It’s a MINDSET issue, not a FOOD issue.

No matter what label you call your relationship with food – binge eating, snacking, grazing, emotional eating, mindless eating, etc, the food itself likely isn’t the main problem. 

So, what is the real problem? 

It’s your mindset.

It’s the way we have wired our brains to seek food for comfort, food for happiness, and food for mental security. You might think this all makes sense, but that isn’t enough! These are the reasons why:

Knowing isn’t the same as understanding

People often believe that as long as they know what their problems are, everything else will be a breeze. This is why some people put the work into the diagnosis of their problems. However, this is rarely enough.

Think of it like this, you know that your phone is broken but you don’t know exactly how to fix it!

The same is true with knowing that you have a food problem. Going to therapy and getting diagnosed is a huge help and it’s a fundamental starting point for a lot of people. It’s also important to know just what the reasons are why you are pushed towards bad habits.

It could be because you just went through a break-up, stressed from work, or maybe it’s your coping mechanism from a trauma. What’s important now is to take action to solve it!

Emotions get the best of us  

Now, this is true especially for those whose food eating problems are rooted deeply in experiences that are too hard to bear or face head-on. Sometimes they know what is causing them to adopt bad eating habits and that these experiences are all too much to just “get over it”.

In other cases, knowing just what the root cause is can be the reason why a person sinks themselves even more into the bad habit. They see it as justification for continuing it and feel like their experiences are invalidated if someone asks them to overcome the lack of self-control with food.

Conclusions

Instead of obsessing over WHY you binge, we need to answer the HOW question. HOW do you create lasting emotional and behaviour change?

Remember that binge-eating is a form of emotional response to situations and that it is NOT a disorder or condition. You are not flawed or broken, and there is nothing wrong with you! 

It is a LEARNED behaviour. 

This means that binge eating is a skill! Not a very useful skill, but a skill! You’ve simply learnt some bad habits for how to meet your emotional needs. Those habits have been repeated enough times that they’ve become automatic and unconscious. 

In order to change those habits, we don’t need to dive into your past, heal your inner child, or go round in endless circles of overanalysing. 

And we all know that the hunter-gathering past is all but ancient now. We no longer need to stock ourselves up to prepare for starvation in the winter. Therefore, we do not need this habit of binge eating anymore at all as it can only lead us to detrimental health & well-being. 

The only solution is for us to forge brand new habits that can help us win in life. Habits don’t come naturally nor is it developed overnight. We need to train you in how to create new habits. New habits in how you think, feel, and behave. 

So the solution is TRAINING. Just like you’ve got training for your body, this is training for your mind, we must train ourselves to undo all the not so helpful habits that we’ve had all our lives.

If you’re still struggling on figuring yourself out and want to know and do something about your bad eating habits, then perhaps can I help you! 

Book your FREE consultation today and let’s have a chat.