your key evidence that this works...

It’s Day 29 of the last 100 Days of 2025!!!

The fire is lit….

We’re getting to 2026 in grand style.

I want you to join us if you haven’t.

But I don’t want to bug you either…. if I am bugging you, unsubscribe here:

As we work on getting through this holiday season STRATEGICALLY, so that we don’t fall head-on into the Christmas cookies and binge our way to Valentine’s Day, I laid out a way of thinking in the Feast Like a Bear holiday e-book. Find it here: https://eatlikeabear.com/crush-2025/

(Save the ebook to your device. The link will turn into a pumpkin in a bit. It even has some holiday recipes!)

Each holiday season we should be looking for a lesson and working on making our lives easier not harder. My biggest learning moment that I apply to holiday seasons actually came from May 2018 when I went on our first big family vacation during the weight loss.

It was a 10-day road trip.

I was down an amazing 120 pounds and concerned that I was about to gain a good bit of it back. Here’s what happened.

That 2018 Family Vacation

We would travel by car for 10 days through the Pacific Northwest. It was a big, exciting trip and I was also greatly concerned that I would un-do all of the weight loss I had just achieved. I decided to keep the cooler packed with foods I had eaten for weight loss and set a goal to maintain my weight.

I couldn’t imagine how I was going to manage it and really simply did not want to gain or get too far off track.

I remember eating my big salads right out of a cooler. I remember a sleepy little ocean-view spot in Oregon where my crew had fish and chips and I got some sort of fish to complement the salad I had in the cooler. We stopped at the Tilamook headquarters where my crew loaded up on ice cream and I sampled the cheeses. We went on four or five pretty big hikes, especially big because I was not well conditioned at that point.

We got home. I stepped on the scale. I more than reached my goal to maintain. I had actually LOST a shocking ten pounds in two weeks!

The ten pounds wasn’t even the key important point, rather it was the lesson: I can go on a trip and wrangle my eating.

I kept that lesson in my pocket and applied it to other trips. I feel like I have a choice these days — tighten up or loosen up. It’s up to me. Here’s a road trip years later where I worked on losing a few pounds and vlogged it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rzZJ3m9tTkc

In our Deep Den community, we’ve been watching Teresa go on a series of business trips this fall. Last year the trips slowed her goals and she’s working on changing her approach. She’s identifying little triggers that have led to bigger unwanted outcomes. She’s chipping away at the dynamic. We all should be looking at our lives this closely at home, at work, on business trips, and everywhere else.

On this point, I would go real granular. Check out Teresa’s quote below about cocktails at the airport bar. She has identified them as triggers in her descent into too-much-eating. She is testing approaching them differently.

Start looking at these little triggers and test doing things differently.

The act of testing through all of these little triggers IS your evidence that you can make different decisions and drive different outcomes. Keep that evidence in your pocket and keep building more.

Coming to Amazon!!!

This is all crazy, but my books haven’t been on Amazon all these years because Amazon’s bots couldn’t verify my extreme rural location. It appears that Amazon was using a Google database and Google had an error in our address. The Google data base did not match our legitimate, government-issued physical address. This has been a burr in my side, but it did create one of our most epic Eat Like a Bear stories when we used our tiny rural post office to ship 10,000 books.  

Read the quaint post office story: https://eatlikeabear.com/usps-postmasters/

Give us a week or so and I’ll send you to an Amazon listing!

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That’s it for now!

Go be awesome!!!