Your relationship with food…
Being present and increasing awareness of your emotional life is essential for personal fulfillment. Without it, experiencing a lasting change in your relationship with food, stress eating and your body isn’t likely.
Nutrition and exercise are essential, but without a shift in your emotional awareness, you’ll be right back at the start sooner than the current diet fad ends.
Be present.
Tomorrow is tomorrow. Future cares have future cures. And we must mind today.
Sophocles
Being present is assessing where you are now and includes both the positive, fulfilling parts of yourself that you like and the draining aspects of your life that you need to either limit or use as an opportunity for growth or both.
The only thing you need to do is be here today. When you’re present, you make moment-to-moment choices that significantly change your relationship with food.
Think about today and what you need right now. Shift your focus away from immediate gratification and get closer to the core of what your heart desires most. Sometimes, asking yourself a question helps – do I want to eat the chocolate bar, or am I looking for a break from stress? It’s easy to grab the chocolate bar that tastes delicious and results in your brain being flooded with feel-good brain chemicals. The challenge is focusing on what you need for your well-being and your relationship with food.
Most people who struggle with emotional or stress eating, body image, and chronic dieting develop an automatic reaction to food. What’s important to remember is that this is a brain-based behavior that can change. What it is not is a lack of willpower or mental toughness. It’s a learned behavior and you can learn different behaviors that align with what you want in your life.
If you want to get off the diet merry-go-round of chronic stress eating, an effective strategy is allowing yourself to accept the challenge of being present right now. You can learn to become a mindful and conscious eater and change your relationship with food.
Follow your guidelines.
He who wishes to be obeyed must know how to command.
Niccolo Machiavelli
When thinking about your future self, are you in command of your present self?
The only way to ‘obey’ yourself is to listen to your wisdom and ‘command’ your body with the clarity, kindness, and compassion you need to move forward. Listen to your good advice; it’s how to change your relationship with food.
A plan based on your unique needs and clarity about what needs to change is a good starting point for lasting change.
You can make clear choices when you’re present and have guidelines that work best for you. You can identify what you need and incorporate it into your everyday life. What you’ll build is confidence that you’re on the path of greater self-awareness and fulfillment. Stress eating doesn’t have a chance!
You will get to where things make sense and the difficulties you experience from living with another person’s guidelines, for their food relationship is impossible. You must listen to your mind, body and heart and do what’s right for you.
It’s easier to notice opportunities when focused on what’s working rather than struggling with what doesn’t.
You can see things clearly, and your path forward is less complicated than your relationship with food.
Even when the path is unpredictable, when clarity is your guide, you can adjust and stay on course.
Practice more of what works and stop doing what holds you back.
Don’t skip the messy middle.
Welcome the present moment as if you had invited it. It is all we ever have so we might as well work with it rather than struggling against it. We might as well make it our friend and teacher rather than our enemy.
Pema Chödrön
When thinking about your relationship with food, it’s easy to get lured into focusing on the result, like you need to –
- stop stress eating
- stop criticizing your body
- feel more comfortable
Looking at someone else’s plan is natural when stressed out and desperate for change. A lot of the time, it’s excellent not to reinvent the wheel. But when new clients start coaching with me and follow someone else’s plan, they usually get stuck and overfocus on the result rather than on one choice at a time.
When you skip over the middle part of the change, you lose all the needed learning. The middle part of the process is where your hard work creates the change.
Step-by-step small changes are what create transformation. The middle part isn’t something that can be skipped over – it’s essential.
This phase is rich with opportunities for self-knowledge to achieve fulfillment in your life. The middle is the ‘how to change’ part of changing your relationship with food. The best part is that you can use the process as a guide whenever needed.
Acceptance.
Even as we live with the knowledge that each day might be our last, we don’t want to believe it.
Sharon Salzberg
Acceptance lays the foundation for everything you want to achieve.
Look at yourself clearly as you are.
It’s difficult your experience of living in the body you have isn’t pleasant, yet it’s essential. As you grow in acceptance, sprinkle in many positive thoughts and feelings. Positive thoughts tend to multiply and nourish your desire for change.
When you build your future by accepting where you are right now while focusing on gaining more self-knowledge, you’re well on your way to getting your needs met and changing your relationship with food.
Transformation cannot be built on someone else’s truths for their life.
Transformation can only occur as you know who you are and where you’re going.
Clarity.
Nothing ever becomes real until it is experienced.
John Keats
Getting where you’re going is faster with clarity.
Clarity helps you identify what you need to do right now that aligns with your goals.
With clarity, wishing and hoping for change melts into doing only what you need to do to get to where you want to be.
Clarity allows you to take a deep breath. When you exhale, the weight of expectations and the pressure to conform to other’s expectations lift.
You can finally say, “Ahhhhhh,” and feel at peace that your relationship with yourself, while not perfect, is progressing.
The way to make your plan work is to work on the fundamentals. Be present, follow guidelines that work for you, start from where you are today and accept yourself with clarity. This is a foundation for building a new relationship with food and your body.
Enjoy food and feel good about it.