By Nicholas Dunbar, CPH, BCE — ACE Certified Health Coach | Hypothesis Coaching

Most diets fail before they start.

Not because you're weak. Not because you don't care. Because they ask too much, too fast.

Here are five tiny habits I use with my clients. They work. The science backs them up.

Willpower doesn’t work; we need to learn habits that run automatically, like clockwork.

Pick one habit that grabs your attention. Focus on it alone until it feels automatic—don't try them all at once.

• Drink Water Before You Do Anything Else – start by hydrating first to curb cravings.
• Don't Say Never — Say Next Saturday – delay cravings to weaken them over time.
• Replace Volume, Not Flavor – cut portions and add vegetables to fill your plate.
• Walk Right After You Eat – ten-minute post-meal walks help satiety and blood sugar.
• Fix Your Sleep Before You Fix Your Diet – prioritize quality rest to regulate hormones.

1. Drink Water Before You Do Anything Else

The Strategy

A craving hits. You want chips. You want something sweet.

Wait.

Drink a full glass of water first. Then wait five minutes.

If water doesn't cut it, try salted broth. Warm. One cup. It sounds strange. It works.

That's it. Drink first. Eat second — if you still need to.

How to Implement It

Don't try to fix every craving at once. That's how habits fail.

Pick one. The craving you think you can beat. Not the hardest one. The one where you sometimes catch yourself thinking "I probably didn't even need that." Start there.

Now think about exactly where that craving happens. The cookie jar. The snack cabinet. The office vending machine. The coffee shop on the way home.

Think about what you see right before you give in. That moment — right there — is where the reminder goes.

Get a sticky note. Write this on it in big, bold letters:

IF CRAVING → WATER FIRST

Put it in that one spot. Just one. Practice this single craving until drinking water first becomes automatic — until you do it without thinking.

Then move to a harder craving. Then the next.

The reason for the note is simple. You just read this article. You're motivated right now. But motivation fades. The note doesn't. When the craving hits three days from now — tired, distracted, hungry — your brain won't remember what you read. The note will remember for you.

Once the first craving is handled, here are other spots to consider:

• On the cookie jar or snack cabinet door
• Inside the cupboard at eye level
• At the exit of your office or cube — before you reach the vending machine
• Wrapped around your credit card in your wallet
• On the dashboard of your car — the one you drive to the coffee shop

Why It Works

Hunger and thirst share overlapping reward circuits in the brain — the signals can feel similar, especially when you're mildly dehydrated (Mattes & Campbell, 2009). Drinking water first costs nothing and takes 30 seconds. If the craving passes, you had your answer.

The broth trick has a different explanation. Sugar cravings are often salt cravings in disguise. When the body is low on electrolytes, the brain sends signals that feel like hunger. A cup of warm broth can stop it cold.

2. Don't Say Never — Say Next Saturday

The Strategy

You're craving something. Pizza. Ice cream. Whatever it is. You want it bad.

Don't say no. Say not yet.

Tell yourself: I can have that. I'm going to have it next Saturday at 2pm. Write it down.

Then wait.

Next Saturday comes. You've probably forgotten.

If you do remember — ask yourself honestly. Is this craving still strong? Or can I push it one more week?

Here's what matters most. Whether you eat it or not isn't the point. The point is that you are not responding to a craving in an out-of-control way. You're planning. And planning sends a message to your brain: I know I can have this. I am in control. No one is restricting me. No one controls me — not even that part of my brain that fires off cravings.

That's the shift. From reacting to deciding.

How to Implement It

Before you try this in a real craving moment, practice it first. With your eyes closed.

Sit somewhere quiet. Think of a food you often crave. Visualize the craving hitting. Feel the urge. Now — in your mind — watch yourself say: "Saturday at 2pm." See yourself writing it down. Feel the urge still there, but smaller. Watch yourself walk away.

Don't practice the part where Saturday comes and you remember. Just practice the weekday moment. The moment you redirect the urge. That's the muscle you're building.

Do this once a day for a week before you need it for real. By the time a real craving hits, your brain already knows what to do.

Why It Works

For most people, cravings peak fast and fade — often within 20 to 30 minutes — if you don't feed them (Marlatt & Gordon, 1985). Most people never learn this because they give in before the window closes.

A Drexel University study found that people trained in urge surfing — a technique developed at the University of Washington — ate significantly less over 48 hours compared to those who used willpower alone (Forman et al.).

The deeper reason it works: you never said no. You said later. That removes the forbidden fruit effect — the psychological reactance that makes restriction diets backfire. The thing you can never have becomes the thing you just haven't had yet.

3. Replace Volume, Not Flavor

The Strategy

You love pasta. I'm not going to tell you to stop eating it.

Cut it in half. Fill the rest of the plate with vegetables. Big pile. Non-starchy ones. Hearty ones.

But here's the key: it has to taste good. You have to actually like it.

Cook them well. Stir fry them in olive oil with pesto. Roast them until the edges crisp. Simmer them in chicken broth with salt. Find the preparation that makes you want to eat them.

Good options: broccoli, zucchini, acorn squash, spaghetti squash, canned artichoke hearts, asparagus. The more fibrous the better — fiber slows digestion and keeps you full longer.

Same plate. Same meal. A fraction of the calories.

How to Implement It

Two reminders. That's it.

First, put a sticky note directly on your pasta — the bag, the box, the container in the fridge. Write:

HALF PASTA → FILL WITH VEG

Second, wrap a sticky note around your credit or debit card. Write:

BUY VEGETABLES

You pull out your card to pay for groceries. There it is. You don't need willpower. You just need the reminder at the right moment.

That's the whole system. Remind yourself at the pasta. Remind yourself at the store.

Why It Works

Your stomach has stretch receptors. They don't count calories. They measure volume (Rolls, 2009). A full stomach feels full whether it's full of pasta or full of zucchini. Same signal. Very different outcome.

This is called volumetrics (Rolls, 2009). You're eating a full, hot plate of food. You just swapped some of the dense stuff for bulk.

Do it once. See how you feel.

4. Walk Right After You Eat

The Strategy

You finish dinner. Doesn't matter how you feel. Still hungry. Satisfied. Stuffed.

Get up and walk anyway. Ten minutes.

The walk isn't just exercise. It gives your body time to register what you just ate. It interrupts the momentum toward dessert or seconds. And if you're still genuinely hungry when you get back — eat. But most people aren't.

How to Implement It

The hardest part of this habit is remembering to do it before you sit back down. Once you're on the couch, it's over.

So put the reminder where you eat — not where you relax.

Write this on a sticky note:

DONE EATING → GET UP NOW

Place it in two spots:

• Tucked into the bottom of your lunch bag or box.
• On your plate. Literally on the plate before you eat. When you finish, it's sitting right there. Grab it and put it next to where you'll sit — as a physical reminder before you settle in.

The goal is to trigger the walk before your brain has time to negotiate.

Why It Works

A 2025 study in Scientific Reports found that a 10-minute walk right after eating lowered blood sugar spikes just as effectively as a 30-minute walk (Nakagata et al., 2025). Blood sugar spikes drive fat storage. They also drive cravings an hour later.

There's a second reason. Satiety signals take time — often 15 to 20 minutes — to travel from your stomach to your brain through a cascade of hormones including leptin, GLP-1, and CCK. If you sit still, you'll want more food before fullness registers. If you move, you give your brain time to catch up.

5. Fix Your Sleep Before You Fix Your Diet

The Strategy

Before you change a single thing about what you eat — ask yourself one question.

Am I sleeping? Really sleeping? Seven to eight hours. Dark room. Cool temperature.

How to Implement It

This is one of the areas I work on directly with clients. If you're struggling with sleep and it's affecting your weight, your energy, and your cravings — I offer dedicated sleep coaching sessions designed to address the root causes, not just the symptoms.

It's often the first thing we fix. Because when sleep improves, everything else gets easier.

Why It Works

If you're sleeping five hours a night, no diet will save you.

Researchers at the University of Chicago found that just two nights of poor sleep caused an 18% drop in leptin — the hormone that tells you you're full. At the same time, ghrelin — the hormone that tells you you're hungry — shot up 28% (Spiegel et al., 2004).

Another study found that sleep-deprived people consumed 328 extra calories a day from snacks alone.

You're not weak. You're tired. There's a difference.

None of these are dramatic.

No gym membership. No meal plan. No before-and-after photos.

That's how real change happens. Not in a week. Not from a crash diet.

I've seen it work. With busy professionals. With people managing chronic conditions. With people who told me they'd tried everything.

They hadn't tried small enough.

References

1. Mattes RD & Campbell WW. (2009). Hunger and Thirst: Issues in measurement and prediction of eating and drinking. Physiology & Behavior. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2849909/
2. Nakagata T, et al. (2025). Positive impact of a 10-min walk immediately after glucose intake on postprandial glucose levels. Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-07312-y
3. Rolls BJ. (2009). The relationship between dietary energy density and energy intake. Physiology & Behavior, 97(5), 609–615. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19303887/
4. Spiegel K, et al. (2004). Sleep Curtailment Is Associated with Decreased Leptin Levels, Elevated Ghrelin Levels, and Increased Hunger and Appetite. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/0003-4819-141-11-200412070-00008
5. Marlatt GA & Gordon JR. (1985). Urge Surfing. University of Washington Addictive Behavior Resource Center.
6. Forman E, et al. Drexel University urge surfing study. Referenced in Positive Psychology. https://positivepsychology.com/urge-surfing/