Hi Brooke,
Me again! I’m so thankful to the other scholars I hear on the Advanced Trainings saying they still haven’t reached their weight goal after a year. I feel so much better about myself when I consider that I’m not alone in this and I’m still willing to try and do it. It’s been a year, for sure, I haven’t reached my ideal behaviour around food but I’m getting there. Now I only eat two meals a day, I’m not interested in fries anymore, I can be offered some chocolate cake and not think twice before saying no… but I still buffer with food, like today.
However, between two bites (read: “pieces of cake”), I wondered why I was doing that . The thought that popped up in my mind was “it’s too much of an effort not too, I prefer being lazy.” That surprised me because I don’t think of myself as being lazy at all. I love working and I’m very perservering.
But I dug a little bit more and found out that to me, feeling an emotion instead of eating still sounds painful, long and useless. I realise that I’m still thinking with a diet mentality where, of course, everythhing I’ve done before was useless: I lost my weight with tremendous efforts and it was all for nothing. I was white-knuckling it and my weight all came back to me, leaving me disappointed. No wonder I’ve lost faith in that project even though I’m still dreaming of it. Maybe that’s what’s called “learned helplessness”…
So I now want to believe that feeling an emotion instead of eating is actually easy, long-lasting and fast. In the meantime, my ladder thought will be “Imagine if a feeling an emotion instead of eating was easy, long-lasting and fast?” And I’m thinking of visualising all kinds of emotions ahead of time, to get ready and to plan on feeling them, to get used to them. To do that, I’ll just read all the unintentional models I’ve written over the last year and will just practise breathing deep instead of reacting.
For instance, I now realise that I was buffering today because my daughter will be away on a school-trip next week and I didn’t want to think about her being away from me (sadness) or her teacher opening her suitcase and, in my mind’s eye, judging its content (shame). It feels so much better when I’m aware of those thoughts! Thank you so much for helping me uncovering them!
Any feedback would be most welcome, as usual!
Have a great day!
Nadège