All or nothing thinking. If I don't eat this now I might not get the chance later.
Now I've eaten this I may as well keep on eating 'naughty' food.
I'll never lose weight and be thin.
Where do these thoughts come from?
Childhood!Think about your food experiences from childhood. I'll share a few here with you. Ask yourself what thought patterns your experiences could have created. What are your beliefs about food and eating. Are they:-
Food is meant to be eaten
Food is meant to be nice
Some foods are bad for you
You are bad if you only eat certain foods
Food is meant to make you happy.
Food is just fuel for the body
I am bad if I want to eat 'fattening food'
If you had anything like the average childhood money was usually in fairly short supply and sweets chocolates and the 'nice' things in life were either few and far between, or had to be earned. Either by doing something special like clearing out the garage or reaching a landmark such as a birthday or Easter. This in itself can set up a non serving cycle of beliefs. It tend to turn preferred foods into treats. Food then can become a reward, or a commiseration. How many people eat in the wrong way simply because they think eating that way will cheer them up?
One of the things that my clients tell me is that when they slip off the 'good' road onto the 'naughty' road they can find themselves getting stuck in a 'naughty' rut. This is all part of the all or nothing thinking. It goes something like this. "I am on a diet, I must only eat food that is good and makes me believe I am good. This does not include all of the things I like, such as chocolate, crisps, alcohol, chips etc; when I eat those foods I fall off the diet and I become a bad person. I am a bad person. Being a bad person is painful to me. It makes me feel hopeless and helpless and out of control. I should accept that I am a victim of my inner conflicts. I am too weak to fight with my inner conflicts. I give up. I shall become fat and miserable". This is of course a very powerful affirmation to be giving to your subconscious mind....."I am a bad person"...."I am weak"..."I deserve to be miserable".
Getting away from all or nothing thinking is one of the most important aspects of losing and maintaining a satisfactory weight. Many people want to do it, but find themselves vulnerable to the cycle of behaviour that I have demonstrated. This is simply because, being on a diet brings thoughts of restriction and loss into our thinking patterns. We do not like feelings of loss, Freud told us that. So we cannot sustain the diet. It becomes too difficult, too absolute. I must not eat all of the things I like until......
So let's change it. Why not consider that losing weight takes a different approach alltogether. After all, as most people tell me they don't just want to lose it. They want to keep it off. They want to develop a healthy way of eating. A way in which they can enjoy eating some of the things they like some of the time. It doesn't take a university degree to notice that slimmer people don't spend their lives eating one Rocket Leaf and a tomato at every meal. They can be observed enjoying the occasional piece of cake or pizza. This is because they have a different way of viewing food and eating. Now to develop a new way of doing things takes organisation and planning. So why not try the idea below.
To develop a new way of eating I'd like you to consider this. Get onto your healthy regime, and stay on it until your lose some weight. My recommended amount is about half a stone. One reason why I say this is because when you first begin dieting you still have a few pounds of waste in your colon which you will lose in the first week, but this is not the fat that you want to lose, so you should wait until at least half a stone has come off, this is likely to be a few pounds of excess fat. When you have a few pounds off, and have begun to develop better eating habits,after a month or so give yourself a week or so off. Allow yourself to expand very slowly into the diet. This is not an opportunity to go mad. Just introduce one or two things over one or two days of the week. For example a glass of wine or two on a Friday. A small bar of chocolate in a Sunday afternoon. Enough to make you feel as though you have had a little treat. Enjoyed a little bit of something special but not gone completely off the rails. By doing this you will find that you can maintain that healthy eating plan because you will not become miserable thinking that your life must continue forever without ever drinking alcohol or eating sweet things.
You will also begin to notice that these small amounts of foods that you thought of as 'naughty' foods are not so naughty after all. They really don't make that much of a difference. It is not having the odd treat here and there that causes weight increase. It is a consistent eating pattern that incorporates those high calorie foods, which are in fact all the foods that have been processed. Allowing yourself just a few little treats during the week at worst is likely to make your weight stabilise, which is of course part of a maintenance programme. It is a good idea to maintain your weight periodically during your weight loss period. It teaches your body to work within tolerances. It teaches it that every now and again you can have something other than salad or fruit and that the body can handle it without massive weight increases.
After the week is over, go back to your regime. You will feel much better for it because you will feel as though life is much more bearable now that you know that a lifetime of restriction is not stretching endlessly before you. In addition to feeling good you will also lose weight. Albeit slowly, but really a slow weigt loss is what you are aiming for. You are trying to adopt a natural eating pattern that allows you to maintain your optimum weight, shape and size.
If you need a little extra boost to get you going why not contact me here.
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