Why is it so damn hard?
Because we, and our children, are bombarded with abundant food options everywhere we turn. We need a strategy for dealing with the relentless onslaught on our senses. We need new habits. One new habit might be only going to restaurants Example when where we know what is on the menu and deciding in advance, what we are going to order.
If we don’t establish new and better habits, we will fail to resist temptation because we are left with only willpower, resistance, and deprivation. This is like hanging by our fingertips over the side of a cliff. Ultimately, we can only hold on so long before we have to let go. In the first few seconds of our free fall, we experience blissful relief. How wonderful it is to stop trying so hard to be strong!
That momentary pleasure of having just one bite is fleeting, however, as we are flooded with feelings of guilt and shame. The brain punishes us with messages that we are weak, weak, weak—weak and FAT! It is impossible to live with these painful and punishing thoughts, so we fall back on old habits because we haven’t learned better ones. Most of the time, these habits involve continuous overeating, but sometimes we develop new habits that are counterproductive, dangerous, and even worse than the ones we are replacing.
Eating Disorders - Out of the frying pan into the fire.
Humans like efficiency. When we practice a behavior over it becomes a habit. When we choose a poor strategy in an attempt to change, we simply replace one bad habit with another bad habit. Because dieting produces unpleasant feelings of deprivation, we might choose to train and strengthen our resolve until we no longer feel any desire to eat (a habit called anorexia) or to relent with an immediate back-up plan to get rid of the calories along with the guilt (a habit called bulimia).* This “a” and “b” also have a “c”: a habit called catastrophizing.
Is catastrophizing what it sounds like?
You bet! Catastrophizing is a mental loop in which a thought that provokes fear or anxiety is cycled over and over again. All this repetition makes our often irrational beliefs stronger and more persistent. We begin to feel more and more stuck and hopeless. The stress becomes increasingly painful. We despair of ever finding a way out of going around in circles. Over time, we create a negative outlook on life that turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure—sort of like opening a fortune cookie that says, “You will always be FAT!!”
There is a way out of the loop—a simple, though not necessarily easy solution (isn’t that so often the case?). We can change our habits by changing our minds or, more accurately, our brains. Brainchanging, or neuroplasticity, if you prefer the scientific term, helps us literally rewire our brains so that forming new habits becomes virtually effortless.
Ultimately, if we want to change our fortunes, we have to begin by changing our habits.
