Planning your food in advance

Next to marriage and parent coaching, the most common subject my clients ask for is weight management. In honor of the holiday season kickoff, I thought I would share one of the most effective tools I teach my clients looking to lose or maintain their weight: planning food intake the night before. This is different than keeping a record of what you eat as you eat it, and it is a total game changer.

You plan looking ahead at tomorrow's calendar with the thought in mind: What do I need to fuel my body tomorrow? That is going to be a little different every day depending on what activities you have planned. When you plan the night before, it's much easier to choose what you are going to eat with your pre-frontal cortex, and then you just follow the plan.

You can put anything in that plan that you want -- just make sure you are choosing it, instead of it choosing you. This is my my plan for today -- Halloween. Notice my dinner includes pepperoni pizza and Halloween candy. Deciding ahead of time which candies I'm going to eat and exactly how much keeps my Halloween binge in check.

This planning workbook is available on Amazon for $5.99, but you can easily just jot down your plan on any paper. Give it a try, and drop me a note to tell me how it's going.