I wish I could count the number of times I sat clenching my fists, gritting my teeth and using any manner of force, will power and sheer brute-strength to resist cravings for certain foods, only to discover much later that “resistance” really is futile. If you’re anything like I was, this will likely sound familiar:
It starts innocently enough most times. A little nibble here, a dip of the finger there…
…then before long, the flood gates open and within minutes you find yourself staring in shock at the bottom of an empty bowl, stunned at how little control you seemed to have over the actions that just transpired
For a long time, struggling with cravings felt like a living horror flick from which I couldn’t escape. Constantly feeling bombarded by “forbidden foods,” I wrestled internally for a very long time before I finally figured out the tools to handle my emotional eating and food obsessions.
It didn’t feel “fair,” when I would look around me and see prom queens kicking back bacon double cheeseburgers and then bouncing off like they had all the energy in the world. They didn’t seem to constantly have food on the brain and they were eating 10 times worse than I was.
I’m happy to say, those food-obsessed days are finally behind me and freedom feels great!
But it didn’t happen over night.
I’ve spent thousands of hours studying, trying, butting my head against the wall, falling down then pulling myself up again until finally coming to the realization that I had been missing a few very important pieces of information and tools to handle the situation. Once I discovered these, I finally had what it took to overcome my food obsessions and cravings once and for all.
We’ve outlined many of the steps of that journey and built in the tools that were discovered along the way in our upcoming program “A Diva’s Survival Guide to Cravings and Emotional Eating”. We hope to release this program next week, so stay tuned!
Today we’re going to share a little something we didn’t include in that program, but has nonetheless had a profound impact on helping me confront my relationship with food.
Why do you eat?
Sounds simple enough, but really, why do you eat?
You eat to fuel your body and have the energy you need to function well, right?
In a perfect world it might stop at that, however, few people actually realize that one of the very biggest reasons we eat is to experience sensation!
If we truly ate to fuel ourselves and get the energy we needed, we’d be much more practical about our food choices, and have way less eating disorders out there. Just think of the shelves and shelves of recipe books in the world, with all manner of shapes, colors, sizes, names and tricks designed to tempt us into foods with the promise of sensation as the reward!
And yet, we know very well that the sensations we get from food, while at times pleasurable, are still of a low grade compared to something like enthusiasm, excitement, love or passion for something more substantial than a slab of cheesecake. Foods that offer sensation at the price of addiction easily drive you into a cycle of dependency.
It’s important to understand that the very ability to perceive anything in the first place comes from you! It is you!
Think about that for a second.
The flavor and perception of sensation (the exciting part) is in YOU, not the food itself! If it was in the food itself, we’d all have the same reaction to the same foods. But it doesn’t work that way.
Any hypnotist knows that you can get a person to go through just about any physiological reaction in the body, simply by imposing commands on the person at a subconscious level.
You could hypnotize a person to have a very violent reaction to specific foods, for example. These are things that are controllable within the person, and are not affected by controlling the food itself.
Fortunately, you don’t need hypnotism or somebody else’s subconscious commands to produce these kind of effects. You can produce them yourself with nothing more than the simple desire to make it happen! You can create any sensation in your body you wish, just by deciding to experience it. That’s what visualization is all about. That’s what hypnotists and therapists make a fortune applying on their patients.
You can experience serenity, joy, fear, excitement, seduction and intense pleasure just by closing your eyes and creating those sensations within you. Just think about something that excites you, and you’ll start to feel excited. Just like mentioning the idea of biting into a lemon is enough to make most people pucker and salivate as if the lemon were right there!
Do you see the possibility of what this could mean for you?
I’ve always insisted that the pursuit of health is about a whole lot more than food. I mean, if people can cure themselves of cancer by watching old comedy flicks, surely we can overcome some insatiable chocolate cravings with a bit of imagination and creative thought!
The sensations you’re getting from your food are actually a very low-grade sensation compared to the sensations of playfulness, joy, enthusiasm or exhilaration that can be gotten from being actively engaged in life. These sensations offer a much deeper level of satisfaction and stimulation, and don’t disappear when you’ve taken the last bite! You can’t get indigestion from having too great of an imagination!
Get your head out of your cereal bowl and set your sites on the stars, the flowers, and the people and places around you! Eat for the sake of fueling your body, and rediscover the pleasure of sensation and perceptions in things that will not bring your body down or get you stuck in a pattern of cravings and emotional eating.
Just play a bit more, take food a bit less “seriously” and start having fun experiencing life for what it has to offer. In no time you’ll see how cravings and food obsessions just run by the boards effortlessly.
More from Tera Warner from theRawDivas.com >>
