Why Do I Feel Out Of Control Around Food?
You are so successful in so many areas of your life. When it comes to your work, you are more motivated than most - you are really driven and you have done really well. When it comes to your personal life, you have a great and loving family and many amazing friends. Your house is always clean, people really like you, you achieve anything you put your mind to ... and yet, when it comes to food, you feel completely out of control.
So many of the people that I work with are amazing, intelligent, determined people that are so successful and driven in so many areas of their life. Yet when it comes to food, they struggle with feeling out of control. They often ask me why they are so in control of so many areas of their life and yet so OUT OF CONTROL when it comes to food.
If this resonates with you, there could be a number of reasons why you feel really out of control around food but yet are so in control of other areas of your life:
You have been taught that to get healthy, all you have to do is to eat less and exercise more. It is true that in order to lose weight, you technically have to eat less. However many of my clients embark on very restrictive diets and meal plans - and this form of extreme restriction is interpreted by the brain and body as starvation. The brain and body then respond to this famine, with a "feast" mentality - they want you to eat as much as you possibly can to protect you against any further starvation. This is often why clients that are very restrictive or controlled with their food intake for a period of time or the duration of a diet can then end up feeling completely out of control over their food choices.
Your thinking patterns around food let you down. Many clients that feel out of control around food have unhelpful thinking patterns when it comes to food. For example, many clients keep thinking to themselves "I will start a strict diet tomorrow" and yet this thinking pattern just triggers them to feel out of control around food - because of course, if your brain thinks you are about to starve it tomorrow, it will want you to feast today. Another example is all-or-nothing thinking and many clients will ban lots of foods or food-groups as "bad" - however a problem then arises if they eat one of these "bad" foods, because their brain then thinks "I have broken the rule so I might as well go crazy and eat lots of bad foods". Again this style of thinking can trigger feeling really out of control around food.
You starve yourself. Your eating patterns throughout the week can lead you to feel completely out of control around food. If you regularly skip meals and/or deprive yourself of food, when you then get a taste of a bit of food - again this "feast" mindset kicks back in, just in case you decide to go back into "famine" mode again in the future.
You have no other ways to cope. For many of my clients, food is a coping mechanism - it is something that they turn to when they are stressed, tired, sad or bored. As this is the case, they aren't eating food because they are hungry or want the taste but because they want a quick high and to feel relief from their emotions. However, often when eating in response to emotions - just a bit of food is never enough. That numbing effect of food and relief from emotions only lasts for a short period of time - so often eating in response to emotions can lead someone to feel out of control around food and craving more and more food to help them to regulate how they are feeling.
So if you have been wondering why you feel so out of control around food - know that it is not your fault. Often the information that we receive around weight loss and how to think about food is not very helpful in helping us to build a positive relationship with food. I have created a 12 week online programme to help you to feel in control of your food choices and re-build your relationship with food. In this online programme to treat binge-eating, over-eating and emotional-eating you will learn a range of tools to change how you think about food, to develop new coping mechanisms and to look at and eat food in a completely different way. You can find out more about the programme here: www.thefoodtherapyclinic.com/online-binge-eating-treatment (I also offer a 5 day money back guarantee, so you can try the programme out risk free).
You are so successful in so many areas of your life. When it comes to your work, you are more motivated than most - you are really driven and you have done really well. When it comes to your personal life, you have a great and loving family and many amazing friends. Your house is always clean, people really like you, you achieve anything you put your mind to ... and when it comes to food, you really enjoy eating - mindfully and calmly your nourishing and delicious meals.
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