27 Nov Martin lost weight accidentally

Martin lost weight accidentally because he no longer did “amnesic eating”.

Martin’s story is that he’d sit in front of television each evening and basically snack on an average of an extra 500 or so calories a day. But when he came to us he wasn’t really aware of what he’d been doing. He actually told us that most nights he didn’t have anything except an occasional beer, and now and then some chips or cheese and crackers. And he absolutely believed that – he definitely was not trying to kid us or himself.

So we did what we do with everyone on the program, we asked Martin to keep a food diary, actually photographing and doing a calorie count on everything he put in his mouth for 7 days straight. We didn’t want Martin to “be good” – we wanted him to eat and drink whatever he actually wanted, because we needed to know what his deep-down eating preferences really were.

Since Martin always had his phone with him, it was really convenient for him to take that quick snap of everything before it went in his mouth, and boy was he surprised. Martin was completely unaware that when he’d get bored with television he’d wander into the kitchen, look at the fridge, and wonder what was in there. He’d open the door, take a look around, choose beer or whatever, and take it back to the television where he’d mindlessly drink it, along with eating the chips or cheese he’d gathered to go with it.

Far from being occasional (which was how he remembered it) this was happening pretty much every night, and some nights he’d do an extra 1000 calories or more.

So we had two things to focus on with Martin. One was breaking the habit of boredom >> wander to kitchen >> look in fridge >> choose something >> etc. That was easy because we just “de-linked” boredom from “wander to kitchen” and the habit was done in minutes.

The other thing we needed to do was to “de-link” Martin’s overliking for chips and cheese and biscuits.

Now Martin chooses water, or a cup of tea, and no snack, not because he thinks he should, but because that’s genuinely all he wants and he can’t imagine putting anything else in his stomach at that time of night.