For the last little while I haven’t been eating brilliantly. I’ve been doing other things that will eventually move me towards better health, but the eating patterns have totally regressed to encompass all the high sugar hits I once fought and conquered.
And that brings me to today’s topic. You need the right mindset to make a change. As soon as I didn’t really care, all my horrid eating habits came galloping back. So it was a case of two steps forward, two steps back.
What I think I’ve learned from this is that there might be two totally different ways that people succeed in changing the way they eat. One way might be to:
1. Emotionally invest – first and foremost!
2. Make the change.
3. Make it easier to follow the changed habit than the old habit.
The other, diametrically opposed:
1. Take the emotion totally out of the equation.
2. Make the change.
3. Make it easier to follow the changed habit than the old habit.
When you’re the one who buys and prepares all the food, a great deal of your time is spent thinking about food and being in the kitchen. Kitchen means food preparation, which means eating. And eating can be an emotional topic.
I suppose it shouldn’t be. It should be simply a case of fuelling the body. But for me, at least at this time, it’s emotional. I use it as a pick-me-up when I’m tired. I sometimes eat quite sinfully when I’m unhappy. I eat when I have a task to do that I’d like to avoid. I eat while I prepare dinner. It would be fair to say I quite like eating. It would even be fair to say I love eating.
I’ve been pretty tired for the past two months. I’m kind of dragging myself through each day, and of course sugar is your friend as well as your enemy at times like this. It’s probably the main culprit but the problem is, of course, it gives you that bit of energy when you’re desperately looking for it.
I’ve been emotionally invested in something other than improving the way I eat, and it shows. But the only reason this has derailed me is that my habit base wasn’t strong enough to survive without the mental motivation. And habit is a better platform on which to base change than my emotional state. Emotions can be a rollercoaster unless you can learn to understand where they come from and how they are created. I’m doing some study on that at the moment and I must say my mind is blown away by how simple change can be.
Eating well should be a deeply ingrained habit. I do it best when I don’t have to think too much about the topic in general. When it all gets to be pretty automatic, my eating life runs on oiled rails. When I have few queries on what I should eat, because I’ve already made up my mind what kinds of foods are healthy for me, life is on an even keel.
When I’m poring over recipes and thinking about food all the time, that’s when I seem to come unstuck. And that brings me to the other argument. Food should not be an emotional topic. And that means that you need to heal your thinking processes before you’ll ever improve your eating. So, back to the drawing board on this one.