How to Stop At Home Mindless Snacking
I’m going to share a small secret about weight loss: it totally sucks.
You start off like a champ; waking up early and crushing your workouts, eating a healthy breakfast and lunch, and drinking enough water throughout the day to put Aquaman to shame.
Yet, when you get home, you can’t control yourself. You begin eating everything in sight, leaving behind a wake of crumbs, and wrappers, only to start building a fire pit to slow-roast a small pig before that hunger strike subsides. (No one else? Just me? Yeah, I didn’t think so :) )
While the last example may be a touch extreme, I have found a lot of my clients (including myself) endure uncontrollable hunger urges and cravings.
We spend the day carefully monitoring our diet, and once home we “fall off” the diet by eating anything, and everything in sight.
This kind of unregulated/impulsive eating pattern can make weight loss even more difficult and set back overall progress. To prevent this, allow me to introduce the “Red Light, Green Light” kitchen makeover.
This kitchen makeover is abiding by one of the most simple yet overlooked kitchen rules:
“If a food is in your house or possession, you will eventfully eat it.”
So if your house is littered with Cheese-Its, Ice Cream Bars, cookies, and other highly processed food items, you will eat it. This is why you want to eliminate, limit, or keep those unhealthy food items far away in an inconvenient location.
On the flip side, if your house is filled with more nutrient-dense foods, fruits, and other minimally processed foods, you’ll be more likely to eat it. This is why we want to make these food items as obvious as possible (i.e fruit bowl, or meal prep).
How to Red Light, Green Light your Kitchen
In this makeover, the first step is to review the items inside your refrigerator and pantry. Categorize each item into red light, yellow light, and green light foods. That’s right, you are cleaning out your kitchen and getting rid of any junk food or snacks that might be a trigger food.
Red Lights Items
Before going any further, I want to quickly address something; the following foods are NOT “Bad” or “Evil”.
Red light food items are foods that usually make you feel unhealthy, feel sick, ultra-processed, unsatisfying to eat, and/or cause you to binge eat.
If you can’t have one serving and put it away, if it makes you say fuck it and eat the whole bag of chips, that is a red light food for you. Usually, these foods have a low nutrient density by containing little to no substantial nutrients, which is bad news for your nutritional goals.
While cleaning out your kitchen, focus on minimizing or eliminating the following items:
Red Light Food Items
Soft drinks and fruit juices
Most commercially available dips and dressing
Processed meats
Frozen desserts and ice cream
Sugar and oil-laden sauces and dressing
All other processed foods
For the record, I’m not saying that you should never eat these foods. Instead, I want you to focus on eating these foods less frequently. When do you eat them, enjoy and savor each and every bite, then just get right back on track.
No guilt treats or thinking that you “fell off the wagon.”
Just as a single salad won’t make you skinny, a single burger won’t make you fat overnight.
Yellow Lights Items
Yellow lights are in a unique category. These items are foods that technically. might not be the best, yet you can occasionally indulge in it without guilt or over-indulge. These yellow food items are highly individualized based on your food preference, lifestyle, and habits.
Let’s take two food items as examples - ice cream and alcohol.
Ice cream will contain a bunch of calories and will be low on the nutrient density front. However, some people can contain themselves with a predetermined amount while others simply cannot control their urges and will finish the pint or even the half-gallon container.
Next, let’s look at alcohol. Alcohol contains 7 calories per gram and doesn’t contain any useful nutrients. In fact, drinking alcohol can inhibit both fat loss and strength gains. However, drinking alcohol is culturally a part of socializing (i.e. happy hours), and you may want to indulge with your friends or co-workers. Maybe you need to have a glass at the end of a long day. If you chose to do so, limit your alcohol consumption.
The major key to determining yellow light foods is to be honest with yourself to prevent self-sabotage. If you don’t have that tempting food around, you will either forget about it or have to go out of your way to cheat.
In short, approach yellow light foods with caution.
Green Light Items
By now, you probably purged some contents of your fridge. So let’s fill it back up with better choices. You’re probably thinking your fridge needs to be filled with egg whites, raw broccoli, and an entire row of La Croix. While I absolutely love La Croix, you’re way off. A healthy fridge is well stocked, just with better food options.
Green light foods make you feel both mentally and physically better. They are more nutrient-dense so they are filled with nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.
The majority of these foods will be in the whole foods, minimally processed category.
Focus on restocking your kitchen with the following items:
Lean Ground Beef or Turkey (90%+)
Boneless and skinless chicken
Turkey or chicken sausage
Wild salmon
Whole eggs or egg whites
Plain, nonfat Greek Yogurt
Cheese
Potatoes (red, yellow, or sweet)
Grains (Oats, quinoa, or whole grain rice)
Fruits and veggies
Extra virgin olive oil
Cooking sprays
Placing foods into different categories can be a bit tricky. Therefore, take an afternoon to go through your entire kitchen and identify your own red, yellow, and green light food list.
You’re probably thinking you need to do some shopping! To make things easier for you, I’ve created a superfood grocery list that I want you to steal. Copy this list and take it with you to the market. You shouldn’t have a problem finding most of these items at a regular grocery store.
Now, it’s time to do some shopping!
And there you go! You have done an extreme kitchen makeover! You have identified all your kitchen food items, limited your red (and possibly yellow) lights items and populated your kitchen with green light foods. By replacing some of the highly processed foods with minimally processed ones (lean meats, veggies, whole foods, complex carbs, etc.) you are off to a great start!
You have primed your environment for success, which is an essential step for transforming into a leaner and stronger version of yourself. Of course, you’ll eventfully want to adjust and individualize, but that comes with practice.
However, this won’t completely eliminate the mindless snacking. i have other tips of mine that I’d love to share with you on how to optimize your environment around you to make sure it doesn’t interfere with your progress.
12 Ways to Optimize Your Environment
1. Use smaller plates to convince your mind that you're eating more.
2. Use smaller utensils so that you take smaller bites, therefore feeling fuller quicker and feeling like you're eating more.
3. If you workout in the morning, lay everything you need -- headphones, food, clothes, socks, shoes, etc. -- out so it's ready to go the night before.
4. Put your "trigger foods" in hard to reach places and out of sight. Make yourself work to find them. Or, better yet, don't buy them at all.
5. In your fridge and in your pantry, pay attention to the foods directly at eye level. Are they fruits, veggies, healthy foods? Or are they shit? Those are what you're likely to reach for first.
6. Eat your protein and fruits/veggies first in your meal, save the carbohydrates/fatty foods for last when you're already slightly full.
7. If you still have food on your plate when you're satisfied, you DON'T have to keep eating and finish your plate.
8. Drink a large glass of water before your meal.
9. If you're trying to lose fat, drink a protein shake before you eat. If you're trying to bulk and gain muscle, drink a shake after.
10. If you struggle to eat enough, make sure you're drinking calories at every meal and eating foods that are easily palatable -- mashed potatoes, dried fruit, trail mix, juices, 2% or whole milk (watch sat fat intake), gatorade during workouts, etc.
11. Have water easily available to you at all times. Make sure to always have a water bottle with you or a water purifier for tap water.
12. Wrap your unhealthy foods in tin foil (hard to see) and your healthy foods in plastic wrap (easy to see). Thanks for this tip, James Clear.
Willpower and discipline can be overrated. Instead of relying on them, use your environment to make your life easier. This will help you set yourself up for success, not trying to “will ourselves” through it.
At the end of the day, it’s all about working smarter, not harder.
Finally, I want you to know…..
All the knowledge you absorbed within this article doesn’t equal change.
If you’re fed up with how COVID fucked up your year, invest in a coach.
If you’ve read LITERALLY DOZENS of guides like this in the past and still haven’t made the change nor the confidence you want, invert in a coach.
If you’re overwhelmed by the content in this article, invest in a coach.
If you cannot be consistent with the strategies within this article, invest in a coach.
If you are ready for a change, I’m here to coach you.