“I started the day being so GOOD, but then someone brought a birthday cake to the office and I was really BAD.”
Have you ever described your eating behavior this way?
Maybe you’ve even told someone about your vacation or a holiday weekend by confessing, “I was so bad the whole time.”
Since eating is not a moral issue, you can’t apply behavioral codes to what you do with food. Eating cookies or potato chips doesn’t make you a bad person.
The truth is that with eating, it’s impossible to be good or bad. So from now on, stop using those words to describe yourself based on your food intake.
To break the habit of calling yourself good or bad, follow the same logic as you did with cheating. When you discuss your weight-loss plan, refer to your eating choices.
With this new approach, you say, “I made a good choice this morning by eating a healthy breakfast. This afternoon, I made a poorer choice when I ate three brownies.”
By talking about each of your actions as a choice, you can eliminate the self-punishing messages that say you were bad.
Today’s assignment (My answers are in blue)
1. Write a sentence or two about the choices you made today.
I’ve been focusing a lot right now on choosing to eat my healthy meals, and choosing to skip eating ice cream or dessert.
2. Whenever you hear people use words such as cheating, good, and bad when discussing diet efforts, mentally rewrite their comments in a way that refers to choices in life. Record their words along with your new version.
This one’s easy… I recently had a client tell me, “I was really bad all weekend!” After our discussion, she changed it to say, “I made a lot of poor choices over the weekend.”
3. Teach this concept to a friend or diet buddy. Describe how this went.
I shared this with a good friend who later said, “I’m in charge. But sometimes I feel tired or weak in my ability to make choices. But by labeling it as “choices” I stop punishing myself for my eating patterns.
Excerpted from Day 70 in 100 Days of Weight Loss