No one inherently wants to overeat. I doubt that anyone would purposefully want to increase their risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Is it down to a lack of willpower, or maybe poor food choices, or could it even be the non-conscious part of our brain leading us astray?

The objective of any diet is to create situations which not only place you in a calorie deficit, but align the motivations of the conscious and non-conscious parts of your brain to support your calorie intake.

It all sounds like scientific nonsense, but when you take an evidence based approach and look at the research, there are actually some very practical steps that you can take to transform your lifestyle. Here I will take you through six steps that you can implement relatively easily to help you break some habits to allow you to manage your weight with greater success.

Step One: Fix your food environment

Reducing your exposure to food cues is one of the most effective tools in your arsenal to reduce overeating, and the awesome thing is it can be implemented straight away.

Start by removing all of the tempting, calorie dense foods that are easy to grab and readily visible on your kitchen worktop and tables. Foods such as crisps, biscuits, and even healthier items like nuts. If these are left open on the side they create a situation that can be too tempting for our brains to resist. After all we are always on the look out for a good deal.

The key is trying not to give yourself the option to eat these calorie dense foods, and in time you will crave them less.

You could try to put small barriers in place such as having to open up a cabinet, or having to twist open a lid to get to the food. They don’t have to be big barriers. If we use nuts in their shells for example. If you have to crack them open, or peel them, the chances are you won’t bother unless you are genuinely hungry.

One of the biggest steps you could take is to just have food in your kitchen that you have to cook to eat. Similar to nuts in their shells, if you have to cook something, the chances are you won’t eat between meals, unless you really need to.

I believe a healthy food environment is one that can effortlessly guide you in the right direction. This is done by reducing all the cues that cause you to overeat, such as those tasty, calorie dense foods.

“‘We may have a hard time fighting our non-conscious urges to eat tasty, calorie rich foods when they’re right in front of us, but with a little bit of advanced planning, we can prevail without having to exert too much of our limited will power. The key is to control food cues in your personal environment. Ultimately, a little bit of planning can go along way.”

— Stephan J. Guyenet, PhD

Step Two: Manage your appetite

This sounds fairly obvious when it comes to managing your weight and transforming your lifestyle. Of course you have to manage your appetite to manage your weight, but it is sometimes much easier said than done.

It doesn't make any difference how strong your resolve is, or how much you can resist temptation, if your brain thinks you are hungry it will eventually wear you down. Every single time.

I spoke about cues in the previous newsletter, and again this is where cues come in. You need to give your brain the cues it needs to realise that you are actually not hungry.

The simplest way to do this is by eating foods that send high satiety signals to the brain. In other words choosing foods that help you to maintain feelings of fullness. This is one of the only times where food choices are actually important. Still not as important as overall calories, but important here none the less.

You want to choose foods that are low in calorie density, and high in protein and/or fibre content. If you pick foods that are also relatively palatable and not bland and boring then you are on to a winner. Just try not to lather your food choices in calorific sauces and oils that will bump up the calories.

To give you an example you want to consider foods that are as close to their natural state as possible. For example:

Fruit and vegetables.
Potatoes, both white and sweet.
Fresh meats and seafood.
Eggs.
Greek Yoghurt.
Whole grains.
Beans and lentils.

If you can, try to avoid bread. I love bread, it’s amazing, but even the whole grain versions are relatively calorie dense so it can be really easy to over eat.

If you want to manage your appetite in the simplest way possible, which lets face it we all do, focus on trying to increase your protein intake and really limit all those highly rewarding foods that cause you to over-eat.

In most cases though it’s a little bit simple to say ‘eat less’ as some foods actually have the potential to be more satisfying than others. Think about it, if you are able to choose foods which fill you up it may actually help you battle the cues telling you that you are hungry.

Step Three: Beware of food reward

By food reward I don’t mean rewarding yourself with a biscuit after working hard in the gym. You’re not a dog that needs rewarding with treats when you’ve done something well. What I mean by food reward is the signals the brain receives once you eat something tasty and delicious.

It’s easy to overeat on foods we love. Think ice cream, chocolate, cake, biscuits, chips, and for me; bacon. All these foods we love are generally more rewarding to us than any other foods we may eat. The problem with them arises when they drive our cravings through the roof and ingrain unhealthy eating habits. But why is this?

Simply, it’s because our brains value foods that are calorie dense and contain a combination of fat, sugar, starch, salt, protein, and other nutrients. This doesn’t mean that we aren’t able to enjoy simple, nutritious foods that are less calorie dense, it’s just that they don’t have that edge that sends the intense reward signal to our brain.

Something to bear in mind is that everyone will have different rewarding foods, but you should all have a pretty good idea what yours are. The most common tend to be foods like pizza, crisps, chocolate, cookies, cake, chips and ice cream. It’s not that these foods are inherently bad themselves, bad and good foods aren’t really a thing, you can still eat them occasionally, but if you are looking to lose weight it is probably prudent to limit them in your food environment. As I have mentioned previously, if you can take away the cues that lead you to overeat it will help massively with your weight loss or weight maintenance goals.

Take ice cream for instance, if you are a bit of a fiend for a tub of Halo Top, try eating a piece of fruit with your meal. This has been shown to help promote sensory-specific satiety and will help to reduce your cravings for a sweet dessert.

As much as what is known about the brain and its connection to food reward, not much is known or understood about the underlying mechanisms of how food reward affects the brain regions that determine our appetite and our increased risk of obesity.

What we can say though, is that focusing a diet on less rewarding, simple foods may make it easier to lose weight and maintain weight loss because our brain doesn’t fight it as vigorously. It may not be motivating, and it certainly won’t get you excited about any diet. But as I’ve told many clients before, and I’ve done it myself, it is possible to lose weight whilst eating all the rewarding foods that you like, it can just be quite difficult to resist the temptation to binge, where as a diet that is lower in these rewarding foods will help you control your appetite more effectively. The simple reason being that the chances are you will stick to the diet for longer.

At the end of the day the key with any diet is coming up with a plan that you can live with for the long haul. Maybe a simple bland diet isn’t for you, but if you can keep those highly rewarding tasty foods to a moderate level, whilst making the bulk of your diet from simple foods, you may just be onto a winner.

Step Four: Sleep should be a priority

Sleep is important. More than you may think. Restorative sleep has a major impact on performance and eating behavior, even if you aren’t aware of it.

To understand how lack of sleep can cause us to overeat you first need to understand the point of sleep, and maybe unsurprisingly it’s all to do with our brain. Here’s the science.

There’s a region in our brain that contains an arousal system. This region is responsible for releasing chemicals like dopamine, serotonin and norepinephrine; these chemicals help to keep us in a state of wakefulness and alertness. Our brain also contains a sleep centre. When it’s time to sleep this sleep centre sends signals to the various parts of the arousal system to shut them down.

What’s important here is that both the arousal system and the sleep centre inhibit each other. When one is active the other is shut down.

Think of the Chuckle Brothers.

‘To me, to you’, ‘To me, to you!’

You get the idea.

As both being asleep and awake are both stable states there has to be a signal strong enough that flicks the switch that allows us to go to sleep and wake up. This signal is strongly thought to be another chemical called adenosine.

Adenosine builds up in our brain when we are awake and builds up even faster when we are pushing ourselves, or exerting intense effort i.e. physical training. As adenosine builds up throughout the day it begins to inhibit the function of the arousal system and thus causes us to feel sleepy and tired, eventually causing us to fall asleep.

This is where we need to monitor our caffeine intake, especially at night. Caffeine works by blocking the actions of adenosine. This is why it’s not recommended to have caffeine too close to the time when you are due to go to sleep. It can lead to a bit of a vicious cycle.

You have a coffee half an hour before you go to bed, you then can’t sleep as the caffeine is stopping adenosine from doing its work to send us to sleep. You wake up having got very little sleep feeling groggy and tired, you have a coffee first thing in the morning to try and wake you up, and so the cycle continues. Day after day.

Common sense should tell you that this is not a good thing. Whilst we sleep, our brain clears excess adenosine and other waste products so by morning wakefulness is restored and we are ready to attack another day. The restorative processes that happen during sleep cannot be undervalued. They are so important for optimal functioning of the brain, and trying to alter or interfere with them, for example with caffeine, will eventually lead to the poor performance of various brain functions.

Lack of sleep not only impairs various cognitive functions, i.e. think of how hard you find it to concentrate when you are tired, it also increases the brains responsiveness to food and its ability to detect our energy status. The brain is basically telling us that we are hungry when we are not, it is priming us to overeat by trying to overcome a negative energy balance (a calorie deficit) that isn’t really there.

Basically when we don’t sleep enough our brain thinks we need more energy, which then activates the our food reward system and causes us to eat more without actually intending to and more often that not without us even realizing it.

So how much sleep do we need?

The simple answer is as much as you need to feel restored.

If you wake up after 6 hours sleep and feel terrible and miserable you likely need more sleep. Get it if you can.

One thing to note is that all the sleep guidelines you see are based on averages from population studies. The problem is that how much sleep you personally need could, and will be, completely different to someone else. So rather than follow a rigid guideline of how much sleep you should get, find out how many hours of sleep works for you on an individual basis. If you get 6 hours sleep and wake up feeling fresh and fully rested you may not gain anything from sleeping more. But if you wake up after 6 hours and feel terrible and miserable you likely need more sleep.

There are five simple steps you can take straight away to move you further towards restorative sleep.

Spend enough time in bed. It may be all you need to feel rested.
Make sure your bedroom is completely dark at night.
Try to keep your bedroom as cool as possible.
Only use your bed for sleeping and sex. Not for watching TV or working on your laptop.
Avoid caffeine late at night.

I’ve not even touched on Circadian Rhythm yet and how that helps to regulate both our cognitive behavior and eating behavior, or how technology can undermine our sleep quality. I’ll save that for next time.

On a more serious side note if you do suffer from a condition that restricts sleep quality such as sleep apnea, it’s important that you seek professional help. It can be treated and in doing this you will take some big steps to improving your health and quality of life.

Step Five: Move

Regular physical activity helps with both your appetite and bodyweight management. You should already understand how it helps with weight management. It works by increasing the number of calories you burn, making it in most cases less likely you will overeat. Some people even find that once they exercise on a regular basis their calorie intake may even go up, but it’s not usually enough to counteract the calories that they burn. Although there is obviously some exceptions, and it will vary from individual to individual.

Think of exercise as life.

By this I don’t mean that you need to go and do a load of exercise everyday. Remember how important rest and recovery is. What I mean by this is movement.

Movement should always be a key part of your daily activity. After all you require it to function. You require it for good health, both physical and emotional, and you require it for healthy ageing.

Physical activity is just this. It’s movement. It doesn’t matter what that movement is, but you want to do it everyday if possible. Whether it’s walking, gardening, running, going to the gym, strength training, it doesn’t really matter. Just make your movement something that you enjoy, and choose activities that fit into your lifestyle and your schedule, and ones that you feel are sustainable long term.

Walking more is something that for most people is easy enough to implement. It’s even been shown to improve blood pressure and other parameters of cardiovascular health.

Just don’t get too hung up on a step number. 10,000 steps per day is often cited as a goal, but it’s still just a number. Don’t let it rule you. If you can do more, do more, if you can’t, do less. It’s all about staying flexible and not feeling like you’ve failed if your fitness tracker tells you that you’ve only completed 3000 steps.

In the end what really matters is how much you walk, and move, over weeks and months and years - not just one single day. It’s exactly the same with your nutrition.

Remember you are on a journey and consistency is key.

Step Six: Manage your stress

Most of us at one time or another will suffer with stress. It’s unfortunately now part of the world we live in. Stress can not only undermine our quality of life, but also our food intake, and that’s regardless of our best intentions.

But how do you go about managing stress?

The key first and foremost is to identify the stressor(s) and then to learn how to control it. Chronic stressors such as work, money, and health are particularly problematic as you may feel that they are something that you can’t control.

But ask yourself if it is possible to turn what seems like an uncontrollable stressor into a controllable stressor. For example, if you’re stressed over your finances is there anything that can be done to improve them? If you have concerns over some health issues, is there a plan of action you can put into place to effectively manage the condition?

As for work related stress, well the easiest way to deal with that is simply to find a new job, and I’m not even joking here.

I believe that most of the time what is actually causing us huge amounts of stress has very little to do with what is happening right now, in this present moment - it’s usually about what will happen in the future i.e worrying about a work deadline, or worrying about not being able to afford your bills.

Sound familiar?

Controlling stress is very much an individualised process. I have certain coping mechanisms that work for me and help me to switch off and unwind. At the minute it usually involves getting out into the countryside on my bike. By doing this it helps me to focus on the present moment, I would even go as far as to say it is like a form of meditation for me. I also have at least one day in the week where I will not do any work at all. No programming. No training clients. No answering emails, or texts, about anything regarding work.

It’s important that you find your own constructive coping method. It could simply be something like reading a book, taking a relaxing hot bath, or calling a friend.

You will also know if you are a stress eater or not. If you are, and I’m going to sound like a broken record here, remove all the calorie dense comfort foods from your food environment at both home, and at work. By removing all these highly palatable and rewarding foods there is less of a chance to self medicate your stress with food.

The ultimate goal for all of us should be a balanced life.

Hopefully the six steps that I’ve taken you through are practical enough and can be implemented with ease to help that you transform your life for the better. Remember one of the most important things you have to do is find out what works best for you, and you alone.

Six steps to help manage your weight