How many times have you been in the middle of a habit challenge and quietly given up? You make it to day 19 of 21, then your kid gets sick, your period starts, or life blows up and you don’t have the time or energy to do the habit that day. The problem is that so much popular habit advice teaches consistency as doing the same thing, the same way, day after day. As Monica Packer puts it, what we’ve actually learned is perfectionism, not habit change.

Monica is a recovering perfectionist and the author of Sticky Habits. Her work looks at something most habit advice misses. Women often have less predictable time and energy because of caregiving, invisible labor, hormones, and the million moving pieces they’re managing. That doesn’t mean habits can’t work. It means we need a model for lasting change that accounts for how our lives actually work.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I sit down with Monica to talk about how rethinking consistency can help you build habits that actually stick. She explains what she calls gentle diligence, why doing your best isn’t the same as doing something perfectly, and how creating a baseline gives you a version of your habit you can maintain when life doesn’t go according to plan. We also get into what long-term social change can teach us about our obsession with quick results and why sustainable change requires measuring something different than speed.

3:36 – A short overview of Monica’s background

6:33 – Why the habit advice that works for men can quietly set women up to fail

12:37 – A solo trip that revealed how much invisible work it takes to keep a family running

15:17 – Male-centered authority and leadership in the habit change industry

18:49 – Why a habit challenge stalls out right around day 19, and the redefinition of consistency that has nothing to do with perfection

24:07 – How to establish a baseline version of your habits for less-than-ideal days, and what shifts when you start to believe in it

30:00 – An example of how showing up matters more than doing it right, and how Monica’s perfectionism inspired her book

36:17 – The point of habits and the flexibility to renegotiate them when circumstances come up

39:48 – Reframing what "fast enough" means for your own change, and being sold the lie of overnight success

44:47 – Two things Monica often says to her clients who are worried about consistency and doing things right

46:27 – Monica’s hopes for how she wants her book to impact both women who read it and the self-help and wellness industry overall

47:28 – Monica’s message for you if you fear you can’t change

Mentioned In How to Make Habits Stick When Your Life Is Unpredictable with Monica Packer

Sticky Habits by Monica Packer

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The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon

Truce with Food: Consistency

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Jenny first learned to connect thinness with acceptance when she lost 30 pounds before eighth grade and returned to school getting attention she hadn’t received before. That connection shaped the next four decades of restriction, bingeing, bulimia, treatment, and trying to make peace with food.

By the time Jenny found Truce with Food, she already knew her struggle wasn’t really about food. What she didn’t understand was what kept pulling her back into the same patterns. Identifying loneliness as one of her eating triggers and recognizing the deeper need for belonging underneath it gave her a completely different place to start.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I sit down with Jenny, a client who completed Truce with Food: Consistency, to talk about how her urge to binge fell away without more food rules or another plan to follow. We also get into the role perfectionism played in keeping her stuck, what helped her close the gap between knowing and doing, and what changed when she started building a life she genuinely wanted to be part of.

6:35 – Jenny’s history with disordered eating and body image

9:55 – Loneliness as Jenny’s emotional trigger for bingeing

19:22 – Valuing peace above thinness in our culture

21:18 – "C plus effort" in the group breaking Jenny’s perfectionism cycle

25:56 – Attuning to yourself to satisfy the emotional trigger underneath the food struggle

28:47 – The "knowing" but not "doing" gap that kept Jenny stuck for years

31:49 – Shrinking the gap by learning how to set up for success or for opting out

41:25 – Movement as a door opener to new friendships and more fun

46:01 – Bingeing as betrayal and Jenny’s refusal to let restriction run her life

50:16 – Why the urge to binge can disappear without explanation

55:23 – Bringing your body online to notice what feels good and what triggers you

Mentioned In How Jenny Stopped Binge Eating Without More Food Rules

Truce with Food: Consistency

Free Workshop: Untangle Your Food Triggers: Catch Yourself Before You Fall Off Track

Find Your Food Stage Quiz

You know you’re not hungry, but there’s still this urgent, buzzy energy around food. You find yourself standing in front of the fridge needing something, even though you can’t say what you’re looking for. Maybe you wait until you’re alone to eat, or decide the diet starts tomorrow. You know what to do, so why can’t you do it?

The problem isn’t that you need more information or haven’t tried hard enough. When that knowing and doing gap shows up, your survivor self is in the room. Its job is to protect you from a change that feels too risky, and food almost works. It soothes you and makes you feel less alone without asking you to risk failure, rejection, criticism, or looking bad.

In this episode of Truce with Food, I’m sharing a masterclass I taught inside my client Diana Feinstein’s community about why eating when you’re not hungry makes so much sense. We talk about why starting habits and stopping habits require different strategies, why the survivor self can’t be coached or white-knuckled into changing, and how growing your healthy adult self helps food become obsolete as a coping strategy. Diana also shares how these patterns showed up in her own life and what changed when she finally understood what was happening underneath the food.

1:42 – How this masterclass supports everyday eaters and the coaches helping them

7:30 – Why health coach Diana Feinstein turned to Ali despite knowing what to do

10:05 – Why what looks like self-sabotage may actually be self-protection

12:27 – How the hidden “why not” can outweigh your reasons for changing

18:33 – Why hearing other people name the same food patterns helped Diana feel less alone

20:28 – Why starting a new habit and stopping an unwanted habit require different strategies

23:50 – Why the knowing and doing gap isn’t a character flaw or personal failure

26:43 – How the survivor self creates resistance to change and why it can’t be coached

31:41 – Why food is such a powerful coping strategy and the deeper need it almost meets

35:26 – How hustling and overworking show up in your patterns with food

42:22 – How growing your healthy adult self helps close the knowing and doing gap

45:29 – The four stages of closing the gap between knowing and doing

51:16 – How compassionate witnessing helped Diana stop fighting her feelings

55:17 – What compassionate witnessing looks like and why it isn’t the same as fixing someone

1:00:08 – How food noise can signal that your survivor self is active

Mentioned In How to Close the Knowing-Doing Gap with Food

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Diana Feinstein on LinkedIn

What Your Food Stage Reveals About Why Nothing Has Worked Long Term

Untangle Your Food Triggers: Catch Yourself Before You Fall Off Track

Get Clients Unstuck and Why Another Tool Isn’t the Answer

Truce Coaching Certification

Find Your Food Stage Quiz