The Three Best Strategies for Beating Stress Eating That You've Never Heard Before

As a skills-based eating coach who's in school studying psychology, here are the skills I give my clients

One client, when we first started working together, said, “I know what to eat, I just can’t stop eating at night.”

She was a successful executive, had a great family, and was on top of her workouts. Eating was the one thing that she couldn’t quite pull together. She’d tried tracking calories and macros dozens of times, but eventually she’d find herself eating after dinner again, being way over her numbers, and qutting. It was super frustrating, because it was the one thing in her life she couldn’t ever pull together.

Of course, another set of macros to track wasn’t going to help. We had to go a level deeper.

I’m an eating behavior change expert who works with busy executives, lawyers, and software engineers who want to lose weight, but just can’t make diets stick.

Here are the three things we worked on:

1. Pausing before getting an after dinner treat

She’d told me that getting a treat just felt automatic. It was mindless. Sometimes it was like she “woke up” and had already eaten.

So, the first step was putting a pause in between wanting and eating. We started with setting a ten minute timer. We outlined practice times so she was looking out for that moment where she got up to go back to the kitchen.

Then, when she found herself jumping up out of her chair to get dessert, she’d set that ten minute timer.

Important point: She could choose to get dessert, or not, after that 10 minute timer, but first we needed to put in enough time that she could make a mindful choice.

This is the one tip of the three that I didn’t pull from research, it’s a component that I created as a structure for practicing the other two parts, which are evidence based. It’s been one of the most impactful practices I’ve seen with my clients.

2. We practiced sitting with disappointment.

Back in 2022, I was in a workshop led by Dr. Jonathan Bricker, one of my favorite researchers. He’d run a very robust study of coaching weight loss over the course of a year, comparing strategies for challenging thoughts and cravings against strategies for accepting thoughts and cravings.¹

He’d also done a component analysis and found that (if my notes are correct), in that study, “Willingness to feel was the #1 predictor of weight loss.”²

This matched with several other studies I’ve seen on willingness to feel and snacking and willingness to feel and weight loss.³⁴⁵⁶⁷

So, with my client, we started spending the first two minutes of that 10-minute pause, just sitting with whatever came up.

Sometimes it was disappointment for not being able to get that treat immediately.

Other times it was frustration, anger, or sadness. Sometimes it was just becoming really aware of how bored she was with the TV she was watching, or how stressed out she was about something that happened at work. Other times, it was just a strong urge to get the treat out of habit.

Like a mini-emotional workout, we practiced noticing, naming, and sitting with whatever internal sensations came up when not immediately getting a treat.

3. We practiced saying “yes” sometimes and “no” other times

We didn’t set out to create some sort of a diet rule about never having dessert. Black and white food rules are a common path to weight loss failure.⁸⁹¹⁰

On the flip-side, mindful, flexible choice making has been associated with weight loss success¹¹¹²

Instead, we looked at which situations it fit her values to eat dessert in, and which situations it did not.¹³

She decided that she wanted to eat dessert when it was a fun bonding moment with her kids, when it was an especially good dessert, or when she was eating it mindfully and really savoring it.

On the flip-side, she decided that she didn’t want to eat dessert when it was mindlessly eaten while looking at a screen, when it was a dessert that she doesn’t really care about, or when no one else was eating treats.

Now she had three criteria she could reference when making that decision, instead of just habit or wanting.

Finally Handling the Root Cause

She could have failed at calorie and macro tracking forever, whenever her willpower for not eating the treats ran out.

Instead, when she learned a different way to make choices, slowed herself down with a pause, and then built the skill (like strength training!) of being able to notice and sit with the feelings or cravings, without having to act on them, she was able to lose weight.

The amazing thing was that none of this required any diet rules, counting, or changing what she’d been eating at meals, at all.

As a bonus, she was finding more opportunities to eat things she really loved and bond with people over food, and was able to do that now without guilt, for the first time in her life.

If you try on these three steps — pausing 10 minutes, sitting with disappointment, and saying “yes” sometimes and “no” other times, you might find that you get an entirely new and more effective approach to eating, yourself.

— Josh Hillis

1. Jonathan B Bricker, Kristin E Mull, Brianna M Sullivan, Evan M Forman, Efficacy of telehealth acceptance and commitment therapy for weight loss: a pilot randomized clinical trial, Translational Behavioral Medicine, Volume 11, Issue 8, August 2021, Pages 1527–1536, https://doi.org/10.1093/tbm/ibab012

2. Jonathan B Bricker. (2022, March 28 and April 4). Secret to Self-Control: Jonathan Bricker’s Contextual Behavioral Science (CBS) Model of Habit Change [Interactive online workshop]. Continuing education activity sponsored by Christ Community Health Services, on Zoom.

3. Forman, E. M., Butryn, M. L., Manasse, S. M., Crosby, R. D., Goldstein, S. P., Wyckoff, E. P., & Thomas, J. G. (2016). Acceptance‐based versus standard behavioral treatment for obesity: Results from the mind your health randomized controlled trial. Obesity, 24(10), 2050-2056.

4. Forman, E. M., Hoffman, K. L., McGrath, K. B., Herbert, J. D., Brandsma, L. L., & Lowe, M. R. (2007). A comparison of acceptance-and control-based strategies for coping with food cravings: An analog study. Behaviour research and therapy, 45(10), 2372-2386. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2007.04.004

5. Forman, E. M., Hoffman, K. L., Juarascio, A. S., Butryn, M. L., & Herbert, J. D. (2013). Comparison of acceptance-based and standard cognitive-based coping strategies for craving sweets in overweight and obese women. Eating Behaviors, 14, 64-68. doi: 10.1016/j.eatbeh.2012.10.016

6. Hooper, N., Sandoz, E. K., Ashton, J., Clarke, A., & McHugh, L. (2012). Comparing thought suppression and acceptance as coping techniques for food cravings. Eating behaviors, 13(1), 62-64.

7. Hulbert-Williams, L., Hulbert-Williams, N. J., Nicholls, W., Williamson, S., Poonia, J., & Hochard, K. D. (2017). Ultra-brief non-expert-delivered defusion and acceptance exercises for food cravings: A partial replication study. Journal of health psychology, 1359105317695424.

8. Byrne, S. M., Cooper, Z., & Fairburn, C. G. (2004). Psychological predictors of weight regain in obesity. Behaviour research and therapy, 42(11), 1341–1356. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2003.09.004

9. Smith, C. F., Williamson, D. A., Bray, G. A., & Ryan, D. H. (1999). Flexible vs. rigid dieting strategies: Relationship with adverse behavioral outcomes. Appetite, 32(3), 295-305.

10. Meule, A., Westenhöfer, J., & Kübler, A. (2011). Food cravings mediate the relationship between rigid, but not flexible control of eating behavior and dieting success. Appetite, 57(3), 582–584. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2011.07.013

11. Forman, E. M., Shaw, J. A., Goldstein, S. P., Butryn, M. L., Martin, L. M., Meiran, N., … Manasse, S. M. (2016). Mindful decision making and inhibitory control training as complementary means to decrease snack consumption. Appetite, 103, 176-183. doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2016.04.014

12. Sairanen, E., Lappalainen, R., Lapveteläinen, A., Tolvanen, A., & Karhunen, L. (2014). Flexibility in weight management. Eating behaviors, 15(2), 218–224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eatbeh.2014.01.008

13. Forman, E. M., Butryn, M. L., Manasse, S. M., Crosby, R. D., Goldstein, S. P., Wyckoff, E. P., & Thomas, J. G. (2016). Acceptance‐based versus standard behavioral treatment for obesity: Results from the mind your health randomized controlled trial. Obesity, 24(10), 2050-2056.