The struggle to feel full!
Are you and food constantly fighting a never-ending battle? if every day is a struggle to avoid temptation and ends with overeating, you have forgotten how to eat! If you can remember, as a child, this struggle was not there. We would eat when hungry and stop when full. Sweets and chocolates presented a challenge but, aside from eating a few too many, our weight did not suffer. We simply burned off the excess. We were too busy playing to let food take over our day!
When did this carefree life change? Life happened, we began working, entered relationships, gained new friendships and had families. We got responsibilities, our relationships broke down and we had problems. We found ourselves in survival mode, suffering the bad times by comforting ourselves and living in excess in the good times. The weight piled on without us realising it and suddenly we found that we weren’t happy about it but couldn’t stop either. We were trapped in a vicious cycle of overeating to make ourselves feel better, feeling bad and then overeating to comfort ourselves. There seems to be no way out so we let our lives spiral out of control.
ALL IS NOT LOST! The good news is that you can reclaim your life, you can release the hold that food has on you but the key is not to rush the process. Instead, slowly, purposefully we need to start to change not just WHAT we eat but HOW we eat. In fact, as you begin this journey to freedom, the HOW is more important than the WHAT. This is because, it is only when we learn HOW to eat that we can even begin to address WHAT we eat.
Here are 3 really easy but very powerful things you can do right now that will help you regain control of your eating and begin to feel full again:
Eat slowly
How many times have you eaten a meal and not really remembered exactly what you’ve eaten. When our relationship with food is broken, we tend to eat in a frenzy as if someone will take it away from us. Guilt is a constant companion, watching us over our backs, making us eat even faster. The problem is, in wolfing down our food, we don’t give our body the natural opportunity to:
Know when we are full – it takes time for the signal from our stomach to reach our brain
Enjoy what we have eaten – Eating quickly, stops us from relishing the taste, smell and texture of the food. After the first bite, we’re so engulfed in finishing to leave any time to experience the sheer pleasure of the food itself.
Chew longer
The longer you chew your food, the more time you will have to savour every morsel and appreciate the full flavour of what you are eating. This will automatically mean that you will enjoy your food more and without realising it, we will eat slower allowing us to fully benefit from the taste and by feeling fuller.
Pause often
Commit to taking a pause as you’re eating. Even a few seconds in between taking a bite will make a difference. This will allow you to feel as if you are in the driving seat of your life, not allowing food to take control of you. Remember, it is natural that you will forget and once again begin to eat quickly, all you need to do is to keep bringing your attention back to the act of eating itself and pause to take a deep breath.  By doing this, you will:
Loosen the hold food has on you.
Naturally slow down your eating
Allow yourself to truly enjoy your food.
Feel more satisfied after eating.
More likely feel full sooner, meaning you will end up eating less.
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