Day 17 - Beck Diet Solution, End Overeating

Piyushgiri Revagar via Flickr

Today’s exercise focuses on how to end overeating.  This prepares us better for the times what food is served and how much of it are out of our control, like restaurants, events, friends/families’ houses, and so on.  How many times have we been served a portion much larger than what we would have given ourselves, but because it’s already on our plate, along with sabotaging thoughts (STs) we might be having (“It would be a shame to waste this,” “I’m hungry and I want to eat the whole thing,” “I don’t want to offend the cook,” etc.) we finish the entire plate of food.  Cue the feelings of guilt, discouragement, bloatedness, wanting to throw in the towel, and so on.

There’s a better way though, where we can practice for this exact kind of situation to the point it can actually get easy to leave extra food on our plate.  Today, the assignment is:

1. Pick a meal for your experiment, preferably lunch or dinner. 

2. Serve yourself whatever you had planned to eat. 

3. Then, A) add an extra portion of the planned food, together with B) something that’s not on your plan at all, like a treat food.

4. Eat only your pre-planned food and portions thereof and push the extra, non-plan food aside.  You can either throw it away or package it up and save it for another meal.

During the exercise, analyze any STs you may be experiencing, like “It’s not fair that I can’t eat this” or “It’s ridiculous to waste food.”  To these, you can respond, “But how great is it that I’m not eating this, when it’s getting me closer to my weight loss goal...my resistance muscle is getting stronger..I deserve lots of credit for this…I’m doing awesome!”  You can also look at your distractions chart and choose an activity to get your mind off the food until you can think more clearly – getting up from the table is a good place to start.

After completing the exercise, ask yourself how you feel.  Was it hard for you?  What STs did you have?  Is it ok for you to waste the food in the garbage instead of in your body?

In order to lose weight and keep it off, we need to learn to stop eating when we’ve eaten the food on our plan, and sticking to our plans will be much easier when we can do this.  Practice this exercise as many times as you need to – once may be enough, but if this exercise stirs up quite a few STs for you, keep practicing, talking back to them, and using other distractions until you feel confident and in control.