21 micro habits that make weight loss stick #12: Redefine ‘full’

This is probably the biggest, most controversial, most brilliant thing I’ve learned since I became a food psychology coach: How to make eating just a little bit less feel ‘right’, without sending yourself into restriction mode.

Here, food psychology coach Laura Lloyd explains how to snap out of the yoyo dieting cycle, and make less gradually feel like your ‘new normal’ without restriction mentality and without activating binge eating.

When you go on a diet, you eat a lot less food. For a while. Then, you don’t. 

You diet, you burn more calories than you consume, and you lose weight.

Then, you stop dieting. You add go back to eating the amount that feels nice to you. Which is more than while you were dieting. It’s not that you’re deciding to eat more – it just unconsciously feels about right, and you’re not weighing out grams of rice any more, or counting points or calories. 

So you regain the weight.

And you can’t understand it – when you’re not dieting, you’re eating ‘normally’. But one problem with this is, we all have a different idea of what ‘full’ is. And your feeling of being full might be more than you need. 

Still, the solution is not to count calories for the rest of your life – that’s not sustainable. 

Don’t worry – there’s another way, and I’ll show you. 

This is probably the biggest, most controversial, most brilliant thing I’ve learned since I became a food psychology coach.

And I’ve learned it over many years, and I’ve learned it because I really really needed to for myself.

For some of you, what I’m about to say may sound completely obvious, like common sense in fact. That’ll be either because it comes naturally to you, or because I’m about to explain it so darn well (emoji).

For some of you who’ve studied intuitive eating, or tried intuitive eating, what I’m about to say might sound problematic – and I’d be interested any discussion that arises.

But for those of you caught as I was, in the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t aftermath of binge eating or yoyo dieting; where you can’t restrict or diet without without wanting to binge eat, and yet if you eat ‘normally’ for you you still gain weight – this might be news you’ve needed to hear for a long time.

Here’s the thing:

If you want to lose weight without dieting, you’ll still need (ultimately) to eat less.

The difference is, with an eating psychology approach, you don’t make what you’re eating your focus. Eating less is a happy byproduct of losing your overeating habits. 

So please, please don’t freak out and start trying to deliberately eat less, and think “Oh My God, I’ve got to eat less, I should eat less, I shouldn’t eat as much, it’s going to be horrible like all the diets I’ve done in the past”.

That is restrictive, deprivation thinking, and it will aggravate your inner rebel and make you have bingey thoughts too.

I was a binge eater as a teenager, so I have to make a clear distinction in my mind between restriction and loving having a little less.

Trust me, I’ve had a backlash to restriction thinking enough times in the past, and I teach unrestricting your thoughts in my mindset reset programme Food Psychology Savvy, which gives you the foundational psychological tools for a lifetime of eating at ease and finding your best natural weight.

And on that, I’d utter a note of caution – if you haven’t done any psychology work on letting go of the beliefs you got from years of dieting, it’d be much much better to set down all that emotional baggage and have a big mental clear-out before you start trying to get used to eating a different amount of food.

Nonetheless, the science is there – if you want to lose weight, you’ll need to overeat less.

But in my approach, you don’t have to set out to eat less, which is what most diets gun for.

Instead, I work to end your overeating.

What is overeating? How do I know if I’m doing it?

(And by the way, many clients come to me wanting to stop these behaviours because they make them feel obsessed and depressed around food, without any agenda of working on their weight).

But just for now, let’s say it’s weight.

Most of us do some of these overeating habits, and have done for our whole lives.

We don’t notice we have an overeating pattern, and wouldn’t label ourselves ‘an overeater’ necessarily.

But it’s the last four, where you overeat at meals, that really have the most to do with being accustomed to feeling really full.

When I work with clients, we work to understand and outsmart all of these kinds of overeating. Changing these eating habits for life leaves you with what you need to maintain your best natural weight – the weight you are when you eat normally, to satisfy hunger, and not ‘over’ eating for any of these reasons ‘over’ and above that.

So how do you stop overeating at meals? If it was easy, we’d all just do it.

The trick is to very gradually, over time, redefine your sense of ‘full’.

Let me tell you how that felt for me, because I NEVER ask clients to do something I haven’t guinea-pigged on myself. 

How do you get used to eating a little less at meals?

• Make a mental distinction – instead of aiming to be ‘full’, aim to feel pleasantly satisfied, or to have had ‘enough’. Of course, it’s really subjective, and you have to tune into your body while you eat to find the sweet spot – and you’ll probably overshoot many times before it feels better to stop at satisfied.
• Notice when you think you might be satisfied. Be curious. Take a little pause.
• Leave a couple of bites behind each time. That’s all. I don’t mean as rule (that’s diet thinking: “I have to leave 2 bites on my plate!”.  I mean, the amount you leave can be very small: This adds up to weight loss, believe me.
• Serve yourself 2 bites less – telling yourself you can go back for it at the end if needed. When it’s time to go and get those two bites, you’ll have to get up and consciously choose to go and get them, so you’ll check in with yourself: Am I still hungry? Have I had enough? Again, watch what your mind wants to do. It may create thoughts of unfairness and deprivation – “I’m not having as much as everyone else”, “Why am I not allowed those two bites till later?”, “I must try not to go back and get those bites”. All these thoughts are your old diet thinking. You’re not deciding you’re allowed or not-allowed something. You’re learning to become conscious of your choices and to check in with your body.
• Stop cleaning your plate. That’s a doozy – brings up all your old beliefs about wasting food, competing with siblings, and more. Great if it comes up – deal with those thoughts in your journal, they aren’t a reason to get stuck.
• Play with a half-time check-in: When you feel yourself becoming satisfied, or about halfway through your meal, look at the clock so you can see where you’ll be in 10 minutes’ time. Just engage with the conversation for ten minutes. If you’re in a restaurant, take a bathroom break. Afterwards, see if you really need more, or if you’re actually OK. Never deny yourself or promise yourself you won’t eat more. Allow the decision to arise voluntarily as those 10 minutes allow your body to adjust to the food arriving, and your mind to get unstuck from the excitement of one bite following another.

Just one note of caution- don’t try to do this one habit in isolation. 

I’m talking about it, so you know what you’re aiming for. But I don’t want you to pick this one habit and take it out of context, as if you can force weight loss to happen just by changing the amount of food you’re consuming. 

You can try to rush ahead like that, but any change you create won’t be sustainable unless you actually start to address your overeating in more sophisticated terms than just trying to eat less. 

What I’m trying to say is: You can take anything I teach you and use it to punch yourself in the face.

Or you can approach your eating with love and compassion, learn to have a different quality of conversation inside your head, and learn to feel your feelings – now THAT’s what I call sustainable lifelong change.

Sustainable weight loss goes deeper than just fixing the eating – you fix the reasons you want to eat when you’re not hungry. 

So make sure you check out the rest of the 21 micro habits series and think about the whole picture of you as an eater.