Welcome back to the last week in our Finding Fullness series! It’s amazing how fast the year is going – already three months of 2022 are behind us! For us business types, Q1 is complete and we are moving fast into the 2nd quarter of the year. Whew!
It’s a good time to reflect. Planning for what we want to create takes intention, so taking a pause periodically helps us to see where we are, refine our goals, and troubleshoot. So how’s it going? Where are you on your weight loss journey compared to where you were at the beginning of the year? Are you still as committed or have you started the unintentional drift away from your plan?
If you’re still moving ahead with commitment and focus, good for you! But if you’ve started to fall back into old habits and have stepped off of your plan, you can recommit and restart right now. It’s ok if you’ve made mistakes if your next step is forward! No matter where you are, you can move ahead!
This week I want to talk about what to do if you overeat. We’ve spent the last few weeks getting clear on how full is enough and how to let your body help you in finding the right amount of fullness so the scale keeps going down. But inevitably while learning a new skill like eating to a just-satisfied level, there will be mistakes. Slip-ups. Errors. The question is, what do you do when you overeat?
Here’s what often happens. You sit down to a meal with the family and you get caught up in a lively conversation when you realize you ate more than you needed. Your stomach is a little (or a lot!) too full. Or you put more than you needed on your plate and felt guilty about throwing the food away, so you ate it, and afterward, you regretted not dumping the extra food in the trash. Or you missed lunch and decided to make up for the missed meal by eating more at dinner, only to discover that your stomach really hadn’t changed in size and you couldn’t fit extra food in there without feeling overfull.
This is what we high-achieving, accomplished women do: We fuss at ourselves. I mean, keeping on track, following the straight and narrow, being disciplined and sacrificing is how we got where we are today, right? If you make a mistake, you have to be corrected, right? And we learned to correct ourselves hard so we don’t have to be reprimanded by anyone else because it’s embarrassing to have someone else tell us we were wrong. So you tell yourself how stupid you were. You should know better by now, for goodness sake! Why can’t you just do this simple thing and stop eating when you’re full? And you say much uglier things to yourself than these – I know because I’ve said them.
The problem with talking to yourself like this is that you’re much more likely to quit on yourself. Maybe you should just learn to be happy despite the extra weight on your body that you don’t want there (you can be happy and overweight). You already screwed up, so just eat the candy bar on the counter or have the doughnuts in the break room. So your beatdown turns into a downward spiral that ends with shame and more overeating than just one meal. Flogging yourself just doesn’t get you to take loving action for yourself.
Have grace. You are a human, and you will make mistakes. We don’t want to make mistakes because we think that mistakes mean we are weak or broken or just wrong. But a mistake doesn’t mean any of that. A mistake is “an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result”. That’s it. If you overeat you took an action that produced an unwanted result. No problem – you can decide to take a different action next time.
Taking the sting out of a mistake helps us change more quickly. Adding blame and judgment to a mistake creates a detour you don’t really want to take. But if you can realize that you can pick up and move on from a mistake immediately, you can move forward toward your goal directly instead of getting caught up in frustration and hopelessness before you regroup and start again.
Here’s a secret of weight loss: No one has ever lost weight perfectly. Everyone makes mistakes all the way down the scale. You will never meet any person who has successfully lost their weight who one day woke up, flipped an internal switch, and from that point forward they ate perfectly and the weight fell off. I made mistakes all the way down the scale. I still do – but I see them faster and get back on track so I stay at the weight I want to be. You can make mistakes and still lose weight!
So what do you do? Just restart. As soon as you realize you overate, restart. Don’t eat a cookie too because what the heck, you’ve already blown it. Don’t decide to start over on Monday or tomorrow – that’s what people on diets do. You’re building a life and relationship with food that you want forever, not living on a diet. So you ate too much – wait until you’re hungry again. Not hungry at dinner because you overdid it at lunch? Cool – skip that meal. You can eat again tomorrow when you’re hungry. You can start over right now and the judgment can take a back seat. It’s not helping you anyway, but starting over right now will help you. Remember, when you make a mistake it’s a chance to take care of yourself, not beat yourself down. I promise, when you are gentle and kind with yourself, you’ll get back on track and get closer to your goal SO much faster. So offer yourself some grace and get going again!
You CAN do this! We’re going to look at some ways to practice taking care of yourself over the next month, so keep watching for these posts to come out for you. Make sure you’re on my list so that you won’t miss any of my free help that’s here for you. And if you want the support of a one-on-one coach to speed up your success, email me at drandreachristianparks@gmail.com, and let’s talk. I can take one more client while I’m getting the course ready for you, so don’t miss out if the one-on-one approach is what you want!
Here’s your video help for the week!