Feeling out of control with food?

 

• How do I handle losing control of food?
• I lose control of food, often seemingly unexpectedly. Often, I’ll see a pattern. When this happens, we have to ask ourselves some questions to help figure it out.
• If you want to solve this problem, you have homework!
• How do I handle losing control of food?
• What was the calorie level for the day's prior?
• What was your sleep level for the day's prior?
• Were you fasting, or doing fasted workouts?
• What was your water intake level for the last few days and the day of the incident you are frustrated about?
• What has been the nutritional value of your food; were you getting enough protein and a variety of nutrients?
• If you take supplements to help fill in the gap for your nutritional deficiencies, were you taking them consistently?
• Do you even know what the deficiencies are in your nutrition on a daily basis?
• What types of things were going on for you emotionally that day?
• What was the situation or event or availability of food?
• Do your family members understand how important it is for you to have control of your diet for health reasons?
• What cultural and family stress do you have regarding food and the requirements placed on you?
• Are you willing to make changes in your life to work around the stress and requirements placed on you? 
• Were you prepared ahead of time, for how you would stick to your plan no matter what the circumstances?
• What will you do to be prepared next time?

Write all these things down and start thinking of solutions to try out. It doesn’t matter if you write it out by hand or type it up on an electronic device. All the details leading up to failure must be documented and reviewed before you can think of solutions. Once the data is right there, written out for you to review, you can do online research, ask people questions, or even see a solution you think of yourself. 

As your life changes, you might need to do this process again and again. The thing is, only YOU can do this for YOU. No one else will do this for you. You might have some people who help or might even suggest you do something out of love and caring for you, but ultimately YOU must do the work. 

 

You have homework.

STRESSED?

Stress can cause you to not eat for too long, then when you finally eat you make bad choices or foods just for comfort like pizza, ice cream, pastries, cookies, nuts, peanut butter, fried foods, etc.

Lack of sleep is a huge stressor. It often raises our cortisol, messes up our hormones, and puts our body in alert mode.

A hunger hormone, ghrelin, may increase when we are sleep deprived, making us think we are hungry, when we might not actually need more food.

If we are always eating when we are not really hungry it's a big clue that we've lost our ability to be intuitive with food. The only way to resolve that is to edge ourselves to eating at what we know is our TDEE. It's very important that you remember what your approximate TDEE is.

OUT of CONTROL?

We are often our worst critics. Feeling out of control is subjective. You may feel out of control, but no one else thinks of you that way.

Will you stay kind to yourself and acknowledge that possibly you just needed more food today. 

Learn to find ways to stay calm, give yourself grace, avoid negative self-talk, and make little steps in progress with eating habits.

Take some time to write things down so that you can figure this out.

Dig into "The Six Thieves of Progress."

Have a wonderful day!

Roberta