Mental Edge For Success

How we think about ourselves and how we think about food plays a huge role in long-term weight management success. Do you eat whenever you feel anxious? If food one of the few things that makes you feel better? How we feel can often be a result of what we eat but what we eat cam also be due to how we feel. For many people, food is more than just nutrition. Eating is something to do when you're bored, anxious or avoiding-dealing with emotions.

For many of us, raised from different background of families, learned that you maybe punished for not finishing our food, possibly comforted with food,rewarded with food, or even a guilty feeling if we didn't eat what  was made just for us .

I remember when Mum used to say "We're going to cancel our trip to the Disneyland unless you clean your plate", "Behave yourself while Mum is shopping, I'll buy you a handful of candy later on", or "Here is a chips to make your skinned elbow feel better". I bet all of you remember having one of those situations before.

As we got older, this pattern of using food as the comforter become a habit and harder to break. This will eventually put us into a pattern of food being a cure for many emotional situations of life: stress, happy, boredom, anger, frustration, etc. And the end of the pattern is feeling guilty after ruining a healthy day within 5 minutes and throwing away all the hard work that preceded it.

What should we do about this?

Step one is recognizing the difference between hunger and an emotional craving. Many have abused food as an emotional fix for so long that they no longer recognize the difference. Hunger is when your body has to have something, almost anything. An emotional craving is "I'd feel better if I had this". If it is truly hunger, you will eat the available green beans. It it is an emotional craving, you will be drawn to eat fattening, comfort foods.

The biggest culprit of emotional eating is stress. In these times, food can be used as a tranquilizer. Stress is not something we can eliminate from our lives, but we can learn to better respond to the stresses that come our way. To help break the habit of turning to food when emotions begin to take over, find other things to do, such as:

• walk around the block
• take a bike ride
• play with your pet
• call a friend
• listen to the music
• read a book
• take a deep breath
• write a journal / blog
• play a computer game

The list must be very personal or it won't work. But the more these distractions techniques are used, a new pattern is developed of recognizing hunger versus emotional cravings and responding accordingly. Using these technique will help give you a Mental Edge in your weight loss journey and prepare you to success not only during the diet program that you are on, but throughout life.

Give it a try! Good Luck!