Unlearn unhealthy eating habits by accessing the subconscious mind. IFS therapy in action.

Do you often find yourself overeating, especially when you are stressed? If you answered yes, then there are probably other things in your mind contributing to this behavior. It’s not obvious. The subconscious mind is unbelievably complex.  I think most dietitians, including me, would agree that you want to honor your cravings to some degree. Intuitive eating teaches us the value of listening for internal physical cues of hunger and fullness and attempting to eat what the body wants. However, intuitive eating is very tricky. You can easily be confused and think that just because you have an urge for a cookie you should honor that urge every time.  In this episode, I discuss how you can learn how to identify when the urge is coming from an emotional need rather than a physical need to not feel deprived. In this way you can begin to teach the mind a new way of responding to your cravings. You can learn how to teach yourself how to retrain your brain to stop your cravings and impulsive eating habits. Your brain remembers every little thing from your past, so the habits can run very deep. The process involves listening inside yourself so you can understand and reassure the overeating parts of you. You learn to connect with them and literally let them know that you’re here for them and you understand them.  If you want to learn more about this process so you can stop overeating, tune in to this episode! Three reasons why you should listen to the full episode: Learn how to stop overeating by retraining your brain using the process of IFS (internal family systems).  Learn ways to tap into your inner guidance and intuition. Consider common triggers that can create urges such as the inner critic, social anxiety, and overwhelm. Episode Highlights Learn How to Stop Overeating Eating is a great way to calm the brain. When we feel stressed or out of control, we tend to reach for foods that soothe us. To learn how to stop this, the first step is to get curious about the part of your mind that makes you reach for food unconsciously. For example, the sense of panic about feeling out of control might be held inside of a specific “part” inside of you. This part is alerting you to danger, and it’s likely got a good reason for this; in your past you most likely had many times where bad things happened when you had no control. To get curious you must separate from it. Internally, this can look like moving away from the part in your mind’s eye and noticing that it’s there.  Setting Goals and Adopting Habits It’s often difficult to identify all the eating triggers, especially because they can be buried beneath all the activities of your conscious mind. They can hide. Start by intentionally aiming to be more mindful. Slow down and turn your awareness inside.  Practically, you might write down a few goals to improve your relationship with mindfulness with eating or with food buying. You may make a goal to go to put your fork down between bites of food, or plan times when you go to the grocery store so healthy food is available during stressful times of the day. You might try to make it a habit not to eat in front of the TV. Focus on one goal at a time. Be Still and Let the Answers Find You We are our own healers. If you get quiet enough to listen, the answer deep within will come to you. What you can do is sit on a chair and actively do nothing. Just notice the inner world.  It’s a helpful exercise to pretend that the emotion associated with eating is a person that needs your attention. It will never leave you alone unless it feels validated, unless it realizes you are listening to it. Communicate with it from a place of curiosity, without being mad at it or wishing it would go away. We need to talk to our eating parts and reassure them that we are there for them. In the process, you connect with the thing inside of you to understand the reasons behind your overeating. You also can develop a relationship with these parts so that you can let them know that you want to go through life without having to rely on food to cope, and eventually they will learn to trust that you can handle things without eating.  Intuition and Inner Guidance Within every single person, there is a capacity to be present. We can lead and heal our own parts. But we cannot do this if there is too much fear and noise. To listen without interference, try to find a way to get grounded in the body. Breathe. Recognize that the parts are separate entities! This can lead us to our intuition. I had a talk with a woman who was a firefighter during 9/11. She had this voice inside of her that said, “You need to get out of there.” Thank goodness she trusted that voice because it saved a lot of people’s lives that day. She had developed a capacity for listening inside of herself.  We Are Motivated by What We Might Lose Rather than rewards, we are more motivated by what we might lose. So, if you feel yourself reaching for snacks, you can ask yourself what you might lose. You might lose your sense of empowerment and hopefulness. You can lose a sense of being in control. Likewise, you can ask yourself, what do I need here? It might just be a relief from boredom, procrastination, or a way to calm your nerves. Working and Connecting with Yourself I worked with another client who has chronic physical pain. This client has a part of her who is so tired from putting on a happy, strong, and stoic face despite the pain. To cope with this, she tended to grab baked goods to reward herself and get on with her day. Ultimately, it was a matter of allowing her to have compassion for and connect with the parts of her that are in pain. This was the same for my clients who were perfectionists. They needed to separate themselves from their perfectionist part so they could see it from a distance. They could then be curious about it and ask: Why do you need to be perfect? Be Quiet, Calm, and Curious We tend to reach for food not because we are hungry, but because we are stressed. What should you do in this situation? You can leave the room. Calm down and rest a second. Connect with the energy inside that’s unsettled. Realize that it’s a part of you, but it’s not you. It’s different from your calm, curious, and compassionate self. Acknowledge this emotion and say, “I can handle this. I can handle the stress without food.” Conversing with Your Critic I also worked with a client who developed an association with certain foods. She would eat these foods when she felt overwhelmed and needed relief. She worked with the part of her that was scared. She also learned how to communicate with her food craving and overeating part. What she ended up doing was to have a conversation with the critic in her mind, since this was the part that was creating such distress. She needed to tell her critic that if she could just allow herself to eat what she was carving without guilt, then she probably won’t overeat. 5 Powerful Quotes from this Episode “It's best to do one at a time. That's how you make progress. It's the little things day in and day out.” “We just take a moment and we just turn towards the inner world. And we let the answer find us because it will be there.” “The brain learned way back when that food could comfort and calm in almost any situation until of course, the brain reverted to that. So we need to reassure our eating part that we're there for them, we understand.” “Social interactions are stressful. That is probably the number one reason I have found that people grab food even though they are not hungry.” “The solution is not a diet. The solution is getting quiet, calm, curious, and [to] stop.” If you listened to the podcast and enjoyed it, please share and post a review! Have any questions or want to schedule an appointment or take my class? You can email me at [email protected] or visit my website. To making peace with eating, Betsy