Here’s a question I received when I asked readers to email me topics to blog about: How to get food off the brain. A trying issue with relevance to both under- and overeaters. As you well know, an obsession with food and weight can lead to highly disregulated eating and ruin the quality of your life. So, how to get food off your mind?
Food may be your main agenda because you’re used to thinking
about it. You may not realize when your focus shifts to eating, weight, fatness
or thinness or you may be all too aware of how these thoughts intrude and fill
up the space in your head. Thinking about food and weight are bad habits born
of anxiety. When you’re comfortable in your body and with your appetite, you
have no need to obsess about them. To eliminate this preoccupation, stay aware
of your thoughts and actively shoo them away. Because they are automatic, these
thoughts will not toddle off on their own. Use the image of an eraser or
actively replace the thoughts with different ones.
You can try brushing them off gently but, most likely, you will have to give them a swift kick out the door and put up a “do not enter” sign in your mind. When obsessive thoughts return, go through the same process. Banishment can take weeks to months. The worst thing you can do is to cave to obsessional thinking, reinforcing the neural pathways it travels. Basically, if you want to stop the behavior, you have to stop the behavior. After a while—okay, a long while—the neural pathways become less active.
Another way to rid yourself of food/weight obsessions is to
understand your need for them. What makes you so anxious? Does going round and
round on these subjects get you anywhere? If not, what might? Often we spend
more time thinking about change in the future or what we could have done in the
past than making uncomfortable choices in the present. That’s where you want to put
your energy—in now—not in anticipation or hindsight. By making sure that
you are present and aware to all food decisions, you’ll reduce the need to look
back over them or anxiously anticipate future ones.
One more point: What would you be thinking about if
not food or weight? In many cases, it’s larger, more thorny issues regarding
work, school, relationships, health, lifestyle, mortality, life’s meaning--ie, if you’re uncomfortable focusing on leaving your job/husband/partner, your mind
may fill up with musings about eating to make you more comfortable. By tackling
dilemmas head on and resolving them, you won’t need to escape them. You can rid
yourself of food obsession by taking a firm stand against it.
Best,
Karen
http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/
Normal Eating talks and media events
PLEASE NOTE: I encourage you to comment on my
blogs and will do my best to address topics/questions you raise in future
blogs. I cannot provide individual responses, but encourage you to post
your questions and comments at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foodandfeelings
or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nicegirlsfinishfat.
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