One of the most popular questions I get asked in emails from my newsletter subscribers is, “how do I stop overeating?” What I always answer back with is that they need to identify their high-risk situations and then figure out how to avoid them. It’s imperative that you do do the same if you want to stop eating too much.
Identify and stop chains of events that lead to your high-risk situations. A high-risk situation is a situation in which the chances are very good you’re going to overeat. For some people it’s going to mom’s house for dinner. Some people want to know how to stop from overeating when bored. For others’ it’s the first 30 minutes after they arrive home from work. it’s helpful to first identify these kinds of situations, and then plan in advance strategies that will help you deal with them. Remember, the more frequently you give in to food cravings, the stronger they become.
What you need to do is identify high-risk situations. The best way to do that is to keep weight-control records, and then search them for similar situations in which you overeat again and again. Once you’ve used your records to identify your high-risk situations, list each one on paper. Your goal now should be to figure out each of the separate steps that led you into the situation in the first place. High-risk situations don’t just happen suddenly for no reason. Rather, they are the result of a long chain of events.
To illustrate this, let’s examine the chain of events in the example of always overeating during the first 30 minutes after you arrive home from work:
a. When you shopped last night, you didn’t have a list, and you didn’t have any healthy meals planned to eat at home.
b. You stored cookies on your counter top.
c. You stayed up late to watch a late-night TV show.
d. You woke up late in the morning, and so didn’t have time to eat breakfast or make a lunch.
e. As usual you were very busy during lunch, and since you didn’t pack a lunch, you ended up eating fast food with a friend.
f. You arrived home devoid of nutrition and starving, and headed for the kitchen. You didn’t have any healthy meals planned, and you were hungry so you headed straight for the cookie jar when you saw it and ate a dozen or so cookies.
g. Now you felt like a failure, and said to yourself, “What does it matter,” and ate more cookies.
Do you see what’s happening here? Once event led to another, and to another, and to another, until a high-risk situation was created that, in the end, was almost unavoidable. To end this destructive chain of events, and learn how to convince your brain to stop overeating focus your efforts on planning strategies that will help you break the chain early in it’s development. To do this, you could list the chain of events described above in one column, and in another column next to it you could list strategies that would help you stop each event dead in its tracks.
For example, your second list of chain-breaking remedies might read:
a. Start planning meals and shopping from a list.
b. Store cookies in the freezer or in opaque containers.
c. Go to bed on time. (Tape worthwhile shows for future viewing.) Wake up on time.
d. Fix a healthy lunch the night before, and take it to work.
e. Go to the store before you go home, buy a bagel first, eat it, then shop for a healthy dinner.
f. Practice relaxed breathing and positive self-talk so that you don’t feel like such a failure when you slip-up. Don’t be a perfectionist.
g. Realize it’s okay to make a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. You can binge and not destroy all the hard work you’ve done.
Give this chain-breaking strategy a real chance. Identify, analyze, and then try to stop the chains of events that lead to your high-risk situations as early in the process as possible. This strategy could finally put you on the road to permanent weight control.
