Using your body's cues to guide your eating is reliable and more effective for losing fat than counting calories or avoiding carbohydrates. But it is not easy. "Eat when you're hungry and stop when you're satisfied" is one piece of weight loss advice that is, while technically true, more irritating than it is helpful. That's because it's a gross oversimplification.

If you were seeking instruction on how to change your car's oil and someone said "take out the old oil, and put in clean oil", you probably (and justifiably) wouldn't feel very... helped.

To successfully change the oil in your car, you'd need specific action steps laid out clearly and explained. Managing to eat well is arguably more complex than changing the oil in your car, which is why we actually teach our clients how to do each skill.

In this article, I'll share some information on how you can adjust your meals in terms of composition to achieve greater satiation and satiety. These terms actually are two different...

A lot of things aren’t ideal about working the night shift, but you knew that already.

Noting being able sleep is obviously the big one.

But then there’s also the wacky nausea-hunger hybrid you get when you’re suuuuuper tired. There’s the fact that nothing but candy can sound good at 2 am, and you brought tuna salad for “lunch”.

There’s the crazy hunger the following day.

And the heartburn from too much coffee.

If you work some day shifts too, there’s a weird long day and a weird short day on either side of your night shift as you transition into and out of vampire schedule.

There certainly are a handful of challenges, but don’t make the mistake of confusing difficulty for impossibility. It’s not impossible to eat nutritiously or practice healthy habits with night shift work, you just need a system.

Trick 1: Don’t Think About “Eating 3-4 Meals a Day”; Think About Eating Every 4-6 Hours You are Awake.

This...

You wake up, only to realize you weren’t sleeping.

You were… off somewhere. Possibly you were caught up in replaying what happened that day. There was an argument, a stinging comment, a decision that didn’t go your way, or an unfair twist of fate.

And what the hell are these crumbs? Oh yes, now it’s coming back… while you were wading thigh-deep in unpleasant emotions, you decided to eat. And now the food is gone, and you barely remember it. And you’re still upset.

In this circumstance, a lot of our clients focus on undoing “the damage." They're concerned about the calories they took in, and how they’ll gain weight unless they do something. They plan a killer gym workout at 5 am. They chop up lettuce for the following days. Or they just head to bed, knowing in the morning things will seem new again, and they can forget the overeating and start fresh.

Heightened emotional states can trigger eating for a number of reasons:...