Up until this point in the Brain and Body Reboot, I’ve discussed several tools that you can use to help address the problems of overhunger and overdesire.
With overhunger, I’ve discussed understanding our hunger signals and our hormones as well as understanding how to use the foods we eat and the timing of eating them to help balance our hormones and signals.
With overdesire, I’ve discussed the cause of desire, allowing and processing negative emotions as well as embracing discomfort. I also discussed making decisions with your highest brain, real vs. false pleasure, commitment, focusing on the future and several other concepts that can help reduce overdesire.
Having all these tools in place is an excellent foundation for weight loss as well as other goals you may want to achieve.
If all of these tools represent the “rules”, then we also have to make room for exceptions. Every rule, afterall, has an exception.
As part of living in the world while trying to reach a goal such as weight loss, we want to practice making exceptions and eating for pleasure or what we call joy eating.
Even if we make a decision like cutting out a certain food type such as flour and/or sugar, we don’t want to be afraid of those foods and feel out of control around them. We need to learn how to eat flour and sugar and other foods off our typical protocol in a way that is manageable and still feels like we can live our lives fully.
One way to do this is to plan an exception or joy eat once a week. The key word here is PLAN.
What you don’t want to do is decide in the moment by acting on urges to make that the moment you eat off your plan and make the exception.
Just like you want to use your highest brain to plan your meals 24 hours in advance, you also want to use your highest brain to plan your exceptions 24 hours in advance. You can pick one food or type of food that you normally keep off your plan and decide in advance to eat it at a particular meal.
You DON’T want to eat the exception in an unplanned, primitive, reactive way. That will only end up increasing your desire and degrade your relationship with yourself.
You DO want to plan the exception ahead of time and be specific. What are you going to eat? When are you going to eat it? How much will you eat?
The other key part of this is to really pay attention to your body and to your taste buds after you do have your joy eat.
What did you feel before you ate the food and what did you feel after?
Where were you on the hunger scale before and after?
How much did you eat before you were satisfied?
When did you stop eating?
How does the food feel in your body?
How does the food taste?
As you were eating it, did you still want it?
It may be harder to plan ahead and answer these questions when you are in a social situation where you don’t really know what will be served. However, you can still plan the type of food you will eat and general amount and you can pay closer attention to how you feel and how the food tastes to you while you are eating it.
One of the surprising things I noticed was how much less pleasurable the joy eats were after making some of the changes in my life that I described in this month’s blog posts and really starting to pay attention to my body and taste buds after I ate it.
The food I so desired in the past brought me much less pleasure now. Often it was just too sweet or I felt too unpleasant with stomach discomfort or bloating after eating it, so it was less desirable for me to eat this time. It was so interesting to learn this and it helped inform my choices in the future.
By making regular exceptions to your protocol, you can experience both the pleasure and consequence of what it is like to eat foods that your body isn’t necessarily well equipped to process. This can teach you and guide you to make different choices in the future and help you establish a different, healthier relationship with food and with yourself.
