I think most of us here have experienced realizing that the key to weight loss both includes and transcends just eating less. What often starts with wanting to eat healthier and move more turns into deep diving how to hack our behaviours and build virtues of discipline and self-care: it starts with adding more vegetables and progresses to focusing on stress reduction, building habits that support an exercise routine, avoiding situations that cause overeating, and getting in touch with our hunger / fullness cues.
But the longer I’ve been trying to kick my binge / stress / emotional eating, the more I’ve realized that it goes even a level deeper. Hopefully this sounds more insightful than discouraging, but it’s taken a surprisingly intense exploration into who I am as a person and the way that I move through my life in general to learn what I’ve needed to tackle my issues with food. Here’s a few examples:
- BODILY AND EMOTIONAL AWARENESS
I’ve been incredibly over-cerebral and disconnected from my body my entire life. Recently in counselling I was shocked to learn that not only does every emotion manifest itself in your body as a physical sensation, but that many people seem to be naturally in touch with this lol. The worst of my binge-eating habit developed mainly out of a need to disconnect from my physical self: the more aware I’ve become of my body and emotions, the less I’ve tried to stomp those sensations out with food. Not only that, but I more aware of and willing to prevent the uncomfortable feeling of overeating and eating things that don’t serve my body well.
- AVOIDANCE
I have an avoidant personality. My natural inclination is to ignore (but still stress about) a problem until it absolutely MUST be dealt with. Need to make an uncomfortable phone call? I’ll panic about it but continue to do nothing until I’m getting in trouble at work / need my medication right this minute / it’s been three months since they’ve heard from me and I’m freaking out about how terrible of a person I am. It took me years to realize the common thread here, but dealing with my to-do list promptly and not having a million stresses about things I really ought to be doing has probably reduced the number of times I feel the urge to distract myself with a binge by 80%
- EMBRACING CONSISTENCY
I still don’t understand why, because it sounds awful on paper, but there is a not-insignificant part of my brain that really likes having a pattern of highs and lows in various areas of my life. I first noticed it in how I deal with housework: I’ll spend every spare minute cleaning one week and then let the dishes form a mountainous pile the next. I used to go to the gym six days some weeks, but then be too burnt out to go at all the next. When things are just fine and I’m making steady progress I feel like I’m getting nowhere: even in my marriage I sometimes find myself picking little fights because I just don’t like things being the same all the time. Although I’ve always intellectually known that it’s counter-productive to weight loss, I really prefer to restrict hard and make rapid progress and then eat everything in sight when I inevitably fall off the wagon. It’s taken a lot of mental adjustment to learn the type of moderation where I don’t feel cheated if a special meal doesn’t include a second or third plate, or that a day of eating “only” 100 calories under my TDEE means I’m getting nowhere.
What do you think? Have you had any other similar personal revelations that have impacted your weight loss journey?
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