I can’t believe it’s Monday already, I was having a lovely weekend. I managed to get rid of Alfie and Mom for an hour yesterday, ran myself a bath and had been in it five minutes reading my book when the door knocked! It was my brother come to see his mom, typical eh, so much for the ‘me time’ we’d discussed in the meeting ;D hey ho, it was good to see my brother and my mom came back eventually, but my bath was cold by then.
I noticed that a lot of you over the weekend have been eating anything you can lay your hands on! There can be many different reasons for this too many to cover in one email. We all know following a diet, and cutting back on what you eat is the way to lose weight, but for emotional eaters, it's not quite that simple, the urge to eat is sometimes too strong. Foods become a tool, a way to avoid certain feelings. If you don't learn to cope with your life and your emotions in a way that doesn't include food, you won't be able to stick to a diet long term. It's easy enough to follow a plan when your life is going well, but as soon as life gets difficult and problems arise, you'll return to comfort eating.
In a Native American folk tale, a grandfather explains to his grandson that he has two wolves inside him. One wolf fills him with hope and reminds him how wonderful his life is, and the other fills him with doubt and convinces him that nothing is worth the effort. The grandson asks, concerned for his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?" The grandfather replies, "Whichever one I feed."
The two wolves inside you are your positive motivation to lose weight versus your experience of powerlessness that leads to the uncontrollable urge to eat, and the overeating camp usually wins. Every time you overeat because of an emotional reason you feed the wrong wolf!
We all know diets that deprive such as drinking shakes, omitting certain foods etc don't work, but sensible eating plans such as ProPoints and finding ways to be regularly active that you enjoy do work, but only if you look into your emotional eating too.
No one wants to experience bad feelings, we look for something to distract us from these emotions, we might go for a walk, read, have a drink or EAT! What we need to do is get to a point in our life where bad feelings are like bad weather, something that's inevitable in life, you know they will pass and you know you can cope with them until they do. Feelings are like weather, they're all necessary.
Food may grant you a little time-out from your life, but the time-out ends and the problems are still there. Wanting a time-out when feelings become too intense is actually normal and healthy. It's using food too often to get that time-out that becomes problematic.
Positive motivation alone simply can't overcome the desire for the immediate payoff that propels you to eat the things you know you shouldn't. If you use are an emotional eater, when you’re having a bad day, you forget all the positive reasons you wanted to lose weight in the first place and you’ll turn to food to take your mind off whatever it is that’s causing your bad day.
It’s not something that you can change overnight, but it helps to simply become of aware of the fact that you do it, to accept that you do it and the next time you find yourself doing it, question it. Ask yourself, “why am I doing this, could I instead experience the bad feelings I’m having and let the mood pass even if it means I feel bad for a while.” Eating might make you feel better in that moment, but you are likely to still feel bad afterwards only now you’ll have two reasons for feeling bad, the original one and the fact you’ve just overeaten and feel guilty.
Here’s to a week of healthy eating and thoughtful thinking. xx
No comments:
Post a Comment