How to Change Eating Habits: What Sobriety Taught Katy Margison
"It creeps up on you." Katy Margison said that on the show when I asked how her drinking grew, and eating habits drift the same way. Her story holds three lessons on how to change eating habits. A habit can be covering something, which is why willpower alone leaves it standing. Bad days need a plan written before they arrive. And maintenance asks more of you than fat loss did.
I had Katy on the Talking Nutrition podcast, episode 219, and she told her story in her own words. I have never been through addiction, and food is a different thing. The overlap I care about sits in the mechanics of behaviour change. This is education and does not replace your doctor. If you recognise your own drinking or drug use in Katy's story, your doctor or a local support service is the right person to talk to.
Who Is Katy Margison, and Why Did She Leave Disease Management?
Katy is an online nutrition and fitness coach for women and the founder of Athena Nutrition. On Instagram she is The Sober Weightlifter (@thesoberweightlifter). She spent more than 13 years in the US healthcare system, in hospitals, health centres and a nonprofit, and felt like a cog in the machine of chronic disease management. Seeing real change with individual people pulled her toward prevention.
She trained CrossFit and Olympic weightlifting for almost 15 years, so exercise came naturally. Paleo, keto, challenges, fat-burning pills and debloating supplements each worked for a while, then she regressed. She says now that she was treating the wrong variable.
Where Do Coaches Fit in Prevention?
Katy and I land in the same place on this. Doctors matter, and when someone is already sick, the doctor comes first. Appointments run around 15 minutes, and lifestyle change needs more time than that. A coach has the hours for accountability and education. We each described coaching as one part of the healthcare team. Food, mindset and behaviour change are where people need company.
If you would rather hear Katy tell it in her own voice, the full conversation is below.
What Does the Moderation Voice Sound Like?
Katy first tried to get sober in 2018 and lasted about three and a half months. She calls what followed a common pattern: "There's a little voice that tells you you can moderate." She believed it. The drinking grew, and 2023 was the year it snowballed, while she kept training five times a week and competing in Olympic weightlifting. In late 2023 she decided to stop, picked 1 January, and stopped drinking and using cocaine that morning.
Food has its own version of that voice. For a woman with a packed diary it says lunch can wait and she will eat properly tonight. It sounds reasonable on Tuesday and again on Wednesday. Everything else still works, so nothing flags a problem, and that is how a pattern settles in.
What Was Being Covered Up, and Why Can Food Be Harder?
About a week into sobriety, on a Sunday morning, Katy walked up the road to a little brook near her house. The sun came through and she cried. She remembers thinking: "I haven't seen a Sunday morning like this sober. I can't even remember how long." She described what the substances had been doing for her:
Those kinds of substances are covering up something else. They're a mask for something else.
For Katy the something else was stress, feeling awkward and not knowing how to make friends. Take the substance away and you sit with the discomfort. Katy now calls her ability to sit there a superpower.
She then made the link to eating. In some people food does a similar covering job, and she argued the food side is the harder one: "I can cut out alcohol and drugs and live. You can't cut out food and live. You still have to eat." That is her view, and I find it useful because food shows up three times a day. When stress is what the eating covers, my post on managing stress is where I would start, and the evening version sits in late-night snacking.
How Do You Change Eating Habits Before You Believe You Can?
Minutes before we recorded, Katy had been messaging a woman who wanted to change how she ate and could not see herself as someone who meal preps and tracks for months. Katy's answer was that she had no evidence yet and would have to create it. Katy never saw herself as a sober person either. She built that picture by putting in repetitions, day after day.
I see the same thing when clients move from a deficit up to eating more. They fear the extra carbs and the scale creeping up. I explain the metabolism, and it changes little until they live through two or three weeks of more food, better training and a steady weight. Belief arrives after the evidence, so my answer on how to change eating habits is Katy's lens: collect proof, one meal at a time.
How Do You Plan for Chaos? Tier 1, 2 and 3 Days
I like to run an exercise with clients on a winning streak. One had lost roughly 130 pounds (about 59 kg) and never had a truly rough week, so I asked her to picture one and write down her response. Katy's version gives each kind of day a shape. Mine left the bad week open, and hers closes that gap.
Katy builds tier 1, 2 and 3 days with her clients. A tier 1 day is the ideal: 10,000 steps, all food tracked. Tier 2 is the normal day, with a box or two unchecked. Tier 3 is the chaos day, when a child is sick and you end up at the hospital. She wants clients to think hardest about tier 3, and this is how she put it:
It doesn't have to be perfect steps. It doesn't even have to be tracking your food. It could just be, I'm going to make sure I at least eat three meals and maybe try to get protein in one of them and drink some water.
They map it together in advance, so a client who falls off plan carries no guilt. A plan with a single setting feeds all-or-nothing thinking, because the first day that cannot match it feels like failure. If tracking sits in your tier 1 day, my guide to tracking macros for beginners covers the setup.
Katy lived a tier 3 day four months into sobriety, when her dog Zeus died suddenly. Friends suggested drinks. She ordered a club soda, sat with it for 15 minutes and told herself she could reconsider if the feeling held. With clients she offers the same grace and asks them to forgive themselves and learn from it.
Why Is Maintenance Harder Than Fat Loss?
Katy remembers her own fat loss as manageable, and she allows that a fading memory may colour that. After holding her weight for well over a year, she argues maintenance can be harder: "With more calories comes more wiggle room to make bad decisions." The voice arrives with a reasonable offer, such as 500 calories left in the day and an ice cream that would fit. One scoop is fine, as she says, and it can become a slippery slope.
I made the same point from the coaching side: getting clients to eat more can be harder than the fat loss phase, since eating less comes with a clear target and eating more asks for judgement. Your TDEE gives the maintenance number its starting point. Scale readings will wobble around it, and my post on whether weight fluctuations are normal covers what to expect.
What Do You Say When Dinner Comes With Comments?
Social events test all of this. Refuse dessert or a second drink and you may hear that your diet will be there tomorrow. Katy writes scripts with clients, such as a reply to a sister giving grief over their mum's cheesecake. She reminds the client an explanation is optional, then they compare notes the following week.
Alcohol came up here, and the two of us hold slightly different angles. In the lens I use, the body treats ethanol as something to clear first, which can push fat loss down the queue. I drink occasionally, and two is my limit before I feel rough the next morning. Katy knows most people can moderate and points to context. With clients who drink two to four times a week she has noticed fat loss tends to be tougher, so she raises it gently as a pattern and asks how open they are to a different plan for social events. Reasonable coaches land in different places on this one, and I leave the conclusion with you and your doctor.
We also compared notes on a trap that lands with anyone who skips meals. Save 500 to 600 calories for dinner, eat little all day, arrive starving, and the evening blows up. It backfires the same way with or without alcohol.
When comments do arrive, Katy offers a way to read them:
When people make comments about what you're doing, whether it's refusing a drink or choosing healthier foods, it's often a projection of their own insecurity with their choices or their lack of choices.
That changed how I picture the sister and the cheesecake. I struggle with insecurity and stress myself, so I know a short answer takes practice. Katy has had plenty of it, and this is her last word on the subject: "People are always going to have something to say, especially about the things they kind of know are confronting. You're holding up a mirror."
The full conversation covers more ground than I could fit here, including how Athena Nutrition began.
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Written by Johan Vesters, functional health and nutrition coach (FNMS, HMCC L1, MMU L1, PN1, CFL1, NCI L1) and founder of Odyssey Coaching Systems.