I have a simple, actionable blog post for you this week. I like to call it “the simple tweak that makes all the difference” 🙂
Before I tell you what it is, I want you to imagine you’re going to a party this weekend where you know there will be lots of food.
Typically, when we have something social that involves food, we do one of a few things:
- We eat “healthy” or “perfectly” during the week to save up for the event. (More on that here)
- We use the event as a “cheat” day. (See info on that here)
- We stress about it, think about it all week and work ourselves into a frenzy about what we’ll eat/not eat. (Find help on that here)
And come time for the event, we usually go in saying something like:
“Don’t eat alot! Don’t eat too many desserts! Steer clear of the appetizers! Don’t binge! Don’t have more than one handful of chips!”
We go in with the mindset of “don’t eat that, don’t eat that, don’t eat that!” (In some form or fashion)
And what happens as soon as we tell ourselves NOT to eat something?
It’s all we can think about.
I STILL am this way (even after 15+ years of being on this path!) As soon as I tell myself “don’t eat that brownie”, it becomes the sole focus of my existence to want that brownie…
So what’s the tweak that can make a difference?
Using this mantra instead:
“Eat balanced, eat balanced, eat balanced”.
I relied on this ALL the time when I first started working on getting out of the diet and binge cycle.
Whenever I had a party, an event, a dinner outing, or something else that was social and involved food (which is almost everything!), I would recite this to myself a million times during the time I was out.
As soon as I heard myself saying “don’t eat ABC” (which is typically a knee-jerk reaction at first!), I replaced it with “how can I eat balanced?”.
It helped shift it from a white-knuckle, willpower based approach to a softer, gentler way of handling the situation.
So, try it out…
Think of the next party, event or outing you have. When those default “do not eat X” tapes come up, replace it with “eat balanced” or “how can I eat balanced” and see what happens!
Let me know how your experiment turns out in the comments below 🙂
