Is your thinking sabotaging your results?

You planned a healthy dinner. All you have to do is heat it up and dig in. Then your spouse/roommate/significant other brings pizza home. It’s a favourite of yours and you decide to have the pizza instead of what you had prepared. It tastes sooo good that you find yourself eating A LOT, to the point where you’re not really feeling all that great...

We’ve all been there before. We set out great plans and then we don’t follow through. Even for the most dedicated ‘healthy eater’, these things happen. It’s actually very normal for all of us. However, what we do at this moment when we are unbuttoning the top of our pants and filled with regret, can make all the difference between this pizza feast being a normal part of your journey to better health, or the start of you abandoning that journey altogether.

Our brains like to throw up all kinds of thoughts, some of which might be true and many that someone (I’m looking at you) needs to call B.S. on. Today we’re going to review a few of the unhelpful thinking styles our brains easily adopt and I suspect some of these might be familiar to you. Then we’ll look at what type of thinking we might want to adopt instead.

Generalizing

This is the tendency for our brains to take one negative experience and turn it into meaning that everything is negative. It might sound like “This always happens to me.” “My husband is always bringing crappy food into the house.” “There is always something that keeps me from following my diet.”

Jumping to Conclusions

Most of us are not mind readers but our brain likes to think we are. For some reason we assume we know what other people are thinking and our brain throws out what it thinks their thoughts or intentions are. It might be telling you things like: “My boyfriend obviously doesn’t care about my health.” “He’s intentionally sabotaging me.” “She brought this pizza home on purpose.” “She never listens to me.”

Magnification or catastrophizing

Jumping to conclusions plagues many of us. We take our thought that our spouse/roommate/friend is trying to sabotage us or doesn’t care about our health and we take that thought on a creative adventure. Before we know it, we’ve magnified this pizza bringing incident to “My husband doesn’t love me.” or “I’ll never turn my health around.” or “I’m unlovable and he’s going to leave me.” Or “I’m going die old and alone with diabetes ravaging my body.” You get the picture…

Minimalization

This occurs when we are so focused on how ‘terrible’ we are for overeating the pizza, we forget all the good things that we’ve ever done. We play down our positive attributes and underestimate ourselves. We forget all the other healthy meals we had in the past, the meditation sessions we’ve done and the great sleep routine you’ve put in place. All of this gets minimized relative to ‘the pizza incident’.

Black or White Thinking

The classic thinking that often stomps out any sprout of a newly formed habit from growing into a well-established one. We slip up and that’s it. If we can’t do it perfectly, we’ll we can’t do it at all. We begin thoughts like “I ate the pizza, I’ve ruined my diet, I might as well have ice cream for dessert.” Hardly the best next step to improving our eating habits… One slip and our brains can easily convince ourselves that we can’t do this.

Self and Social Labeling

Our brains love to find patterns. In fact, our brains love patterns so much, they’re really good at creating them, even when maybe there isn’t an actual pattern there at all. The brain will quickly link this pizza overeating episode with any other similar incident and draw some VERY unhelpful conclusions and VERY unhelpful labels such as “I’m just a failure.” “I am powerless around food.” “I’m addicted to food.” “I can’t control myself around food.” “I’m an overeater.” “My roommate is a food pusher.” Wow, there’s a whole lot of thinking that doesn’t really leave us feeling like we can really make change happen!

Finger Pointing

While many of us beat ourselves up when we slip up, we also like to blame others for our mistakes. The blame game is a dangerous one and it might look something like this. “My husband is just sabotaging me.” “If my roommates would stop bringing food into the house, I could do this.” Or maybe it looks like: “My colleagues (or the kids, or your in-laws, or the neighbours, you get the picture….) are stressing me out and causing me to eat.”

Well unless these people have tied you down and forced that pizza into your mouth, I think we might need to look elsewhere for the blame here… We’ll talk more about our emotions and how we can manage them in future posts. For now, just remember, you are the one that makes the decisions around what food goes in your mouth, no one else does.

So maybe you’ve recognized a few of these unhelpful thinking styles in your own life. So how do we break the pattern and what does a helpful thinking style look like?

Here is a 3 step process to get you started:

Step 1) Gather the Facts

The first thing we need to do is to question the B.S. that our brain is throwing up at us by examining whether our thoughts are really true. Now you might be inclined to automatically say “Yes, of course, my husband is sabotaging me. He brought home the pizza, didn’t he?” but ask yourself again, is it REALLY true. Could you prove in a court of law that your roommate is trying to sabotage you? Has he told you this? Could there be another explanation? Is he, just maybe, trying to do something nice because he’s seen how stressed out you are and he knows how much you love pizza, or maybe he just really wanted pizza for dinner? Is it really true that you are powerless over food? Have you ever said no thank you to food you would enjoy? Have you ever eaten a meal and not felt overfull at the end? I bet you have. Once you’ve challenged your thoughts, you should be able to work your way down to just the facts of the situation. 1) My husband/roommate/friend brought home pizza 2) I chose to eat the pizza instead of the meal I had prepared. 3) I overate the pizza and now feel unwell. Those are the facts.

Step 2) Be Curious

Once we have the facts, we want to explore them with curiosity and compassion. Ask yourself questions, without judgement, about what happened here. Explore what you might consider doing next time to end up in a better place. This might look like “Hmmm… I’m not feeling all that great after eating that pizza. Probably not a great fuel food for me. I also think I overate. I wonder what made me choose the pizza when I had a better alternative prepared? Next time I’ll remind myself of just how pizza feels in my body after I eat. Perhaps then I can avoid this feeling or maybe I can limit myself to just one slice to see if that feels better. I could eat a little pizza and a little of what I had prepared.

And what about eating soooo much. Why did I eat beyond full? Was I distracted while I was eating or maybe I was eating too quickly? Maybe I need to try slowing down when I eat. This way I can make sure I don’t miss my fullness cues. Good learning opportunity. I’ll do better next time.” Notice how there was no self-deprecating negative talk here, just applying curiosity to what happened and how it could be better next time.

Step 3) Show yourself some compassion

Now you may still be feeling a little regret or remorse for eating that pizza and that’s where some self-compassion is needed. First, occasionally overeating food is totally normal! Food is more than just fuel for our bodies. There are lots of traditions and emotions that we associate with food. Everyone gets caught up from time to time with the deliciousness of a meal or the distraction of a good conversation (or scrolling through social media) and find our ourselves having eaten too much. It’s OK. Remind yourself that there is no such thing as a perfect human so we need to stop expecting that of ourselves. You have not committed a crime, you just ate too much pizza tonight. Period.

If we find ourselves doing this too often and we would like to reduce the frequency, well this pizza eating incident is a perfect gift. Recognize that it is only in the mistakes we make that we learn and move forward, better than we were before. We remind ourselves of the times we were successful and then take to heart the lessons we learned from Step 1) being curious about the incident, and move forward with this new information.

The three-step process provides us with a little bit of a more positive conclusion to our pizza over-eating session, don’t you think?

If you need help with addressing your unhelpful thinking, that’s what a health coach is for. Contact me for a 30-minute free consultation when we can discuss your goals and determine if health coaching is a good fit for you.

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