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Alternative Health & Healing: Heal Your Heart, Heal Your Life.
Gain Control over Your Life and Eating Habits For Good
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by Rena Greenberg |
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When your dog gets upset does it run over to its food bowl? When your baby has a diaper rash, does he down twice his usual amount of milk? Most likely, you answered no to these questions. So why do you consistently put food in your mouth when your stomach is saying “no”? You may say, well food just tastes so good, and that is certainly true. However, feeling full, fat, or having diabetes or heart disease doesn’t feel good and that is what eating more food than you are burning off consistently leads to. Yes, food does taste good, but eating larger quantities of food doesn’t help us to enjoy that good taste more . . . in fact, it’s very likely that the more we eat, the less we actually enjoy the flavors and taste sensations.
Aside from wanting to put something in your mouth there are three reasons why you may overeat and a solution that gives you the necessary tools to end this unproductive behavior once and for all.
Procrastination
To ward off doing the inevitable you bide yourself time by taking a food break. You tell yourself, “After I eat this, I’ll be more receptive to doing the dreaded task at hand.” Is that true? Most likely, not. But what may be true is that after you eat what you “shouldn’t eat” your focus moves from the dreaded task you were delaying, to that full, bloated, remorseful feeling or just guilt.
In relation to the bad feelings in your body or mind that have just been created, the job you were once dreading doesn’t seem as bad as it once did. You get through that pile of mail or the mound of dishes in the sink but all the while your focus is on the thought, “I’m going on a diet,” or “I am out of control around food.”
What really happened there is that you wanted to avoid the uncomfortable feelings you felt when confronted with what you had to do. Unfortunately, by diverting your attention with food, you only delayed the uncomfortable feeling and changed your mental focus from one “bad” feeling to another.
Distraction
You don’t want to feel what you are actually feeling, whether it be boredom, loneliness or frustration, so you eat as a way to distract yourself from painful feelings. You don’t want to think about difficulties at work, unpleasant chores that lie ahead of you, complicated decisions about your aging parents, or repeated worries about your children, so food becomes a welcome distraction. Fretting about your weight or your health is also a way to keep your focus off the obstacles in your life that keep you stuck. The problem with this approach is that the challenges are still there, needing to be faced after you’ve devoured the entire container of ice cream. What’s worse, you now have one more “problem” to cope with.
The great news is that when you begin to tackle your issues directly—simply by facing them while in a relaxed state—you will gain the confidence, strength and solutions you need to handle them.
The Momentum of Habit
Why do we do anything we do repetitively? Because we have been conditioned to do so. If you tend to smile at people when they walk by, you are likely to do so again tomorrow. If you look away and avert your eyes, most likely that same response will be repeated. Unless you consciously make a decision to do things differently than you have yesterday, chances are your actions tomorrow will be just as predictable as your neighbor’s dog barking when you approach within a certain distance. We are creatures of habit.
You may like to credit yourself with great intelligence, but the truth is most of the things you do are simply the same actions that you took yesterday and you do them—not because they make sense—but because you have been trained to do them and you’re comfortable with them.
When your habits are positive like brushing your teeth or wiping the counter after a meal—then your auto-pilot behavior serves you. However, when your automatic responses to the steady stream of life’s stressors involve shoving a bag of chips into your mouth, it’s time to re-think your strategy.
You Can’t Avoid the Unavoidable
Difficult feelings are part of life and overeating or using food as a method of procrastination or distraction only makes your problems worse. We can’t “get out” of feeling bad by eating. We know that bingeing would never stop a thunder storm and yet we often forget that food doesn’t solve any of our other problems either. What do we do when it rains? We wait for it to stop and we stay indoors if possible. What can you do if you feel bad? Rest, give yourself love, breathe deeply, eat healthy food if you are hungry, accept your painful feelings as part of the ebb and flow of life and let your feelings pass. Then, learn from these feelings by asking yourself what you are needing and help yourself to meet these needs in a productive way. However, often we have to wait for the “storm” (difficult emotion) to pass before we can clearly assess the deeper need wanting to be met. That is the real hunger that needs to be satiated.
The Solution Exercise
Take a look at a typical day. Write down your common routines by time frame e.g.
7-8 am – I arise, shower and get dressed. I get the kids off to school and have breakfast.
8-9am- While I drive to work, I talk to my Mother on my cell phone.
10:30 am – I get a snack out of the vending machine
11am - 3pm – I work at my desk through lunch.
3pm – I order Chinese food and eat at my desk.
4:30pm – I leave to pick up Michael and Justin from school.
5-8pm – I stop at the grocery store, go home and fix dinner, help Mikey with his homework, clean up and put the kids to bed.
8pm – I sit on the couch, exhausted and watch TV.
Now take a moment and think about what your needs are. Write them down. You may need to give and receive love, to have healthy relationships, to feel financially secure, to feel peaceful inside, to live a healthier lifestyle, to have a sense that you are contributing to the world in a profound way. While some of these needs may inspire you to make a big life change such as embarking on a new career or moving closer to loved ones, it’s very likely that shifting your perceptions and therefore your actions, can give you the gratification that you are seeking.
When you look at your typical day on paper, what adjectives come to mind? Stressed? Overwhelmed? Survival? Now go inside yourself and look deeply at how you’d like to feel. Perhaps peaceful, calm, strong, content, competent, satisfied . . . Beyond the force of habit, in your deep, subconscious mind, these greater qualities are accessible to you. Your life feels and looks out of control only if you believe it to be so.
Transforming Procrastination, Distraction and Habit
Imagine that you could play a DVD of your typical day on your television set. Pretend that you are sitting on your couch and watching the video of your typical day as you wrote it down earlier, going through the various time frames, from morning to night. As you watch this video, imagine that you could send only compassion to yourself—the main character. Have a pen and paper handy and jot down any constructive ideas that come to you on how the main character of the movie could do things differently to achieve her outcome of feeling peaceful, calm, strong, content, competent and satisfied.
Now look at your new paper filled with ideas of new ways to cope with the particular challenges of your life situation. Run the video again, but this time, use the new ideas that have come to you and watch yourself, as the main character, respond in a new way to your typical day—choosing thoughts and behaviors that support your goal of feeling happier, confident, more deeply connected with others and more relaxed.
Run this new video in your mind’s eye, over and over as you are waking up in the morning and as you are drifting off to sleep at night. Remember to thank yourself for taking the time to do this and for giving to your self so deeply. Notice how good it feels to send your self gratitude and to imagine yourself responding to life’s challenges resourcefully. Allow your mental movie time to become a routine that becomes deeply imbedded in your subconscious mind, through repetition and intention. You can overcome the momentum of your past habits, including tendencies to want to procrastinate or distract yourself by giving yourself the freedom to choose new responses to your life. Take this moment and seize the inherent opportunity to create your new reality and gain control over your life and your habits.
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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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