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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.

Are We There Yet?

Sep15

Patience is a friend to anyone living with a food addiction. Patience doesn’t mean waiting for somebody else to do something. It’s the secret ingredient in life’s great recipe for happiness.

One of the reasons food addiction, or compulsive eating, has become such a problem, and obesity along with it, is this idea of having to have everything now.

It reminds me of how children like to ask, “Are we there yet?” as if by saying it, they would be instantly transported to their destination without further adieu.

It’s like that with goals of any kind. Who would think of food addiction or obesity as a goal? And yet the frenzy with which so many Americans live their lives drives us to behaviors that reinforce the very negative behaviors we seek to avoid.

By asking yourself this simple question, “Are we there yet?” you can gain insight into where you are on your path to recovery or change. It’s a yes or no question, and that means you have to do some work.

Are we there yet? Are you where you want to be? Are you willing to do what it takes to get to where you want to be?

Since stress is unavoidable in some cases and self-inflicted in many others, it is up to us to work through it without endangering ourselves in the process.

Food addiction isn’t just about being fat. It’s about endangering ourselves by taking something we need to survive and turning it into a tool for self-destruction.

Food is very powerful. It’s purpose is to provide fuel for the  body. Without it, our survival would be greatly threatened. For the food addict, food is a double-edged sword.

Patience is like moderation. Both are states of balance. Moderation is not too much and not too little. Patience is not being worried about how things will turn out because you are doing what you need to be doing and are on target.

Patience is willing to wait for the result that you have deemed worth waiting for. There is no need to force a flower to bloom before it is ready.

When a person is suffering from a food addiction, they are suffering. Patience can help the recovery process and reinforce new behaviors.

Healing takes time and yes, there is frustration, and panic, and even despair.

Some journeys take a long time and lead us into uncharted waters. Sometimes it is hard to know how far we’ve come on the journey.

So be patient, and stop every so often and ask, “Are we there yet?” Soon or later the answer is bound to be “yes”.

Can Food Addiction Shorten Your Life?

Sep6

Since giving in to food addictions is a response to heavy duty stress, the answer to that question has to be “Yes”. Stress is the main cause of death by so-called natural causes, such as heart attack and stroke.

Cardiovascular disease gets the credit but how do we get there? What do you have to do to put so much strain on your body that it cannot ward off diseases? What is so natural about death by stress?

Less than half a century ago, ulcers were thought to be the only thing stress caused.

The original study decades ago of the effect of aspirin on the heart did not include women because it was thought that women had nothing to be stressed about.

There were no food addictions even though there were. Certain things were not talked about, and the doctor was the expert on your body, even though he saw you once a year for twenty minutes and you lived with your body 365 days a year.

Now that obesity has become such a problem and we now know that stress is closely related to the risk of disease and the length of life, it is important that we examine closely our eating habits.

Everything has a label now and an abbreviation. When people talk about diseases they sound like parents spelling out something they don’t want their children to know about.

Food addiction is serious because it is the abuse of food, not out of control eating but eating when we are out of control.

It’s no different than hitting something. We just do it to ourselves rather than someone else. Food should be a servant, not a master. We think it is one thing, but it quickly becomes another.

A food addiction may start out as comforting yourself with food after a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend, a disappointment over getting a lower test score than you hoped for, or even good old-fashioned loneliness.

The problem with using food as a response to stress is that it makes you even more stressed when the effects become apparent.

The more you know about why you use food to ease your emotional pain or soothe away tension, the more you can help yourself.

Because stress affects hormone levels, it can cause all kinds of problems. Add to that a food addiction and it becomes  more complicated and more dangerous.

Know thyself. Keep a journal of your feelings. Explore what it is that makes you happy, what makes you distressed, and what makes you eat.

Instead of stuffing down those feelings, write them down. It will take you one step closer to overcoming your food addiction, and it might even add years to your life.