It’s The Holidays…: Try this food awareness exercise to learn to prevent overeating

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While the holidays bring many wonderful times, we can’t deny the challenges of this season for those of us who are working hard to lose weight or maintain our weight loss.

We encounter food, mostly the fattening kind, in our path at every turn, and most of us are stressed by the pressures of planning for holiday celebrations. What a combination for trouble.

At The FACE WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAM we know that it is not realistic or helpful to forbid yourself all treats during the holidays. At the same time, we are aware that for many people struggling to lose weight after weight loss surgery or without surgery, it seems that with that first bite of candy we are off and running and eating way too much. We know the goal is to be able to eat a portion of candy that is enjoyable and satisfying, yet does not lead to overeating or binging.

Try this food awareness exercise to learn how to prevent overeating.

Take out a piece of your favorite holiday chocolate candy; the size of a Hershey Kiss is a good amount. Examine it, checking out the color, texture, shape. Outline it with your eyes. Pick it up if you want and look at it from all sides and angles. What sensations, thoughts, and feelings come up as you examine this food? Think about the time in your life when this first became such a pleasurable food. What do you like about chocolate? Where do you gain satisfaction- mouth or stomach? When do you usually eat this food? What do you usually say to yourself when you eat this food? Put the chocolate up to your nose and smell it. Is it an enjoyable smell? Lick it several times and then put a piece of it in your mouth. Let it rest on your tongue with your mouth closed. As the chocolate warms and may begin to melt in your mouth, suck out the flavor and let it slide down your throat. Now check your mouth for an aftertaste. Explore your mouth with your tongue for any lingering sensations.

Close your eyes and reflect on how satisfying just one, slow bite of chocolate can be. It often really doesn’t take that much food to experience a high level of satisfaction and enjoyment. During the holidays when chocolate treats and candy are so plentiful, remembering to eat with this kind of awareness can help you prevent overeating.

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The Mindset to Make Healthy Food Choices

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We talk a lot in the weight loss world about making “healthy” choices. What helps us to be able to make healthy choices? Often, we don’t feel like we’re making choices at all. We walk into the kitchen and find ourselves eating our 2nd muffin before we even know what happened. Or, we are in the grocery store thinking we need to avoid the candy aisle and the next thing we know we are in the car devouring a bag of peanut butter cups. What happened? That is an essential question.  We need to figure out exactly what happened so that we can be in charge of those choices, rather than feeling controlled by our “bad” decisions and compulsive eating. 

For many of us, what happened goes something like this:  As we walked into the kitchen and saw the plate of muffins, many thoughts bombarded us in a flash. “Ohhh,  muffins, yumm, but I shouldn’t eat those, there are so many calories in each one, and I will be ‘bad’ if I eat them. Don’t eat any, it’s bad for you. I should be ‘good’— try to be good.” Then another voice chimes in.  “I want what I want when I want it.  It tastes good and I need it now.”  Suddenly, I am feeling angry that I can’t eat the muffins and everyone else can, and I really want it, and I hate these decisions and there is a “civil war” in my mind, and …. You get the idea.  Already the 2nd muffin is in the mouth and being eaten quickly because we are feeling too guilty to enjoy it fully.

In order to conquer the inner battle that leads to unhealthy choices it is essential to become aware of these thoughts and be able to recognize and hear them as they are happening.  We call this inner dialogue self talk. It is both possible and necessary to detect these often unconscious thoughts.  We can focus our attention on what is going on in our mind and how we are talking to ourselves. Get a pad or notebook and have it handy for jotting down these thoughts as you bring them to you consciousness. It may be after the fact at first, reflecting as you are coming out of an episode of overeating, or as you are struggling to decide what to eat or not to eat.

After we have become more familiar with the negative self talk that generates unhealthy choices, we can learn to reframe these thoughts to be a supportive and productive aide to ourselves in making healthy and satisfying food choices.

Please Visit our website at www.faceweightloss.com

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Positive Coping for the Darker Days of Fall and Winter

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It is getting dark earlier these days, and with the switch away from daylight savings time, the goblins of our minds are coming out more and more. With darkness descending when it seems as if it’s still afternoon, the lure of the leftover butterfingers from Halloween often trip us up.

It is well known that many people react to the diminishing daylight with feelings of depression and low energy, and with a lack of enthusiasm and interest in taking care of themselves. It has actually been identified that an increase in cravings for sugar and carbohydrates accompanies these seasonal mood changes, as well as a decrease in activity level. The sense of the world closing in seems to come abruptly as daylight shortens in the fall, and our coping mechanisms for making it through the darker winter months are rusty.

What can we do? How can we comfort ourselves and lift our mood and energy as the darkness descends without turning to food?

In the summer we find easier answers when outdoor activities such as walking with a friend around the park or playing on a company softball team are all beckoning to us. At this time of year we have to move the party indoors (or at least a well-lit playing field if it’s still warm out.) In our tele-groups in which we help people learn to stop emotional eating, we ask participants to make a list of activities that provide comfort in dark times besides eating. For some people their image involves talking with a good friend, while sharing a cozy fire. For others, playing monopoly or scrabble is their cup of tea. And for others, participating in community affairs offers a respite from aloneness and the urge to fill the space with food.

Think about what you enjoy and have been enjoying in the summer months, and how you can adapt these activities to evenings that are long and dark. Pick one activity off your list and make a plan to make it happen today. Many people find that once they are home and it is dark, it is difficult to take action or go out again. It’s a good idea to make these plans while it’s still light out.

Let me know how it goes and what you discover about coping with the darker days without turning to the old patterns of overeating.

Joan Swerdlow-Brandt, MSW

www.faceweightloss.com

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My Story

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I began dieting at the age of 8, and by the time I went to one of the first Weight Watchers groups started by Jean Nidetch in a loft in Little Neck, N.Y. as a teenager I had already lost and gained 60 pounds.

By the time I was in my mid 20s I was consumed by the struggle to lose weight and the feelings of shame about being too fat. I was fortunate to discover the book Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach when it came out in 1978 and I immediately created a support group with another psychologist to explore the radical idea that dieting was actually the problem, not the solution. It became obvious that years of dieting had led me to feel deprived and I was caught in the diet–binge cycle.

I came to understand that there were emotional connections to my overeating and body image issues. With the help of that first wave of anti-dieting approaches, such as The Psychologists Eat Anything Diet by Leonard Pearson, I was able to become a normal eater, lose a healthy amount of weight, and more importantly learn how to keep the pounds off.

We developed The FACE® Weight Loss Program in 1980 to offer the successful strategies and skills that had helped me to become a comfortable eater and maintain my goal weight. Over the years our program has helped thousands of people to permanently restructure their relationship to food and weight.

For some people, it means learning to eat when hungry, stop eating when satisfied, and to examine the emotional connections to food and weight in a safe and supportive environment. For others it means learning to work more sensibly with a structured diet, ultimately making it one’s own, and avoiding the deprivation-binge cycle.

For those who are severely obese, it may mean helping them decide if weight loss surgery is right for them, and helping them re-develop a new comfortable eating pattern that enhances the success of the surgery. Wherever you are in the weight loss journey, we can help you make the permanent changes you need to in order to live your life fully.

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