A short spoken presentation offering seven practical techniques to manage willpower and eating habits by building skills (not relying solely on willpower). Techniques include hiding trigger foods, brushing teeth after meals, using smaller plates, weighing oneself regularly, postponing treats by saying "later," eating protein and waiting 30 minutes, and journaling emotions to identify triggers and create new habits.
Chapters
Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's Boost. Do you ever wish that you had more willpower? I do too. But the fact remains we all wake up with a certain reservoir of willpower and it gets depleted throughout the day. How does it get depleted? Through phone calls and emails and driving through traffic. Even suppressing our emotions will deplete our willpower and cause us to eat even more. So what do we do? Don't rely on the willpower. Instead, rely on skill power. I'm going to share seven techniques with you to help you build some skills that might lead to habits so that the next time you're faced with a big piece of chocolate cake, you can easily walk away. Number one, keep your trigger foods out of the house, or at least hide them. So, for example, my husband loves dark chocolate and I still buy it because sometimes we allow our kids to have it. Or maybe I want a little bit. I can't keep it in the kitchen because my husband will find it. So instead I have to hide it in a drawer in my dresser so that he can't find it and eat it all. He asks me to hide it to help him with this. It's a skill. Number two, brush your teeth. Let's say you've finished dinner and you really don't want to have desserts in the evening. You just want to be done eating. Brush your teeth. That will help you say no to any possibility of consuming more food. Number three, use small plates. Here in the States, we use these huge plates, so just find some smaller plates and over time you'll probably end up eating less. Number four, get on the scale. Now, I know that this idea is polarizing, but I agree with the camp that says getting on the scale frequently will help you stay a little more aware of where you are. So that if you start to see that you're heading in a direction you don't like, you can course correct. Number five, tell yourself later instead of never. If we say never, that will make us want something even more. But if we say later, half the time we will actually end up forgetting about the food that we wanted later. Once later becomes the present. So tell yourself, oh, you know what, I'll just eat that later. And more likely than not, later comes and you've moved on. The sixth idea is to eat protein. If you really are hungry, eat some protein. Wait 30 minutes, see how you feel at that point. And then my final idea, number seven, is an idea that I just heard today and I love it. If you have been consuming certain trigger foods and you want to stop, go get a journal. And each time that you are just drawn to the trigger food and you want to eat it, pull out your journal and write down very specifically the emotions, the feelings that you're experiencing in that moment. What is driving you to want to eat that cookie? Eat that brownie? What is it? Keep that journal on you for a few weeks and then after about a month or so, look at that journal and read through it because it will be very telling and will help you understand your inner psychology better so that you can learn what are your triggers and be able to course correct or create new habits so that they no longer control you. That's it. Those are my seven ideas. I look forward to hearing what you think about them. What over in our community page. Have a great day.
