I have many memories of struggling with food over the holidays.
When I was single, I feared having food (specifically candy) in the house. At Halloween time I would buy a bag of candy my thought was to use it on Halloween, but that never happened. I always ate it. It wasn’t that I just ate it. I ate it all and felt so ashamed. I was convinced that I could not stop.
I came up with a plan…
I would go to the gym on Halloween night. I don’t know if you have been to the gym on Halloween night- there are not many people there. I thought it was the only way that I could stop myself from overeating on candy. If I was not home to give out candy, they I would not have to buy the candy. It was my way of not binging on candy. It worked if I did not buy the candy.
When I returned home from the gym, I would sneak into the house, go upstairs, and watch television with the lights out so no one would knock on my door. I did not feel brave enough to tell them I had no candy, I wanted to avoid the whole scene.
I then married a man who loved to give out candy on Halloween. He bought the candy and did not open the bag before Halloween. On Halloween he ate few pieces and took the rest to the office to share with his co-workers.
I have learned that it is ok to have candy in the house and I do not have to be afraid of it. It does not call my name like it used to. I used to feel compelled to eat the candy or any sweets if it was in the house. My head would say, you know you are going to eat it, just do it. I was convinced that I had no control over candy.
I learned about Intuitive Eating.
It took me time and effort to feel freedom with candy. It is doable. We now have candy in the house, and it does not call to me. I do not think about it, and I have it when I want it. It is not a struggle anymore.
I have been creating my newest program Peace with Food Over the Holidays and have been looking at what does help to release the grip food and sweets can have on us. Interestingly, it is not all focused on how to manage food. Food is one of the many components that lead to peace with food.
In order to have Peace with Food Over the Holidays we need to look at:
Physical: How to look at food/candy differently. There are simple tweaks that can make you feel so much more successful.
Emotional- How to deal with emotions that surely come up over the holiday season.
Mental: Those thoughts about food can be overwhelming. Finding some tools to manage them is critical.
Lifestyle/Social: Learning how to say no and set boundaries is crucial.
Mindfulness: How can you get quiet with yourself when there are so many competing priorities AND you are not one of them?
Self-Love: What do you really need? If you were going to be loving to yourself, what would you do?
Notice that only one component is focused on the physical, which includes food! The reason why it feels so hard to put food in its place as nourishment is because we focus on food and generally it is on restricting food.
Food restriction does not work.
What works is bringing balance and synergy to all of the components. I will not lie to you; it does take effort to learn and practice this new way. It is worth it, and it does work.
As an end note…
I now happily give out candy to our neighbor kids. I do not feel afraid when my daughter brings home her Halloween candy. I have a piece and it is not a big deal.
Do you find you are already thinking about candy? It is front and center in the grocery stores. I have already heard stories of people buying candy in September and eating all of it.
This is your opportunity to look at this holiday season, which I lovingly call the Holiday Trifecta, differently. The holiday trifecta is the time between October 1 and January 1 where we can be tempted by food. This is 3 months of pressure, stress and overwhelm.
Here are some ways to handle food over the holiday season:
Don’t keep candy in the house?
Think you won’t overeat during a holiday meal and then despite your best intention you overeat to the point of feeling sick.
Plan to overeat this holiday and deal with it (weight gain) January 1 when you plan to go on your diet.
Plan to restrict your food intake over the holidays. Well, maybe not we all know how well that can work after the second week in October????.
The saying “failing to plan means you’re planning to fail” takes on a whole new meaning when we look at the holiday season. We think we will do it the RIGHT way (whatever that is) and not have problems with food.
The difficulty is the plan is around food not around all the areas that lead us to overeat. This is the season of the special foods, the one we do not have all year. The ones we wait all year for (hello Pumpkin Spiced Latte). We want a lot of the special food because we feel deprived of them the rest of the year.
This deprivation mimics when we are on a diet, and we say we can’t have something. We engage in diet type behavior all year when we don’t have these special foods and then at the holidays, we overeat them. One of my wins is to realize that we can have mashed potatoes anytime, it does not have to just be at Thanksgiving. Allowing the food when we want it makes it part of our normal routine.
To move through this time, it can be helpful to have a plan:
How will I address food?
How will I address my emotions?
How will I address my thoughts?
How will I address my social obligations, including family members?
How will I create peace?
How will I act in a loving way towards myself?
All the above questions lead to the overwhelm. This plan does not have to be vast, but it must be in the forefront of your mind.
There is a better way.
The starting spot can be answering the questions we addressed earlier. Make a conscious choice to make it a peaceful holiday season AND enjoy yourself.
Emotional eating is complicated. The diet industry would have you think that there a simple AND QUICK answer: dieting. If dieting would have worked people would not have to continue to look for the next best diet.
I get a lot of questions about emotional eating and overeating. Here are some of the most recent questions I have gotten.
“I cannot seem to quiet my mind for mindfulness practice. What can I do?”
Does your mind keep talking and talking to you? Saying, just eat that, just a little more.
You might try to actively stop it, and that doesn’t work.
You think you can’t be mindful, and you can’t seem to quiet your mind. That has to do with the thoughts that go on in your head, you can’t seem to quiet and also how to be more mindful.
The first thing I think of when we talk about mindfulness is meditation. Many people tell me they don’t know how to meditate. They think it’s a big struggle or a big hassle to meditate or they can’t find the time to meditate. Then they do not do it at all.
Meditation is that time to quiet your mind. It doesn’t have to take hours sitting in quiet with your hands in front of you and your eyes closed chanting, which I think is many people’s idea about meditation. Truthfully, meditation is simply closing your eyes and getting quiet.
There are many ways in meditation to focus on that quiet.
First, you can just close your eyes and just focus on breathing in and out. One technique is to literally say in your head, breathe in, breathe out as you actually breathe in and out. Your mind might start wandering off and thinking about things or worrying about stuff. I’ll just remind myself, okay, Kim, let’s come back to your breath, breathe in, breathe out. Just breathing in and breathing out. Noticing the breath is a really easy way to focus on meditation, it doesn’t have to be any harder than that.
Second, I recommend meditation apps that you can put on your phone. I love them because they give me hundreds of ways to meditate. I just flip through my app and see which one fits for me at that particular time. One that I like a lot is meditation where they just have a gong sound at every so often, and I’ll put it on for however many minutes I want to sit in the quiet.
Third, as you are in the quiet of your mind there will be thoughts that show up. I like to notice them and release them. Sometimes I will go down the rabbit hole of continuing with the thought and when I notice it, I quickly come back to focusing on my breath.
In meditation, it’s really about seeing what works for you. There’s no one way to do it.
Honestly, 100% of the time I feel better after I do some type of meditation and my mind is quieter.
The second question is “I feel frustrated that I can’t eat mindfully all the time. What can I do?”
I am not able to eat mindfully all the time, too. As I practice intuitive eating, I do it more and more often. Go easier on yourself, this is not a race where you have to do this immediately.
Being mindful with my eating is a process and it is a practice. It’s actually what they talk about with meditation as a meditation practice. This is really a mindfulness practice. What do we know about practice is we have to practice that. Just like basketball players have to practice their free throw shot, they have to practice, go into free throws, practice, and practice.
I love the affirmation:
I eat mindfully, more and more every day.
This change in your approach to food is a lifelong journey, we’re really running a marathon. This is not a sprint. There is no end.
The third question is “How do I accept my body when I do not think it looks okay?”
Do you think to yourself, how can I accept my body, it doesn’t look good? My body does not look the way it’s supposed to.
How is your body supposed to look?
We have been taught by the diet industry, models, magazines, television and our families that our bodies do not look right unless we are thin.
This is an opportunity to begin to think about your body differently, and have a different sense of your, your body and its purpose.
I love the affirmation:
I AM not my body.
Your body and your size are not WHO you are. The person you are is not your body size. It could be that your body is not allowing you to do the things you would like to do. That is a different statement. This requires a realistic look at what you can do and what you would like to do. Sometimes there is a grieving that our bodies do not perform in the way we would like them to do and that is a whole different conversation.
Accepting your body as it is, is a spiritual idea. Who am I really? What’s my purpose? And what am I here to do? Those are the bigger questions.
To be more in touch with myself, I like these affirmations:
I am not my body.
I am not, whatever shape my body is, is not me.
I am kind.
I am compassionate.
I am loving.
I am caring.
I love to laugh.
These affirmations are parts of me have nothing to do with my body. Those are all things that are positive about me, and they’re really who I am.
Nothing in my list has anything to do with my body size, my clothing size or the number on the scale.
I invite you to do to move out of the idea of not accepting your body and thinking there is something wrong with you and move into who you really are.
Start with the question I who am I? Take out your journal and write about this and see what comes up.
When I focus on those positives about who I really am, I feel better. I feel better about myself, and I feel better about my life. Then I come to the table differently and my intuitive eating is in alignment. Feeling good about yourself builds on itself.
The last question is, “I can’t come up with ways to take care of myself what can I do?”
It is pretty consistent that I get asked about self-care. Taking good care of yourself is often lacking.
One of the ways I like to introduce an idea of self-care is to star making a list of what you like to do. I have invited people to write down 100 things that you like to do. You might say, this is too hard to do. Let’s see how you can do this.
You can start making a list of things that you like to do.
They don’t have to be expensive or cost anything.
What did you used to do for fun?
What have you dreamed of doing?
What brings you joy?
It might feel challenging to do make your self-car list. To give you some ideas here are some of my self-care go-to’s.
I like to journal. I would love to journal more often.
I love to meditate. And it makes me feel good.
I like to be creative. I like to make things.
I like to go to the gym, and I’m at a gym that really fits for me.
I love going to the ocean.
I love listening to musicals.
I love going to the library.
Having my list of self-care is part of my overall wellness plan for myself. If you do not have a list, just start with one idea, because that will bring on other ideas. Write them down.
My other suggestion is to listen to what others do for fun and self-care. If you feel jealous about what they are doing, it probably means it needs to go on your list.
In conclusion, ending emotional eating has very little to do with food. We have become disconnected to our inner knowing about what we need. The inner knowing is how we start connecting to food as nourishment, our emotions, our thoughts and all the other components that make us ultimately experience overall wellness.
I often hear people say that all they want to do is lose weight and how different their life would be when they do lose that weight. I find people are then focused on the future and what will be rather than what is. They will call themselves names or let others column names and underneath the shame builds. The shame is what ultimately leads to further binge eating in the future. When you say “I need to lose weight” you’re saying that you’re not OK with yourself as you are. Shame is a core root emotion in overeating.
Focusing on our weight is focusing on the external (your body). Instead focusing on the internal is the way to get more connected with yourself to understand your body and your food. Focusing on your weight is putting judgments on yourself that you do not like who you are.
Truthfully, your weight is not who you are.
I have often heard people say, I am just telling the truth about myself. Accepting yourself as you are different than the subtle and not so subtle put downs of yourself. All of those negative statements and thoughts hold you back from a life of peace with food.
It can be hard to think about loving yourself. It also can be something you have never considered. Here are 4 techniques to help you love yourself and your body NOW…
Keep clothing that fits.
I challenge you to look for the clothes that you are saving for when you lose weight. This can bring up a lot of feelings, so good easy on yourself. These old clothes can keep you stuck in that diet/binge/shame cycle. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your clothes:
Do you own items that fit?
Do they look good on you?
Do you like them?
Act lovingly towards your body now.
I know it can be hard to love the body that you have when our society is so focused on looking differently than we look. The process of acting lovingly towards your body is healing to your heart and mind. It can go a long way to bring more balance into your life.
Take a bath
Walk down the street.
Use some scented lotion.
Affirm a healthy body.
See and affirm your body’s’ health. There are a lot of techniques out there to help guide you with affirmations and visualization. Loving where you are at helps you continue that health in the future. The whole concept of a health body has been hijacked by the weight loss industry ($58 billion industry). The statement “I am looking for health”, can be code for I need to lose weight.
Disconnect “health” from your body size. What is a health body to you, without mentioning size? What does that body feel like and how do it work for you.
Mindfulness is the best way to get become more loving of your body.
Being present in your body can be so tough when we have been taught and encouraged to deny our bodies. Being present in your body is the ultimate way to feed your soul and to feed your body. Practice mindfulness moment to moment with your breath.
In conclusion, being loving to your body sets you up for success.
This success shows up in feeling good about yourself and your body. Making the connection between your body and self-love is a crucial component to feeding your soul and nourishing your life.
Practice one (or many) of the options above and focus on the value of loving yourself as you are right now. The value of this experience is profound!
It is commonly thought that self-esteem increases when we lose weight. Yes, you can lose weight and you might feel better about yourself because of that.
Is your weight your barometer about how you feel about yourself?
I know there is this euphoria that can come when you lose weight. AND I know that feeling lasts only a while, because it is not based on something that is not based on who you are. Is the size of your body who you really are?
Using weight loss to feel better about yourself is based on a fleeting idea. It is based on an external process.
To really increase your self-esteem, there needs to be a connection with how you feel about yourself, which is an internal process- NOT the number on the scale.
The truth is you should have self-esteem no matter what weight you are at.
Rather than having a goal of weight loss, how about a goal of increasing self-esteem?
What is self-esteem?
The dictionary says, “it’s confidence in one’s own worth, or abilities and self-respect. And it’s a sense of self-worth.”
Self-esteem and self-worth go together. It’s confidence in your own worth and your abilities. It’s a sense of self-respect.
Self-esteem is also how we feel about ourselves and our abilities. It affects how we manage our lives, and how easily we move through our lives. When self-esteem is high, life feels good:
We know how to manage life.
We know how to talk with somebody.
We know how much we want to eat.
We know which foods are in our best interest and feel good in our bodies.
Self-esteem really is a lot of components that kind of come together into making us feel happy.
What is high self-esteem?
If you can think of self-esteem on a 1 to 10 scale. We are shooting for 8,9,10 on our scale as high self-esteem, right in the middle would be 5 and the low end of self-esteem is 3,2 or 1.
Where do you fall on that self-esteem scale?
If you are noticing, you have high self-esteem- you can ask yourself:
How did I get here?
What have I been doing to get and keep my self-esteem this high?
What have I done in the past to increase my self-esteem?
If you are in the midrange of self-esteem, ask yourself:
What is going on?
What got you here?
Do I want to increase my self-esteem?
How can you increase your self-esteem if you notice it is low?
First, notice what’s going on for you. How are you feeling about yourself? How lovable are you feeling? How accepting are you of yourself?
Second determine if you want to increase your self-esteem?
Third, consider what do you need to do or think or be to increase that self-esteem?
Focusing on weight loss is not the way to increase self-esteem. Although, focusing on increasing self-esteem leads you to feel more physically present which can lead to you moving your body more, eating foods that nourish and it can help you be a better intuitive eater.
Getting into action to increase self-esteem can be very helpful. Here are some strategies:
The first strategy is to have more positive self-talk. Notice when you’re talking negative to yourself, when you’re beating yourself up, when you’re calling yourself names, when you’re calling yourself out, when you’re saying you’re bad. Increase your positive self-talk: I am kind, I am happy, I am love, I am lovable, I am worthy, I am confident, I am successful. Those are great positive self-talk strategies; I am and put in a word that is positive.
The second strategy is let go of perfection. Perfection can be needing to be perfect around food, needing to eat a certain way, also let go of having to exercise in a certain way. Perfectionism can lead you to not feel good about yourself. We can never be perfect; it just doesn’t work. There’s always going to be a level of imperfection in all our lives. So, let’s acknowledge it. Let’s move beyond it. Let go of that pressure of perfection and call things good enough.
The third strategy is to forgive yourself. Remember, we talked about not being perfect, forgive yourself for not being perfect. Forgive yourself for the things that you do that you think are wrong. We tend to beat ourselves up over perfection. And then we’re shaming ourselves. The antidote is forgiveness. Be gentler with yourself.
In the end, determine where you’re at with your self-esteem. Determine if you have been trying to use weight loss as a way to feel better about yourself (increase your self-esteem). Utilize one of these strategies to start increasing your self-esteem. I encourage you to get into action, I encourage you to make it your goal to increase your self-esteem.
