacking and nibbling and stuff after you come home and while you make dinner, it's a weight loss killer. Those little bites and tastes and things that you're handfuls of this a little grab of that they all add up fast.  

So the issue really isn't that you're eating. Don't make the mistake of thinking that the problem is me, I must be lazy, I must not have willpower, I must be undisciplined. Or if I just wasn't eating, everything would be good. We want to make sure we get used to accurately articulating what the real problem is. In this case, the problem is that eating is happening without my thinking. That's all that's going on. The problem isn't your eating. The problem is accurately stated when we say the problem is, my eating is happening without thinking. So my solution is to now start thinking and analyzing what's happening when I'm eating. Because as I keep saying to y'all, if you don't state the problem correctly, you try to address problems with the wrong solutions. Sometimes you're legit hungry. So we don't need to just not eat. If you are legit hungry, what are we supposed to do?  

Ladies, say it in unison. We fuel our bodies. We are allowed to nourish. Eating is not a bad thing. If I have hunger, it means my body needs food. And then sometimes this eating is not about hunger, it's just mindless that we've got to figure out a way to turn on our brain again while it's happening so that we can stop it. So mindless eating is just eating. You're just used to, and sometimes I will say this, eating might be emotional, but many people for this type of eating, it's more based in the habit loop. I would say that probably 70% of women who are doing this fall more into the category of this is a habit loop. This is not about emotion. So for all of you, whether you're in the 70% or the 30%, I would start with what we're going to talk about today.  

And if you find that you can't break this habit consistently after 30 days, then you are more likely needing to dig into the emotions behind it. But let's start with the easiest solve of all and see what happens. See how much of this eating we can gain control over, and then if we have extra stuff on top or it's not solving it, then we'll go on to working on a different solution. So the fix for this type of eating really starts with dissecting what's happening so you can plan better for interrupting your patterns. Gone are the days where we are just going to try harder, ladies, we are going to try with a better, well-informed approach. We're not trying harder anymore. We are going to approach these things well-informed. Alright, so here's what I want you to do. If you are hungry and you know that you are eating when you get home or after you get off work and up until dinner, it's because you know you're legit hungry, then we got to adjust your food.  

You need to be eating, we have to eat smart. So take a look at what you're eating at lunch. This type of eating often is a sign of daily undereating. So when you're at work and you're busy and you get your day going and stuff, your adrenaline, your cortisol could be suppressing your hunger or maybe you're just so fucking busy that you're not eating and this type of eating is showing us a lack of fueling and this lack of fueling during the day is actually showing up at night. It's like your body's way of saying, oh fuck, we're so fucking hungry. We made it through the day. I just need to eat and I need to eat right now. I've got to get this solved. And so it's going to always ask for more food than than it needs. It's always going to try to get you plugging away all kinds of things into your mouth.  

So what you can do is a couple of things. You could plan a snack to eat if you know you're going to be too busy to eat. Most of the time you need to plan some snacks that you can grab and make sure that last one is about two hours before your regular dinner or when you're coming home. Remember, you want to try to make sure that these snacks though are not some kind of a hundred sad ass calorie pack. That is what I call a good start. That is not a legit signal to your body that you have taken care of it. So plan something that's more at least 200 calories or more. So things like an apple plus some nuts, a rock solid protein bar, a shake, and some nuts. Those are just some easy quick things that you can keep that they don't go bad.  

They're easy to grab and they're easy to suck down. Then for some of you, you may want to actually eat more at your lunch. Maybe you have time for lunch, but you're so afraid you're going to overeat at night that you're eating like a fucking bird at lunch. Try getting your lunches a little bit more beefy with some real food in them so that when you get home, you don't feel like you're mindless and not able to stop automatic patterns because just to remember, your brain gets more and more tuned out as the day goes on because it gets more and more tired. It has to make too many decisions all day long. So expecting your brain to be highly aware and alert of what's going on at the tail end of your day is a big ask. So we want to make sure that we are looking at things from a perspective when you have a fresh brain and really analyzing what all's going on.  

Okay, so you can always beef up your lunch also. Now, the other thing that you need to make sure you do is that you are hydrating during the day. A lot of people who do this transition and nibbling through dinner are actually going in dehydrated. We skimp on water all day long because again, we're busy and then we get home and we have more powerful urges that slide us right into a habit loop, simply do to dehydration. Now, if you're doing mindless nibbling while you're cooking, this is one of the most surefire ways to help get your brain turned on long-term. What you're going to do is you are going to get what I call a scraps plate. So while you're cooking, you're going to have a plate out on your counter and on this plate every time. Either you want to nibble or take a bite or taste something or eat a little here, eat a little there.  

You are either going to put it on the plate ahead of time so that you can see what all it is that you're eating, but that's an advanced technique for most of you. You're going to start with what I call level one before you go and beat the next boss. Level one would be with your scraps plate. If you grab a handful of nuts, you grab a second handful of nuts, you put 'em on the plate. If you take a bite of mac and cheese to make sure it's sages right, you take an equivalent bite of mac and cheese, you put it right there next to that handful of nuts. If you grab a little wad of let's say chicken off of the cut up chicken, then you're going to have to grab a little piece of chicken and put it on the scraps plate.  

What this does is it starts getting you aware of what's happening. So many of us will just sit and be like, well, I don't eat that much. Or It's just a few bites here and there. It shouldn't matter. That shouldn't add up. It doesn't matter if it's a lot or if it's very little. We want to break the habit of putting things in our mouth without thinking. And so one of the things that you do is you put those things on the plate and then your brain will have to think differently. Like, wow, that's more than I thought. Oh, if I was to eat all that, no wonder my weight loss is stalled right now. No wonder I keep bouncing around two to three pounds. We want to alert our brain to mindless eating. So once you get this going, what happens is now your brain is going to start thinking all those little bites and stuff.  

It's going to change its opinion. It's not going to say a little bit won't hurt or whatever. It's going to look at that scraps plate and be like, oh my gosh, that's really adding up. And when it now thinks that there's a problem, guess what? Tomorrow it starts paying more attention like, oh God, you're grabbing that bite again. I remember seeing how much was on that plate last night. That matters. This is how we make some significant changes to our typical excuses and stuff without having to work so hard at it without having to argue with our brain. So all we're really doing with a scraps plate is we are giving our brain an entirely new way to think about all the nibbles when you're mindlessly doing them. It's easy for your brain to make up a sexy story that it shouldn't hurt, that it shouldn't matter, that it's just a habit.  

It's too hard for me to break, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you do the scraps, your brain has to create a new story because there's a new situation happening and it's probably going to make a new story that supports you wanting to lose weight. So use that as a really powerful technique to breaking one of the most, what I would call honestly, easier things to fix in weight loss. Because this type of eating is easier to solve because most of the time it's light on the emotional work. You might feel like, oh my gosh, I'm so stupid that I didn't realize how much I was eating. Shut that shit down. That said, boring ass self-loathing voice that always wants to come to the party and you need to be like, bitch, go sit in a corner. Aren't we doing a good thing here, noticing these things? How about you just get on board? So most of this type of eating I have found is laced with biological fixes and simply breaking the habit of being on autopilot and just starting to pay attention. That's why we use the scraps plate. So with a little adjustment here and there, I would almost bet you in a few weeks, you will see this type of eating dramatically going down, if not ending, you'll see the scale starting to dwindle down along with it, and you'll catch fire and momentum. That is not that hard to create.