When you hear over and over that you’re unworthy or unattractive because you can’t see your hip bones, when you’ve been brainwashed with the drip, drip of messages that say any body fat is wrong, immoral, unacceptable, weak, ugly, the first thought that comes to mind is: “I must eat less.” This has been programmed into all of us and it’s present even if we reject dieting. This thought is the first sign of unconscious dieting. It means that whatever you’re eating, the guilty feelings are eating away at you.
Years of failed dieting means you’ll have a lot of evidence that whenever you’ve tried to eat less, you’ve ended up eating more. So when you come under pressure to lose weight you get the urge to cut down on food. Together these two factors cause inner conflict. Translated into words this conflict would be: “I should be eating less but I can’t,” and it feels stressful. So each time you feel bad about your weight or size, you experience stress and internal battling – wanting to cut down on food, but knowing deep down that you can’t.
This hidden internal stress increases tension at the very moment you’re trying to resist eating something you think of as bad food. You experience a very real internal fight: “I want that food, I can’t have it because I need to lose weight, but I want it, but I can’t have it.” The longer you resist this food, the more intense and uncomfortable this inner battle becomes. You feel the food pulling you, your mind is unable to think of anything else. You feel stressed and uncomfortable.
If you give in and eat the ‘bad food’, the internal conflict is immediately gone. The stress of the battle that was raging within you is over. You feel some peace and this feels pleasurable, much like the pleasure you feel when a headache tablet starts to work and the pain in your head disappears. The pleasure, though, is an illusion. Without the pain of the headache (or the internal conflict) there’s no relief on its absence. Without the thought: “I want that. I can’t have it,” there wouldn’t have been any stress to relieve in the first place and avoiding or not avoiding the food would have been a matter of free will. But once this internal conflict-driven eating has happened a few times it’s too late. You want to avoid eating, you get the internal argument, you eat, there is and ending of the internal argument. And your brain has recorded eating as a great way to instantly relieve stress. Your brain then always sees food as a painkiller.
When your brain sees food as a way to end pain, you will be driven to eat it.
There are ways you can combat unconscious eating and we will be covering them in part 2. Watch this space.