Many of us would like to stop bad eating habits that we tend to return to. In fact most of us have lists of things we feel we should stop doing or should start doing that we carry around in our mind every hour of every day. But, because we are constantly telling ourselves what we shouldn’t do or what we must do – we don’t want to.
By trying to stop bad eating habits by telling ourselves over and over again to “knock it off!” we are actually creating a feeling of resistance inside that is preventing us from doing the exact things we are telling ourselves we shouldn’t do.
It is human nature to resist someone who is trying to tell you to do something (think back to how you felt when mom told you to clean your room) and this resistance is not only when others tell us what to do but it also comes up when we tell ourselves what to do.
So here is the thing to understand so you can move past your bad habits…
Any eating habit, no matter how long you have had it or how strong you think it is, really has nothing to do with the food. It has to do with how you are coping with your feelings and emotions, habits are just ways you have come up with to cope with uncomfortable emotions and through repetition they became habitual.
Therefore, in order to stop bad eating habits that you have, you will want to allow yourself to let go of the uncomfortable emotion (stress, fear, anxiety, grief, depression) that is driving that habit. And what you will find is when you release the emotion, the habit falls away.
How do you let the emotion go? By understanding that the emotion or feeling is not physically attached to you, it is not a part of your being it is simply a sensation and when you allow yourself a moment to focus on that sensation you can then decide whether you want to hold on to it and continue to feel it or to let it go and be free.