What You Need to Know to lose weight without dietingWritten by Michelle May M.D.
If your commitment to eat right, exercise, and lose weight always seems to lose its steam, you are not alone! Weight problems are not just about what you are eating, but why you are eating in first place. To see what I mean, ask yourself these questions. Do you think about food and eating more than you think you should? Do you feel guilty when you eat certain foods? Do you have trouble passing up tempting food even if you aren’t hungry? Do you often eat when you are bored, stressed, lonely, or angry? Do you eat differently in private than you do in public? Do you fluctuate between dieting and eating too much? If you answered yes to most of these questions, you have probably discovered that dieting hasn’t really solved problem. To help you understand why, lets take a look at three different eating styles: Over Eating, Restrictive Eating, and Instinctive Eating. In “Over Eating” people eat because it is mealtime or because something looks good - whether they are hungry or not. They may also eat to distract themselves or cope with stress and emotions. They may reward, comfort, or entertain themselves with food. Their weight tends to go up and down depending on whether they are off or on their diet. In “Restrictive Eating,” a person controls his or her weight by dieting. They decide when, what, and how much to eat based on rules of latest diet they are following. Since diet rules are always changing, they sometimes feel confused about what they should eat. They think of food as either “good” or “bad”—and they think of themselves as good or bad, depending on what they ate. Now think about someone who doesn’t struggle with his or her weight. If you are having trouble thinking of someone like that, think of a baby or a young child. I call this “Instinctive Eating.” These people just seem to know when, what, and how much food they need. When their body needs fuel, they get hungry, triggering an urge to eat. They simply stop eating when their hunger is satisfied. Most of them really like to eat and seem to be able to eat whatever they want. However they will turn down even delicious food if they aren’t hungry.
| | Mistaking HungerWritten by Caryl Ehrlich
You are not hungry most of time. You are not always hungry when something smells good, looks good, or tastes good, whether or not you think you are. All food is prepared to tempt your taste buds, even though you’re not hungry. You are also not hungry because there is stress, a deadline, pressure, a personal or business problem, anxiety, tension, it’s morning afternoon evening when alone with friends weekdays weekends day time night time money problems it rained it didn’t came with dinner it was there . . . You are not hungry 24 hours a day, though you might think you are. There are many daily food encounters: friends offering food, a maitre d’ describing dessert, smell of popcorn in a movie theater, to name but a few. Acknowledging visual and emotional blitz helps interrupt knee-jerk reaction that causes you to eat even though you’re not hungry. Just knowing you are not hungry most of time is a helpful piece of information. You may even have pinpointed reasons you’re thinking of food, reasons that seem to justify your eating when you’re not hungry. I’ve heard excuses as varied as “I got so angry because I couldn’t get a cab” to “I got caught in a downpour without an umbrella.” Many of these reasons might seem a valid enough reason to make you eat. They are not. Certainly anger might tempt you to use food as a drug to keep feelings down. If you eat when you’re angry, does anger go away? Or perhaps frustration weakens your resolve. At which point is your threshold for discomfort seriously challenged? Bored? At exactly which point does a yawn become a yen? Tired? When does food become a replacement for sleep? Does emotional pain diminish when you eat? Is celebration any better because you come home stuffed, bloated, and full of gas, uncomfortable and with lowered self-esteem? Is it worth it? Consider, if you will, that your past behavior has not worked. A clear vision of what you’re trying to accomplish will. Most of all, you need a mind open to possibility of change. One man I almost taught was so afraid to change that he was locked into where he hung his coat, where I sat, and where he sat. He was terrified I was going to pull off his covers and yank away his security blanket of whatever food he was holding onto – whichever food he thought made him comfortable. He was so uncomfortable with even thought of change, he would not tell me how much he weighed, or what he wanted to weigh.Of course it’s possible that some discomfort might occur while you’re changing. The very act of weighing less than you did before is a change. And there is no change without change. But there are ways to lessen discomfort of journey from where you are to where you want to be; to offer options, suggestions, tactics, tips, tried and true assignments that work more and more as they are practiced. After all, you learned to use food to calm yourself down. You can learn a new method, a new automatic response. Do you eat out of habit, not hunger? Identifying habits requires guidance, introspection, and patience, but most of all honesty. Once you acknowledge, “Yes, I do that,” you can decide you don’t want to do that anymore and begin to do something else, instead. It is unrealistic and self-defeating to expect to go from habitual, compulsive, or addictive eating behavior to a calm, rational, in-control eating person by reading an article, even this article. You can, however, alter automatic, learned responses by creating new and effective alternative behaviors that will result in permanent change. The new behavioral choices add up to a permanent weight loss, incrementally, not rattattattat. It’s worth repeating: Your original patterns evolved over a lifetime. Now you can consciously plan person you want to be. Food does not contain a narcotic. Food only has power you gave it by doing same thing with it each time you encountered it. Food has power you vested in it as part of a ritual distraction with your mind, many times since childhood, when you might have learned how to cope with stressful situations by using food inappropriately. It might have worked then, but it’s not working now. Now you need to find a new way that will work now. I’ll show you what to do if you are not hungry but are tempted. There are many things you can do when food is offered, baked, cooked, prepared, and present just for you. Learn how to handle compelling urges at office, in a restaurant, or at home. Learn that an umbrella-topped pushcart, wafting a familiar aroma, doesn’t always mean you have to eat a hot dog. Hunger demands to be fed. An urge passes. Know difference? The next time you’re at home and thinking of food, and you just ate a little while before, set a kitchen timer for 20 minutes and distract yourself with some activity. Sometimes I set timer, get busy with some other project, and when bell goes off, I not only forget I set bell, I’m not even sure why I set it in first place. One woman recalled a walk she took one summer day. She spied a man eating an ice cream cone, (a visual stimulus). She used mental repatterning techniques she’d created to distract herself. She’d practiced and repeated words, “Alert. Alert. Cross street,” which she did while laughing. She reassured herself that everything was going to be okay, and she prompted herself to calm her breathing.“Two minutes later, I’d found most adorable sequined hat in a store window,” she recounted. The moment clearly had passed. The techniques were there in her memory bank because she had written specifics of her plan, reviewed it daily to remind herself of details, envisioned it in her mind, so that when ice cream cone appeared, her new automatic response to say, “Alert. Alert. Cross street, take a deep breath, and keep walking,” kicked in. It is a process everyone can learn. It begins in your mind.
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