From the Diary of Kate Johnston

Why a woman who is disciplined all day can still struggle with food at night, and what a former Physician Assistant does about it.

When Kate Johnston was a Physician Assistant, she was stress eating in the office and on the couch at night. She describes it now as emotional eating during a stressful job: night snacking to relax and cope with emotions, then worrying about the weight gain from it. “I know what it’s like,” she writes on her profile, “to have it together everywhere except this one area.”

She has written about the conclusion that tends to follow. “You can feel self-disciplined all day working in healthcare, yet think you have no self-discipline with the sweets in the breakroom.” It is, she wrote, “just an error in thinking,” and one she knows from the inside: “I made the mistake of thinking it too.”

Kate’s is not a rare shape of story. In the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey of 2013, 43 percent of women said they had overeaten or eaten unhealthy foods in the past month because of stress, and about half of the adults who had done so reported feeling disappointed in themselves afterward. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reporting in 2018 on data from 2013 to 2016, found that 56.4 percent of American women had tried to lose weight in the previous year.

Kate is now an Eating Habits and Weight Loss Coach and the founder of Kate M. Johnston Coaching LLC. Through Lighter, her 1:1 coaching program, she helps high-achieving women break emotional eating and overeating patterns, build doable eating habits, and lose weight. To the woman who has tried to fix it with more willpower or discipline, her answer is short: “But willpower was never the missing piece.”

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Why More Willpower Doesn’t Fix It

Ask Kate why willpower rarely works on emotional eating. She starts with what the eating is for.

“More willpower doesn’t fix emotional eating, because emotional eating is about emotions and feeling better, not the food itself.”

Kate Johnston, Eating Habits and Weight Loss Coach, Kate M. Johnston Coaching LLC

Food, she explains, has throughout time been associated with safety, comfort, connection and pleasure. So when an uncomfortable emotion arrives (worry, boredom, stress, sadness), “our brains naturally tend to think food is a great solution to that uncomfortable emotion.” It isn’t only the uncomfortable ones. Celebration, joy, excitement and relaxation can lead to eating too, with food used to enhance a good feeling because eating is pleasurable. Once it becomes a pattern, she says, “that’s when it starts really having a negative effect on your emotional and physical health, as well as body weight.”

Her answer is to address the pattern at the root, which for her means the uncomfortable emotions. “You can never ‘get rid of’ uncomfortable emotions, because they’re just part of being a human,” she says, “but you can learn to cope with them in a healthy and effective way, without food.” The point isn’t to use willpower to resist a cookie when you’re stressed. It’s to be able, in her words, to “feel the stress, not have it be as much of a problem, and move on with your day.”

Thoughts sit beside emotions in her account. She has written that somewhere along the way the brain starts telling stories (“You have no control around sweets.” “You always overdo it.”) and that, if you dug into each of them, you’d find they “aren’t entirely true.” It’s why she works on what’s behind the eating as well as the eating itself. It’s also why, to the woman who thinks she lacks discipline around food, she says the opposite: that she is already a self-disciplined person, and “there’s something else making it hard with food.”

She held that view as a clinician before she held it as a coach.

Fifteen Years as a Physician Assistant

Kate trained as a Physician Assistant at DeSales University, where she took her Master of Science, and spent 15 years in the profession, some of them working in surgery. “During my 15 years as a Physician Assistant, I discovered people don’t really need more advice on what to eat or avoid,” she says. “They need to have someone who understands what’s making it hard for them to choose the healthier option and address that, rather than just focusing on the food itself.”

She also saw what it did for people to be listened to. They felt much better, she says, when someone took the time to hear what they were struggling with, explained what was going on in a clear way, and formulated a plan together with them. Her patients left the office more confident and comfortable going forward, “and now, my clients feel the same way.”

Then there is what she lived herself. She broke her own emotional eating habit, and did it before she coached anyone: “I overcame it on my own before I started coaching, lost the weight I gained and have maintained that. So I know what it’s like to be where my clients are, but also to be on the other side of it.”

She is a Certified Habit Coach through The Habit Coach Professionals, and she started her business right after quitting her job as a PA-C. “I ran into a huge roadblock that created a ton of stress,” she says of that start, “but I told myself I’d keep trying things until I figured it out, and I did.”

One lesson came from Stacey Boehman, a life coach and Kate’s business coach, who taught her “to always think about the person who is crying in bed at night because of what she’s struggling with, and how I’m going to show up for her.” It resonated deeply, Kate says, and she gives the reason.

“I went into my career as a Physician Assistant to help people who were in physical pain, and now I help people with the thing that’s causing emotional pain.”

Kate, Eating Habits and Weight Loss Coach, Kate M. Johnston Coaching LLC

That help begins with one small habit.

What Lighter Looks Like

Lighter is 1:1 coaching. The first thing Kate and a new client do is create “a simple habit of pausing before you eat to see if you’re truly hungry or if it was something else such as an emotion, thought, or another trigger.”

The pause does two jobs, as she describes it. It gathers information about that specific moment, “so I know exactly how to help you.” And it creates an interruption in the pattern, which she calls “a crucial part of breaking any habit” and which lets a client start “feeling more in control immediately.”

What changes over time, she says, goes wider than eating behaviors: mindset, emotions, and the ability to cope with them. “You become the person who eats when she’s hungry, not for other reasons, and who can stop at enough, rather than overeating.” From there, in her account, come trusting yourself around food, a healthy relationship with food, your body and yourself, and “weight loss that feels easy to sustain.”

She doesn’t ask for perfection. Her standard, in her own two words: “Not perfectly. Consistently.”

Asked for evidence, she describes one client.

A Nurse Who Had Tried the Diets

The client is a registered nurse and mom who, in Kate’s telling, “had been overweight her whole life and was in a pattern of gaining weight.” She had tried many different diets and weight loss programs and felt they were all addressing the actions only, not the thoughts and emotions behind them. Her biggest struggles, as Kate lists them, were staying consistent enough with healthier eating to make true habit change, eating fast food and takeout frequently, and snacking at night for comfort and “me time.”

“We made small changes she could easily implement and stick with,” Kate says, “but more importantly, she changed her thoughts about food, her eating, herself and her body, which helped her choose foods that she felt good about.” The client also became skilled at coping with her emotions in a healthier way, without food.

Kate shared the client’s own words, with her name withheld:

“Not gonna lie, losing 35 lbs. feels amazing! But most importantly, I feel more comfortable in my body and mind. I feel proud of myself.”

A client of Kate’s, registered nurse

The same client told Kate that food had felt as though it was controlling most aspects of her life, and that the coaching showed her she did not need a complicated diet. Kate’s own summary goes past the weight: the client’s relationship with food, herself and her body “changed to one she was proud of.”

Still Learning to Slow Down

Kate doesn’t present herself as finished. “Apparently, my nervous system thinks EVERYTHING IS URGENT,” she has written. “And it only took me 15 years as a PA-C to realize I didn’t have to agree with it.”

For years, she wrote, she thought being productive meant moving quickly: see the patient, write the note, answer the message, finish the task, move on to the next thing. What she practices now is slowing down her movements and her breathing, which she finds helps her concentrate and make fewer careless mistakes. “I’m still learning this, by the way,” she added. There are still days when her brain decides “everything is urgent and apparently we’re competing in the Productivity Olympics.”

“Sometimes the productive choice is to slow your body down enough for your brain to come with you.”

Kate, Eating Habits and Weight Loss Coach, Kate M. Johnston Coaching LLC

The habit she names as her own is paying attention to detail. “I had to as a Physician Assistant, especially when working in surgery,” she says, “and I find that habit really serves me well now, as both a coach and business owner.”

Where Kate Is Now

Kate coaches women 1:1 through Lighter and hosts the podcast Eating Habits for Life, which she built, she has written, “around what’s making food (and weight) difficult.” Getting the podcast in front of more high-achieving women who are struggling with food and weight is one of the things she’s focusing on.

The women she wants to hear from are high-achieving and feeling stuck with eating habits (emotional eating, overeating, night snacking, cravings, binge eating) and with weight. Where they live doesn’t matter: most of her clients are all over the US, and several have come from outside it. The first step is a free consult. Her reason for wanting them to find her is plain. “I truly believe my approach is different than anything they’ve tried before,” she says, “and I’m afraid if they don’t hear about it, they’ll give up since many have tried so many things before that weren’t successful.”

Outside work she’s a runner, both recreational and competitive, and says she is constantly learning from it things that translate to her clients, often as analogies she can share.

She has been where they are and she is on the other side of it. Her line to the woman who has it together everywhere else is the one she can say from experience: “And I know it’s possible to have it together here too.”

Five Lines from Kate’s Diary

“Because if you only needed to change your actions, you would’ve.”
“But the good news is, we already know you are a self-disciplined person.”
“So finding that trust again has less to do with food and more to do with your thoughts.”
“Give your brain a chance to catch up with your body.”
“The work will keep asking for more. You don’t always have to say yes.”