This morning a member of my Lovin’ the Skin You’re In Facebook group contacted me with this question:
Q. While waiting for election results, I got so anxious, I found myself eating out of control and going back and forth to the fridge about 5 times. What can I do?
In short, I suggested that she pay close attention to how she was feeling in her body, notice how the food felt in her stomach and what affect it had on her after she ate it. It’s really important that you pay close attention to how a food makes you feel physically. Because that is what is called a compelling learning experience and afterwards when you’re able to be more conscious about what you want to eat, that memory will come to mind and you won’t likely choose the same thing because the memory of the discomfort will be so strongly imprinted in your brain.
Something important to remember: your cravings are actually unmet emotional needs in disguise.
To read my full response, you can join the group and become a member too.
But to get the skinny on the why I suggested what I did, here’s an old post that I wrote several years ago about how to short circuit the lure of the forbidden foods we all sometimes tend to crave.
S was one of my first Losing Weight without Dieting clients. Let’s call her Sally. As she faced the first challenge of the program, “Legalizing All Foods: Welcoming Back the Former Forbidden No-nos, she went shopping and bought her favorite cake. She brought it home and waited until she got hungry.
Attempting to follow the second principle of the program which is to pay attention to your hunger and eat when you are hungry, she ate and enjoyed the taste so much that she didn’t stop until she felt overfull and bloated. She was beside herself with disappointment and guilt. She wrote to me saying that she fell head first into a binge. Just to clarify, by definition a binge is characterized as eating a large quantity of food over a discrete period of time.
I explained to Sally that her experience with dieting over the years had led her to believe that certain foods were either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and that her choosing those foods made her either virtuous or weak and undisciplined.
Overall, that frame of thinking was detrimental to her ultimate weight loss success since it kept her always focused on what she couldn’t have. That tension of wanting foods that she considered to be ‘bad’ created an anxiety in her that compelled her to eat the forbidden no-no. She often gave in and ate the food, feeling badly afterwards.
That is the dynamic of how typical diets work. As you focus on what you can’t or shouldn’t eat, your desire for the forbidden becomes more threatening. This is the reason that she felt guilty when she brought home the cake. She felt like she was being ‘bad’ on her diet.
Some people have food allergies and their doctor’s recommend that they avoid the foods that give them the allergy. But if that food is associated with comfort and joy, it makes it really difficult to set it aside. That’s because the experience of getting the quick fix of comfort is more real and compelling than the awareness of how sick and uncomfortable that food makes the person feel. This creates a conflict in the mind about what to do. So to eliminate the conflict, you have to neutralize the feelings about the food. You can do this by tapping gently on the side of your hand or holding your hand over your heart as though you were about to say the pledge of allegiance. This will calm your anxiety and your feelings of emotional neediness connected to the food will begin to subside.
If you don’t choose to use the tapping and if you know that eating the food won’t jeopardize your health and turn into an emergency room visit, then, you can just go ahead and eat the food and pay attention to how your body feels afterward, such as my client did in this instance:
When she overate the cake, she noticed that her body felt a certain way. She said that she felt bloated, gassy, anxious, depressed, angry and tired. She felt so uncomfortable in her body that she vowed to never do that again.
I explained to her that having this experience and looking at it from a learning perspective is the way that our bodies will re-learn how to eat normally. This was not a bad thing, but a very necessary and important lesson. She began to feel better knowing that there was no judgment imposed on her overeating.
Think about this. Imagine for a moment that you are in a room filled with your favorite food. There are plates and bowls filled with your heart’s desire. You can eat as much as you want for as long as you want. You decide.
Most likely at first you will eat a large quantity and get so overfull that you will get sick. You may repeat that several times. After you realize how miserable you feel after you get sick, your body unconsciously makes a decision to avoid that feeling and to move towards a feeling that is more pleasant and comfortable. That may mean choosing another food entirely or eating less of the same food. The point is this. As you learn how to eat differently and stop making choices of what to eat based on feeling deprived, your body determines what is right for you, not your head. Therein lies the secret to losing weight without dieting and eating like a naturally slender person. By doing that, you reclaim power over all foods.