I used to eat all the time. When I wasn’t eating I’d be thinking about eating and I’d certainly be wanting to eat. I love food. That’s what I’d tell myself. Well, yeah, of course, everybody loves food. It’s designed that way. We’re supposed to enjoy it, otherwise we wouldn’t do it and then we’d die. Anyway, that didn’t explain why everybody else was able to stop at one helping of macaroni cheese whereas me, I had to virtually force myself to stop at two and would always go back for some further scrapings if no one was watching.
A decade and a half of crazy diets, mad exercising and frustration followed and then I finally discovered what the fuck was going on.
It turns out my lower brain, so accustomed to me having seconds and secret thirds, took it upon itself to help me in my endeavours. It created the drive in me, thanks to the wily and sophisticated neural pathway, to keep having seconds and secret thirds, and every time I went along with its “helpful” suggestion to keep eating, the helpful suggestion became more intense and harder for me to refuse.
That’s why I found myself in my early thirties, losing my shit around a bread roll and thinking of mothing much else other than where my next bowl of macaroni cheese was coming from. It’s hardly the stuff dreams are made of and my skin was on par with that of a hormone ravaged teen.
But see, armed with the understanding that the nudges to eat were coming from inside me, I was able to cure myself for good.
And I am cured. I eat small portions. I spend most of my time not eating. I say no when people offer me food. I don’t get all stressy and pissy and hangry – ever. If I’m hungry and have no access to food, I just suck it up and go hungry. If I’ve eaten a huge lunch and am still not hungry come supper time I – get this – skip the evening meal altogether. I don’t eat when I’m ill and don’t feel like it, I don’t stare at other people’s plates when they’re eating something that looks delicious. I don’t pile my plate at a buffet cart, seeing it at somewhat of a challenge. I’m immune to cake for gawd’s sake. In short, I act like a grown up with her shit together, around food.
Quite a feat when you think that once upon a time I’d salivate and lust and pine after the cold toast that was forgotten in the toaster. So what’s the secret to all this? How does understanding the yearning to butter up the stale, cold leftover toast is coming from inside us enable us not to do it. to walk away, think about something else, act like a grown up?
Because sweetums, it means that the food – the toast or whatever – is not pushing these feelings onto you. The toast is not doing anything at all. It means you are feeling thought. That yearning to eat the toast is not created outside of you to then worm its way in and create that sweaty-palmed longing inside of you. The feeling starts inside of you. It starts its journey in your lower brain. It’s created there and blasts outwards as thought, creating the corresponding feeling of desire as it passes.
And because it’s thought and not say, a policeman holding a taser, you have permission to point and laugh at it, without doing as it says, with full immunity.
A thought can’t “get” you. It can’t make you do anything. It can make you lust after your mid-afternoon snickers bar, but it can’t actually march you do to the shop, wallet in hand.
Once you see this is true, it becomes quite hard in fact to act on your urges ever again. You feel kind of ridiculous if you do. You can’t be strong-armed by a thought and giving in to the urge for the snickers is nothing but you pretending that you can. But you know you’re pretending which kind of takes the fun out of the snickers bar anyway.
I’m going to get you to try something. I want you to shut your eyes and see if you can feel your inner body, as in, try to become aware of your toes to the top of your head. See if you can hold that feeling for a minute or so, you might experience your toes or fingers starting to tingle.
Good. So that, right there, that place inside you, is where the feeling or urge to eat another portion of supper is coming from. You don’t think about its origins when you’re experiencing it, you just feel intense desire, but recognising its provenance of said desire is the key to untangling you from it. I promise.
It’s a feeling that’s coming from inside you. It’s self-created. It’s habitual. It’s automatic, conditioned thinking that your lower brain has wired itself up to send, via a strong neural pathway, because every night for 15 years you’ve had a second portion of supper. It’s a thought created feeling.
And because it’s a thought-created feeling, the only power it has is the power you have innocently been giving it. You’ve assumed it has power, so you’ve let it control you. But it doesn’t. It’s power is illusory, non-existent.
You get to decide whether or not to take it seriously. The authority has always been yours. So take it now. Take back control. Grab the power, by recognising you have it.
Then, the next time the urge or pining or longing sensation comes over you, you can ignore it, laugh at it. You can roll around in the feeling of gratitude, liberation and empowerment that comes on when you realise that option is available.
The way I do this specifically, is by recognising the feeling of compulsion, and:
1 recognising it’s a feeling that’s coming from inside me.
2 recognising it has no power
3 remembering it’s a conditioned response and therefore not a genuine desire, and not about me.
4 remembering it’s not tethered to the food, so can’t even be about food (I’ve just labelled it that way).
5 realising I’m a hollow pipe through which any thought it entitled to flow, but none of which I have to take seriously.
6 relishing the immense sense of personal power and freedom I experience as a result of these realisations.
You only have to do this a handful of times and the urges go away altogether. The lower brain stops bothering to “help” you in this manner when its help is no longer accepted,
It’s really a beautiful system, don’t you think? And most of the time it works well, like if you brush your teeth over and over, it’ll step in to nudge you towards the toothpaste of an evening before bed. So you don’t keep forgetting to brush and can keep that Hollywood smile.
It’s just unfortunate that it can’t tell the difference between a repeated behaviour that helps and one that leads to a flabby back. But not to worry because now you are in on the secret sauce, you have the missing piece of info that turns even the fiercest and most foreboding or urges into an ignorable puddle to be stepped over.
I hope you can see that the power of this knowledge extends way beyond being able to decline a piece of cold stale toast in the afternoon, or a second helping of pasta. If you can’t then don’t worry, because upon exercising the power of this knowledge, you soon will.
Yes I’m leaving you on a cryptic note, but trust me, it works best when you discover the hidden power of this knowledge? For yourself.