I’ve got good news and bad news. If you want to lose weight and keep it off without dieting, you have to be willing to experience some discomfort.
Discomfort! Who wants that? What’s the good news?
If you’re reading this, there is a good chance the reason you overeat is to avoid discomfort. You are gaining weight to avoid being uncomfortable. Hmmm.
So what’s the good news?
You’re already uncomfortable anyway, so why not direct your discomfort away from emotional eating and into changing your habits and losing weight?
Have I totally confused you?
If you’re eating to avoid discomfort, that means it is already there in your life. Using food does not get rid of whatever is causing you distress. It just distracts you from it. Very temporarily. And it increases your waistline. Which causes more discomfort, both physical and emotional.
By choosing to eat instead of looking at what is causing your discomfort, you can’t fix it. You eat instead of wondering something like this: “I feel really unsatisfied in my job because the work doesn’t use my talents and it isn’t interesting to me. What can I do to find a job where I’ll be happy?” You just stick with the status quo of doing your lousy job each day, being uncomfortable about it and eating to feel better. It’s a discomfort hamster wheel.
Avoiding your discomfort by overeating causes more discomfort. It causes you to gain weight, not fit into your clothes, increases your risk of several deadly illnesses, and a host of other things you don’t like about being overweight.
Do you see how you’re already pretty darned uncomfortable?
What if you switched this discomfort for the kind that comes from making real changes in your life that will ultimately make you healthier and less uncomfortable?
You see, losing weight is about change. It’s about doing things differently. Change takes effort and that requires some discomfort, especially when it comes to changing a habit you’ve had for a long time. Like using food as your drug of choice. You’re bored, you reach for food. You’re stressed, you reach for food. You’re tired when you come home from work, you reach for food. You don’t even think about it. Are you hungry? Who cares! You just eat.
Those uncomfortable feelings will always be there, but if you keep eating to avoid dealing with those emotions, you will always struggle with your weight. Even if you manage to lose a few pounds or more, it won’t stay off because you haven’t solved what is causing your weight problem in the first place.
And that is emotional eating. It is a habit.
But you have options. You don’t always have to respond to unpleasant emotions by eating. You can choose the discomfort of feeling your genuine emotions over the discomfort of being overweight. If you’re willing to feel temporarily uncomfortable by experiencing that you’re tired or bored or stressed, and make a choice not to eat, those emotions will pass.
And you will be rewarded with the joy of losing weight and having a healthier body.
Then there’s that added bonus of dealing with your discomfort by actually doing something about what is causing it. You get to see what is really going on in your life and learn to deal with it in a productive way.
Eating is a very unproductive way of dealing with our problems.
I challenge you to be willing to feel the discomfort of your emotions without eating when you aren’t hungry. Let the feelings move through you and dissipate without eating. I promise you’ll feel lighter, both physically and mentally.
If you’re ready to make this change, click here to get your own free copy of my 8 Secrets for Permanent Weight Loss Guide.
Or I would love to work with you one-to-one to help you do this and hold your hand along the way. I can help you look at the thoughts behind your choice to eat for comfort and help you make better choices. For more information about how that works, click here.
Such great advice about emotional eating. I think it’s a major cause of weight gain. You can be eating nutritious food and be exercising but the cortisol build up from stress makes it impossible to lose.