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Kick Food Addictions To Kick-Start Health
If you already know which foods in your diet are harming your health but just can’t stop eating them, you need to understand how to shift your emotional relationship with your meals. You have to alter deep-seated beliefs and feelings in order to change your food choices. Once you do, you can take a big step toward a better diet and a healthier future.
The Psychology Of Dietary Choices
Why is it so difficult to say goodbye to poor eating habits even when you may know they are not healthy? The fact is the psychology of lifestyle choices runs deep. I have asked my patients, “Why would you wait for a disease to manifest itself when you can prevent it by changing your dietary lifestyle now?”
I get varying answers that range from “I don’t know where to start,” or “It’s just too hard to change” to “I went on a liquid cleanse once, but soon afterwards I reverted back to old habits.”
Human Nature
It is human nature to settle in on a lifestyle that matches our beliefs and feelings. We do what we think we really want to do. We usually see no reason to change things that appear to bring us satisfaction. That’s why we need a driving force, a clear motivation for change to make healthier choices, especially when it comes to giving up food we enjoy. Changing the foods you habitually eat can be as difficult as quitting smoking.
I have seen firsthand how the smoking epidemic claims its victims. For example, in Ukraine, a study [1] from 2001 estimated that about 60 percent of Ukrainian men smoke. When I visited that country, I thought the percentage was even higher. All of those men knew that smoking destroys health. But they didn’t care much, because they weren’t suffering. Not yet, anyway.
Even in the United States where we all should know better, smoking is still a habit carried on by 21 percent of men and 17 percent of women, according to 2012 Centers of Disease Control and Prevention statistics.[2] Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death (tied with obesity) in the United States. But even knowledge like this doesn’t persuade some people to quit smoking.
A similar process keeps people eating unhealthy foods.
Brain Chemistry And Food Choices
Changing your food choices is not a casual process. I have learned a lot about it by writing, producing and then coaching individuals through a personalized healthy lifestyle mastery program. Consequently, I have seen many individuals make seriously difficult changes in their food choices. It first requires a change in belief about what is most important in relationship to your physical body.
The paradigm shift I observed in program participants did not occur just by reading something I wrote in my book. Instead, a change from “living to eat” to “eating to live” occurred only because my program required that they begin to feel deeply about their own selves, especially to feel self-love and appreciation for their body temples. This emotional shift was created by listening to my daily audio instructions, accompanied each day by journaling to music. The journaling topics were serious and personal ones. They often included recording information about their most important relationships, painful self-defeating thoughts they experienced, and how these thoughts controlled their health and food choices.
Once they addressed and then transformed the beliefs that were holding them back, they found that healthy food choices simply became a natural outcome of their new paradigm.
Personal Power
This process demonstrates that feelings are incredibly powerful. I believe that feelings (emotions) are generated by our thoughts. For my program participants, the key was to find a way to shift their thoughts, and I encouraged them to use emotional means to do so.
To change you have to buy into an “emotional” sale concerning yourself and the value of your life. That’s what it takes to change your food choices long enough to change your brain chemistry away from former food addictions. In running my program, I have found that people can become addicted to healthier foods and the satisfaction of self-mastery. Once they feel love for themselves, the shift in food choices becomes easy.
In my article next week, I’ll share in more detail some of my secrets to overturning harmful food addictions.
To your best health,
Michael Cutler, M.D.
Easy Health Options
[1] Am J Public Health. 2004 December; 94(12): 2177–2187.
[2] http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/adult_data/cig_smoking/index.htm accessed Feb 8, 2012.