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The Surprising Strategy

Sometimes the thing you're afraid of doing, is the thing that will set you free

By S.KPublished 3 years ago 5 min read
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The Surprising Strategy
Photo by Emilio Garcia on Unsplash

"Sometimes the thing you're afraid of doing, is the thing that will set you free." ~ Robert Tew

I recovered from binge eating and bulimia by giving permission to drink. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?

My weight for decades and the food war began in my youth, soon after reading my first food book, about Atkins, to be exact. I spent the next twenty years trying to lose weight (only to continue gaining) and struggle with diet.

At the age of thirty, I was finally able to lose weight, but it had not yet ended the war, it had just started a new one. The battle to lose weight and change my body is moving forward.

Thus began a ten-year period of my “exercise trip.” I became an award-winning coach and health coach and became a nationally trained athlete.

The battle for weight and food continued throughout.

I was introduced to fresh food by the coach I hired before I became myself. For four days in my first attempt at a healthy diet, I had a bulimic problem - overeating and starvation and overuse to try to compensate. Within eight months, I was found to have been officially diagnosed.

Recreational activities to the point of feeling like I could die in my sleep became normal, and I realized that I had two options: either eat or die. I chose the last one.

I realized that understanding what was driving those behaviors was the key to learning to change it all, so I decided to keep busy and just read that.

And I realized that that meant I had to stop worrying too much (and hate myself) about my food choices. It was not a problem; it was the symptoms of whatever was happening to me that drove those characters.

So I gave myself full permission to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.

I even gave myself permission to drink as much as I wanted.

And little by little, I began to indulge in little. It's been years since I've had it - the drive is completely gone.

I know permission to indulge in noise sounds crazy, but are you trying to force yourself not to overeat or eat "bad things" at work? Does trying to judge, control, criticize, limit, and disgrace your “right” diet and / or health and happiness work?

If so, proceed. But if what you didn't do didn't work for you, stay with me while I explain two reasons why consent is so important, and a helpful comparison method that doesn't help.

Why Is Permission So Important?

Permission to eat whatever we want helps to reverse the two most common causes of self-injury: restrictions and punishment.

Food restrictions (rules about what we think we should or should not eat) have caused my cravings, overeating, and overeating.

Science has shown that food shortages / restrictions activate the millennial desire to survive in our brain causing cravings, compulsions, and even raw foods until we "fall."

Punishment also plays a role in overconfidence because we behave in a way that we believe is appropriate.

We have been taught that certain foods are good and create "good" bodies, and that certain foods are bad and create "bad". We are taught that we are what we eat, and we judge weight gain or eating “bad” things like failure, whether it is good or bad depending on what we eat and how big it is.

We punish ourselves by trying to limit ourselves, or we go to the other side and overeat what we tell ourselves we should not have, which fuels the cycle.

How can you want to choose nutritious or nutritious choices when you hate, judge, humiliate, and criticize yourself? You can't.

That thought, "Well, you're already twisted, you might as well eat the rest and start all over again tomorrow" —that all that or whatever you think, overindulgence, self-injury — is largely driven by two things: prevention and punishment.

Complete consent, even indulgence in alcohol, helps to begin to change both.

It stops the feeling of deficiency in certain foods (so it loses its appeal), and helps to improve the relationship you have with it (so you no longer judge yourself and beat yourself up by eating "bad things").

Now, you might think, but Roni, eating whatever I want put me in this mess. I can't be trusted to eat whatever I want.

This is where the biggest lie has led us to the poison zone: the idea that our natural compulsion to “be bad” and consume all that evil is bullshit.

We are not born with a perfectly sound body that needs food in ways that make us feel like garbage. We are not born with a body that is “lazy to exercise.” I call it a bull for all that.

We are born with a body that can eat and naturally want to move. We are born with bodies that want to feel good and work hard to keep us healthy 24/7.

But we are actively taught not to ignore or cut ourselves off from them, and we become better at ignoring and cutting through the natural elements of our bodies that we can no longer feel.

We learn patterns of thinking and behavior that are implanted in our brains and end up driving our own choices, not the natural instincts we were born with.

It’s not your natural feeling to knock down the whole bag of potato potatoes just because they exist. And it is not uncommon for you to ignore your body's cries for help. That's the moral to be learned.

As we get older, the ways we eat, think, and live become learning behaviors - which can be changed when you stop trying to follow other people's rules and begin to understand how you got where you are.

When you spend your life trapped in that “follow-up” cycle compared to the “off-track” cycle you are completely cut off from yourself, your body, and what you want and need.

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About the Creator

S.K

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