Hi what I am going to talk about in this blog is one of the most important aspect of fat loss .
The 5 main principles of burning fat and gaining lean muscles and how it actually works.. so this is going to be quite lengthy hence I will be putting it in part series . Kindly read it through and understand it thoroughly …
I am going to start with Emotional eating here as this seems to be the foremost reason why most women end up in their never ending battle with weight and fat loss. In the later part I will talk about the right foods to eat and the right way to exercise in order to achieve your healthy weight and lose fat.
So start by becoming AWARE….
Awareness is the starting point of change as unless you know you have a problem how will you even address it? So the first step is to develop keen sense of awareness of your behavior pattern.
1. Become AWARE of your eating behaviors
2. WATCH OUT for your emotional eating triggers.
3. ARREST the behavior patterns when they occur.
4. REPLACE the old emotional eating behavior with more constructive alternatives.
5. ESTABLISH new beliefs about food and right reasons for eating.
STEP 1: Become AWARE of Your Eating Behaviors.
AT first, your biggest challenge is that you don’t even realize when you are eating mindlessly.
95 percent of our daily behaviors run on auto pilot. These unconsciously driven behaviors are
known as habits.
Just like you don’t have to think about your beating heart, releasing hormones, or
digesting your food because these are autopilot bodily functions handled by your autonomic
nervous system. If your conscious mind ha the power to handle such enormous tasks then
You can understand how easily it can also create and carry out automatic eating behaviors without consulting your conscious mind.
For example, if stress eating has become an unconscious pattern, you don’t have to think about what to do when you feel stressed. A line of code has been installed in your brain that says, “ If there’s stress, then eat comfort food.”
You eat without thinking for many reasons, and the neural associations to foods that trigger emotional eating can be formed at a very young age. Foods can get linked to home, family, friends, love, being pampered, and just about any place, person or experience.
Since habitual eating patterns can go back so far and they are programmed at the unconscious level, they will continue to run on auto pilot unless you intentionally break them and replace them with new ones. However before you try to break an old pattern, you must first know that it exists. That’s where awareness comes in. You must start paying attention. Some people call this conscious or mindful eating.
There are two important aspects to eating with awareness, the first is eating exclusively, which means that when you eat you do nothing but eat. For example eating while watching television has been linked to weight gain. One way to explain this is that while watching TV its easy to overdo on calories as you are so engrossed with what’s going on the TV screen you don’t pay attention to how much you are eating.
Eating exclusively also helps prevent you from forming undesirable neural associations through stimulus-reponse conditioning, also know as the “Pavlov’s dog effect”.
I often come across many of my young client’s who complain that they always seem to put on during their exam time..And they really don’t know how to put an end to this vicious cycle .Many start stress eating just thinking about their papers.) Well this is why it happens.. When you repeat any act very often it forms a habit as in this case snacking whenever you sit to study, or while working on the computer or watching TV. Both these habits get linked and a neural association gets formed in your brain so your brain sends the signal that whenever you sit to do that particular activity you must eat so you start feeling hungry no sooner you open the first page. This is emotional hunger not physical.
The second aspect of mindful eating is to eat slowly.
We have so often heard this one from our elders to eat slowly and chew your food properly. The effect of eating slowly, which scientists call ”time-energy displacement,” has been studies extensively. Eating too quickly doesn’t allow your brain the time to register the feeling full factor so by the time you feel full, you may have already eaten too much.
This also means choosing foods with high “chew factor” and a low energy density ( such as high fiber vegetables and lean protein), and fewer foods which you can ingest easily without much chewing and high energy density (such as liquid beverages, refined sugars and grains). Will talk about this more in detail in the next part.
Third way to stay aware is to keep a food journal, including a daily record of your nutritional intake, as well as a dairy of your thoughts and feelings before, during and after you eat. I personally recommend journaling for at least 2 months when you start with your weight loss program and again at any time when you feel you are slipping away from your goal. A journal can be a real wake up call as soon as you begin to realize the extent of your old emotional eating behaviors. So if you are seriously looking forward to making a permanent changes in your habits then journaling is very crucial.
STEP 2: WATCH OUT for the Emotional Food Triggers
Remember emotional eating always happens for a reason . there’s always a cause so you have to become vigilant and find out the right cause of your impulse eating . during this initial period of breaking the old habits and replacing it with new think of your conscious mind as the police. If you know in advance where the “scene of crime” is then you can be on guard and arrest the old negative pattern before it gets out. So its time to do some self policing and write down whatever reasons you can think of when you are pushed to eat impulsively. Keep in mind that triggers generally fall into one of the four categories: feelings, places, people, or events. Some of them are under your control others are not.
Once you have identified the triggers your work is to eliminate the ones you control and prepare your defenses for those you don’t. cleaning your house and work place is easy and a good way to start as this is where mindless snacking happens most of the time. Convenience leads to mindless eating. If its not there, you cant eat it. If possible get convience food out of your house if not atleast out of reach out of sight.
If your primary trigger are people, then you can create you can create social coping strategies in advance. First tell your friends and family what you are doing and ask them to support you unconditionally and if they resist then plan a rebuttal for every comment you’re likely to hear . here are some ideas:
– Maybe it tastes good but nothing feels better than being lean
– Its not about missing out on sweets , its about missing out on being this lean and fit person.
– Its not about losing freedom to eat what I want, its about not being a slave to food.
– Its not about eating with family,it’s about being with family.
Stress as an Emotional trigger
One of the most common triggers for emotional eating is STRESS. One of the simplest ways to handle it is to change the way you perceive it. Try and change some of your beliefs and reframe your experience of stress like this:
– Stress is an essential part of life. it serves as a stimulus for growth.
– Stress is ok. what’s bad for me is the continuous stress without release. when i feel over stressed that’s my signal to rest, relax, and recover.
– It’s not food that i really want when i am stressed, It’s rest and relaxation. Feeling stressed really means I need to balance between my hectic life and rest.
– I shall not use food for relieving stress. Food is good for energy and nutrition, but It’s terrible way to de-stress because stress eating only makes me feel guilty afterwards and guilt feelings makes me even more stressful.
to be continued…..
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