Diets Don’t Work, Reason #1 – Eating to Self Comfort Has Become a Habit – Your urge to reach for food when you’re not hungry, during times of stress has become an unconditioned habit that has been your body’s way of dealing with overwhelm and feelings of frustration. Despite what you may have been told, it can’t be controlled by sheer ‘will power,’ nor is it evidence of any weakness, wrongdoing or lack of discipline on your part. Nothing is wrong with you. This just means that you are an emotional eater.
http://thejuicywoman.blogs.com/my_weblog/2008/06/diets-dont-work-reason-1—eating-to-self-comfort-has-become-a-habit.html
Your urge to reach for food when you’re not hungry, during times of stress has become an unconditioned habit that has been your body’s way of dealing with overwhelm and feelings of frustration. Despite what you may have been told, it can’t be controlled by sheer ‘will power,’ nor is it evidence of any weakness, wrongdoing or lack of discipline on your part. Nothing is wrong with you. This just means that you are an emotional eater.
Unconscious or emotional eating in response to stress is one of the biggest enemies and saboteurs of any diet. This stress eating is how most dieters unwittingly sabotage their weight loss efforts. Stress is the body’s physical, mental and biochemical reaction to all of our life’s events. These good, bad and ugly situations known as “stressors” parade throughout our lives whenever the status quo gets challenged.
When you find yourself ready to give into your kids’ whining, wanting to bang your fist on your dying laptop, feeling the pinch of making a promise you can’t keep, or perhaps feeling overwhelmed with joy at the prospect of celebrating a great job opportunity; your body is under the siege of stress. These stressors in your life are threatening to ravage your body and make you lose control.
If you are a busy woman who’s an emotional eater, you’ll notice that almost anything can trigger a binge when you’re dieting. Cakes, cookies, pies, donuts, even last night’s cold chicken with broccoli looks appetizing at a time when your life gets rattled. You’re probably just as likely to fall off your diet if you’re celebrating a big success or just having a really bad day. If this is your plight and you recognize that you have unconsciously created these kinds of associations to food in your brain that leave you at the mercy of your cravings, then take heart, there is a solution that will take you beyond dieting into a life of food freedom. You can begin again and reclaim your power over food.
As stated before the secret is to learn to make peace with food and deal with your stress. If you’d like to get started learning more about how you can lose weight without dieting, then download a copy of my free Lovin’ the Skin You’re In Sampler: The Juicy Woman’s Self Image Makeover Morsels.
food, hungry, stress, unconditioned habit, body, overwhelm, frustration, will power, discipline, emotional eater, unconscious, diet, sabotage, stressors, binge, cakes, pies, cookies, success, Lovin’ the Skin You’re In Sampler, The Juicy Woman, Andrea Amador
Dieting has directed you to focus solely on the foods you’ve been eating. The problem is not what you’ve been eating, but what’s been eating you! When you diet, you throw your body into conflict and you wage war on yourself.
For people who are emotional eaters, food holds an extraordinarily powerful and important meaning, connecting with love and acceptance, comfort and peace. If you have happy memories of eating and food, your brain has created an association that food=comfort. You may have heard people joke around and say that they are on a See food diet. That means that when they see food, they automatically want to eat it.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Your experience with trying to lose weight and dieting has led you to accept many conflicting beliefs about yourself and food.
As a dieter and a woman raised in a society where thin is considered beautiful and fat is ugly, you’ve been unconsciously collecting a whole bunch of limiting beliefs that keep you stuck and afraid of food, trying to grab the brass ring of beauty and become that thin version of you. With the focus and emphasis on the importance of being thin, diets reinforce the message that deprivation is the road to success.
Our culture worships thinness and condemns fat. We are living in a fat phobic society where it’s not okay to be okay with being fat. According to our society’s double standard, if you’re fat, then you have to resign yourself to eating carrots and celery and eating lean until you become a thin person and then you can eat what you want. Diet organizations have turned food into the enemy.
Imagine what kind of pressure that puts on you as a dieter. There are two conflicting thought patterns going on inside of you. First you’re thinking about how good food tastes, how much you love it and all the happy memories that come from eating. At the same time, your brain is battling with thoughts and judgments that come from years of dieting that has labeled your beloved food as bad for you, fattening, tempting, forbidden, poison and many other labels that lead you to fear it and want it at the same time.
It’s no wonder that your head doesn’t just explode from the stress!You’ve got to end the conflict that keeps you in unhappy patterns of dieting and binging. Freedom from food and weight obsession starts by making peace with food, saying goodbye to dieting and self acceptance. Get started on the road to ending the war on food and calling a truce with your body. Grab a free copy of my Lovin‘ the Skin You’re in Sampler.