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Alternative Health & Healing: Heal Your Heart, Heal Your Life.
The Power of Intention to Break the Cravings
Chapter One
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by Rena Greenberg |
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Chances are you picked up this book because you feel compelled to give in to unmanageable cravings for snack foods, simple carbohydrates, sweets or stimulants. Do you feel that your are often out of control around food? Do you find yourself compulsively reaching for sugar-filled foods even when you have made a decision not to?
Do you turn to food as a way to stimulate yourself or suppress what you are actually feeling?
For example, you may find yourself feeling tired, but rather than lie down and rest, you reach for chocolate. Perhaps you have a big chore ahead of you—like cleaning the house, mowing the yard, or writing an important proposal—but rather than get started, you find yourself in the kitchen, inspecting the refrigerator. Maybe you are feeling remorseful, because you were a little hard on your son, but rather than have to face what you are feeling, you distract yourself by turning on the TV and munching on a bag of cheetos. What is it that you are truly seeking?
If you are like most people, you seek to be happy, to be fulfilled, to have a vital and meaningful life. You also probably wish to avoid sickness, pain, and discomfort. Your desire to feel good is very positive. People have always searched for ways to make themselves feel better—from spinning around as children to discovering foods that create that little extra buzz of energy or sense of confidence. Seeking happiness outside yourself may seem like the most natural thing to do. Even though you can certainly find momentary pleasure in the foods you eat, the addictive impulses that are guiding you are slowly chipping away at the quality of your life.
You, too, may think that your favorite foods are your greatest source of pleasure or comfort. It may seem that way, at this time, but at what cost? It’s amazing how much suffering we can block out to justify our desire to continue with an unhealthy addiction. Once we realize what we are truly searching for—such as love, safety, deep rest—it can be such a relief because we are much more likely to get what we truly want, only after we have the courage to break free from our old, destructive habits of the past.
The good news is you can have all that you desire and most importantly you can be free from your sugar addiction. I define sugar addiction as the compulsion to consume sugar, simple carbohydrates, and/or stimulating foods or beverages containing sugar, sweeteners, caffeine or alcohol. This means turning to these items as you would to a drug—to stimulate, sedate or distract, and feeling compelled to eat them, even when you intellectually know it’s not best for you.
{A}What Is It That You Are Craving?
Your addiction is caused by your insatiable craving to feel full and more alive. When you eat sugar and feel the rush of feel-good chemicals flood your bloodstream, you get the momentary pleasure you crave. Unfortunately, when your blood sugar begins to plummet as a result of the assault the glucose imposes on your bodily systems, it only causes you to desperately want more. When your behavior stems from addiction, you will never feel fulfilled in the long run. It is like being trapped in a cage, with your arm extended, seeking more of that which put you in the cage in the first place. The freedom that you seek is possible, and the strength that you need to find that freedom is within you, but it will not come through ingesting substances that are ultimately toxic to your system.
Rationally, you know that your behavior is harmful to you. If you didn’t have the good fortune to discover this fact about yourself—that certain foods are poisonous to your system—your ignorance would keep you in a vicious cycle of indulging, gaining more and more weight, or having an increase in symptoms that make you feel bad, and feeling more and more trapped by the consequences of succumbing to your addictive tendencies. The pain of your compulsive behavior and the ill effect your eating style has on your physical, mental and emotional health would be outside of your level of consciousness. You may even feel like a victim in the face of the ensuing and mounting health problems you are faced with. Food addiction (specifically sugar addiction) has been linked to physical ailments such as diabetes, stroke, obesity, osteoporosis, heart disease, dental carries, arthritis, auto-immune disease, candida, kidney stones and chronic fatigue syndrome. Emotionally and mentally, food addiction has been linked to anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, hyper-activity, PMS, insomnia, irritability, and anger. Besides being a source of empty calories, sugar is a drug that is upsetting the entire balance and delicate workings of the physical, mental and emotional body, often leading to dire consequences and a host of physical and psychological problems.
Why do you continue to eat and live in a way that is harmful to you and puts you at risk for illness or premature death? Why would you continue to reach for foods that are likely to perpetuate mood swings, fatigue or even create a mental imbalance? Is it just because sweet food and beverages taste so good? Yes, temptation abounds and yet there is a much deeper reason why you are on a self-imposed roller-coaster or self medicating with seemingly innocent—and yet potentially harmful, if not lethal—substances.
{A}Seeking Pleasure Through Food
Having a conscious knowledge of the many health risks of harmful foods and drinks may not have been a strong enough deterrent to allowing your addiction to continue. This is because, on some level, the perpetuation of eating sugary foods has been pleasurable to you and you have a perceived benefit. Perhaps this benefit is a temporary good feeling or relief from the hardships in life, or a feeling of comradery with friends, or a sudden burst in energy and feeling uplifted from fatigue or depression.
Your addiction—whether it be to rich, sugary foods or simple carbohydrates—is fueled by your desire to achieve a certain inner state. Even though being stuffed with food feels miserable, on some level, you believe it will ultimately lead you to feeling good or getting the love and happiness that you want and deserve—so you keep repeating the negative behavior. Even though drinking Margueritas and eating greasy nachos leaves you feeling hung over and remorseful, you associate fun and youth with your drinking and eating sprees. Late-night binging may leave you too exhausted or spaced out to spend time with your children the next day—but it gives you a feeling of joy and is a welcome reprieve from the demands of the world. The cookies that you indulge in cause you to feel bloated and depressed, yet while you are eating them you feel a deep sense of safety and security. That which you are seeking is not bad. What you desire is a state of happiness—whatever that image is for you.
Your association with sweets—or certain foods like chips, bread or french fries—is that of strong pleasure—joy, socializing, relief from emotional pain and comfort. These “pictures” of happiness around food have been with you—and very likely your family—for a long time. However, you can dispel them and ultimately find the true happiness that you are searching for. In fact, you will discover that your food addiction has prevented you from experiencing the very peace and joy that you seek. The true happiness is the deep love buried inside yourself. By learning to love yourself and to care for your body, you will free yourself from the imprisonment of an endless food-craving cycle.
You will come to see, that although sugar, like any drug, seems to be eliminating the undesirable states of emotional pain you experience in your life, it’s actually keeping those very conditions you wish to move away from in place. Once you make that connection deeply on every level of your being—physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually—something will click inside and you will naturally find yourself repulsed by or indifferent to sugary foods, and instead drawn towards those foods which nourish you. Your perceptions of empty calorie, carbohydrate-rich foods will change, so that you are no longer attracted to the selections that are harmful to you. By employing the methods that you will be learning here, you’ll notice that as you begin to select foods more and more from the high nutrition category—water-rich, whole, unprocessed foods as much as possible—the less hunger and craving you will experience. When we are eating the right amount of healthful foods that we enjoy, with occasional treats that will not reel us back into addictive behavior, we feel light and free. What a relief it is not to have to use stimulants just to get through the day.
No matter how long your self-sabotaging behaviors have been going on, you can learn to free yourself by changing your inner state naturally when you travel through the different parts of yourself to your source of strength. You’ll learn to gain energy and vitality without needing to drug yourself with food. You will learn to become conscious of the triggers that cause you to overeat, eat in unhealthy ways, or reach for addictive substances and change your response to these triggers.
{A}Relating to Food in A New Way
Before you can learn the tools for updating your unproductive responses to life, you need to commit to changing your entire way of relating to food. Food is not here to make you happy, or to distract you or comfort you. Food was given to us by our Creator to sustain us. It is the fuel that makes your motor run. Without this realization, you are likely to continue to sabotage yourself. Yes, you always want to enjoy your food. In fact, that is one of the most important principles on this approach. However, enjoying food does not necessitate overindulging. In fact, you’ll discover that in a way the less you eat—eating just enough to satisfy physical hunger only—the better you will feel. On the other hand, you do not want to experience too much hunger. Hunger is a sensation that can quickly lead you to overeating or choosing the “wrong” foods. You’ll learn ways to eliminate hunger without eating too much food. You’ll discover how power breathing and physical movement can help to regulate your blood sugar and eliminate excess hunger and cravings.
{A}Why Certain Foods Make You Hungry
Often it’s because of the types of foods that you are choosing that you experience frequent physical hunger or feel insatiable. Refined white sugar, and other sweeteners actually mask the body’s natural signals of feeling full. This is why it is possible to consume so many calories when eating sugary foods. When the foods you are eating are devoid of nutrients, your body continues to send out signals to the brain to eat more, because it is still waiting for the nutrients it desperately requires to keep your body functioning in an optimum way. When we eat food that is high in nutrients, the appetite naturally shuts off when we have eaten enough. However, when the food and liquids we are consuming are high in sugar or caffeine—that natural system is bypassed—and we are often left feeling insatiable.
Typically the endocrine and the nervous system cooperate to let us know how much to eat and when to eat. But when we introduce large amounts of refined sugar, or sugar substitutes, into our diet (and particularly when we’ve been eating that way for years), we throw those systems out of kilter. The increased appetite induced by sugar is not signaling a need for more sugar (although that is often how we interpret an increase in hunger), but a craving for nutrients, and much needed vitamins, minerals and fiber. When we continue to ignore the communication of our body, by stuffing it with even more sweet, sugary, or simple carbohydrate types of food, we are perpetuating a condition where our endocrine glands and organs—the pituitary, pancreas, adrenal and thyroid, as well as the nervous system are overworked and thrown out of balance.
{A}From Struggle to Solutions
Your food addiction is rooted in physiological cravings combined with spiritual and emotional cravings. Once you fulfill the underlying need that is causing you to seek harmful substances such as rich, sugary, empty-calorie food, or chemically filled, toxic beverages, you will no longer reach for these substances automatically.
We are always driven by our needs. As you begin to get in touch with and meet all your needs, you can end addictive behavior for good. This includes your physical need for energy, rest, relaxation, health and a sense of well-being and your deeper need to feel love, happiness, inner peace, purpose and connection with something greater than your small self.
You may find yourself repeatedly engaging in certain behaviors around food, without ever really understanding the cause. Perhaps you have an insatiable urge for chocolate every time you have conflict with your child, spouse or boss, but never made the connection that when your world feels shaken up and you feel scared, chocolate is your oldest source of love and comfort. Perhaps it gives you a sense of peace, safety, or even confidence. Maybe when you are socializing with friends, you tend to overeat certain carbohydrate-rich foods such as pizza. You may associate the pizza with bonding with others, having fun and enjoying life. Perhaps what you are really seeking is a sense of connection and companionship. Everyone has a different form of addiction and a different cause, so try this quiz to begin to identify the root of your problem and see how food affects you.
Exercise #1: Discovering Your True Needs
1. Take out a sheet of paper and write down a scenario in your own life that is causing you to struggle with food or sweets addiction. Perhaps you find yourself bingeing at night regularly when you are home alone, or finding excuses to eat candy bars on a regular basis. Maybe your difficulty is eating large quantities of bread when you go out to dinner. Write down the scenario that is challenging for you and your response to it e.g. “I’m sitting in the restaurant feeling famished, the bread comes and it smells so good. I tell myself I shouldn’t eat it, but then I can’t resist so I eat three pieces,” or “I come home from a long day at work, where my boss makes unreasonable demands on me, and I automatically reach for a can of soda and a bag of pretzels to soothe my frazzled emotions.” As you recall the scenario, write down what you are likely to be feeling at the time. Bored? Exhausted? Anxious? Stressed?
2. Write down the positive result that the negative behavior gives you. This step assumes that you would not be repeating the harmful behavior if it didn’t fill some need for you, no matter how much more in touch you are with the painful outcome it produces. Maybe your raiding the refrigerator nightly helps you to relax before bed and release some of the stress of the day’s events. Perhaps the candy bars you reach for automatically give you energy and help spur your creative juices when you are working on a project. The bread you are consuming may help you to feel safe as you sit down to dinner with friends or colleagues. Jot down any benefit you can think of to continuing with your unwanted habit.
3. Now write down how you feel afterwards. After your evening eating-spree you may feel sick, full, regretful, stuffed, and angry with yourself. Write these feelings down. Following the chocolate splurge you may find yourself depressed, hopeless, wired, aware of feeling uncomfortable in your clothes or irritable. After you consume the bread, perhaps you feel bloated, uneasy, regretful, bad inside and embarrassed, and perhaps even ravenously hungry.
4. How do you want to feel? This may seem obvious, but write it down. Embellish on the qualities that you wish to experience in your life, no matter how far from your current reality they appear to be. You may want to feel totally at peace, able to fall asleep easily at night without using food as a drug. Maybe you want to concentrate easily and feel creative and alive, having no need for harmful stimulants. It’s likely that you wish to experience yourself as relaxed in social situations, happy, and feeling confident.
Now take a moment to assess what you learned about yourself. Do you see how you are using certain foods—or categories of food—to fill your deeper needs? There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to fill your needs, whether they be for love, safety, control, power, integrity, self-esteem or peace! The issue is that continuing to try in vain to fill your needs with food, keeps you in a state of feeling unfulfilled and in some level of emotional, or perhaps physical, pain. The way to freedom from this perpetual cycle of addictive behavior and its dire consequences is to become conscious of what’s really happening inside yourself, without judgment.
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Rena Greenberg,
Author, Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming, & Hypnotherapist
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Rena Greenberg is the Founder and Director of Wellness Seminars, Inc, which provides weight loss programs for over100 major corporations and city governments, including over 75 Florida and Michigan hospitals.
She is a graduate of City University of New York at Brooklyn College. Rena Greenberg’s wellness programs have been featured in many television and radio news features. Master's Degree in Spiritual Ministry and Sufi Studies from the University of Spiritual Healing and Sufism.
Ms. Greenberg holds two certifications in hypnosis from The Eastern NLP Institute and the National Guild of Hypnotists, as well as national biofeedback certification from the Biofeedback Certification Institute of America. She is also a certified Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming and an ordained Minister.
Rena Greenberg is the author of The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss used by over 100,000 People (Hay House, January 2006).
Email:
wellnessseminars@aol.
com
Web:
www.easywillpower.com
Read an excerpt
of Rena's new book:
The Right Weigh: Six Steps to Permanent Weight Loss
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