that little bag of ...

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We’ve made it to the year 2026, and we’re going to do better this year than we have in the past.

I’ll be emailing you throughout the year, checking in, often talking about “Good Day Strategies” to help with weight loss and maintenance, but if this is bugging you, be sure to unsubscribe.

That little bag sitting next to you? It’s got the chips or nuts or ...

Take a little bite, minutes mindlessly pass, the bag is empty.

That little bag IS our biggest problem.

When I pay attention to that little bag, it tells me a lot about myself.

It tells me that I can eat 300 calories that I don’t even remember.

It tells me that if there is another little bag around, I am probably going to eat that bag mindlessly too.

I didn’t gain 140 pounds by eating one little bag, but I did gain it by eating a whole string of them.

How am I stopping that eating? It was only once I recognized the problem and developed a plan that I was able to maintain my weight.

A big part of my plan involved the “Good Day Strategies” I discuss in this video while I was out on a hike on a “bad day” in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78HNxQnlAJ4

It’s bad days when we are FAR MORE LIKELY to start that mindless eating. It’s good days when we prepare for the bad.

We had a nice discussion in our regular LIVE video last week, available for anyone to view here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYn4YgOu1oU

We have a follow-up tomorrow for Deep Den members. (I’ll send a reminder to members tomorrow.)

Whether you view the live video or not, I know that each of us can identify a small behavior like this that keeps us from meeting our goals. It’s habitual behavior that our brains do with basically no thinking.

We have to work actively to retrain our behavior, and that can feel pretty difficult at times.

The bad days are definitely not our best days to start projects like this. It’s our good days we can leverage to build new structures of support to align our behavior on bad days.

It’s a long old process, and it can start very simply: Clean three problematic items out of your pantry. Make a few meals for your freezer. Find an activity for your bad days (like my hiking activity in that link above).

Though I am not making new content in the coming months, the Eat Like a Bear archive of resources is out there and ready for this moment. It would honor me if you make ample use of it.

Explore the Eat Like a Bear YouTube channel with videos on what to eat and on the psychology of eating: https://www.youtube.com/@EatLikeABear

Search through community questions. Ask your own: https://www.eatlikeabearden.com/c/frequently-asked-questions/

Deep Den members should make use of the content library, where there are about 50 videos not on YouTube and additional e-books (including the draft of the Two-Meal Model e-book from spring 2024, right before my injury): https://www.eatlikeabearden.com/c/content-library/

There are a lot of tools out there, and each of us needs to grab on to some and implement them every single day in 2026. That’s it. Simple. 🙂 

Here’s more about the Deep Den: https://eatlikeabear.com/the-deep-den/

That’s it!! Go be awesome!!!

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