Archive | September 2009

Take a Vacation From Your Food Addiction

Sep30

When heading out on vacation, there’s that little thought in the back of your mind thinking about the weight you’re going to gain. You may be pleasantly surprised and you might even lose a few pounds.

It’s true that overeating is common for most people while on vacation. However, emotional eating and food addiction are not the same as overeating. They’re triggered by enormous stress, not all the delightful foods that beckon you on your holiday.

Give your food addiction a vacation, too. If you’re not emotionally stressed out, you won’t feel the uncontrollable urge to stuff down your feelings with too much of the wrong foods. And, by the way, the wrong foods for someone else aren’t necessarily the wrong foods for you.

So, here’s today’s rescue remedy. Try some personal empowerment. When you’re on vacation, enjoy yourself. Relax, get a massage, do what you really want to do at least part of the time and you won’t feel the need to eat in order to cope.

Emotional eating is eating when your emotions have gotten the better of you. Don’t let your vacation companions, even if they’re family, bully you into doing things you don’t enjoy and that don’t make you feel relaxed and happy.

Be a little selfish. Let someone else cope for a change. You just enjoy yourself and your vacation, whether it is for a day or two weeks.

There’s no law that says you and your food addiction can’t take separate vacations.

Organize Your Life for Success

Sep26

One of the most frustrating things about having a food addiction is never seeming to get what you want out of life. Too much emphasis on food and too little emphasis on you can create a vicious cycle.

Too much nothing, as the Peter, Paul & Mary song referred to it, can really mess with your head. It’s hard to get what you want if you don’t know what you want or how to get it.

Getting over a food addiction or losing weight can be a goal, but it doesn’t have to consume all your energy. And it doesn’t deserve to be your only goal.

If you want to overcome a food addiction, you have to have something that is important enough to you to choose it over your panic and helplessness when the food addiction threatens to sabotage your best efforts.

Emotional eating and food addictions are default behaviors we engage in when stress levels increase to the point that we don’t know what else to do but eat. At those times, no other choice matters.

To ensure our success, we need a plan of action that is already in place so that we can see that we have other choices and we know what those choices are in advance. Goals are the first step in that plan.

If you write down your goals and have a written plan to achieve them, then you are in good shape. However, if you are in the majority, you probably live day to day, without any real plan for getting the things you want out of life.

Most parents don’t teach their children about goal-setting and achievement strategies because they never learned it themselves. That can make for a very stressful lifestyle.

But fear not! Here is something that can really help you get your goals straight, and organize your life for success. It’s one of the best things I’ve found to simplify your life.

You learn how to focus on what you truly want to achieve, once you figure out what that is. And it teaches you how to figure it out.

I know from personal experience that most food addicts and emotional eaters have a problem with goal strategies. You have to set a goal before you can put a plan together. And you have to have a plan to reach your goals.

You just have to know how to set goals and achieve them, and you have to know what they mean to you in terms of priority. Not so easy for most people.

There are all kinds of successes, but they happen in stages, not all at once. Everything has its season. Only when the proper steps are taken in the proper order will success arrive at your doorstep.

So here’s something that will make you put that candy or cake or ice cream or red hot Cheetos back where you got them and take a break from your food addiction. This one’s for you.

Visit this website when you get a chance: www.simpleology.com . It’s awesome, and you’ll think you’re pretty awesome too when you see what you can do for yourself in just a few days.

And guess what?! Simpleology 101 is free. You’re going to love it! That’s today’s rescue remedy.

Good luck! And let me know how it goes.

Food Addicts, Don’t Forget The Love

Sep21

I was reading Darya Pino’s column in the Huffington Post yesterday. It focused on a book written by former FDA commissioner, Dr. David Kessler.

According to the article, Kessler’s book, The End of Overeating, outlines the basic steps of habit reversal and advocates, among other things, “developing positive associations with healthier foods while demonizing the hyperpalatable foods we have been conditioned to crave…”.

Dr. Kessler uses two terms, hypereating and hyperpalatable, that I had never heard before. At first sound, hypereating sounds like overeating, eating quickly, or an eating disorder that makes you eat faster than the rules allow.

Hyperpalatable foods can only be those very tasty, fat-, salt-, or sugar-laden foods that seem to be the first ones food addicts grab when an emotional trigger clicks.

I can’t in all fairness take exception to Dr. Kessler’s opinions and suggestions without reading his book in its entirety. Out of context, you can make the spoken or written word mean anything you want.

I’m not so sure, however, that  using the same techniques that make you loathe cigarettes work when it comes to comfort food. I am an ex-smoker and I will never feel about my comfort foods the way I feel about tobacco.

The article caught my attention so I decided to mention it here. To read the entire article, click here.

Not everybody who is fat has a food addiction, this is true. And no professional wants to label people without first categorizing them or their ailment.

Nevertheless, a food addict has a food addiction, or multiple ones depending on how you look at things, and that’s just the way it is.

Only someone who has a food addiction, or has had one and healed it can be an expert on how it feels, what it does to your life, and how you live with it while learning how to heal it.

I say “heal it” because a food addiction is caused by unresolved emotional trauma that stays with you until your heart heals and the pain is banished.

While the brain circuits may respond in similar ways to certain stimuli, the underlying cause of a food addiction is what must be discovered and understood in order for true healing to take place.

You can’t think your way out of a food addiction. Mind control and reprogramming will not succeed unless your goal is to ignore and forget.

True, food addicts may eat foods that aren’t good for them, and in unhealthy amounts. But understand that we are eating for comfort, for that moment of peace when the emotional, and sometimes physical, pain is gone.

We don’t eat to forget. We eat to be free, and we pay a high price for that moment of freedom.

The sooner we get to the bottom of what is causing the addiction, the sooner we can string together those moments of freedom until we have a life again.

No diet in the world will ever work until the heart is healed. There is only one way to heal the heart and that is with love.

Food Addicts and Support Systems

Sep20

Today I am reminded of how hard it is to change your life without a support system in place. Not everyone has family or friends in their corner when they are in need.

Food addiction is an extreme response to stress. Whatever the cause, if you want to have any quality of life, you have to have someone in your corner. That’s the only way you will survive.

A food addiction is not some passing fancy or an occasional episode of overeating. Food addicts aren’t just a bunch of fat people who can’t stop eating.

People need to be allowed to be who they are without having to define or defend their actions at every turn.

You can’t spend your whole life proving yourself. There comes a time when people either accept you or they don’t. Only you can know when you’ve had enough. If one or the other has to move on, so be it.

The feeling that you have to constantly prove yourself to win someone’s acceptance is one of the underlying causes of food addiction. It emotionally cripples the addict and sets them up for failure.

Some relationship issues may never be resolved to the satisfaction of all the parties involved, and it is best just to let go and move on.

Why risk constant setbacks, feelings of rage, self-hate and humiliation when you know what they do to you? Why keep starting over again and again and again?

My best advice on that is to learn and practice Divine, unconditional love. Let people be who they are but don’t sacrifice yourself in the process. Divine love doesn’t judge, doesn’t process, and doesn’t fail. Let that be your guide.

Find a safe place where you can feel happy and joyful, a quiet place, a favorite haven where you feel strong and sure. Make it your temple and don’t share it with anyone.

Food addicts already have problems with hormone imbalances. Strong emotional reactions to trigger events and trigger people make things worse.

Collect joyful, wonderful moments and store them up for those times when there simply is no one there for you. Relive the moments in your safe place and let them strengthen you and make you whole again, so you can carry on.