Hi,

I'm on day 4 of focused intuitive eating practice. Actually, it wasn't that focused. I had quite a week at work. But thanks to this intention to practice, this morning, I was triggered to reflect about the previous days. The reflection gave me some important insights into what could be the major blocking points for learning how to eat intuitively. I would like to share them with you.

A first root-cause seems to be emotional eating:

  • Due to feeling "down". This is the one I could clearly identify. It is typically caused by exhaustion, lack of sleep, illness. In addition, this ties into my personality trait of being an HSP. I tend to get easily over-aroused - overwhelmed by the many "impressions" I take in during the day, typically caused by having to work on different urgent things in parallel. After a certain threshold, I find it very difficult to calm down and come out of this state. A big difficulty is that if I cross this threshold, my sleep gets impacted - I wake up in the middle of the night, and I "process" the events, thoughts and worries from the preceding days. This tends to push me over the edge and into a vicious circle, as when sleep deprived, I'm much prone to getting over-aroused again. I've been working on addressing this from one particular perspective, working with the "Now Habit" book, which helped me tremendously to take more control over my work, and deal with the perfectionism related to work tasks. This helps, but I need to also learn how to more effectively take care of my self
  • Due to other negative emotions: feeling "all work no play", disappointed or frustrated (e.g. by someone, some event...), feeling insecure, fearing or worrying... A problem here is that, for most of the time, I am not even aware of all these emotions I am feeling. Instead of addressing, or simply experiencing the feelings, I sometimes use food to cope and comfort my self

A second major root cause I could identify is mindless eating 

  • Due to distractions (e.g. TV, speaking to someone, social events...)
  • Due to being too hungry - I find it extremely difficult to eat in a mindful way if I wait too long with eating, and become too hungry
  • Due to lack of time (e.g. sandwich at lunch in a meeting, or at my desk, in front of my computer)

There are also some other causes that are still playing. I do feel they are starting to change:

  • Lingering feeling I will not be able to loose weight unless I diet. I gained a couple of kilos during some vacations and trips earlier this year, and I find my self fearing I will not be able to loose those - not unless I "do something about it" (=diet). Thinking more explicitly about stopping when full helps to deal with such thoughts. The more I will practice this, the more this feeling will go away. Patience
  • Not completely making peace with all the foods. I still catch my self classifying foods as "good" or "bad" and making my choices based on that, eventually depriving my self of a certain food, being afraid I will not be able to control my self around it. The paradox is that a precondition to feeling okay around all foods is giving my self unconditional permission to eat them whenever I want. I need some more practice here. Furthermore, as for the previous point, practicing my stop button (stopping when full) will also help further build the self-trust 

Here are a couple ideas for concrete actions I can do about it. 

To overcome emotional eating

  • Self-care. I posted recently a list with self care ideas. I would like to try and see which of them are practical in this situation, and what I can do to make it easier for me to try some of them out.
  • Write down how I feel
  • Read the chapter from CBT for dummies on feelings, and see if it offers other exercises to identify negative feeling, and other advices

To further practice intuitive eating

  • Exercise stopping. In a few experiments, on purpose take much more food on my plate than I need to fill up, and try to be very mindful of when I reach the "last bite"
  • Fill up on snacks, and allow my self to eat any of them, whenever, but with the condition to stop eating when I feel full. I bought a couple of snack in the shop and packed them for Monday. Let's see how this will work out
  • Try to take more time for eating so that I can be more mindful about it
  • Keep making the hunger log, maybe combine it with the feeling log.

Let me now try and see what I can do. I will check in a couple of days.

Thanks for letting me share.