“Sara, I’ve just had a lightbulb moment; I think about food all the time … apart from when I’m actually eating it. How do I change that up?”
If this sounds familiar …. Stay tuned for 3 steps you can implement TODAY to shift you focus and see real results.
Hey hey, Sara here. This was a great bit of self awareness from one of my clients just last week … which was VERY convenient and useful for me … because I was literally planning what this week’s podcast was going to be about when she messaged me.
So thank you … you know who you are, and I told you I’d give you a shout out.
So … it’s completely totally normal, and actually pretty damned useful to think about food part of the time – maybe first thing in the morning when you’re scanning your day ahead & making plans, maybe when you’re shopping, or when you’re about to cook … and of course, when you’re physically hungry.
But yep, thinking about food all the time …not overly useful. And if this sounds like you, you’ve landed in EXACTLY the right episode for you right now.
Because working out how to stop thinking about food means understanding why you’re thinking about it
When I realised this, it created a massive shift for me,
So, here are my 3 top tips for shifting your focus to something more beneficial for you too.
1. Step 1, First of all … mind your language. (anyone else remember that dodgy TV comedy called Mind Your Language in the 80’s or am I showing my age now?)
So, the statement was: “I think about food all the time” …. Allll the time. Really? Or just a lot of it?
You see, our subconscious mind, which is the bit of us that’s running the show … literally, its where our programming is held. It’s what makes us do all the things we automatically do out of habit .…it doesn’t know the difference between what’s real, and what we just say or think about.
And our subconscious just wants to serve us, and serve us well.
So it will seek to make real what it hears from us. Because it thinks that’s what we want.
Now this can be dangerous (God dang it, think of all our mean girl self talk …) and, and and and we can use it to our advantage too – by visualising what we DO want). So if you’re telling yourself that you think about food ALL THE TIME ….guess what your subconscious mind will nudge you to do … yes! It’ll get you to think about food all the time.
So, great self awareness …. AND maybe switch the language up to something more useful. And that could go like this:
So, if your thought is “I think about food all the time” you could maybe shimmy that into “I think about food more than is useful for me”
Now, that’s more realistic …
But, another super interesting thing about the subconscious mind is that it’s just like a massive search engine, and just like a search engine, it doesn’t recognise or compute negatives.
So, lets take Google for example. If you wanted to go on holiday, and you wanted to rent a villa, but you didn’t want to go to Spain …. And you typed into Google “HOLIDAY VILLAS, NOT SPANISH” …… what would Google present you with?
Yep, a whole load of, very lovely, I’m sure, but SPANISH holiday villas.
Doh!
And our subconscious minds are exactly the same.
So if you started with “I think about food all the time”, & then shimmied into the more TRUTHFUL version of “I think about food more than is useful for me” , we’re getting there, but can you see that your subconscious mind would still want to serve you well by getting you to think about food MORE.
So what would be a great way to tweak that into something even more powerful …well, maybe;
“I think about what to eat OCCASIONALLY, when it serves me well”
So that was Step 1.
Step 2 is to Give yourself enough.
You see, when we eat, it’s always for one of 2 reasons – either physical hunger – for fuel or out of emotional desire, so for pleasure.
And that’s cool.
Always remember,
Food is great. And the good news is, we are meant to eat.
Food keeps us alive, and it’s scrummy, and we are meant to enjoy it.
There's only one reason we become overweight. And it isn't because we eat. It's because we over eat.
Now I know that's a really simplistic thing, but, it’s been a huuuge light bulb moment for many people that I’ve worked with over the years.
It's not about the eating, we are meant to eat. Our problems arise in the OVER eating.
And with that being true, maybe then we need to place all of our focus and our attention on the over bit on the overeating?
Well, isn't that what we've been trying to do for years?
And my FILL-osophy is (see what I did there) is the problem, the MASSIVE problem is when we focus on trying not to overeat, we slip into the trap of affecting our eating, and not in a good or useful way.
We negatively affect what we’re meant to do. Of what we’re meant to enjoy.
The phrase throwing the baby out with the bathwater springs to mind.
So in trying to get rid of the problem, (the over eating) we harm what’s both NECESSARY and flipping GOOD in our life (the eating)
Now, of course, even on a diet we eat, you know, even on a strict diet, we eat something.
But when we are trying not to overeat, we often don't give ourselves enough
So, does this sound familiar?
You can, “be good” so eat really well during the day, but as soon as you get home after a busy day – the picking starts – and it snowballs, and then you feel like you can’t stop until you’ve eaten the contents of the fridge. And the fridge. Sound familiar?
Or, you can “be good” all week, you start every Monday with, “this is going to be the week” … THE week you eat perfectly all week. It starts well (if you measure well by how many calories you consume … or don’t) But by Wednesday you’re climbing the walls … having to go to bed early so that you don’t scream at the kids because you’re so emotionally fraught and by Friday the fuck-it fairy has landed, you have a maccies breakfast, a pub lunch and chocolate and copious glasses of prosecco for tea.
So you write Saturday off as well, then ‘try to be good’ to make up for it all on Sunday. But can you see when we do this, we’re just perpetuating this negative cycle. You can’t get control over your eating by restriction and deprivation, by ‘trying to be good’ or eating less. If you’re constantly thinking about food or feel out of control around food, then chances are you need to allow yourself much more. So that you get enough -
Enough freedom, enough fuel, enough nutrients, enough satisfaction and enough emotional understanding,
Because when we are trying to eliminate overeating, the effects of that spill over to our eating and the very things we need in order not to overeat (energy, nourishment, satisfaction, good feelings and freedom) they are all diminished.
Boom.
What if we gave ourselves enough? What if we restored our freedom around food – we got rid of the judgement and unuseful messages that diet culture has given us over the years?
What If we ate enough to keep ourselves so well fed that we don't trigger the biological primal urge to overeat..
What if we nourish ourselves enough so our hormones don't go out of whack and send us false hunger signals.
What if we ate foods that we love that love us back, so that not only are we full and well fed, we’re also SATISFIED with WHAT we are eating
And what if we learned to accept all our emotions and recognise them for what they are – useful messengers about how our lives are panning out for us right now, and we were able to either sit with those emotions and let them flow through us or act on them from a place of self love and care, rather than using food to distract or numb or detach us.
You see, going on a diet hoping to become the type of person who does enough of all these things in a way that maintains health and happiness is like putting a sticky plaster on a broken arm.
Weight is not the problem. Weight is a symptom of over eating. And actually, Over eating isn’t the problem. Over eating is a symptom of not giving ourselves enough,
enough fuel, nutrients, satisfaction, emotion, or freedom, and we need to gift ourselves more of all five. And then ironically, the overeating would take care of itself.
We wouldn't have the same physical urges or emotional cravings to eat, and therefore we naturally wouldn't feel the need to overeat.
Because, when we have enough we don’t go looking for more.
And when I realized this, I was like, oh. All those times I asked myself, “why can't I just flipping do it”? And that's it.
So there was a lot to unpick in that second step …. So please reach out to me if you’d like to explore that more.
Step 3 is BE MIND FULL.
Remember my lovely client wayyy back at the beginning of this episode … “Sara, I think about food all the time … except from when I’m eating”? well she went on to finish her sentence with “when I’m eating I’m not thinking about anything …. I’m like a woman possessed, I just kind of inhale it, and then I’m left with an empty plate or the empty wrapper wondering what happened”.
So keep your mind FULL of the eating when you’re eating. Fully experience the food. Check in with what it looks like, what aroma is it giving off? how does it feel in your mouth, what’s it’s texture, it’s flavour? Does the texture or the flavour change as you chew? How does it leave you feeling as you eat more and more of it.
And do all this from a place of gentle curiosity, not judgement.
Remember, food is great and we’re meant to eat.
Distracted eating, or not thinking about the food while we’re eating it, is a way we disconnect ourselves, sometimes out of our awareness, often from feelings of guilt or shame about what we’re eating, how you’re eating it, how you feel about your body and yourself.
So step 3 is to be mind full of the food while you’re eating. It’s really useful to make an occasion out of eating. Sit down, set the table if you can, focus on fully enjoying the food rather than driving or watching telly or playing on your phone. Honor yourself with those few minutes. And you’ll experience those “Did I just eat that” moments less and less.
So the objective is to think more around food while you’re eating, and only think about food as much as is useful for you when you’re not.
I’d LOVE to hear how you get on with this.
If you need more help with this, if it feels like you can’t stop thinking about food, or if it feel like you can’t stop eating, even when you’re not hungry, I’ll soon be releasing my free 3 day mini-course, so follow me on Insta or Facebook to be one of the first to grab it.
I also have a free Facebook group – “The other Way for beginners” where I share lots more tips and support, so come on over and join me there – I’ll pop the link in the shownotes.
Until next time, love yourself lots, Sara.