This weekend I encouraged us to set some boundaries so we could approach Mother’s Day with a bit of self control. How did it go? Did you meet your expectations? What choices did you make that were awesome? What choices make you cringe this morning?
If you’re like most of us you made some great choices (veggie omelet on Sunday!) and some not-so-great choices (4ths on that amazing chocolate cake. Oops.) And I bet you’re not high-fiving yourself for that omelet…you’re probably beating yourself up over your lack of self control and bloated belly from the cake. That’s a pretty normal response, but how’s it working for you? Seriously. Yeah, it doesn’t work for me either. I get frustrated, wonder why I even tried, how I could ‘erase’ all my progress with just one weekend and dive back into what’s left of the cake.
What I’m going to suggest is mind-blowingly simple. What if we just looked at what happened as information? No emotions, no moral judgement, no ‘shouldas.’ It’s just info. The flow of thought might go something like this:
Wow. I don’t feel so great today because I ate 4 pieces of that cake. It was delicious, but I regret those last 2 pieces today. My stomach hurts and my pants don’t fit well. I have sugar cravings like crazy and I’m snapping at my family more than usual. What can I learn from this? You know, I felt this way last time I ate chocolate cake. And the time before. And each time I ate more than 1 piece. Come to think of it, I skipped lunch because I knew that cake was coming after dinner so I was starving. I ate a huge meal and never did really feel satisfied. I tend to do that when I know there will be desert because I want to save some calories.
By taking a step back, removing the emotions about what we ate, we were able to come up with some valuable information. Some patterns started to emerge: I tend to hurt after eating chocolate cake and I typically eat too much of it. I also tend to ‘save’ calories so I approach this desert with a huge appetite. This info sets us up to do some experiments. The next time this cake is served I could try eating 1 piece to see if I still hurt. If I do, maybe there’s something in that particular cake that doesn’t work well in my body. If I don’t, maybe it’s just the amount of cake that’s been the problem. I could also recognize that ‘saving’ calories isn’t working for me. Time for another experiment! The next time that cake is coming I could purposefully eat a lunch with protein, veggies and healthy fat and see what it does to my appetite. If I have more self control at dinner then I know I do better with a satisfying lunch that keeps my appetite more even. If I still struggle then I could look at other influences (how rested I am, what my stress level is, what I’m eating at dinner, etc).
You may think it’s impossible to stop beating yourself up about food long enough to approach it objectively, but we do this all the time in other circumstances. If we got a flat tire would we sit on the side of the road, crying about how stupid we were for hitting that nail? Nope. We’d drive to the nearest tire shop or call AAA. No guilt, just take care of the problem. If we realized we had picked up the nail driving by a construction site we would avoid the construction site. No shaming involved. The same principle can apply here. The fun part is when clients actually try this…learn from a situation…and almost immediately see success. They become students of their own lives and actually have FUN experimenting to see what will happen!
So, what can you learn from your choices this past weekend? What experiment could you do with the information you gathered?
