In today’s lesson you’ll begin to understand where your beliefs about food and eating come from.
Kicking binge eating into touch means that you’ll need to begin to understand why you behave the way you do around food.
Yep, you’re just gonna have to dig deep into your past experiences and look at the way you talk to yourself about food and start putting that jigsaw together.
It’s no good burying your head in the sand and reaching for the next bag of crisps in the numb way you do right now.
That’s just gotta stop if you want to off-load binge eating and tell it to take a hike.
Instead you’ve got to get clarity and understanding about what influences you absorbed as you grew up and how you talk to yourself now.
We’re talking here about influences from home, school, your culture, religion, and all those pesky emotional meanings that you confer upon food.
So, have you ever been faced with a plate full of food and not been able to stop eating even though you felt full?
That’s your food script rearing it’s ugly head!
Perhaps your inner parent is berating you, “You shouldn’t waste food”. But do you know that really you should be able to leave food if you’re full. It is allowed.
So if we want to get to grips with this food problem, this bloody binge eating that’s blighting our lives, then we’ve got to get digging down into what has formed us.
We’ve got to understand our food script, what it is and where it came from.
Once we do get some clarity here then we can begin to recognize our responses to food and slowly change them to healthier attitudes and behaviours.
We all have a food script that we’ve taken on board, usually unconsciously, from being very young children.
We get this information from our parents, from friends, from magazines, television, advertising, public health messages and so on.
The experience of one of my clients, Amy (name changed) illustrates this well.
Amy had a real problem with leaving food which meant that even when she was uncomfortably full she felt compelled to clean her plate and would even finish the children’s leftovers.
As we discussed her food script she began to remember the messages she’d picked up about food as a child. From the media she remembered regularly seeing images of starving children in Africa, on the News and even on children’s TV.
At the table with the family pressure was put on her to eat what was on the plate and she remembered being told, “Eat it all up. Your father has worked hard to put food on the table” and “Eat it all up. There are children in the world who are starving”. Sound familiar?
Coaching Assignment:
So now here’s the work that you have to do.
This assignment may seem simple enough but it can evoke a powerful and transformative understanding of why you treat food, and yourself, in the way that you do.
There are two parts to this assignment:
Part 1
What do you say to yourself about food? Do you give yourself permission to eat certain foods? Do you berate yourself? Just what is going on inside your head?
Think back carefully to the last few times you had an issue with food.
Your inner parent might have been saying:
“You shouldn’t waste food”
“Have a sweetie it will make you feel better”
“Go away and eat some chocolate on the Motorway”
“You’re a greedy pig”
Your inner adult might have been saying:
“You would have to eat 20 Magnums to gain 1lb”
“One slice of chocolate cake has 300 calories”
“Lentils are a good source of protein”
Your inner child might have been saying:
“Yum, yum. I want it now”
“I hate vegetables”
“I feel fat so I mustn’t eat”
“I deserve a treat”
Think carefully and write down your answers if it helps.
Part 2
Think back over your childhood. Do you have any food related memories? Think carefully and write down the answers that come to mind if it helps.
Here are some useful questions to help prompt your memories:
Were you forced to eat everything on your plate as a child?
Were you ever made aware of food shortages e.g. the starving children of Africa?
Were you ever told that certain foods are good for you?
Were you ever rewarded with food treats?
Did you parents eat between meals?
Were you given special foods when you were ill?
Did you ever sneak food as a child?
What about your mother – did she enjoy cooking? Who did she cook for? How did she feed herself? (Last in line?) What does that tell you about how she felt about herself?
Family mealtimes – did you eat together? How was the atmosphere?
Explore your memories and images that these questions bring to your awareness. What have you come to understand about yourself and your relationship with food through this exercise?
Perhaps you can talk to your siblings to discover more of your family’s food script.
If you found this lesson valuable then others might too. Please feel free to share it on Facebook or Twitter etc.
Related posts:
- Binge Eating Treatment: Control Your Eating With Optimum Nutrition [mini-course - lesson #1]
- Binge Eating Treatment: Your Route to Recovery from Emotional Eating
- FREE DOWNLOAD: Keeping A Food Diary Helps To Stop Emotional Eating
- 3 Ways to Find Inner Peace and Stop Binge Eating
- Food Offence #1: Crisp Sandwiches ain’t food!