It’s time for the psychology of eating. After all, you’ve tried all the diets. You’ve counted calories, carbohydrates and fat grams. You’ve studied every food combination ever invented and used your own body as a laboratory. They work—temporarily.
They may even work for months at a time and you think you’ve finally licked it. You have found the answer. But then slowly… insidiously… you start to regain. The pounds creep back on. You do what the books tell you to do. You try to lose it again right away, but you feel it slipping away.
This is the psychology of eating at work.
You can’t believe this is happening again. And you can’t seem to apply the right formula. What worked before like magic doesn’t seem to respond the same way. How could this be?
You feel out of control and helpless over your own impulses. Your own body seems to have turned against you. So you start turning against yourself.
The Psychology Of Eating Problem
Diets don’t work for many reasons, at least not for long. One reason is because diets are based on deprivation, and depriving yourself creates stress and tension—an internal battle. Your energy is focused on controlling what you can and cannot have, rather than giving yourself and enjoying what you really want.
The psychology of eating works every time. If you deprive yourself, it makes you want it more. You have just created the “forbidden fruit.”
Setting up an internal battle is not the best way to solve a problem. Do you know how much time and energy it takes to be constantly fighting with your own impulses?
Willpower eventually erodes, and even if you win the battle, you almost always lose the war because self-respect and trust in yourself are compromised.
Some psychology is paradoxical, and this certainly exists in the psychology of eating. When you stop trying so hard to lose weight, that’s when you are most likely to lose. But you have to truly let go—like the Buddhist concept of not being attached to a particular outcome or result.
My own experience with the psychology of eating is probably typical. As soon as I even start to think about dieting or losing weight, I get hungry and start craving foods that would be on no one’s diet. Call it an oppositional streak or a midlife crisis, but I’m just not willing to fight with myself anymore.
Letting go can be a scary proposition. We’re not exactly experts at trusting ourselves. TV commercials even tell us that we need a pill to distinguish love from lasagna. With every diet that “fails”, we mount evidence to convince ourselves that we are not trustworthy. Could it be possible that it is the diet, rather than us, that is not trustworthy?
One way to stop trying so hard is to shift your focus from losing weight to truly experiencing and enjoying food using mindful awareness. It may be scary at first and you may worry about your self-control. But if you can make this one shift, you will automatically grant yourself a life upgrade. You will have a much better chance of actually losing weight and being free of these “weight battles” forever. (Excerpt from Lose Weight Now Stay Slim Forever)
source : stresseating
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