Change your thinking, improve your eating.

Changing mindset, thoughts and behaviours around how we feel about our bodies and our eating behaviours is something I’m really passionate about.  Too many women spend their lives yoyo dieting, fixated on good foods/bad foods and have an unhealthy relationship with food – but it doesn’t have to be this way.

I mentioned on Facebook last week that I was off to a workshop on using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques (CBT) in nutrition.  I’ve learned a little about CBT in the past few years but this workshop was great and has left me wanting more!!

CBT is about helping people to identify unhelpful thinking and behaviours so you can develop ways to change these.  This process helps both support change and maintain change .  It also helps you to get back on track when you fall off the wagon.    Some of these principals worked really well in helping me defeat my own food issues years ago, before I really knew what they were.

I thought I’d share with you today just a small snippet of CBT that we learnt about in the workshop- something practical that you can use every day to help you.

This little snippet is making up “Rationale Cards”.   This involves taking some of those negative, self defeating thoughts you have and changing this to a newer, more positive thought and behaviours.  It’s not about affirmations.  It’s taking skewed beliefs about yourself and re framing them to help with more positive outcomes, and writing these on cards so you can remind yourself to think in a new way.

I often say to my clients that we are real bullies to ourselves, and we need to quieten down the bully in your head and be more of a friend to yourself.  Imagine this – your bestie is trying to lose weight and she goes to have dessert at a BBQ you are both at.  Would you say to her “OMG you are so useless – look at you eating dessert, what a failure, you can’t stick to a plan”.  No you wouldn’t.  (Well I hope you wouldn’t or I don’t want to be your friend!) But yet those are the sorts of things many of us say to ourselves ALL the time.   These thoughts lead to negative behaviours that then further sabotage our efforts  – like comfort or binge eating.

Here’s one thing you can do to help challenge your thinking to create healthier food patterns long term.

Activity – Creating Rationale Cards

Have a think about a situation where you’ve done something you didn’t really want to do – and felt annoyed/bad/sad afterwards.

Have a think about what happened in that situation and what your thoughts and beliefs were – and what the consequences of these thoughts/beliefs were.

Here’s an example:
Situation – I had to work late to finish a project my boss pushed on you at the last minute. My boss doesn’t even say thank you, or acknowledge all the work you’ve done.
Thoughts/beliefs – my project mustn’t have been good enough.  I feel like I’ve failed.  I may as well get some chocolate – that’s my only comfort right now.
Consequences:  Eat block of chocolate.  Feel down and annoyed that I’ve slipped up on my healthy eating patterns.  I feel even more like a failure.

Note it’s NOT the situation that leads to the consequences – it’s your thoughts and beliefs around this situation. 

For you, pick one of those negative beliefs/thoughts you have and ask yourself the following:

– what is the evidence that the thought might not be true?
–  Is there an alternative explanation or another way of thinking?
–  what would I tell a friend in this situation?

What we want then is to write the old thought and a new, constructive thought on some cards that you can keep handy and read regularly.  It does take a bit of time to change these thought patterns so it’s important to remind yourself regularly of a more positive, constructive thought pattern.

 

Here’s some examples, the first one is an extension of the above example:

This is really just a little taster of one CBT technique, but it’s one we all can use.  Keep these cards handy and read each day to help train your brain into new, more helpful thought patterns.  It’s doesn’t happen overnight, but it will happen!!