We get it into our heads that the reason we are fat is because we are somehow flawed or weak and that in order to fix the problem WE need to change. We HAVE TO become exercise freaks or we have to fix our “issues” or we have to develop new, healthier habits – like we have to learn how to love kale and how to enjoy a refreshing cup of lemon tea after work instead of a cold beer (gag to it all). Or learn how to try and pretend grated cauliflower is in any way similar to rice (by perhaps holding our noses and our breath as we ingest it?)
But actually none of that is true.
Your eating “problem”, if I can even call it that, is not fixed by retraining your body or retraining your behaviour, it’s fixed by retraining your mind. It’s mental actions you need to take to sort this out, and if you take consistent effort to do so, in very little time, the desire to want to eat all the time will disappear.
I’ve done it, so I know. Food cannot continue to hold you in its grip when you realise you’re the one that’s been clinging to IT, this whole time.
So what are the mental actions you need to take?
1 Recognise / realise that the feeling of desire, the urge to eat, “The Nudge” towards another bread roll is THOUGHT. It’s not an omnipotent energy wave created by the bread roll and fired at you to deal with because you are addict or fucked up in some other way. It’s thought, from inside you. You are the creator of the feeling.
2 Recognise / realise that because you are the creator of this feeling, this desire to eat, this thought, it cannot and does not have any power over you. It couldn’t possibly when without you, it wouldn’t exist. You can’t create a thought and then be forced into action by that thought because you can’t be both the thought and the one who created it.
Do you see?
If you created the thought, you can’t be its bitch.
This thought isn’t you. You are the witness to this thought, and as such, you are the one who holds all the cards.
3 Recognise / realise that as a thought flowing through you – you can be the awareness that has thought and don’t have to be do anything with it. You can literally pull up a chair and sit and watch this thought, this feeling, this urge, this nudge towards the bread roll, with interest. You can sit and watch it and witness it and not do anything with it because it has no power over you.
4 And just like that you are free.
The goal is to recognise / realise you are the one in charge of your mind, you are the power that chooses whether or not to take a thought seriously, and once this realisation dawns there is not one thought – or bread roll – that can force you to act on it, ever again.
You can get rid of your cravings and urges to eat all the time, not by trying to go 31 days without sugar and hoping that the new behaviour sticks, but by mentally dismantling these cravings, through recognition of what they are and what you are in relation to them.
This is about mind retraining, away from the notion food is the one with the power because you are defective, and towards the truth that food is neutral, nothing, meaningless blobs of energy rubbing up and down against each other in a bowl. You’re creating the experience of the food. You’re creating the taste, the smell, the feeling when you eat it. You’re creating the urge to eat it in the first place – and as the one with all this power, you’re also the one who can ignore, disregard or laugh at any feeling you happen to create – including the ones that feel like sweaty cravings and delirious impulses to eat all the jaffa cakes.
Behaviour doesn’t drive your eating habits because thought drives behaviour. So if you really want to make changes and fix this, you’ve got to go to the level where the problem is occurring.
Changing your behaviour without addressing the source of that behaviour – thought – is not going to give you the freedom that you crave.
But going under the bonnet where your true power lies? This won’t just give you the body of your dreams, it’ll give you the life of your dreams, too.
Photo by Chien Nguyen Minh on Unsplash