It’s February 1st. Do you know where your New Year’s resolutions are? Maybe you’re still plugging away on the dietary changes you wanted to make, or maybe things are starting to slip a little. I spoke with Adam Gilbert, head coach at MyBodyTutor.Com, about some strategies for staying consistent when things get challenging…instead of delaying, procrastinating, rationalizing and making excuses for poor food choices.

A little background: Gilbert became interested in nutrition and exercise when he was just 9 years old. His parents got divorced when he was 4, and while he was still a young child, he watched his father suffer from a heart attack followed by a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. His sister used food as an emotional crutch, so her ups and downs with food had a big impact on him as well. “I knew I wanted to be healthy and fit from a very young age,” Gilbert said. He became the go-to guy for health information in 7th grade. After majoring in accounting and working for Ernst & Young for two years, Gilbert launched My Body Tutor, a coaching program which allows participants to access an electronic portal and track every single meal, snack, and workout on a daily basis, as well as receiving daily feedback.

Gilbert envisioned the business after realizing that his clients, colleagues, partners and friends loved the plans he wrote for them, but would get caught up with work projects or their family or happy hours. “Whatever it was, there was always an excuse, and I realized something has to be done, and there needs to be a way to help these people stay consistent, day in and day out.”

Whether you’re having trouble with maintaining a healthy diet, or are working with your own athletes who struggle with their nutrition, some of the strategies Gilbert uses with his clients may help with consistency—and success.

Check Your Emotions

“I think when most people think of emotional eating they think of a girl watching Sex in the City on the couch, eating a pint of ice cream. However, we are all emotional eaters,” Gilbert explains. Any time you’re eating when you’re not truly physically hungry is emotional eating.

‘Am I hungry or am I eating to change the way I feel?’

That’s one of the questions Gilbert encourages people to ask themselves before they eat. “Nine times out of 10, what we’ll realize is that we’re not physically hungry. We’re emotionally hungry. We’re hungry for something else,” he says.

The next step is to try to figure out what’s bothering you, and what you’re really ‘hungry’ for.

“We reach for food so many times and it’s really just out of habit, or mindless, we’re doing it for entertainment, to soothe ourselves, but we’re not actually physically hungry. So just asking ourselves the simple question, ‘am I hungry or am I eating to change the way I feel,’ can really help a lot, can really help you diagnose whether you’re physically hungry, which comes on gradually… we feel it in our stomach, we feel it in our head a little bit, whereas emotional hunger comes on suddenly. With emotional hunger, we crave a specific food. With emotional hunger, we can have snack after snack and nothing satisfies us. That’s because we’re not actually physically hungry.”

Realizing when you’re eating emotionally doesn’t necessarily stop you from doing it, so Gilbert recommends taking things a step further by asking yourself some more questions.

1 What am I really hungry for? (What’s really bothering me?)
2 What can I do about it?
3 Why don’t I do anything about it?

“What we’re doing when we’re emotionally eating is putting our hands in the air and saying, ‘I don’t want to deal with it; I don’t want to do anything but eat and suppress the emotions.’ Then we go into a food trance, as I call it, and hope everything works out on its own. But of course as soon as we’re done eating, we feel guilty, we feel regretful, and whatever was bothering us in the first place is still there. It’s much more effective to try to figure out what it is that’s bothering us and actually take action on that,” he explains.

Craving Specific Foods

Taking action on the underlying issues fueling excessive consumption is huge, but so is narrowing down what specifically you are craving and seeing if there’s any way to find an alternative. This may not always be possible, but in some cases, it is. For example, one of Gilbert’s favorite foods is a hamburger and French fries—but he’s found that it’s the combination of onion and pickle and tomato he really likes—not necessarily the burger and bun. Dipping oven-roasted potatoes in ketchup satisfies his craving for French fries, which he sees as more of a conditioning thing—something he’d gotten used to ordering with a burger.

Be Realistic

Unless you’re a figure model or need to cut weight to be in a specific weight class, choosing not to ever eat your favorite unhealthy foods is a recipe for failure. It’s all about finding that fine line between regularly indulging and trying to be unrealistic.

“It’s not about never having your never food again,” Adam said. “What works for me and for my clients so well is being really ruthless with our meals and snacks and events and days that don’t matter, so that when they do, we can indulge guilt-free.” A typical mid-afternoon snack, or even a dinner after a long day, isn’t that worthwhile. But going to a really great restaurant, celebrating a birthday or holiday, or doing something special that’s really memorable is absolutely something you can indulge in, and because the rest of your diet is so spot-on, you’re good to go.

“Knowing that we can indulge makes it easier to push through unnecessary cravings or temptations we might have, the meals that are not worthwhile,” Gilbert adds.

This is also a good strategy for those events you end up at where packing your own lunch isn’t really an option. “So many people focus on the 10 percent of meals they can’t control, and let them impact the 90 percent of the meals they do control. What we want to do is flip that and really concern ourselves with the 90 percent of meals we do control,” he explains.

“I was talking with a client the other day, and he was saying he wanted to eat healthy food for dinner, however, he didn’t want to change his entire family’s eating habits. And I said, ‘before we worry about dinner, let’s really nail down breakfast and lunch and your mid-afternoon snacks.’ For him, that was a big aha moment, because he was using the fact that he wasn’t eating healthy for dinner as an excuse to not eat healthy throughout the day. But we flipped it and focused on the meals the rest of the day, and once we nail those down, then we’ll begin to focus on dinner.”

So don’t sweat it if you’re having trouble planning your meals while traveling—but once the rest of your meals are squared away, then you can start planning your snacks and meals ahead of time.

Embrace Discomfort

When asked why so many people fall off the wagon while trying to make healthy changes, Gilbert explains that it’s often so much easier to revert to what’s more comfortable. “’Better the devil you know’ is the psychological explanation for it. Ultimately, change is uncomfortable. If change were easy, we’d all do it. If consistency were easy, we’d all do it. At the end of the day, it’s very easy or easier to do what you usually do because it’s comfortable—even if it leads to discomfort later on, or you might not like how you look or feel or that you’re unhealthy.”

Because it’s so much easier to give in to urges or cravings, having support and accountability—and different ways of thinking about these challenges—is crucial. “It’s entirely too easy to rationalize and justify our poor choices, without someone pushing us and reminding us of what we really want.”

View Healthy Food as an Investment, Not a Cost

We’ve all heard people complain about how expensive healthy eating is. Knowing that you can’t out-exercise a poor diet—and that the evidence would show up in your biomarkers, if not your waistline—can be a good motivator. But Gilbert is quick to point out that costs don’t usually come up as a concern when it’s food people really love. “One of the interesting things is that when we crave ice cream, pizza, whatever it is, we’ll go across town, we’ll walk as far as we need to, and spend as much as it takes. I myself have spent a lot of money on fancy ice cream or fancy food when I’m craving something. However, when we’re rational, when we’re in the supermarket, we might look at grapes as so expensive, ‘Oh, five dollars for a bunch of grapes?’ However, one of the things that I like to remind people of is that junk food doesn’t give us anything back, but eating healthy is a good investment. Like a dividend, it pays back over and over and over again. I like to reframe healthy food as an investment. Everything unhealthy is a cost, and anything healthy is an investment. It’s certainly cheaper to pay for healthy food now than it is to pay a doctor later on when you’re sick. Being sick costs time and money.”

If you’re intrigued by Adam’s philosophy on consistency, and need some daily personal accountability and feedback to reach your fat loss goals, check out MyBodyTutor.Com. Adam also offers a partner program, allowing coaches to use his platform to build their business and help their clients reach their goals. For more information, contact Adam at adam@mybodytutor.com.