New clients often come to work with me asking for structured meal plans or drowning in the nutrition/diet information overload frustrated with themselves and food saying things like “I just don’t know what to eat anymore.”
Believe me…I totally get it.
Is it just me or do you find that as the years go by not only is there vastly more information about food, calories, and nutrition but the information seems to sometimes conflict with old information.
WTF?!
As smart and capable women we are very successful in so many areas of our life it’s reasonable to think we should be able to tackle this thing called food, right?
I mean it’s…just food!
I’m not saying that I’ve got it all figured out. Geez! I’m still learning what works for my body and what doesn’t. Just this weekend I ate something that didn’t totally agree with my gut and I’m feeling the bloating and discomfort this morning.
Sigh…
However, I have learned from experience that focusing on the symptom won’t change things – you’ve got to address the cause.
While I absolutely want to help you sort through all of the information about food, I think my best work this to help you sort out your thoughts about food.
And, even more importantly, your thoughts about yourself ; your relationship with yourself is more often the cause of the disempowering relationship you have with food than the food itself.
I just started working on a new book and workshop in collaboration with a health coach specifically focused on nutrition and recipes (and much more). Out of this recent work I thought I would take a moment to share something I am going to be including in the new book (that will come out in a few months).
When you take better care of the relationship you have with yourself, the relationship you have with food immediately, and often dramatically, improves.
Because our behaviors are caused by our feelings which are caused by our thoughts and corresponding underlying beliefs I think we would be better served by looking at the beliefs in our minds than looking at the food on our plate for answers.
In this week’s video I explain what causes self-sabotage…especially around food. When you find yourself sabotaging, avoiding, and falling into unwanted behaviors I assure you it is because there is I belief, most likely about yourself or about the world, that prevents you from doing what you want most.
The video includes an exercise I created to help you look at the cause of your behaviors and I’ve also woven in four questions from The Work from Byron Katie which is a powerful process for breaking up old beliefs.
Here’s the 6 step process I suggest in the video:
- Think back to an experience you had before you binged the first time.
- What’s one of your earliest memories of noticing your body or someone talking to you about food or being fat?
- How old were you? What did they say? What happened? What did you do? What did they do? Who was there? What did you make it mean?
- Now write down what you remember of the story of what happened when you first started restricting food.
- What did you tell yourself to start binging/purging? How did you justify it? How did you feel the first time, do you remember?
- Do you see now as an adult the perspective you took as a young person was based in fear? Does remembering this help you understand where it all started? Do you remember your decisions started this a long time ago?
Then get curious about what you find and try out Bryon Katie’s four guiding questions:
- Is it true? (Yes or no. If no, move to 3.)
- Can you absolutely know that it’s true? (Yes or no.) How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
- Who would you be without the thought?