I never thought salads!

Our brains seem wired to crave junk food and sweets.

And while their composition does mess with our brain chemistry, we have more control over our cravings than we might think.

I discovered three slippery slopes that would tip my brain into helplessly craving junk food and sweets.

So I took these three points and flipped them into Clarity Guardrails,

which over time became stronger and stronger to the point that my brain hardly ever craves junk food and sweets now.

Put your detective hat on and try to spot the three slippery slopes in this story.

When I was losing weight, I'd wake up with just enough time to get to work before my first meeting,

so my entire breakfast consisted of grabbing a banana on my way out.

I figured the fewer the meals, the less I eat, so it's a win-win.

And then unsurprisingly within a few hours I'd be hungry, head to the vending machine, and get a tea and nuts to tide me till lunch.

Lunch rolls around and finally my first proper meal in the cafeteria.

I'd go for salads, but sometimes the specials for the day were calling my name.

I'd try to keep the ratio three to four days salads, at most one to two days specials.

This way on average I would still be eating less.

Then between lunch and dinner, I'd start feeling the need to eat again, so I'd grab some nuts or maybe some string cheese.

Nothing too big because I'm losing weight.

I am also only pounding down zero-calorie soda the whole time.

Finally I get home exhausted and eat a home cooked meal.

But then as the night keeps going, I am craving some of the chocolate in the pantry.

TV is so much more enjoyable with chocolate and a scoop of ice cream, you know?

If I am on a new weight loss attempt, I'd be able to fight off the urge and watch TV with just a cup of tea.

But if it's been a while into the attempt, chocolate and ice cream would start sneaking into my after-dinner wind-down.

At first I'd think "I'll just have a little bit" but then it'd snowball until I am back to the eating habits I've always had, completely off-the-wagon.

I'd be good the whole day but the nighttime cravings were what always got me.

So every new attempt, I'd try to battle my nighttime cravings by finding substitutes like low-calorie ice cream or hiding junk and sweets at back of the cupboard,

but I'd fail each time.

The problem was that while nighttime craving is a slippery slope, it's the last one, and inevitable if the two earlier slippery slopes are not addressed.

Did you spot the two earlier slippery slopes in the story?

If you guessed cooking more of my meals, or intermittent fasting, or cutting carbs, or adding exercise, or any specific diet, then it's none of those.

The first slippery slope was not fueling my body properly throughout the day, which made my hunger and cravings roll together into a monster at night.

Think of cravings like an elephant and hunger as the rider of that elephant.

The elephant is harder to control than the rider, but if I also don't have a good relationship with the rider, I can't control either and will get trampled.

There are two clarity guardrails I put in place to form a good relationship with the rider aka my hunger.

One: Remember how I was pounding down soda all day long?

Turns out our bodies indicate the need for water as hunger first.

It's only when we're severely dehydrated that we start feeling thirsty.

And soda does not help as much as water here.

So the many times between meals when I was quote unquote hungry, what I needed to do was drink water instead of snacking.

Once I started drinking more water, the number of times I felt the need to eat reduced, but I still kept getting hungry between meals.

Especially two to three hours after lunch.

I researched how to stop this and found testimonials from people doing paleo saying that their hunger had reduced drastically.

So I tried paleo, it worked, but I really like rice and bread.

I fell off paleo in three weeks, but surprising side-benefit:

those three weeks had trained me to become better at finding protein because I had to replace my normal rice, bread and pasta with something else.

So even after I stopped doing paleo, I kept up with eating one palm-sized amount of protein four times a day.

And voila!

The gaps between my hunger pangs became the normal 3.5 to 4 hours after eating.

Just these two guardrails got my hunger under control, and I found that my nighttime cravings reduced from daily to every two to three days.

And even on days when I was craving my favorite ice cream, the urge wasn't as crazy because the rider of my elephant was sane.

This got me to lose many lb for many weeks until my weight loss stalled.

I realized that while I had reduced indulging in after-dinner snacking, it now needed to be reduced even more if I wanted to continue losing weight.

I needed to also tame the elephant which led me to slippery slope number two.

Now if you've read any habit building book, you know how habits form:

first comes the trigger, like stress.

This causes you to have a craving like "You know what makes me feel better? Chocolate!"

Then you act on the craving by eating some delicious candy.

And finally comes the reward:

the sweet satisfaction, stress relief, and fireworks that go off inside you while you enjoy that chocolate.

The moment where the elephant goes truly berserk is between the craving and the action.

Now I had read that the way to prevent hurtling from craving straight into action is to make the action difficult.

So I tried hiding my ice cream behind a bunch of other stuff in my freezer, but somehow a week in I didn't find it that hard to dig my way to it.

Then I tried not buying junk and sweets at all, which lasted many weeks until I finally got ahold of some pie at a party and lost all semblance of dignity as I gobbled up 3 slices in record time.

It was at one of these parties as I was waiting for more ice cream that my big Aha happened.

I had already had a bowl of ice cream and I was waiting for another one.

But it took so long to be put out

I realized I had no interest in having it anymore.

This shocked me.

What had changed?

Just two things.

One: I had given myself full permission to eat as much ice cream as I wanted.

Unlike those times when I hid my favorite snacks, I wasn't trying to dupe myself into not eating something I really wanted.

And two: the time between craving and action had stretched.

The restaurant's slowness had added an unintentional speed bump in my behavior chain.

This gave my mind enough time to catch-up to my stomach.

These two became my clarity guardrails for slippery slope number two.

From then onward I gave myself full permission to eat whatever I wanted, as long as I went over a speed bump first.

Some of my favorites were drinking water after every bite, making the first plate a small salad before any meal, and jotting down my thoughts before I ate my craved ice cream.

My weight loss resumed once I got these in-place and kept going for another 2 months before it stalled again.

Because while the speed bumps and permission had reduced my cravings and the amount I ate even more,

I was still indulging more than I should twice-a-week on, you guessed it, the weekends.

This last slippery slope is the slipperiest of them all because it required me to move up the habit chain and address the craving directly.

I knew from watching my friends that when faced with, say, stress, they didn't experience the same cravings as me, namely, lunging for food.

They were able to treat food like it was optional.

This made me ask myself uncomfortable questions:

"Why do I turn to food for stress-relief?"

"Why does celebration mean stuffing myself to the gills?"

I started answering these questions whenever my cravings hit, and I realized over time that they all pointed to 1 main answer:

the scale I used to value food was one of pleasure, celebration and relief.

The opposite of this is pain, sadness and distress.

So of course I didn't want to change my relationship with food!

I finally made sense to myself!

From then on whenever I watched my friends eat, I asked myself: "What scale are they using to value food?"

And over time, I realized it all pointed to one scale: "How do I want this food I'm about to eat to serve me right now?"

For example, I noticed at parties that they did value it as celebration like I did.

But when I met them after gym, the value was to refuel after the workout, not as a treat for being good.

If we ordered food that didn't taste good, they didn't value it all and wouldn't touch it, unlike me who'd eat it anyway.

This is well and good as an insight but really hard to put in practice.

So my clarity guideline here was not to set any particular goals but instead turn the observation spotlight on myself I'd simply jot down before I ate how I wanted the food I was about to eat to serve me.

At first I was alarmed to see how many times I wrote down energy while about to have pizza and soda, the antithesis of energy.

But over time my logs started changing more and more toward my intended value for the food aligning with its actual value.

Addressing these three slippery slopes got me to stop sabotaging myself, but there weren't enough by themselves to get me all the way to goal.

This is why you don't want to ignore this video where my co-coach, Lucy, shows how she boosted her metabolism and lost 30 lb.

It wasn't crazy diets or workouts, but three simple things that you could literally start right now.

So you don't want to miss the complete step-by-step breakdown here.

And always remember, you can do it!