Happy New Year! Starting today, for the first 9 weeks of the year, Beeminder and MelzaFit.com are teaming up for a group accountability coaching program. If you want to try intuitive eating as a weight control strategy, dump the diet mindset, and also try out some nerdtasticness with Beeminder graphs as guardrails, you might like it. We’re taking the first five days to decide our metrics, so it’s not too late to get in on this. Head to interest.melzafit.com which will ask you a bunch of questions and also give you more of a sense of what to expect if you join the program. Both of the Beeminder founders and several pretty amazing Beeminder users are already in, along with some folks from the MelzaFit side who are new to Beeminder.
What Is Beeminder?
For the MelzaFit folks or anyone else just joining us, here’s how Melanie describes us.
Beeminder is an app that helps you see tangible daily progress toward your goals while having some skin in the game (a monetary pledge). You’re very literally committing to your goals. If you join Mindful Munching with Metrics, you get to use Beeminder for free during the program.
Some people like that “fire” under them to keep them moving toward their goal, and when they do go off track, are happy to pay their pledge amount as a fair fee for the motivation they’ve gotten so far. They are encouraged not to see going off track as a failure, just information to use to keep tweaking things. This is exactly how we want to view our eating habits. Nothing is ever perfect and all actions are just a chance to learn what works, feels good, etc. (Our culture tends to believe that things need to be done perfectly to see results when it comes to health and fitness. So not true!)
Some people don’t enjoy this style of motivation. By using Beeminder for free during MMM, you’ll be able to see if it’s helpful for you and your psychology.
History and Science
Some of you old-timers may recall that Melanie was involved with Beeminder in the early days, as Beeminder’s Resident Fitness Expert, before she founded MelzaFit Training. More recently, Melanie and Danny have been debating the merits of their seemingly incompatible approaches to weight control. Melanie’s Mindful Munching program is about learning to trust your body; Beeminder and Danny’s crazy weight control schemes are all about setting up external systems. Rather than just fight about this (did we mention that Danny and Melanie are siblings?) we thought we’d try an experiment. Here are the questions we’re hoping to answer by the end of this program:
- For mindful munchers, can we add metrics and guardrails without undermining the mindfulness?
- Can the Beeminder types who’ve been relying on metrics and guardrails manage to make them superfluous with the power of mindfulness?
- Are there distinct types of people for whom one or the other approach works best?
- Or is there a hybrid approach that, with enough parameters, is fairly universal?
- Or even, is pure mindfulness just superior for pretty much anyone?
- Or, conceivably, or for completeness, is mindfulness just woo-woo?
- Assuming no universally best approach, how can we identify what will work best for who?
As we’ve worked on putting together this program, we’ve become pretty optimistic that these approaches will turn out to be nicely complementary.
On the Beeminder side, we’re also pretty excited about a new feedback control system we’ve designed. Initially this will all happen in a shared spreadsheet and we’ll see what eventually makes its way into Beeminder proper. We’ll say more about that in followup blog posts.
Mindful Munching
On the mindfulness side, here’s Melanie again.
Join us to understand the simple changes that make the difference between overeating and nourishing yourself while enjoying your food. Weight maintenance and loss is easy once you recognize that difference and get some practice, learning how to feel satisfied without overeating.
I (Melanie) recently lost 9 pounds myself, running this program in the fall, and those who joined me lost 2-6 pounds each! The more you practice these basics, the further you move toward natural eating that sets you up for success, even in tempting situations like the holidays.
Throughout the program and beyond, thinking about how you want to feel from eating can help you snap out of a rash decision to overeat or grab a snack when it’s not truly what you need or want in that moment. It helps remind you of the bigger picture, such as how you feel better when waiting to actually be hungry to eat, or when not finishing the last few bites just because they’re there and easier to eat than toss or put away, or just because you feel a little sadness that you don’t get to eat the whole plate you were excited to start eating at the beginning.
As my Mindful Munchers this past fall experienced, you too can…
- Lose inches and pounds
- Experience less anxiety around food
- Get more veggies & protein
- Reduce cravings
- Notice fullness more easily
- Have trigger foods around without fear of overindulging
- Not overeat as often
- Include whole grains more (without carb fear)
- Have an easier time building Feel Good Meals (FGMs, aka balanced meals)
- Have more energy
- Plate your food and sit to eat more often
- Experience less guilt from eating all foods
Each time I repeat this program along with my participants, I get a little further along the spectrum of feeling like a calm, relaxed, natural eater who has way less fear about “screwing up”, all while having treats in my house without needing to ask my husband to hide them from me anymore. I dropped this need four years ago after becoming a certified nutrition coach and running my first nutrition coaching group; it’s freeing!
(“Screwing up” is in quotes because no eating is a screw-up! It’s simply eating, and provides insight into what feels good to you and what’s driving you to eat in that moment. Slowing down and noticing what you’re thinking can be eye-opening!)
All foods are totally fine, nothing is off limits.
My own progress during past Mindful Munching programs has been due to both the added motivation of being accountable and the lasting mindfulness about eating that I developed. But just as you don’t learn an instrument with a 2-month concerted effort, you don’t become a natural eater who has dropped all diet mindset that quickly either. You will see great progress, and be excited to take it further over time and with practice. And you’re always welcome in future Mindful Munching programs if you want to reinforce and further the practices.
Program Notes and Logistics
- The cost for the coaching and running of the program is $60 for the 9 weeks. This all goes to MelzaFit.
- You get $15 of that back as Honey Money (Beeminder credit), so if you already spend money on Beeminder, Mindful Munching with Metrics effectively is $45.
- All the action happens in a private group in the Beeminder forum. There are 24 people in that group now — everyone who’s expressed interest — but we’ll pare that down to those who commit in the next couple days.
- We’re capping participation at 20 people, so hurry and fill out the interest form if you might want to join us!