What No One Ever Tells You About Eating Healthy And Losing Weight That Sabotages Your Progress. Part 4

Hihi!

Alright! Let us wrap up our 4 part series! I will tell you, when I set out to write the first post in this series I did not realize it was going to turn into quite so many words. I really hope that what I am sharing here is going to help you feel happier, more confident within yourself and more in tune with your body. You have the power to create the life you wish, with the health you desire - sometimes you just need a little love and support along the way - and that is why I am here!

Today we are going to wrap up the final 3 ways you may be using staying in a place where you struggle with your weight and your health as a tool. Then I am going to open the floor - please do share your thoughts, questions, insists and anything else you wish to share.

If you have not done so already, you can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series 🙂

Now onto the final three tools!

Tool Number 3: It Is A Distraction

Being sick, or constantly yo-yo dieting is a HUGE distraction. Let me paint this picture for you.

1. You get sick and tired of your weight, your health and you decide you are going to go on a diet.
2. You choose a diet, plan what you are going to do, and realize that you must cut out items from your diet that you love.
3. You are on a high for the first week or two. Your new diet is all shiny and exciting, you are seeing some results, it is fun to do this new thing.
4. Then, 2-3 weeks in, you start to get bored with your diet. Now you are looking at the foods you used to eat and enjoy that you cut out of your diet. You start to crave them.
5. You start a mental battle. Should you just give in to the craving? Should you eat the food? No, you want to be thin. This diet is working. You don't want to fail again.
6. You wrestle with the idea of eating the food for a day, a few days, a week. You spend lots of hours a day trying to decide if you are going to give in or resist.
7. Finally, you break. You eat the food. You feel pleasure for the first two bites, then the guilt starts to set in. You start beating yourself up. Why did you eat the food? You know how it is going to make you feel? Why did you give in?
8. You spend the rest of the day feeling guilty. Now, since you have already broken the diet, you may as well keep going. You eat another thing. And another. Soon, you are totally off your diet.
9. Now, you are eating all the foods that you had deprived yourself of for the last few weeks - in larger portions that you would have eaten before you even started your diet. You feel like a weak failure for caving in, which makes you feel hopeless and depressed, which drives you to eat more.
10. You feel sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, and decide you are going to go on a diet.

That is a tone of mental and emotional energy hey? When you step back and look at this cycle, it is quite dramatic, isn't it? This whole cycle has the power to distract you from a lot of painful emotions. It has the power to distract you from the fact that you are not satisfied in your job, or that you are not happy in your relationships, or that you don't really love yourself. This is the thing. This whole diet cycle is one, huge distraction.

If you did not have it, what would you be thinking about? What issues would come to the surface for you? If you could not run to dieting, what would you use to help you move through your pain? What would you have to face if you did not have the mental distraction of dieting to keep you pre-occupied?

Again, if you don't believe me that you are using this as a tool for distraction, do the meditation where you put yourself in your perfect body again - we did this back in Tool Number 2! You may notice that you feel uncomfortable. You may notice that things come up. This is where you can discover what it is you are trying to distract yourself from. You do not need to 'do' anything about this at this moment. Simply become aware.

Tool Number 4 - It Is A Source Of Entertainment

The scenario I described above may not look or sound like 'entertainment' in the traditional sense of the word, but the fact that it is so time consuming and the fact that it takes up so much mental and emotional energy means that on some level, it is entertaining you. It is giving you a ticket out of other thoughts, feelings, emotions and circumstances in your life. It is helping drive you into an area where you are controlling the 'drama' rather than feeling like life is handing you drama you cant do anything about.

The drama of dieting, struggling with your weight or with an illness, how others react to you, how others respond in conversations that revolve around your weight or illness is all very entertaining in and of itself.

Also, if you were to really get your diet and health nailed down, there would be no more reason to read diet books. No more reason to watch the latest diet trend on t.v. No more reason to visit another doctor or naturopath or chiropractor. No more reason to try this food, to cut out this food, to restrict this or to increase that.

Also, if you were to choose a whole foods diet, this means there would be no more extreme flavours and textures. No more extreme salty or extreme sweet. No more large and complex meals or all consuming tastes.

Many people find the idea of eating a healthy diet, or getting to their 'happy' place with food and weight and health to be a little boring. A little flat note. Which makes sense. Health does offer a lot less in the way of entertainment value.

What it does offer is a chance to funnel all that extra time and energy into new areas of your life. If you no longer had the diet or illness tool to help entertain you, imagine all that you could create! Imagine all you could learn. Imagine all you could absorb.

If this idea overwhelms you or makes you feel like you would then be obligated to do more work, like you would then have all this pressure to perform, create, express and so on - know that this is not really the case. If you were to give up the entertainment and time consuming venture that is dieting and weight problems there would be no more added expectation on you. You could use that new found energy and time to rest. To relax. To treat yourself. There is no external expectation on you. You can breath, you are safe.

Another thing to note here is that if you are using food as a way of entertaining yourself, it could be that you are doing this because you don't allow yourself entertainment and fun in other areas of your life. It could be that food has become your only source of acceptable entertainment.

I wanted to start with to demonstrate how much entertainment value food, dieting and health issues have. Generally this using food as a tool for entertainment bleeds directly into our final tool.

Tool Number 5: It Is Your Main Source Of Pleasure

Food has become one of the only acceptable forms of pleasure in our culture. There is a stigma around most other forms of pleasure - be that sexual expression, creative expression (there is always a critic out there), smoking, drinking, being lazy ie watching movies, watching tv. playing games - essentially there is an underlying current in our society that if what you are doing is not accomplishing something, then it is not really worth doing. Or if you are going to do it, you should at least feel a little badly about doing it.

Food on the other hand is universally accepted. We have cake to celebrate birthdays and weddings. We have big family dinners on holidays. We drink coffee with cream and sugar to start our days, have a chocolate bar to help us make it through the afternoon and a nightcap to help us wind down before bed.

Food is everywhere, in everything and it is the one thing we are 'allowed' to do publicly that brings joy. We have essentially funnelled all of our acceptable expressions of fun, joy, relaxation, play, enjoyment and consolation into food. 

Those are some pretty huge shoes for food to fill. 

Honestly? It does not do a very good job. I think you can agree with me that no matter how good that cookie or bag of chips was, it is never really satisfying. If you are only allowing yourself food as a form of pleasure, chances are you are not really filling up. This is why you need more and more and more to fill the gap. Because food can never actually fill the gap.

If you resonate with this - if you tend to be 100% productivity, or beating yourself up or feeling guilty for resting or playing or taking pleasure in other areas of your life, there is a good chance you have made food you one and only 'hit.'

I used to tell myself that there were starving children in Africa, so who was I to sit around on a Saturday afternoon and watch a movie? How did I deserve to read a book for fun? Why should I think it is OK for me to go to a coffee shop in the afternoon to just sit and people watch? I thought I was making myself more productive, a better person. In reality I was just wearing myself out, and making myself a crazy person around food because it was all I would give myself at the end of the day to enjoy.

We can see in other cultures - like the French culture - where they do not have such a stigma about enjoying life. About enjoying things other than food. They have a much healthier relationship with food overall due to this. They have not placed all their pleasure eggs in foods basket, so to speak.

Play and pleasure are essential, basic needs. Do not get this confused. You cannot live a rich and satisfying life without play, without pleasure, without rest and without relaxation. It is time to give up the guilt and to start allowing more fun into your life.

Again. I repeat. It is an essential need. Taking the time to slow down and enjoy things in your life that are not food is the number one best tool you can use to start healing your relationship with food. Take some of the pressure off of food. You deserve it.

Ok. Lets all take a breath. Did you do it? If you did not, I will wait.

I understand that this was a lot. If you want to read through all four posts again a few times and take a moment to reflect with each most I highly encourage that you do so. This may feel big and overwhelming, or perhaps it feels finally freeing and illuminating. Either way, take some time to digest this stuff.

Then, please do feel free to post your comments, questions, concerns and so forth. This is a safe place for you. I would love to hear what you think 🙂

Until tomorrow!

<3