Ditching Diets How to Lose Weight in a Way You Can Maintain by Gillian Riley

Author:Gillian Riley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Gillian Riley
Published: 2012-12-16T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• Don’t necessarily avoid the situations in which you overeat. They are not problems but opportunities for you to make genuine changes.

• In time you may want to develop new routines, such as taking more exercise, but it will be best to do this having first made peace with your addictive desire. Then, when you fall back into your old ways – and who doesn’t every now and then? – you won’t necessarily fall back into overeating.

• You don’t need to make all changes at once. See what overeating you really do want to change and be clear about why you want to change it.

• Take a couple of deep, slow breaths as you start to work through your addictive desire to eat. This will bring down your level of stress and this, too, improves access to the PFC.

• Pay attention to the physical sensations associated with the feelings of temptation and desire. The more you actively attend to this process, the better results you get.

• The connections between cell networks are stronger when emotions are involved. This is why you may find that your desire to eat is stronger when triggered by feelings such as anger or sadness.

• If you substitute another addictive behaviour in the place of eating, such as smoking, drinking or shopping, you will continue to reinforce the same networks, keeping them in business. This is known as ‘cross addiction’ or ‘addiction transfer’. It’s not so much a problem of trading in one addiction for another, as much as it’s adding or increasing the strength of another addiction on top of the first one. This is not a good idea, as it doesn’t get you anywhere.

• However, it’s likely there will be times when a substitution is appropriate and not addictive. For example, if you often snack on some junk food in the afternoons you might want to eat something healthier instead. The main thing is not to rely on healthy substitutions as the way you deal with your addictive desire, as that will only work up to a point.

• Be willing to be repetitive. We all know that repetition is the way we learn, whether learning to write, read, drive or whatever. Even if we just want to remember a phone number or the time of a train we want to catch, we do that by repeating it over and over again.

• Be willing to be patient. The patterns in brain activation do change, but not instantaneously. Consider how many years you’ve been overeating, and don’t expect your memory of this to vanish like magic. It’s impossible to say how long all this will take, but if you engage in it whole-heartedly we are probably talking about days and weeks rather than months and years.

• Connect with these three themes:

Do I know I’m free to overeat?

What outcomes do I want to create?

How am I responding to my addictive desire?

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