Changing Your Relationship With Food

The Top 3 Current Weight Loss Products on the market:

Lose Weight Fast System is a diet and fitness system for the female body that has taken a new approach to weight loss for women.

The Fat Loss Factor is A 12-week online weight loss program that involves a comprehensive diet and exercise regime in combination with supportive activities such as goal-setting and stress management.

Customized Fat Loss is a nutrition and workout program to help you burn off unwanted body fat and lose weight so you can get that great, healthy and sexy body.

Changing Your Relationship with Food
By Barbara L. Holtzman, MSW, LICSW
How do you decide what and when to eat? Because it's lunchtime? Because someone brought donuts to the staff meeting? Because you're tired or bored? Most of us eat based on external stimuli rather than our own physical needs and food preferences. Many of us don't even know when we're hungry or comfortably satisfied. If our urge to eat is usually triggered by external situations such as the time of day or the availability of food, we may lose the awareness of our body's message of hunger. If eating is our primary coping mechanism for dealing with uncomfortable feelings, we may never experience physical hunger since we are medicating ourselves with food before we even experience the sensations of hunger.
For those of us whose physical needs for food have been overshadowed by our desire for a smaller body size, we have probably ignored our body's signals, counting on a diet, rather than our body's wisdom or our personal preferences, to tell us what to eat. When we eat from the "outside" instead of the "inside," it is normal to rebel by eating formerly "forbidden foods." To change our relationship with food, we need to develop a conscious relationship with food. Conscious eaters make food choices without feeling guilt; they honor their hunger, respect their fullness and enjoy the pleasures of eating.
If you'd like to change your relationship with food, you might want to experiment with the following:
When you think about eating, take a pause and take a few slow, deep breaths, as fatigue and stress often trigger the desire for food. Ask yourself whether you're physically hungry or if something else is prompting your desire for food. If you're hungry, great! What would you like to eat? Would you like something light, like salad, soup or eggs or something heavy, like pasta or meat? What would feel best in your stomach? What would taste good to you right now? Something sweet? Salty? Bland? Spicy? Try to get the right match. Do you want something chewy, smooth, or crunchy?
If you're not physically hungry, would you be willing to explore what you do need? Do you need a break? Are you trying to put off a loathsome task and are looking to food to help you procrastinate? Are you feeling anxious? Angry? Sad? If you're not sure what you feel, can you take some time to be still? If you realize that you're not physically hungry but still want food, try to become curious about it. "What is prompting my desire for food right now?" Is it a habit? Do you always want food as soon as you come home? Perhaps an uncomfortable thought or feeling prompted the automatic reaction of wanting food to distract you or sooth you. Are you willing to use the desire for non-hunger eating as a message from your inner self and explore what it is trying to tell you?
Try asking yourself "What do I need right now?" Get quiet, go inside and allow the answer to arise. Journaling may help. Is there anything else that will help soothe these feelings besides food? - taking a walk, calling a friend, taking a shower, going into nature, petting the dog