Repetitive Thoughts and Eating Habits

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Related Episodes:

• Thought Habits and Your Results
• How an Eating Habit Coach Helps
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Full Episode Transcript:

Repetitive Thoughts and Eating Habits

 

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. This podcast episode topic was actually inspired by a conversation that I had with a good friend yesterday while running. So we talked a little bit about how his thoughts will affect his race performance.

Now, if you’ve been a listener for a while, you’ve heard me talk about how our thoughts cause how we feel or our emotions, and then our emotions affect our behaviors. Behaviors being our actions, reactions, or inactions. And then of course there’s something that always results from our actions, reactions or inactions.

This concept is pretty much an agreed upon universal concept over the years. It even goes back to Roman Empire days. Probably even before then.

Before I really dive into this fascinating topic, I want to tell you about an upcoming free virtual workshop I’m hosting on August 17th at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. You’re going to want to be there especially if you find yourself emotionally eating, because I’m giving you a creative tool for emotional eating.

This workshop is going to be a little bit different than other ones that I’ve hosted, because it’s going to be kind of fun. The other ones were definitely more educational and enlightening, but this one you’re going to get a little bit creative. And you’re going to start to break your emotional eating habit or if it’s not a habit yet, you’ll be able to stop it in its tracks before it becomes a habit.

So, sometimes the word “creative” scares people a little, because they feel that that means they need to be creative themselves or they need to be an artist, but that’s not the case with this. If you know how to write or if you know how to scribble or color a little bit, that is all the creativity that you need to have.

In this free virtual workshop, I’m going to be teaching you a tool that is easy and fun to use to help you to be able to break that link between feeling and emotion and reacting to it automatically with eating. When you practice this tool, it not only breaks the emotional eating habit, but you also get an additional benefit of managing your emotions better.

This also means experiencing positive emotions more fully. It means that your negative emotions won’t feel as badly to you either. I don’t know about you but I think that is a win-win situation. So you’re not going to want to miss this free workshop if you emotionally eat.

Alright, so back to thoughts ultimately leading to our results. Again, our thoughts cause us to feel a certain emotion, which then drives our actions, reactions or inactions, and then something results from that. There is some sort of an outcome.

Becuase eating habits are just eating behaviors that have become more automatic due to frequency and several other factors, that means that your thoughts play a large role. Your thoughts ended up ultimately leading to the eating behaviors that then became an eating habit. Your thoughts also can keep you stuck in an eating habit. I’m going to explain why in this episode.

First, I just want to explain what exactly thoughts are. I know that you know what thoughts are, but I want to point out that there’s another way of looking at thoughts that will ultimately help you with anything in life, but definitely with eating habits.

So thoughts are just sentences in your head. They’re just sentences or ideas that your brain likes to make you aware of. Another way to look at it is that they’re just suggestions. They are not all truths. They’re considered to be opinions or judgments.

The good news about that is that you can decide if you want to keep a thought or not. You can decide if you want that thought to be your truth or not.

So, if a thought that your brain is suggesting to you doesn’t make you feel the way you want to feel, do what you want to do, or accomplish what you want to accomplish, you can decide that you don’t want to believe that thought. Or you can change it to something that’s more believable that better serves you and makes you feel the way you want to feel in order to do the things you want to do or not do, and have the result that you want.

In the case of my friend and the conversation that we had yesterday, he wants to run an upcoming 5K at a certain pace and he hadn’t run this pace in a year. He is a very fast runner and is perfectly capable of running this 5K pace that he wants to run, so for him, in order to actually run this pace, he needs to feel a certain way before and during the race. And in order to feel a certain way, he needs to think a thought or several thoughts that will make him feel that way.

Now how this all relates back to eating habits is that if you want to change an eating behavior that you currently have that you don’t like, you’re going to have to have the feeling that will help you to do so, to help you with the actions or inactions. And in order to have that feeling, you’re going to have to have the thought or thoughts that will create that feeling.

Now, imagine if you had lots of thoughts that created that feeling, to make it easier to do the behavior that you want to do as far as eating. That would be super helpful, right?

Now conversely, if you feel like you are stuck in an eating behavior and it’s become a habit, a large part of what’s keeping you there is your thoughts. The thoughts you’re having are generating a certain feeling or emotion in your body, that keeps you stuck in that eating behavior.

Now with eating habits, there also is a certain component of automaticity that may feel very much like it’s out of your control, but a large part is in your control. And you can’t start to change that automaticity until you take charge of what you do have control over. And there are other things that you can have control over besides just your thoughts, which is something that I help my clients with, in addition to the thoughts and feelings part of it.

So interestingly, your brain likes to create more of the same. That’s how our human brains feel the safest. So, your brain actually likes to keep you doing the things that you’ve already been doing. It also likes to keep thinking the things that it has already been thinking.

In fact, there’s an article out there that was published in 2005 by the National Science Foundation and I can’t actually find this article anywhere, however I found where the article was referenced several times, and unfortunately there is no actual link to the article. But apparently this article states that the average person has 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts per day. 80% of those are what would be defined as negative and 95% of those thoughts are repetitive thoughts from the day before.

So first, that’s a lot of thoughts per day. Although, I wonder how many of them occur at night when you’re trying to fall asleep. Too many.

So, let’s just say that YOU specifically have 40,000 thoughts per day and 95% of those thoughts you had yesterday and 80% of them were negative. So that means our brain loves repeating negative thoughts. How fascinating. So if you have a negative thought about yourself, your eating habits, your body weight, your capabilities with your eating habits or weight loss, your brain is going to keep repeating this thought.

And remember, our thoughts create how we feel and how we feel determines our behaviors. Our behaviors then result in something.

Now, I do find it interesting that we still accomplish great things despite all of this, so imagine how much you can accomplish if you even just change some of those thoughts even a little bit. Change some of them to something more positive, that generates a more positive emotion, that is more in line with the actions that you want to be taking to create the results you want.

So, if that many of your thoughts are negative and repetitive, and you feel like you’ve been stuck in an eating habit that you don’t like, there’s a very good likelihood that it’s because of some negative repetitive thoughts.

For example, if you’re an emotional eater, you may find yourself thinking that you can’t handle your emotions. Or you might find yourself thinking that food is the only thing that helps your emotions. Even if you don’t want to be thinking these things, your brain is probably feeding you thoughts similar to these that are keeping you stuck in that emotional eating habit.

Your brain can be really sneaky. And remember, your brain is just giving you suggestions to keep you exactly the same. Our human brains don’t like change. So, it’s going to keep feeding you thoughts to keep you right where you are. And the reason why you may have gotten into emotional eating in the first place, is just because of the human brain as well and food providing that little bit of short-term pleasure to take away some of the discomfort.

This is part of the motivational triad, which you’ve probably heard me mention multiple times in my podcast.

Now, if you dig a little bit, you might be able to come up with some of the repetitive thoughts that may be influencing your eating behaviors or keeping you stuck in certain eating habits. For some, it’s easy to find those thoughts, for others it’s not so easy.

By the way, this is what I help you with as a coach, which is helping you to become aware of thoughts that are creating certain feelings that are driving your actions and determining your results. And then helping you to decide if you want to keep that thought or change it to something that’s going to serve you better.

And if you change it to something that’s going to serve you better, you need to be able to believe this thought, right? We don’t just repeat positive affirmations that are not believable. We need to find a thought that is believable that does feel true to some extent and help to prove that thought true. But I help you with this with coaching. You don’t have to do this on your own.

So, thoughts are a reason why some people have such a difficult time changing their eating behaviors or habits. Because they don’t realize that it’s the underlying thoughts that may be keeping them stuck there, or that are keeping them stuck there. And even if they do realize, they don’t know what thoughts of theirs exactly or what to do next after they’ve identified them.

But again, that’s something that I help you with as an eating habit and weight loss coach. It’s not just the action steps, but also really addressing the underlying thoughts and helping with those feelings that play a role in eating behaviors and also with weight loss.

Let’s bring it back to those 10s of thousands of thoughts per day that you have and 95% of those being repetitive thoughts, if that’s accurate of course.

If thoughts are just sentences in your head that your brain likes to offer to you and they are not the truth, that means they’re optional right? They’re optional for you to believe. They’re optional for you to keep. And there’s a difference between default thinking and intentional thinking.

Default thinking is going to be those thoughts that your brain just likes to feed you automatically. Many of those again are going to be repetitive thoughts or negative thoughts. Intentional thinking is when you then decide what you’d rather think. So, your default thought is the first thought you have and the intentional thought is the second thought you have. Does that make sense?

So basically, you’re not responsible for your first thought, your default thought that your brain offers you. You are responsible for your second thought, the intentional thought. I just like that so much, because often we can get really hard on ourselves for those default thoughts we have.

We can feel badly but if you think of it as your brain is just giving you this suggestion and it’s not necessarily what you want to be believing or thinking, you can decide if you want to keep that thought or not. And any new thought you have is your intentional thought. That’s the one that you’re responsible for. Therefore, if you’re going to have some repetitive thoughts, wouldn’t you rather they be the thoughts that you chose, rather than those default thoughts that your brain offered to you? I would think so.

Alright, so I can’t teach how to think more intentionally or to choose thoughts that are more in alignment with the results you want to create, because that’s very individualized and that’s what coaching is for. But, sign up for a free consult with me, and we can talk a little bit more about this especially if you’re curious about what working together can do for you as far as changing your eating habits for life. Or with losing weight and actually keeping it off, while still eating foods you like to eat and not going all day feeling hungry.

Just a little something on my approach to changing your eating habits and losing weight if that’s a personal goal too, is that I don’t have you do anything I wouldn’t want to do. I also like to make things as easy as possible for you, because I know you’re busy, just as I am, and it’s way easier to follow through on things when they’re easy.

So, working together to hit your goals, whether they be to break an emotional eating habit, lose 30 lbs., stop overeating sugar and carbs, is not going to be as difficult as you’re currently thinking it will be. Even the thoughts and feelings part of it is easier than you might be currently believing. So don’t let a fear of failure or difficulty stop you from pursuing what you want for yourself. Don’t let it stop you from the future you want versus the current path you are going. Don’t let it stop you from feeling your best right now.

Alright? So, book a free consult by clicking the button below:

Also, be sure to grab your spot for the free virtual workshop where you’re going to get a creative tool to help you significantly with emotional eating. We will use this tool together during the workshop, so be sure to bring a notepad or notebook, as well as a pen or pencil, and also bring some colored pencils, crayons, markers, whatever creative tools you have as well. This is going to be fun. You are not going to be on video, so don’t worry.

Okay, thanks for listening, take care and I’ll talk with you next week.