If you’ve been following my blog over the years, you’ll know that I’m passionate about supporting those who want to achieve a healthier, happier weight for life, but who also suffer significantly from emotional eating and dieting / relapse cycles that often affects their ability to maintain their weight loss successfully long-term.
Long-term Dieting Behaviours
For many people, certain dieting behaviours are often strongly associated with long-term weight re-gain, not weight loss. This is mainly because energy or food restriction when not carefully considered or approached in a structured way, can lead to a strong preoccupation with food. Coupled with stringent and often unnecessary ‘rules’ about food, for some people this can lead to feelings of shame, guilt and failure when things don’t go as planned, further fuelling emotional eating and weight re-gain. And from there the cycle continues, often leading to the overall net result of no significant or long-lasting weight loss from one year to the next.
The Importance of Reflection
The weight loss process is not just physiological, but psychological and emotional too. That’s why it’s so important to develop a healthier more sustainable relationship with food in conjunction with losing weight, so you can easily maintain your weight loss for life.
It’s important to reflect on what you’ve done differently each day. Acknowledge when you’ve made different choices. Notice I didn’t said ‘better’ choices – just different choices. Therefore, taking the emphasis away from ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in association with food.
This can be important for someone who suffers from extreme guilt or binge eating associated with consuming particular foods. For the most part, we all know deep down which foods are healthier than others. I suggest shifting the focus to thoughts that will help repair and rebuild your confidence and self esteem around food.
Managing Expectations
Managing expectations, especially when attempting to lose weight, is vital to successfully breaking free of emotional eating for good. Reflection in action, thinking more positively, becoming more consistent with things that work well, letting go of harsh expectations, taking one day at a time and preparing to build for the future. Subconsciously you will start believing in yourself more and believing in yourself is the first step to building a happier, healthier and more sustainable relationship with food.
Ready for the first step?
See my follow-up post: Overcoming Emotional Eating: The First Step
