Читать книгу Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book - Lee Janogly - Страница 15

Sometimes just the thought of going on a diet—‘I’m never going to eat biscuits or cakes ever again!’—can make you feel stressed. You think of your sugar-fix as a drug and, as with any drug, you fear withdrawal symptoms or that you will feel deprived. The stress this invokes just makes you want to eat more, but this sort of stress is just something you have manufactured so that you can use it as an excuse to stuff your face.

When I ask my clients what makes them eat inappropriately, I get the following answers:

1. Boredom. So does eating cake relieve boredom? Boredom is a state of mind. If you are doing something that fully occupies your mind, you’re not bored and don’t think about eating. In truth, eating will simply intensify your boredom because the sugar makes you feel lethargic, and instead of doing some energetic physical or mental activity, you lounge around feeding your perceived feeling.

2. It relaxes you. Really? Yes, eating carbohydrate foods like biscuits can relieve anxiety and, as the food fills you up, you do experience a certain relief. But what about later when you try on your favourite trousers and they won’t do up? How relaxed are you then?

3. Having a bad day. Everyone has good and bad days, even people who don’t binge. Let’s face it: some days are a total waste of make-up! Eating sugary food will just make a bad day worse. You must have dealt with bad days before without bingeing, so are you just using this as an excuse to eat?

If you take the food out of the equation, you have to find another way of coping with whatever problem is driving you. Sometimes it is difficult to put your finger on exactly what is making you overeat. Maybe it started as a habit and just carried on that way. The trouble is that overeating is an auto-exacerbating disease—the more you do it, the worse it becomes. When you eat you feel guilty and disgusted with yourself, and when you feel that bad, you eat.

The only way to cure this habit is to manage it. Your eating behaviour is deeply ingrained into your subconscious. If you have binged in stressful situations in the past, you will automatically do it again, unless you can get your eating under control and change the way you think and feel about yourself. Once you admit to yourself that you do have a problem, you have taken the first step towards dealing with it.

You have coped before. You can cope again. Do not turn to food. Food will not change the situation. It will only make you feel worse.