The Self Love Diet – coming to terms with your relationship with food

You’re not overeating because you’re a pig. You’re not a pig. You’re a person. You overeat because there is something psychologically out of balance and you’re using food either to punish yourself or to comfort yourself. You might not realize that’s what you’re doing.

At this point you’re probably well established in your eating habits and at the stage where the real problem is buried under layers of new problems that have piled up since you started in your habit of using food to cope whether you eat to punish yourself or eat to comfort yourself. You probably have bought into the idea that your weight problems have to do with age, genetics and all the other ideas that get thrown around out there. No doubt these things play a role, but you know deep down that you’ve been eating quarts of ice cream and having whole cakes in one sitting. You’ve been finishing off entire pizza pies and having much more food than is normal. Is it because you’re a glutton? Come on, you know yourself. You love food and it’s okay to love food, but you’re not eating the way you eat because you love food. You’re not a glutton. Frankly the idea of gluttony should be reassessed because it’s clear that people who gorge themselves on food have deeper psychological problems than just being “greedy”.

So why do you eat so much? That is a question you need to ask yourself and take the time to answer. It might not be easy to answer it without first starting to pay attention to your eating habits. What are the impulses that drive you to eat? What are you thinking about just before you get up and go to the kitchen half an hour after you’ve had your breakfast?

If you really want to get your weight problems under control you are going to need to come to terms with your relationship with food. People who overeat have bigger problems than vanity. If you are an impulse eater trying to lose weight you’ll find that your bad eating habits will always return even if you have some success with diets. You’ll usually gain back the weight because vanity diets will not treat the problem that lead to your weight gain to begin with. You might feel good about yourself for a little while after you’ve lost weight, but your problems in life will not go away just because you have a slimmer body; and sooner or later you’ll turn back to eating quarts of ice cream and whole chocolate cakes.

Forget about the vanity aspect of dieting. Even if you’re on a vanity diet right now, taking diet pills, or on some other diet program, focus more on the deeper problems that drive you to use food as punishment or comfort than on the goal to be thin. Make it your goal to have a healthy relationship with food, to understand that food should not be used to punish yourself or to comfort yourself but instead to nourish your body and your mind.