Q&A 21 – Overeating: Putting the Cart Before the Horse

Traditionally, when we tackle an overeating habit with diets and white-knuckling and other strategies like that, we’re innocently focusing on the wrong thing. Using this horse-and-cart analogy, today we explore where to instead place our focus and how that leads to lasting change and the resolution of unwanted habits.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

* My book: It’s Not About the Food

* Online course: Freedom From Overeating

* Dr. Amy Johnson

* Dr. Bill Pettit

Transcript of Episode

Hello Explorers and welcome to Ubroken podcast. This is Q&A; episode number 21. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. Thank you so much for being here with me today, I really appreciate it. 

The other day this expression popped into my head, it goes like you’ve like this: you’re put the cart before the horse. 

I was thinking about that in terms of unwanted habits like overeating and realize that it’s a really good metaphor or analogy for the two different approaches to dealing with an unwanted habit. So that’s what we’re going to explore today. 

As I’m speaking in this episode, the cart that I’m talking about represents the unwanted habit itself. And the horse is the healing or the recovery or the changes that occur about that unwanted habit. And so culturally, what we tend to do, when we’re trying to fix an unwanted habit is, first of all, innocently, we don’t see the wisdom in the habit, we don’t see that it’s a solution, it’s not a problem. 

And we don’t see that we’re always simply very simply and innocently, trying to feel better, trying to get back in touch with our innate mental health. If we’ve temporarily forgotten about that, or if we’re even unaware that it exists. That’s what unwanted habits are doing for us. They’re a sign of our mental health, actually, because they’re trying to get us to a good feeling, the good feeling that we instinctively know exists within us. But given all the thinking that we have about our lives, and about our unwanted habits, we’ve maybe fallen out of touch with that. 

So the cart is all the techniques that we try to try to heal that unwanted habit or resolve it. In the case of overeating, it would be things like dieting, it would be whatever the strategies are that we try to resolve that unwanted habit. So things like bribing ourselves, maybe white knuckling it through the discomfort of sort of quitting something cold turkey. I’m thinking back to a lot of the self-help strategies that I used things like talk therapy, digging up the past, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness. So these are really you can think of them as strategies, or tactics that we’re applying to try to manage the unwanted habit or control it. And ultimately, to get rid of it. I mean, really, that’s, of course, the aim, when we’re doing anything like that. 

So that’s the cart in this cart and horse scenario. And as the expression goes, when we put that first things don’t work out so well.