Take Charge of Your Health: Session 9

Making healthy changes is one thing – staying with them over the long haul is another. In this free class, Megan Ellison, RDN, CDCES of Sound Dietitians, LLC covers Chapter 11 of Prediabetes: A Complete Guide by Jill Weisenberger, diving into the mindset patterns, emotional eating cycles, and practical habit-building strategies that determine whether change actually sticks. This is the ninth session in the Take Charge of Your Health series, offered through Stilly Valley Health Connections – explore more in our free class recordings library.

What’s covered in this class:

• Common mindset traps that derail behavior change – how all-or-nothing thinking, perfectionism, good/bad food labeling, catastrophizing, and magical thinking (chasing the next quick fix) all quietly undermine long-term progress, and why guilt and shame may work briefly as motivators but are reliably demotivating over time
• Reframing negative self-talk with the HAP method – how to Hear the automatic thought, Observe it objectively (would you say this to a friend?), and Plan a more useful response, plus how to counter one negative thought with three specific positive and true ones to shift thinking over time
• Emotional eating: naming it to address it – how keeping a food-and-mood journal helps identify whether eating is driven by hunger or by loneliness, boredom, stress, or habit, why naming the emotion leads to a real solution rather than a food-based workaround, and how strategically planning enjoyable foods earlier in the day reduces late-night overindulgence
• Working smarter with habit stacking – the key insight from Atomic Habits that motivation follows action (not the other way around), how habit stacking works (after I do X, I will do Y), and the four-part formula for building any new habit: make it obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying
• The motivation ruler and stages of change – how to rate importance, motivation, and confidence on a 1-10 scale to pinpoint exactly what is keeping a goal stuck, when to adjust the goal versus the approach, and how the stages of change model (pre-contemplation through maintenance) helps normalize the reality that most people cycle through a behavior many times before it truly becomes a habit