RISING WOMEN EXPERTS...

How can I keep my mind from sabotaging my healthy eating?
    By Nancy Anderson Dolan of WiseHeart Wellness Services

If you have chronic eating issues, it is likely they evolved to help you survive in what your mind and body perceived as a hostile world. So what looks like sabotage is really your mind assuring your survival.

Experiencing chronic stress or trauma overstimulates and overwhelms us. Our mind helps our body by facilitating ideas that will get us to act on the natural survival response to soothe. Food is a powerful soothing substance. So when you change how you eat, it is often perceived on an unconscious level as a threat to your survival. But we can’t make sense of that, so the mind tells us “we deserve it” or “one bite can’t hurt” or “I will start again tomorrow”.

Changing what we eat also changes our brain chemicals, but the system doesn’t adapt easily or quickly. In the meantime it tries really hard to return to the previous pattern to assure our comfort and survival. On the purely psychological level, we don’t usually have a clear positive picture of what it would be like to live our lives free of the food fix. We may even have a clearer mental picture of how distressing it would be to live without our old friend and comforter: the food. Is it any wonder that all the distorted and conflicting thoughts leave us feeling confused and “sabotaged”? So understand, we are not weak willed people easily sabotaged by stray thoughts. We can, with compassionate observation, reveal and revise our unskillful patterns of thinking.

When we practice compassionate observation of our thoughts, without judgment or resistance, we are able take what is unconscious into our conscious awareness. These thoughts have a complex origin and need the expansion of our minds not the usual contraction to the ideas of how we “should” be thinking.

It is good and even useful to create positive intentional ideas about your health and eating, as long as you realize they will be met with resistance and you use that as an opportunity to experience and explore the deeper origins of your “reluctance to change” thoughts. Repeated compassionate return to those positive food and eating intentions can actually reroute old brain patterns, after you have released all the negativity, fear and confusion they bring up! Just witnessing a reactive thought “you will never be able to control your eating!” begins to lessen its strength. Just start with those you notice.

For more info or to ask a question about food addiction & compulsive eating, sign up for free seminars & information at www.wiseheartweightmastery.com