This is probably not the way you would like to evolve
With growing obesity, many people are resorting to diets and get thin quick wats to lose weight. Diet is fast becoming a mainstream dirty word, normally associated with losing weight, and waif like anorexic women or beefy men exhibiting 6-12% hyper low bodyfat achieved through a cocktail of chicken breasts, tuna, steroids and powerful fatburners.
Many people view diets as ways to manipulate the body into burning high amounts of fat, but there is a good news and bad news, the good news is that its possible to lose weight rapidly if you employ hardcore techniques that involve starvation, drugs and improper eating and then theres the bad news, that it doesnt last, one year or even 5 years down the road, you are going to have a damaged body and face struggles as you body tries swing the pendulum back to your original state.
My point is that you cant diet without permanent changes to your lifestyle, and dieting is eating more of the right things instead of eating less. We all intuitively know what is the right things to eat, toufu or burger, brown rice or white rice. But we normally take this with an attitude of invincibility, thinking that we can shrug off the chocolate bar or the extra burgers. Or even relishing in the comfort that such food brings.
The Psychology of Over Eating
We have heard of binge drinking where people drink themselves silly. But theres also binge eating where people drown (or rather down) their sorrows in food. It doesnt help that ALOT of the odds are stacked against us by food producers who spend millions creating the perfect and most addictive foods that you would like to put into your mouth to maximise the gratification and sense of addiction to fat, salt and sugar. There is no doubt that much of what we eat in restaurants or what we can find in supermarkets is fat on fat on sugar on fat with salt. Even the salads are drenched with thousand island dressing and liberally sprinkled with bacon bits, because this is the thing that makes food SEXY.
Never let your Food be your Drug
If losing weight seems like a huge task to you, chances are that the greater your sense of shame you link with your appearance, the more you’ll be inclined to feel hopeless about losing weight. When you find you cant break the hold of food over your life or cant seem to take the effort to exercise, this breaks your confidence and spirals into other areas in your life.
That snickers bar just had the last laugh.
Psychology and Proper Eating
The best way to learn how to control our urges is to realise that eating creates positive emotions. There is no doubt about it, when you reach for that Hagen Daaz ice cream after your break up, you are reaching for an instant lift me, a sense of power and certainty that when you have the first bite you would immediately feel good. Its an instant Prozac, just that it kills your confidence and youself ultimately in the long run.
Emotional eating is not the way. One way to prevent that is to change your perspective about food. Do you eat to live or live to eat, make distinctions about food. Is food a fuel or is it a drug to you. Would you want high performance petrol in your vehicle or would you want sloppy oil coursing through your veins. Choose a positive way to view eating and youself, merge a positive self image with proper eating. Associate health and vitality with overeating instead of pleasure.
If you are guilty of emotional eating. Here are some ways you can prevent it.
- Learn to recognise when you are overeating and where you do it most. In the office, or on your couch.
- Determine the situations and feelings that you go through that precede the bouts of overeating
- Ask yourself HARD questions and try to find out why you are doing this, the answer is usually deeper than because this tastes good so i would like to eat it. If proper thought be given, your reason should be more of “Finding solace or comfort in food” , or “venting frustrations by eating”.
- Allow the feelings to sink in, and learn to recognise them. Appreciate that they are giving you the message and that you are doing what you think is best at that time to make yourself feel good.
- Also realise that you have to let go of the feeling and find methods to prevent yourself from getting into such situation. Choose alternate behaviours or avoid going to places that you think you would over-eat.
- Reinforce and reward yourself for the positive action that you take, one less chocolate bar per day, cut down take small steps in reducing your overall intake.
- Find support groups and exercise groups and learn from people who have taken massive action and succeeded, and learn from the ones that most resemble your situation.
It isn’t easy but its definitely worth it
Related articles
- Excerpt from – Stop Your Emotional Eating – from the Using Psychology to Lose Weight series (mariaslastdiet.com)
- Obesity (articles4friends.com)
- Compulsive Overeating Disorder and Receiving Social Security Disability (socialsecurityhome.com)
- “Tired of Trying To Loose Weight And It Never Works or You Have To Starve Yourself (indigitalplr.wordpress.com)
- Diets Fail, Weight-Loss Programs Fail, You Cannot Lose Weight. What’s Up? (mariaslastdiet.com)
- How Diet Doctors Lose Weight (charmshealthbeauty.wordpress.com)
- Are You a Habitual Starvation Dieter? (herfitnesshut.com)
- Protein diet : Lose weight with proteins (weightloser7.blogspot.com)
- Nutrition and Superfood Expert David Wolfe Gathers 15 Top Anti-Aging, Detox and Immunity Speakers at Longevity Now Conference Health Event (prweb.com)
- The Dangers of Rapid Weight Loss (mytopweightloss.wordpress.com)
- Losing Weight Without A Diet (bestfruitsmoothies.com)
- When is Overeating Binge Eating Disorder? (Author Michelle May) (pushdumpfatbutton.wordpress.com)
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