Re-Write Your Eating Habits Story

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Related Episodes:

• Repetitive Thoughts and Eating Habits
• How Your Childhood Affects Eating Habits Now
• Thought Habits and Your Results

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Full Episode Transcript:

Re-Write Your Eating Habits Story

 Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I’m pretty excited to bring you this episode, because I know that you’ll find it to be an incredible useful tool in your life for virtually anything, but definitely for eating habits. When I first learned this about 2 years ago, it has impacted my life so greatly in many ways and because of that, I want to share it with you.

Now, what exactly do I mean by rewriting your eating habits story?

Your story is what you’ve been telling yourself about yourself. So your eating habits story is what you’ve been telling yourself about your eating habits. Now what you’ve been telling yourself isn’t necessarily the truth, it’s just your opinion, your belief.

Your brain is a very tricky organ though and likes to keep you safe and keep you the same. Because of this, your brain will be more likely to think thoughts that will keep you safe and keep you the same. So your brain likes to continue telling you the same thing about yourself.

Now your brain may think that it’s doing the right thing, but that’s not necessarily the case. You have to remember that your brain’s primary objective is just to keep you alive and keep you reproducing to keep the human species alive.

The story about yourself came about from something in your past. That can be in your childhood, that can be of just a few years ago or even just a few months ago.

Your brain will also look for evidence of why that belief or story that you had about yourself is indeed true. So anything that occurs once you already have that story about yourself, will just prove to your brain that that belief was true.

That’s just because your brain is actively looking for evidence because it wants to keep that story, to keep you exactly the same as you are. I hope that makes sense, I’m trying to simplify this as much as possible.

So, regarding eating habits, at some point you had a certain belief about yourself regarding your eating habits, and your brain has been looking for evidence to ensure that this belief is true in order to keep you thinking and doing the same thing. To keep you the same, to keep you safe, or at least what your brain believes is safe.

Now, to re-write your eating habits story, we’re going to be talking about your thoughts, or the way you think about people, things, circumstances, etc. The way you think about these things makes you feel a certain way. Your feelings or emotions always drive your behaviors. Behaviors are just actions, reactions, or inaction. And then of course those behaviors always result in something.

So, if you want to change something in your life, meaning if you want a different result or a specific result in your life, it starts with your thoughts, your mindset, how you think about yourself or something else or someone else.

To re-write your eating habits story, we’re going to focus on your thoughts about yourself and your eating habits. More specifically, statements that start with “I” or “I am”. Meaning, the story you have been telling yourself about yourself for a period of time. That period of time could be a few months, a few years, or your entire life. Typically, it’s for a very long period of time such as your entire life or most of your life.

Your current eating habits story is just thoughts about yourself and your eating habits. These thoughts or beliefs are ultimately affecting your feelings, behaviors, and results in your life.

Let me give you an example of a current belief and the result that it creates. This will actually be an example not related to eating habits, but then I’ll give an example of how to re-write your eating habits story.

And just a note, belief is another word for a thought. Opinion and judgments are also words that are used interchangeably for thoughts and beliefs.

Let’s just say that you have a social anxiety. You hate walking into a room full of people and you have the thought, “I’m awkward and everyone will see that and think I’m weird.” I actually used to be this way when I was really young.

So, if you tell yourself that story before going to a social event, how would that make you feel? You’d probably feel something like awkward, uncomfortable, self-conscious. Let’s just choose self-conscious as the emotion that this belief produces in your body. When you’re self-conscious when you walk into a room of people, what are your behaviors?

Your behaviors might be to walk very tentatively, maybe fix your outfit multiple times, not really smile too much, maybe even start sweating a little bit and your face starts turning a little pink. You also might not approach anyone, so there’s an inaction.

So, with all of these behaviors, what result do you think you’re going to have? You’re more likely going to come across to at least some of the people in the room as awkward, and they might be looking at you because of that. Interesting how your thoughts about yourself ultimately create your results, right?

Now let’s just say you rewrite your story to what you’d like for it to be like. Let’s say your new story before walking into the room is, “I am a good conversationalist and people will see that”. With a thought like that, how do you think you might feel inside? Maybe more of a feeling like calm, or confident.

Let’s just say that you felt more calm walking into that room. What would your behaviors be?

Probably walking in in a more relaxed and natural way. Probably not fixing your outfit or your hair multiple times. Probably smiling a little bit more, certainly not sweating and having your face turned pink. You’d be a little bit more likely to say hello to people and look for a friendly face to strike up a little bit of conversation with.

And then with those behaviors, the results are going to be different as well. People will be more likely to think, “Hey she’s a really good conversationalist”, or “I really enjoyed chatting with her. I’m going to reach out to her to chat again.” So do you how your story about yourself, meaning your thoughts or beliefs about yourself, will affect how you feel, how you behave, and the results from that? Also, notice how the results prove the thought, the story true?

Okay, so let’s get into how to rewrite your eating habits story. I’m going favorite example. Let’s say that you have the current story, “I am addicted to sugar.”

That’s your belief about yourself and your eating habit involving sugar. If you have thought or if you do currently have this thought or belief about yourself, how does that make you feel? Even if you felt that this was 100% true, how does that thought make you feel? Or if you don’t have that thought as part of your eating habits story, if you did have that thought, how do you think that would make you feel?

There are lots of different emotions that can occur because of this thought and that’s because we all have different bodies, right?

Emotions are just sensations or vibrations in your body. This thought might cause a feeling such as self-pity, despair, or powerlessness, maybe even weak or hopeless. It can make you feel out of control or stuck…yes, those are emotions as well.

Let’s choose self-pity as the emotion that this eating habits story creates. So, if you have the thought “I’m addicted to sugar” and that makes you feel pity for yourself, what do you think your behaviors are going to be?

Well, as an eating habit coach, I know that emotional eating plays a really large role in eating habits that career women usually want to break. And in this case a feeling of self-pity, is not a good feeling, it’s pretty uncomfortable, and can definitely lead to emotional eating to take away that discomfort. So that feeling of self-pity can cause you to then eat more sugar.

Self-pity is not a great motivator to help you get the help you need in order to decrease your sugar intake and break that sugar habit. The inaction might be that you don’t seek out and go forth with more help for this.

Also, every time you see about sugar, your brain may freak out a little bit and start to get very stressed and try to use willpower to resist the urge to eat the sugar. Which is not an effective way. There’s a much better way to deal with urges and cravings, which my clients know and have so much success with.

So then all of these behaviors are going to produce what result? Eating more sugar, thereby proving the story true, which is exactly what your brain wants. Because it’ll keep you exactly the same. Remember your brain thinks keeping you the same means keeping you safe.

Now, let’s rewrite your eating habits story for this one. I recommend that you think somewhat into your future and picture yourself where you’d like to be as far as this sugar habit. It may be something like, “I’m able to be around sugar and not overdo it,” then that would be your story. Your new belief about yourself and your eating habits.

Next, think about how this story would make you feel in your body. It could be a feeling such as relief, confidence, self-control. So let’s just choose a feeling of confidence as the feeling that is now present in your body because of this new story. When you feel confident and are around sugar, what do you think will be less likely to occur?

You’ll probably be less likely to overdo it with the sugar. Maybe you’ll just take one cookie and walk away, without taking 6 cookies. Maybe you won’t even take a cookie, because you know you’ll be having ice cream a little later on. So you still get to enjoy the sugar if you want to, but you’re more likely to be in control when you have a feeling like confidence in your body. And then your result will be that you are able to be around sugar and not overdo it.

So just to summarize How to rewrite your eating habits story. Take your current belief about yourself regarding your eating habits. Just choose one to start with. Determine how that thought or that story makes you feel. And then think about how you behave when you’re feeling that way. Meaning, what you do or don’t do. And then, think about the results that gets you.

To create a new eating habit story or to rewrite your eating habits story to one that better serves you, you are going to create a new belief about your eating habits. Basically where you’d like to be. Try to just keep it to one sentence.

Then you’re going to envision yourself and think that thought about yourself and your eating habits and see how it feels in your body. Name that feeling or emotion. Then you’ll think about your behaviors if you’re feeling that emotion, or feeling that way. Write down those behaviors and from those, think about the one result that you’ll create because of those behaviors.

This result you’ll find is in alignment with the thought, your new eating habits story. Same thing goes for your current eating habits story. Your current result is in alignment with your current thought, your current eating habits story.

Alright, so give this one a try. This is all an example of part of coaching. So an important piece of coaching is not just guiding you with your actions, but also helping you change the way you see yourself and see other things or circumstances.

Because when you change the way you see yourself or other circumstances or even other people or the number on the scale, you feel differently. When you feel differently, you do differently. When you do differently, you have different results. And we can change any part of that sequence with coaching.

So if you’re struggling with your emotions such as with emotional eating, we can work on a couple of things. We can work on the emotions themselves, or the thoughts that create the emotions. If you’re struggling with your behaviors, then we can work on the thoughts and the emotions behind the behaviors.

And then certainly, in order to create different results for you, such as weight loss results or eating habit results, we can work on your thoughts, your feelings or emotions, and your actions, reactions or inactions.

Also, there are other things like your work schedule, other people, social events where there might be food….those are circumstances and we sometimes don’t have full control over circumstances, but there are lots of things that we can control.

So I just want you to know, that you aren’t a lost cause. There are lots of different ways that you can create different results in your life regarding eating habits and weight loss all for the purpose of better overall physical and emotional health. Because that’s what it’s all about, my career woman.

Alright, thanks for listening. Take care and I’ll talk with you next week.