Perhaps you’ll never have to say again “I’ll start on Monday”
If we are completely honest with ourselves, how many times throughout our lives have we told ourselves, “I’ll start again on Monday”? Or some version of that. Some allusion to the point that, if we ate much more than what we had intended to eat, we can wait until Monday and put ourselves back on track with the start of the new week. A new beginning. Renewed hope.
For people who emotionally eat, this is pretty common. We may have been depriving ourselves for some time, be it days or weeks, and then came a moment in which.. we couldn’t resist dessert. Or the drink that we said we would not have for 2 weeks, and there is someone offering it to us at night, after a long stressful day. Or our child left his whole plate untouched but we are kind of full because we already finished ours- but we kind of mindlessly start eating it. And on and on it goes. You get the idea.
We were doing SO good with our eating until inevitably…
we slip. Right? Hasn’t it happened to us all? we start with one cookie, one treat, one venti mocha latte frapuccino, and all of a sudden the gates open and we cannot stop at one cookie, or one serving of homemade comfort food. We figure that we screw up anyway, so there is no use now in pressing the breaks—this is often the subtext of this behavior.
One anything usually does not do the trick. We feel we need more. The magnitude of our feelings require more food to assuage them, to relieve them, to make a us a bit numb to them.
All these happens unconsciously the majority of the time. We do not intend to soothe our tiredness, boredom, sadness or anxiety with food, we do not set out to do it. It just happens that way. We are driven to food because we have the emotional experience that it has served that purpose in the past---that is, in the first part of the cycle. We remember in our cells the feeling we got during the second phase of the cycle of emotional eating (see my previous blog for an explanation of the phases of emotional eating) in which we experience that feeling good, comfort, relief that happens in response to dopamine being released when we eat. We know that feeling in our gut. And we want that and we feel wee need it, so we automatically eat in these moments of high [stress]—anxiety, sadness, loneliness, you include here your most triggering emotion.
But in those moments we forget about.. second part of this cycle..
the part that we have probably experienced numerous times but it tends to be dormant, to not be influencing our behavior that much once the cycle of emotional eating starts. We are seldom in touch with that third phase, or if we are, the power that it exerts over us is not enough to help us stop.
By the third phase of the emotional eating cycle I mean all the negative consequences that this pattern brings about—for many of us the shame, the guilt, the feeling heavy, boated, feeling uncomfortable in some of our clothes, our jeans being too tight, the corresponding hit to our self-esteem. One. More. Example. That we could not ‘control’ ourselves and our behavior.
“I’ll start again on Monday”
And at the end of an emotional eating ‘episode’ we often tell ourselves, We’ll start again on Monday. And we say it with conviction, really committing ourselves to do it. Monday. “We can certainly do that”, we think. There’s relief in these words because it allows us to put to rest our emotional eating for a bit.
Don’t get me wrong. Telling ourselves we’ll start again on Monday is a good start, and a testament of our desire to be more intentional and more mindful of our eating patterns. That we want to rein our feelings in some way so that they don’t end ‘making us’ eat in ways we truly do not want.
But the truth is there is no need to wait until Monday. There is nothing magical about Monday other than the attributes that we ascribe (most of us anyway) to Monday. A new week. A new opportunity. And perhaps more unconsciously a fresh new page were we can have a clean start, not contaminated by my out of control eating episode like the one just happened.
The idea of starting on Monday is a powerful one because it serves a twofold purpose—
First, it gives us some time (days or at least hours if it is Sunday) to gradually ground ourselves and put ourselves back on track. Perhaps a part of us feels we need to eat some more, that we are not done yet. It may scare us to commit to start again now or later today. Monday may sound safer.
Second, Monday for many of us represents the start of a new week, the connotation being of a fresh, new period were we can start ‘anew.’
Wouldn’t we all welcome more freedom and a sense of empowerment around food?
Often times we do things or think in certain ways just because this is how we have always been or thought. Because this is what we have absorbed from our environment for years and years. However, if we want to feel freer, and less constrained by these paradigms that we keep following over and over without knowing really why, we can start to question how our current paradigm serves us (or not).
“I’ll start again on Monday” may be a paradigm you choose to leave behind. The alternative paradigm, as you may have guessed, is not waiting until Monday :) We can start right now. In the moment we had the awareness that what we are doing (or just did) is not aligned with how we want to show up in the world. You are just either beginning to realize or perhaps, on the other side of the spectrum, know full well that this is not what you want. And that is a great start!
So—let’s go through it together.
You just had a moment, and episode, you over-ate in an attempt to manage feelings or emotional states. You experienced the ‘high’, the comfort, the relief, the good after-feeling of ingesting the food, the “food analgesia,” meaning the feelings of relief and numbness food may induce.
But now, a few minutes or hours later you start getting more in touch with the discomfort of the emotional eating, be it physically (feeling overly full, heavy, bloated, clothes fitting tighter) or emotionally (feeling you disappointed yourself, discouraged, distraught, down, sad that is still happening, feeling that yet again you could not be fully in control of your actions).
Now we have a choice.
We can decide when we want to feel we are again “on the path” in regards to our relationship with food. It can be Monday. Absolutely. Or it can be now. Or tonight. Or tomorrow morning, allowing us whatever time we feel we need to “reset” or “ground ourselves” before putting ourselves back on the path.
I love the now because now is the only moment we really have. And it is in the now that behavior happens. Always in the now. Some of you may be thinking, I can’t start now, or I may need a bit more food to navigate my not feeling good that I am experiencing now OR I need a day or at least an afternoon to get over this episode and ‘start again”. Whatever you need. If you need a day, take the day. If you need two hours, take two hours. There is not pressure for you to start now. I would like to invite you to feel the freedom to choose when you intentionally put yourself back in the path you want to be.
My intention with this piece (and all my work in this area really) is to empower you and, if you so choose, work alongside you so that you are again the one in control, making the choices that best fit for you in the moment. I love the idea of you having more freedom and a deeper sense of empowerment. An episode of emotional eating or binge eating does not need to define the next 5 days of your life—practically and emotionally speaking. We can decide to start now.
I’ll end by sharing a quote that portray this idea beautifully:
“How to begin the journey?
You need only to take the first step.
When? There is always now.
-George Leonard
It is always up to you, You call the shots. I am here supporting you on whatever you may need on this path towards more freedom and self-empowerment; regardless of how long you have been engaging in this behavior.
If you want to walk this path toward freedom and possibility, I would love to support you in it. Head over to claudiaperolini.com/quiz and learn more about what are your most powerful triggers. Along with the results you’ll obtain tips and suggestions to shifting your relationship with food once and for all.
What is your #1 emotional eating trigger?
To the freedom that lies ahead,
Claudia