The Mindset to Make Healthy Food Choices

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We talk a lot in the weight loss world about making “healthy” choices. What helps us to be able to make healthy choices? Often, we don’t feel like we’re making choices at all. We walk into the kitchen and find ourselves eating our 2nd muffin before we even know what happened. Or, we are in the grocery store thinking we need to avoid the candy aisle and the next thing we know we are in the car devouring a bag of peanut butter cups. What happened? That is an essential question.  We need to figure out exactly what happened so that we can be in charge of those choices, rather than feeling controlled by our “bad” decisions and compulsive eating. 

For many of us, what happened goes something like this:  As we walked into the kitchen and saw the plate of muffins, many thoughts bombarded us in a flash. “Ohhh,  muffins, yumm, but I shouldn’t eat those, there are so many calories in each one, and I will be ‘bad’ if I eat them. Don’t eat any, it’s bad for you. I should be ‘good’ try to be good.” Then another voice chimes in.  “I want what I want when I want it.  It tastes good and I need it now.”  Suddenly, I am feeling angry that I can’t eat the muffins and everyone else can, and I really want it, and I hate these decisions and there is a “civil war” in my mind, and 
. You get the idea.  Already the 2nd muffin is in the mouth and being eaten quickly because we are feeling too guilty to enjoy it fully.

In order to conquer the inner battle that leads to unhealthy choices it is essential to become aware of these thoughts and be able to recognize and hear them as they are happening.  We call this inner dialogue self talk. It is both possible and necessary to detect these often unconscious thoughts.  We can focus our attention on what is going on in our mind and how we are talking to ourselves. Get a pad or notebook and have it handy for jotting down these thoughts as you bring them to you consciousness. It may be after the fact at first, reflecting as you are coming out of an episode of overeating, or as you are struggling to decide what to eat or not to eat.

After we have become more familiar with the negative self talk that generates unhealthy choices, we can learn to reframe these thoughts to be a supportive and productive aide to ourselves in making healthy and satisfying food choices.

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