The Pause & Pivot: How I Learned to Pray Instead of Panic-Eat

I want to tell you about a moment in my kitchen about ten years ago that changed everything.

It was evening. I was tired. I was stressed. I was standing in front of the open bottle of wine with absolutely no memory of walking there — that particular kind of automatic, trance-like habit that is not driven by anything at all. My hand was already reaching.

And something stopped me.

Not willpower. Not a diet rule. Not a calorie count running in the background of my brain. Something quieter than all of that. A small, clear interior question that echoed from a sermon I had heard earlier that day: What do you actually need right now?

The honest answer was: not another glass of wine.

That moment — that pause, that question, that honest answer — is where my Pause & Pivot method was born. (Thank you to Father Brian Larken and his sermon on St. Francis de Sales.)

What Is the Pause & Pivot?

The Pause & Pivot is the simplest strategy I teach and the one that makes the biggest difference. It has two steps:

Pause.

Before you eat anything outside of a planned meal, stop. Physically stop. Take one breath. Ask yourself one honest question: Am I actually hungry, or am I stressed, bored, lonely, tired, or just habitual?

Pivot.

If the honest answer is not hunger — pivot. Turn toward something else. For the women I work with, that something else is prayer. A quick decade of the Rosary. A one-line conversation with God. A moment with your patron saint. Something that interrupts the automatic pattern and gives your nervous system a chance to reset. 30-60 seconds.

That’s it. Two steps. It sounds almost too simple. It is not.

Why This Works

The research on emotional eating is clear: the gap between the impulse and the action is where change lives. Most of us have no gap. The impulse fires and the hand is already in the bag before the conscious mind has registered what is happening. The pause creates the gap.

And prayer does something specific in that gap that nothing else quite replicates. It is not just distraction — it is reorientation. It shifts the question from what do I want right now to who am I and what do I actually need. That is a fundamentally different question. And it leads to fundamentally different choices.

The Catholic Dimension

I am a Catholic woman, and my faith is the foundation of everything I teach. The Pause & Pivot is rooted in a very old Catholic spiritual practice — the examination of conscience, the moment of recollection, the brief turning of the mind toward God in the middle of ordinary life.

The saints practiced this constantly. St. Teresa of Ávila called it mental prayer. St. Francis de Sales called it brief interior recollections throughout the day. Brother André Bessette gave everything to St. Joseph — every craving, every difficulty, every impossible moment — and trusted him to handle it.

Your craving is not too small to bring to God. Your pantry moment is not beneath the notice of heaven. The Pause & Pivot is your permission to bring it all — the stress, the tiredness, the automatic reach — into prayer. Every time you do, you are building a habit of recollection that will serve you far beyond your weight loss goals.

How to Practice It This Week

Pick one moment each day — one predictable moment when the reach tends to happen for you. After dinner. Mid-afternoon. Before bed. And practice the pause. Just the pause. One breath, one question. You do not have to get the pivot perfect yet. Start with the pause.

The rest follows.

→ Learn more about the Pause & Pivot in Weight Loss with the Saints at coachmaura.com