Posted by mmorand on February 3, 2012
One aspect of The Diet Mentality that you must be on the lookout for in order to step free of that old way of thinking and step into an effortless relationship with food and a natural weight for your body without dieting is the pattern of restricting the amount of food that you are ‘allowed’ to have.
In a rational, functional relationship with food, what you are physically hungry for is what you are ‘allowed’ to have. And the only one who ‘allows’ you is you. Not the other people you’re eating with; Not Jenny Craig; Not Dr. Bernstein; You!
Your primary responsibility where food is concerned is to wait until you are hungry to eat something. Your next responsibility is to learn to stay present while eating and to identify and listen to the cues of comfortable fullness you are eating naturally. You are not responsible to buy into anyone else’s ideas of what you should have or how much.
What you choose to eat may vary depending on your body’s needs on any given day, at any given time. What you needed to eat yesterday at breakfast will likely be different today simply because you expended a different amount of energy or ate a little differently (amount and nutrition wise) than you did 24 hours before. That’s a main reason why diets don’t work so well. Our bodies naturally need different amounts at different times on different days.
Practice listening to your natural cues for hunger and fullness. It’s easiest to start listening for hunger cues (empty tummy, growlies, – if you feel grumpy or shaky you’ve waited too long and your blood sugar is dropping – this is dangerous to your health and can harm your brain so eat something quick). Then once you’ve got that down you can start to pay closer attention to the signals of fullness (we’ll talk about that soon).
This week, to tackle with annoying and stifling aspect of The Diet Mentality, invite yourself to wait until you’re hungry to eat and then invite yourself to have what you really want.
If you feel that you ended up eating too much just wait until you next get hungry to eat again, and so on, and so on, and so on. You’ll soon learn how much is enough for you and you’ll also hear much less self-judgement and feel less heavy and stuffed as you go through your day.
Give this a try and tell me how it goes. Ask me questions about what you notice or what you want to learn and I’ll incorporate them into this series on The Diet Mentality.
Have a great week!
Love
Tags: acceptance, body image, bulimia, Chronic dieting, compulsive eating, diet mentality, eating disorder treatment, eating disorders, overeating, rebalancing, restricting, self-judgement
Posted in:
2012, Relationship with Food, Relationship with Self, Tips for Natural Eating
Everything you say makes so much sense and I am so ready to be over the diet frenzy’s, can you hear the but coming… What if your life really is as crazy as you think, nothing has turned out the way it should have. You have to take care of and watch your grown children suffer daily with a incurable degenitive disease. You have to be strong for them. I want to get off the rolly coaster of binge eating. I’m 57 years old and have been on it all my life. I feel like the person that says ‘I’ll be the one you can’t help.’ Why can’t I stop??? Sandy