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Archive for category Avoiding Traps

How Stress Can Affect Eating Habits

Jul 20

Posted by Jason in Avoiding Traps, Healthy Lifestyle | 1 Comment

Ah, stress…that common thing that seems to be so prevalent throughout our modern society. This is not to say that it is a new thing to the human race. It has always existed in one way or another, but has manifested itself differently throughout the ages.

So what forms does it take today? In industrialized cultures, one common way is through people leading such busy lives. Many of us work full-time, and that in itself is a huge stressor. We also play our role within our families, and although the family is the most important thing, the responsibilities each role has can be vast. Some of us may go to school, which is something that can be quite demanding, especially of our time. Then there’s the house, the car, the bills, the appointments, the social life, economic issues, traffic, commuting, shopping, etc., etc., etc.

All of these things take up their fair share of time, and at the end of the day, we may feel worn out, tired, irritable, and frustrated, because it seems like there just isn’t enough time left for ourselves. It can leave us feeling tense and not relaxed.

Then we wake up and do it all over again, but without letting enough pressure off from ourselves to recuperate our energy levels to a healthy balance. This constant state of feeling tense and stressed keeps us feeling a bit tired and frazzled, and we may begin to cut corners to make it seem like we’re “freeing up some time.”

A lot of the time though, the first corners we may cut make be in regards to taking care of ourselves.

One of the major areas where this may be true may involve how and what we eat.

This can affect our overall balance and weight, and can be an impediment to our success in these areas.

We may begin to eat fast food options more often, and may end up replacing healthy meals with less healthy ones. Why might this be detrimental?

There can be several reasons. First of all, most fast food lacks the nutrition that other, fresher options which contain whole grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables do. Without a good balance of foods with these nutrients, we can be more apt to feel less energetic, more tired, and generally more run down, which can only make the stress worse.

Fast food is easy to eat, and packs a lot of “empty” calories. It is generally more caloric than other foods, and can take more to feel “full.” As a result, you may end up eating more than you think you are, as a burger that doesn’t seem to fill you up can contain almost 1,000 calories. And with the portion sizes of fries and sodas going up, even a small fries and drink can add on another 600 calories to the burger – and that’s just one meal!

We may “eat on the go” and pay little attention to sitting down, taking some time, and enjoying a meal. When we do this all the time, we are not eating consciously, nor are we slowing down to fully separate eating time from other activities. This can throw us off balance, because we may scarf down our food so fast, that we end up eating more than may be beneficial for us.

Our negative emotions may fester, as the building stress sometimes doesn’t allow for them to naturally release, but instead can cause them to build up. As a result, we may end up eating emotionally to help alleviate them, sometimes without even realizing it. We may be stressed out, tense, and frazzled at work, and the candy bar in the snack machine may just seem to be an outlet which can make us feel better. So we may give in and get one, even when we are not really hungry.

We may feel tired all the time, and the body may send us hunger signals in an effort to compensate for the lack of energy. And as a result, we may eat more!

This lack of energy may hinder us from getting the proper amount of exercise. When we can barely muster the energy to keep our eyes open, then going for a long walk or hike may be completely out of the realm of our mind’s consideration!

Prolonged and excessive stress can also breed other detrimental habits or conditions. Some of us may end up drinking more alcohol, smoking more cigarettes, and other detrimental habits. Prolonged and excessive stress can also make us feel depressed, can affect our overall health, and can even lead to some serious and chronic conditions.

Wow, I didn’t mean to try to scare us by listing these things! Instead, I wanted to spark some discussion about how stress can affect us, and hinder our goals of weight loss. Being aware of and understanding how stress can affect you can be a good foundation to start to minimize the amount of it you experience.

And there are many ways you can do this! It’s something you have the power to change as well, just by adjusting some of the ways you think about and approach certain things in life. Minimizing stress can lead to better eating habits, and a more balanced life.

Check back soon for an ongoing discussion about tips you can use to relieve stress, and please feel free to comment about any things that help you minimize stress in your life!

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On managing portion sizes…

Jul 19

Posted by Jason in Avoiding Traps, Dining Out, Eating Naturally, Making Food Choices | No Comments

As we believe there is a huge psychological component to the overall action of eating, we wanted to briefly discuss how portion sizes, especially those served at many restaurants, can, over time, influence the average portion sizes you tend to consume on a regular basis.

It kind of goes along with the old saying “you have eyes bigger than your stomach.”

At many restaurants, you order an entrée, and the plate comes out completely packed full of food.  As this is the norm at a large majority of restaurants, you may feel that these must be portions that are normal for a person to eat.  Furthermore, couple that with something you may have heard as a kid:  “Don’t leave anything on your plate!  Remember, there’s starving people in China!”

Now we’re certainly not advocating the waste of food.  But what we are saying is that it helps to be conscious of when you physically feel full, and of how much food is the right amount for you to eat in a sitting.  When you are conscious of these things, portion sizes that fit a healthy intake for you can naturally result out of habit.  This can positively affect your decision as to how much you serve yourself at home, and what you may end up ordering at a restaurant.

So keep in mind that what is put on your plate at a restaurant is likely the result of a formula that was devised to make the restaurant more money.  Even though the portion may be huge for an $11 plate, making it seem like a good value, the larger portion at the slightly higher price may be proportionately making the restaurant more profit.

An easy rule to remember, which may be a reversal from what was ingrained in you as a child, is that just because it is on your plate, doesn’t mean that you have to eat it!

Here are some easy tips that may help you better recognize when you are full:

Eat slowly. When you savor the flavor and pause a bit between bites, you can, as stated in as simplistic terms as possible, let your brain catch up with your stomach.  If you scarf down your dinner really fast, without pausing or taking a small break in between bites, then you may consume food quicker than the brain can produce a natural feeling of satiety.

Find a sense of being “full” that feels healthy for you. At some point, many of us may have defined “full” as being completely stuffed, which may mean not being able to physically consume any more food without feeling a bit of nausea or indigestion.  That may not be the type of full that is healthy for you!  A healthier sense of being full may instead be a feeling of being satisfied, content, and no longer hungry, but not so much so that you feel like taking a nap!  Like I mentioned before, it may help to try to be very conscious of how you feel while you are eating, and establish a reference point that you can readily recognize where you feel satisfied, and not hungry again in just a few hours.

Once you have established these reference points, or “cues”, try to size your portions accordingly. With practice, you should be able to recognize what portion sizes it will take with just about any kind of food to get to this point.  Prepare your meal or order your selection accordingly.

Bottom line – you know what the right portion is for yourself.  Don’t let someone else condition you into thinking what it is.  Restaurants usually put the same amount of food on their plates for everyone, but do you think everyone has the same appetite?  Don’t be afraid to take home some leftovers, or to leave a little bit on your plate.

Check back soon for some related topics!

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Strength and Focus

Jul 15

Posted by Jason in Avoiding Traps, Compulsive Overeating, Emotional Eating, Food Obsession, Negative Emotions | No Comments

On the topic of strength…

One way that you can use your inner strength is by creating and maintaining a focus on the benefits of utilizing and maintaining the plan you can develop for yourself to achieve an overall healthy, balanced lifestyle.

One thing that I mean by this is being able to pay close attention to your thoughts and actions regarding food, and watching out for the tricks that your mind can play on itself.  Essentially, it means being in control of these thoughts, instead of letting them control you, and your decision-making about eating in general.

Here’s an example.  Say that you absolutely love eating chocolate.  It is one of the foods that you totally crave all the time, and end up binging on.  This is one of those foods that is dangerous for you, and one that you may have determined you must avoid in order to reach your equilibrium.

The reasoning?  You may feel powerless around it, that it brings you emotional comfort, and is something that you feel tempted to overly indulge in when given the chance.  At times when eating it, you feel like you just can’t get enough, and have trouble stopping the consumption of it.

And then the wave of guilt and remorse comes.  After gorging on it, you feel horrible, and then the emotional spiral comes where you beat yourself up all over again and end up right back where you started.

But it’s almost like it has this strange power over you, because even with all that guilt and shame, once the wave of it washes away, you may end right back up in the “danger point” – the thought that comes to mind where you think about eating some, because it is oh so good, tasty, and emotionally soothing.

That danger point is where the problem, and the solution resides.

When that thought of the ever-alluring chocolate comes into mind, it’s almost like your brain is presenting you with an illusion.  The pleasure and the reward center of your brain may be generating the desire for a temporary sense of euphoria.  This can seem so alluring, and it can seem to be something that can soothe the bad mood you have been in, or the emotional void that can make you feel empty, unworthy, and lowly.  So it keeps saying “come on, this will make you feel better,” and it can flood your conscious thought with the warm and fuzzy sensation that the first bite of chocolate can produce.

It is that temporal sensation that can seem so wonderful, even if just for a split second, that it can create the illusion that it will solve your problems, and relieve the psychological state that you are in.

So this is where, with good practice and determination, your strength can be called upon to help smash that illusion, and look past the sense of instant gratification that gets you in trouble.

This strength can help you to see clearly and realistically, overcoming the power and the gratuitous recall of the warm sensations produced by the chocolate, which delude your rational self.

So how can it work?  Well, it is actually quite simple.  When the craving for chocolate comes to mind, and the flood of associated thoughts that try to convince you that the pleasure of the chocolate binge will be greater than what comes afterward, the strength that you can consciously draw on will eventually become so ingrained that it can become the new habitual thought, and the positive outcome of resisting the binge can become more satisfying than the chocolate, and the craving for it may eventually wane away and diminish.

But “diminish” is different than “disappear,” because the cravings and positive associations of chocolate may never disappear, so that’s why it’s so important to never lose sight of what the strength provides.

So a simple method to draw upon it can work like this:

The next time you have a chocolate craving (or craving for whatever is your “danger” food), look at that craving with clarity.  Look at it as a deceptive tool that your mind is throwing at you to fall for the illusion that the gratification and “satisfaction” of the chocolate is going to outweigh the self-torture that comes afterwards.  Look at it clearly and through past experience.  Turn those illusory thoughts upside-down and look at the flipside instead.

The strength inside you can keep the focus on that realistic flip-side – the fact that indulging in a binge of chocolate may feel great for the first ten minutes, but the next ten hours that follows of berating and shaming yourself is pure hell, and is certainly no way to soothe the emotional hurt that your brain may be trying to convince you that the allure of chocolate will assuage.

Take that to heart the first time, and then see how you feel when the craving passes – and it will pass.  It’s almost guaranteed that you will feel empowered and proud of yourself.  By doing this, you can regain the hours that you would have lost to self-torment and loathing that could have resulted if you would have binged on the chocolate.

Doesn’t the repossession of your sanity and well-being sound better than a chocolate bar?

When that positive association is reinforced through practice of this, you will likely feel much more empowered when the cravings strike, and over time, the weaker the cravings can become, allowing you to open up more room to help you shift toward the equilibrium that can bring about a healthier life, and the associated weight loss.

You have the strength to focus clearly upon those danger points, and the strength to change their outcomes.  All it takes is one try, and you can build upon that success!

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What is conditioning, and how does it influence eating?

Jul 10

Posted by Jason in Avoiding Traps, Compulsive Overeating, Food Obsession, Motivation, Science | No Comments

Have you ever stopped for a moment and thought about how conditioning may affect us all?  What exactly is conditioning?  Does it really apply to our lives?

From my experiences, this isn’t really a widely discussed topic, but it is something that I feel is intricately weaved within most of our lives, a lot of the time without us really realizing it.  But once we do realize it, we have the opportunity to reverse it and start on a direction toward freedom from the whims of unwanted habits, the whims of society, and the will that it and others unconsciously force upon us every day.

To start though, by no means am I suggesting that realizing this relieves a person from taking accountability for many things that he or she has experienced or contributed to inflicting up him- or herself.  Taking the stance of being a victim can only lead to powerlessness, which is contrary to the sense of empowerment which can accelerate your progress toward the life and habitual changes that you seek.

But to understand the powers that be is another thing.  Understanding that they can consciously and unconsciously influence your behavior and thought patterns and understanding what they are is imperative toward weeding them out from yourself and declaring your independence.  Realizing their influence and realizing how these influences can weave themselves into what you have control over and the actions that you take can be a very motivating factor to establish your defenses against them.  This can be very empowering and can help you plant your own roots deeper into the soils of your beautiful inner self, your true belief systems, your true happiness, and not someone else’s whims.

From my point of view, conditioning is the result of human societies and others’ desire for money, desire for control, and desire for power.  It can be the product of group “consensus,” superstitions, doctrines, traditions, habits, education, and a vast myriad of other systems.  It can be good, it can be neutral, and it can be bad.  Conditioning is very apparent in almost every aspect of life, and after all, we have to learn somehow.

So I am not going to label it really as anything in particular, and I especially don’t like to look at things as only good or bad, black and white, this or that, friend or enemy, or anything totally exclusive of one another.

It follows that conditioning is no exception.  It acts in a very good way, for example, when we were conditioned as young children to always look both ways before crossing the street.  The ingrained habit that resulted keeps us safe, most of the time without us realizing its influence.  Out of this habit, we barely even think about it every time we come to a crosswalk.  We “just do it” and cross.

The same goes for those of us who learned how to drive.  We learned that red means “stop,” and green means “go.”  How many times do we pass right through a green light, or stop at a red one, without really thinking about it?  We don’t really need to exert much though into it.  We “just do it,” because we have reinforced that habit for so long that it just comes natural.

Well, that is a good way to look at the conditioning that has affected us in not as good of ways.  With these habits that may be detrimental to our well-being, we “just do them” because we have reinforced them for so long that they just seem to come natural.  We can’t really get ourselves to think there is any other way.  I mean, could you ever imagine stopping at a green light?  In the case of safety, it certainly wouldn’t be advised, and it certainly would take a lot to get over the impulse to go right through it.

Enter the world of food.  As everyone has been eating it ever since they have been alive, this is obviously an important habit for every person and every other species on earth.  It is what keeps us going, gives us sustenance, nutrition, and much more.  It is what allows for our existence.

The biological impulse to eat is one of the most primal drives that we have.  It is what, in our ancestral times, kept us on the move.  It kept us in pursuit of survival.  It was our instinct to scour the land to find enough for ourselves and others within our community.  It was likely not as abundant as now, was likely much more simple and limited in variety, and there, in the earliest times, was likely no profit motive behind the distribution of it.

That impulse and instinct – hunger – has not really biologically changed within us over thousands of years.  But the way food is cultivated, produced, manipulated, advertised, distributed, and sold sure has!  Furthermore, the types of foods available to us certainly has as well!

During this evolution in the world of food, the by-product of habitual conditioning has resulted – a by-product which latches onto our most instinctual drive and can help create deeply ingrained thought-patterns, behaviors, emotions, and even obsessions.  Left unchecked, left misunderstood, or left powerless to them, the mind and its conscious behaviors can compel a person to react in certain ways around food – certain ways which can contribute to unhealthy habits.  This is one way to view conditioning, and a good starting point for you, if you feel that you have trouble with how you react to food, to begin to become part of an ongoing discussion about this, and a good starting point for you to condition yourself away from what you may determine is bad for you, and toward something brighter.

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What if the word “diet” was removed from your vocabulary?

Jul 7

Posted by Jason in Attitude, Avoiding Traps, Finding Your Way, Healthy Lifestyle | No Comments

A good first step toward establishing life-long, sustainable eating habits that will help you reach the healthy goals which you want to achieve may be to take the word “diet” out of your vocabulary.  The reasoning?

Diets are temporary.  Life-long, sustainable eating habits are permanent.  In my opinion, it is this permanence over the long-term which can provide lasting achievement of weight-loss, without all the ups and downs and the other tumult that can come along with dieting.

So let’s look at it this way.  When you stop and really think about the concept of dieting, the context of the word just oozes a sense of being temporary.  “I’m on a diet right now, so I can’t eat that.”  When you’re on a diet, what is it that you are dieting from?

That’s the point to consider.  Obviously, the primary motivating factor for going on a diet is to lose weight.  The goal is to achieve the slimness that you may be looking for.  The “diet” is the vehicle that can get you there.  Conventional thought usually states that once this goal has been achieved, then you can go off the diet.  But then what?

That’s the mystery question.  When the diet is “done,” do you go back to your old eating habits?

When many, if not most diets out there are examined, it can be quite evident that they are not developed to be a long-lasting solution to ensure a continuity and gradual sense of weight loss.  Many of the methods used may actually be unhealthy for the body.  Some of the plans may only offer prescribed foods that you absolutely despise.  Others may require that you only eat a certain manufactured product, and they can be quite expensive.

As a result, a good number of diets cannot be sustained over a lifetime, nor do they touch other areas that we believe to be so important – the emotional and psychological aspects behind overeating.

In other words, this may point to some reasons why so many diets don’t leave the dieter in the happy place that he or she is seeking – they may not be addressing a transformative shift into life-long, healthy equilibrium.  Instead, they may be only offering a quick fix.

And a quick fix may not be the solution.

Now we are not here to offer and tell you to go on another “plan.”  What we do suggest though is to think critically, deeply, and to keep an open mind.  Most of all, we want to help people overcome the negative emotions, stereotypes, societal conditioning, and misunderstandings that can be the propellers toward unhealthy, detrimental eating habits.

Furthermore, we want to help you to be able to feel good about yourself, to take care of yourself, and to help you look outside of the hamster wheel of the conventional sense of “dieting” toward a reality which can help you achieve an emotional, psychological, spiritual, and physical equilibrium that will have the resulting natural effect of losing weight, and keeping it off.

And this all starts with you and your beautiful self.  This will be your own journey, and you will find the way that’s right for you.  It may not be easy, but a transformation of this sort tends not to be.  But it’s not going to be hard either.  Just keep your spirits up and keep an open mind.  Put diets past behind you, and look toward the success you can create in the future.

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