Habit Transformation Challenge: Your Second Habit

Stop Snacking Challenge

Prepared by: Dr. Kushairi Zuradi

Introduction

We are using the slow change method to make a lifelong impact in your life. Follow this habit transformation basics first prior to starting your challenges.

This is our second habit challenge – to stop ourselves from snacking.

Haven’t started your first challenge yet? Start here first.

Snacking can reduce our natural hunger cues and ruin our appetites. This can result in irregular eating patterns and lack of eating routine.

This habit coaching challenge will help you eat regularly throughout the day while being in tune with your hunger and fullness cues. It will help you ‘re-connect’ with your body.

Habit Challenge: Stop Snacking!

Lets try at least eat every 3-4 hours without snacking. It may not be a long time but for most of us, this could be quite a challenge.

One of the most important healthy eating habits you can create, is to ensure you eat regularly throughout the day, while being in tune with your hunger and fullness cues.

By missing meals we tend to under eat, which leads to a lack of energy and performance.

Drastic under eating also causes a reduction in your metabolism, and can actually slow fat-loss. Unless you are in fasting mode which points out to another discussion later on.

Snacking can also reduce our natural hunger cues, and ruin our appetites. This can result in irregular eating patterns and lack of eating routine. For some people, this is the key reason as to why they gain weight.

This habit will also help you ‘re-connect’ with your body. The connection you have with your body is the most precious thing you have. It is your past, present and future.

Understanding how your body can work for you, and processing the knowledge to make it perform optimally, is the most important information you can ever learn. ↓

Making it yours

How Can I Personalize This Habit?

Choose where your current biggest pitfall, with this habit, may currently lie.

Are you skipping meals throughout the day? If so, which ones in particular? Are you mindlessly snacking between main meals? And are you doing this on a weekday or weekend, or both?

Think about what area needs your focus and attention the most to help you achieve this daily habit, and put some small changes into place to make it a success.

How Can I Make This Habit Easy?

The first step is to scale the habit to something you are 90-100% confident you can do for 6 days of the week. You might want to start with eating breakfast (or lunch or dinner), or focus on specific days Saturdays and Sundays).

Have one day off per week from completing the habit.

This is very important: whatever you pick, it should only take you one to two minutes to complete each day.

What Can I Piggyback Off Of?

Look for events you can use as a reminder to eat every 3-4 hours: after your morning coffee, getting to work, after your workout, getting home from work, when an alarm goes off on your phone, whatever you want. Just pick a pre-existing habit to use as your reminder.

TO DO: Create your personal version of the habit to commit to this challenge!

Here’s a template:

I am 90-100% confident that I will [insert habit] for 6 days a week after I [insert what you're going to piggyback off of].

Here’s an example:

I am 90-100% confident that I will eat every 3-4 hours without snacking for 6 days per week after I set reminders on my phone. P.S. Don’t worry about making this perfect. We’ll help you adjust.

The debate over ‘optimal’ meal frequency rages on and general advice ranges from one large evening feast to the tradition of 6+ meals per day.

Which approach is correct?

Well, it depends. Nutrition must be matched to your physiology and current goals. And of course, for long-term success, it must also fit your lifestyle to be manageable on a day-to-day basis.

We can find ‘success’ stories for almost every nutrition protocol/strategy, whether eating two meals per day or eight. This indicates that overall daily food intake is the key factor in someone’s results, not how many meals they have had.

The results usually come down to the fact that the person has found a nutrition system to suit them, one they can stick to consistently, that helps them adopt a set of healthy lifestyle habits.

What this shows us is that some of the time-honored myths can now be firmly put to bed.

So let’s do that.

Greater Meal Frequency Increases Metabolism

When we consume food we get what is known as the ‘thermic effect of food’ (TEF). This is the amount of energy expended by the body during digestion. When we eat food we get a slight rise in our metabolism, however eating more meals per day does not provide any significant increase to metabolism. Eating a greater amount of meals per day doesn’t raise the metabolism enough to impact fat loss. It is actually the total amount of daily food consumed that equates to our daily energy expenditure on digestion. Look at the numbers. If you consume three meals per day at 1000kcals each, you get exactly the same daily energy turnover as if you ate six meals per day at 500kcals each.

You Must Eat Breakfast Upon Waking

It’s often suggested that eating immediately upon waking helps improve fat loss. This is not the case as it does not kick start the metabolism for the day. In fact, it has been shown that going periods without food (usually skipping breakfast) can actually increase metabolism. We can get additional health benefits from short fasts, such as improved insulin sensitivity, nutrient partitioning, greater fat loss and induced autophagy (the cellular clean-up process). Experience has shown that eating every 3-4 hours without snacks, is the perfect middle ground for the majority of people. It also provides a great place to quickly add or subtract meals to learn what works for you.

Adjust

If all went well for one week, and you didn’t struggle or skip the habit for more than a day, I recommend that you lengthen the habit this week. If you’ve struggled, keep it the same as last week or make it even easier.

For example, if you’ve just been focusing on eating a healthy breakfast that you would have previously skipped on a morning, then extend that to your lunch now too.

Or if you’ve been focusing on reducing your snacks between meals, try to focus on eating your main meals every 3-4 hours.

Or if you’ve noticed increased hunger between meals, then try making your meals bigger, or eating more frequently.

Never make too big an adjustment so that it becomes too difficult.

This slow change process of expanding the habit a little at a time helps overcome the resistance of the mind to change and discomfort.

Each step isn’t difficult, so your mind doesn’t rebel much. Gradually the habit becomes your new normal and you can expand a bit more, pushing your comfort zone a little at a time.

Keep on track for 1-2 weeks and we’ll see you in your next challenge soon!

Not sure of what to eat during meal time?

As we aim not to snack, we must maximize proper nutrition from real food during our meal time. A healthy meal will definitely make us full longer, reduce cravings and ultimately remove the need to snack.

Here at Sihatologi, we have designed a perfect guide for you to eat delicious real food which you can prepare by yourself at home- easily.