5 Things You Need To Know About Eating And Control

Whether you are overweight and trying to lose weight or normal weight and obsessed by the possibility that you might gain weight, you need to get some simple facts straight if you are ever to get a comfortable relationship with eating, with weight loss, with yourself.

1.ANY food, however HEALTHY you think it is, will be harmful if eaten to excess (yes, even carrots).

It is very easy to divide the world of food into good and bad, healthy and unhealthy; and it goes without saying that we are expected to eat more of the healthy foods and less of the unhealthy ones. We are regularly and sometimes vociferously encouraged to recognise this, to accept it - and act upon it.

Articles and scientific studies proliferate the web, television, newspapers, magazines and radio. Every form of media laps up the latest story on super foods and danger foods, obesity and slimming. Intelligent, well educated people think it is entirely reasonable to want to forego all 'unhealthy' foods in favour of all 'healthy' ones.

The truth is that, whilst a balanced range of fresh, natural food will always be better for us than an unbalanced diet of processed foods, it is equally true that a diet consisting wholly of carrots, or grapefruits or any other 'healthy' food is just as damaging as a diet consisting of all chips or chocolate.

What matters is NOT what you eat, but how much of WHAT you eat, so it should be perfectly acceptable to eat a slice of cake, a chip or a piece of chocolate without the negative connotations that provoke all that guilt and deprivation, which, arguably, can cause as much damage as the overeating.

Those uncomfortable feelings eventually lead you to eat even more of the very things you are trying to avoid, so you initiate and perpetuate an uncomfortable relationship with food and an uncomfortable relationship with yourself.

When you start to appreciate all food as just food, possessing of varying nutritional value but NOTHING MORE than that, then you can start to free yourself from the mental tyranny that can lead to obsession and guilt and deprivation. Arguably, these negative feelings can be just as harmful as any poor diet to your health and well-being.

2.The more you think about food, the harder it is to control.

When you first recognise you have a problem with eating and weight, you may, reasonably, begin by trying to plan your meals and mealtimes, becoming more aware of calories, portions and fat. When you have some success with weight loss, you might, reasonably, be pleased with yourself and want to continue in the same vein.

For some people, what starts as awareness can turn to obsession and, if you start to interpret any deviation from the plan as failure, you also start the increasingly familiar emotional see saw of deprivation and guilt. You start off wanting to control your behaviour around food but now you seem to have lost control of your thoughts. It remains a struggle and a battle until you allow yourself to think about something other than food.

Perhaps you convince yourself that if you can just gain control of the food and the eating, then life will be better. In fact, it is completely the opposite. If you are focussing more and more on food and eating then you have lost sight of something else. Perhaps it is control of your job, your relationships (family, work, friends, partners).

The trick is to figure out what - and once you start focussing on what that might be, allow yourself to come up with answers. The minute you begin to make changes, the easier it becomes to stop thinking about the food - without any effort at all. It just happens.

3.The more you try NOT to think about food, the harder it is to control.

There is a powerful difference between trying not to think about food and not thinking about it.

Do this exercise. Try very hard NOW to NOT think about blue elephants.

You're thinking about blue elephants aren't you? The very act of trying NOT to think about them encourages you to think about them more. Now, think about pink elephants instead. Are you doing that? Find yourself thinking about the pink elephants, concentrate on how pink they are and notice the detail of the pink in their trunk and the pink in their tail.

Notice how the blue elephants have gone away - or at the very least got smaller? The minute you stopped paying attention to them and started paying attention to something else, your mind was more than happy to help you out.

So stop trying NOT to think about food. Think of something else instead - something you like, something you can enjoy without eating. You will begin to find it easier to regain control, to relax, to feel comfortable around food.

4.Calm is the source of control.

This should probably be number one because if you aren't calm, you aren't in control of your thoughts and if you aren't in control of your thoughts then you aren't in control of your actions - and vice versa. Tension in the mind is reflected in the body and tension in the body is echoed by the mind. If you need some help with relaxing, try meditation, deep breathing, and yoga or get yourself a self-help hypnosis CD or download. .

5.Anxiety, stress, worry, fear, guilt, deprivation - take away your control.

If any of the above is familiar to you, take steps to deal with it. Trying to gain control of eating and food without addressing uncomfortable feelings first is just setting yourself one task too many. Trying to control the food and eating first might be like trying to keep a boat afloat by baling water with an egg cup. You'll have some success if you work hard enough, but you won't be able to sustain it; and the answer isn't to get a bigger egg cup or bale faster. You need to fix the underlying problem.

You might be able to do this yourself with a few self-help tools - or you could get support from a coach, a counsellor, a therapist. Whatever works for you, do it.