Day One Hundred and Forty One!!!!!

Two ways emotion effects weight loss:

1. Emotion can drive our food choices, as well as the bad habits that support your food choices. So, the set up is really important in regards to whatever that emotionally driven habit is. So, for example, I used to have a snack cupboard that needed to be filled at all times with chocolate. My habit was; as soon as I felt empty and/or I had absolutely nothing to do, and/or I had something to do, I went to the snack cupboard. The feeling of the emotional need would prompt my immediate desire to go to the snack cupboard to either soothe myself or celebrate.
2. The second way emotion effects weight loss is how we feel about ourselves. We have a tendency to ‘wear’ our emotion. When we have bad feelings about ourselves we actually activate the reward centre of our brain creating a nasty cycle of eating badly to get that reward, and then feeling badly that we got that reward. This often happens with any kind of addiction. So, it doesn't have to be food, it can be anything. Unfortunately, a lot of the time what happens is that people will just move from one addiction to another, like for example cutting out smoking and then turning to food. An important realization is, that we can actually change our mood by what it is that we think and what it is that we do. When we feel stuck, it means that it ‘feels like’ we don’t have the ability to create change, we get caught in bad feelings, which spins that nasty cycle wheel again. 

There is something called a gratitude journal and the point of keeping a gratitude journal is to force you into being able to identify the things that you experience during your day that you are grateful for. The point of that, is to increase your affection for your self, your experiences of your daily living, the people you are in relationship with, the things that you do well, the things that make you proud. So that, in turn you increase your feeling of daily pleasure and success, and pleasure is that reward centre of the brain. So, being able to get in touch with our experiences that make us grateful, gets us in touch with that reward centre which releases serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins.  


So, shifting the focus from bad feelings to good feelings helps to neutralize the driving force of the habits that lead to bad food choices and the wearing of bad feelings. Negatives are sticky and it takes ten positives to overcome one negative. Those negatives are powerful driving forces. We don’t like feeling negative feelings so we immediately direct ourselves to an avoidance tactic in order to be able to turn on the pleasure centre of the brain as the ultimate avoidance strategy. 


This is how it is that your brain is wired, the more negative self talk you have, the more you will be driven to the snack cupboard. The snack cupboard was my set up of my environment to support my avoidance habits. So, part of grabbing ahold of your emotional connection with food is also about unravelling those habits and how you set up your environment to support them. 


It is really important to be able to identify exactly how it is that you have set yourself up to fail. How it is that you set yourself up, is the most important factor to understanding the changes that you need to make. It really is all about the set up.