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This Time for Good!

This Time for Good!

By Thomos JamesPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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This Time for Good!
Photo by Àlex Rodriguez on Unsplash

“Resistance is the key to the greatest force in the universe.” ~ Eckhart Tolle

I can't say I haven't fought hard in my life. But there is one area in which I overcame the challenges I faced without effort: quitting my eating disorder, losing weight, and keeping results easily for twenty-eight years.

How Did I Do That?

In a moment I will tell you exactly how I did that and how you can do it too. But first let me take a moment to explain exactly what I was going through.

As a kid, I used to love food and eat a lot, but even when I wasn't a bully, I was always thin.

For about fifteen years I had an eating disorder. I usually have bulimia, but when I read the symptoms, I realized that it might have been an eating disorder.

I was going to eat a lot of food in one day in a short time, and the next day I started an overeating program that I couldn't take care of for a long time. Sometimes I was able to keep such a diet for a few months until my period was over and my hair started to fall out.

I rarely vomited. First, because it took a few years until I found it possible, and second, because it made my eyes red and swollen.

But I think a direct diagnosis is not so important. In any case, I was suffering. And I'm sure you can tell, because even if you do not have an eating disorder, you may still be struggling with chronic cycles of eating and overeating.

(You may not call your diet "food," because today it is fashionable to say, "I eat healthy."

Why Did It Happen to Me?

At the same time as I was growing up, I struggled with an eating disorder for six years.

As an adult, when I think about what happened, I used to say that eating was a distraction from my emotions. This is not entirely wrong; however, over time I realized that this was not the main cause of my problem.

My mother suffered most of her life with obesity and spent years trying all kinds of food, without success.

When I was in the seventh grade, he worried that I was eating too much. "If you continue to eat too much, you will end up fat like me," he told me repeatedly.

As a result, I came to believe that I had inherited his tendency to be overweight and therefore not to eat certain foods. And because I was having a hard time resisting temptation, I started eating secretly and eventually became obese.

Big Shift

At the age of twenty-three I woke up one morning realizing that I was not only thinking about eating all day, my efforts to overcome my weight problem did not get me anywhere.

That morning I decided I would never eat again, even if it meant gaining weight for the rest of my life. I have also decided that food that has caused me to break down my diet over and over again will be an important part of my menu.

For example, from that day on, for many years my breakfast consisted of coffee and cookies (and that wasn't the only delicious thing I ate that day).

Once the burden of food was removed from my life, I no longer had the insatiable desire to end all chocolate as before. I knew I could eat chocolate today, tomorrow, the next day tomorrow, and so on; and that way, I got to the point where I had chocolate at home and I didn’t touch it - something I had never thought of before.

The following year my weight is moderate and to this day, twenty-eight years later, I am thin and maintain a stable body weight.

I still think a lot about food, but not too much, just because I love it so much. I eat quite a lot, on average between 1700-2000 calories a day (I don’t count). I love healthy food but I also enjoy unhealthy foods, and I do not feel guilty about what I ate; in the worst cases I have a stomach ache or nausea.

Principles That Gave Me My Freedom

1. No enemy food.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no diet that is potentially addictive, that harms your health (unless you have a medical condition), or causes you to gain weight quickly. However, most people are very rich in convincing you otherwise.

Obviously, a major part of your diet should be healthy, but the problem is that eating unhealthy foods can be stressful, stressful, and disgusting!

If you can't control yourself before a meal, allow it to be eaten only when you are outdoors or in small packages.

2. No diet is completely forbidden.

When we abstain from certain foods, we inevitably develop a craving for it, and eventually we find ourselves feeding it helplessly.

When we allow ourselves to eat whatever we desire, as I do with candy, the day when we may feel like eating food that we could never resist, or wishing you only once in a while, will definitely come.

The reason why this view seems absurd to most people is because of what I will explain next.

3. Give yourself permission.

The secret to my success was that I really allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted for the rest of my life.

While people sometimes say they give themselves permission to eat certain foods, they are motivated by fear of these foods and the belief that they should not eat them.

While they "enjoy" their freedom, in their minds they tell themselves, "tomorrow I will get back on track." (Tomorrow, in this context, could mean the next day or "as soon as possible.")

And as long as this is their attitude, they will be forced to eat as much of the food as possible today.

4. Stop behaving like an emotional person.

According to an urban legend about emotional food, a "normal" person

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