(You can’t think or read your way out of this one!)

Countless clients have come to me thinking ‘Why the hell can’t I get a grip on my food issues, I’m smart, hard working, but why can’t I do this?!’ This makes them frustrated and panicky because it seems that nothing is working. The good news though is that you already know what to do.

What you really need to do though is stick to it! It’s easy enough to motivate yourself to start your diet and other health goals, but it’s another thing to stick to it. Remember your commitments and your goals every time you have cravings or an urge to splurge on food.  

In most cases, the voice inside your head is working against you. Telling you things like, “You’ve had a bad day, you deserve a takeaway!” or “You know you’re going to quit this nonsense anyway, so eat what you want!”.

“What difference is one more day going to make?” “Just have one.”

For some people, simply seeing images of food on their social media news feeds are enough to send them craving for their favorite snack. Others are egged on by their friends who deliberately eat delicious unhealthy foods in front of them. Sometimes it’s a physical feeling or sensation. Or visualizing what you can eat on your way home from work. Or that fill up at the gas ️ station! 

Willpower and distraction techniques may help you to resist for so long, but eventually, the “f**k it moment generally takes over. 

You may also feel that breaking from your diet gives you a feeling of emancipation from all your food frustrations. After a long time of bearing with it, you feel like you’re finally free- like an act of rebellion.

Yet, despite all these reasons, in the end, we still feel like we were lacking in something. As if we lacked discipline, commitment, or determination. This leads us to have less confidence and drag ourselves down. Worrying, “what’s wrong with me?”.

But of course, that sense of inadequacy, shame, and guilt only adds fuel to the fire and makes it worse. However, there is nothing wrong with you!

Our brains are simply predisposed to favor acts or things that aid in our survival during the primitive days and you know what we badly needed back then to survive? Food.

Back then we may not have had enough, but now we have easy access to it every day. However, our brains don’t know this and still favor binge eating as a means to survive the next famine or winter by storing fats in our bodies.   

So if you struggle with binge eating, emotional eating, mindless eating, or compulsive eating – or whatever label you want to call it – your survival brain has stored that behaviour like a piece of software that says… 

“Binge eat in order to survive!”

In addition, through repetition and habit formation, some of us have led our brains to think and associate binge eating as a form of rewarding response to stress, and other unhealthy emotions. The more we repeat and engrave these behavior patterns with emotional eating, the more this habit is amplified with emotions.

It doesn’t even have to be a major stressful event, because binge eating and other unhealthy eating habits can be triggered by things like overthinking and worrying. We can’t really slow our brains down; however, we must not make food a means of escape as this unhealthy repeated pattern leads us down an unhealthy spiral.

Bottom line, if we want to quit binge eating and other unhealthy eating habits, we have to be in tune with our emotions and not let it get the best of us. 

By training yourself to handle your emotions effectively, you are training yourself to be more in control of your behaviours and coping mechanisms as well. You become able to tell your brain the difference between a real survival situation vs an everyday situation. 

We need to learn how to re-educate the survival brain using the language that it understands.

The “language” of the survival brain is emotions, pattern recognition, and associations. The “language” of your conscious mind is intellectual thought, logic, and reasoning.

The truth is the ONLY way this works is with 1-2-1 coaching. As with learning anything new, you’re going to misinterpret things or misapply things. There will be fears, confusion, and over-analyzing that can quite often get in the way. 

It’s not going to be easy that’s for sure but looking for quick and easy fixes will only slow you down even more! Know that true healthy change has to come from a committed and consistent frame of mind. Hence, if you really want to see true change when it comes to your health journey, you have to start with your mind, and with the right training, you’d be AMAZED at how fast that happens. My clients overcome their issues with food within weeks. 

Snacking, grazing, binge eating, emotional eating, struggling to lose weight, stress eating – GONE AND DONE by Christmas ! 

If you’re looking to invest in a real solution that actually works, then BOOK in a call today.