Sometimes we allow ourselves to fall into bad habits with food.

Perhaps you have a busy schedule and often miss meal times, choosing instead to snack through the day. This all too often leads to reaching for quick and easy foods, likely to be packaged and processed and full of unwanted calories and fats.

You could be an emotional eater, turning to, or away from, food in times of stress, anger or upset. If emotional upset is your trigger then you are not alone. This is one of the most common reasons why people overeat, or stop eating.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Have you gone onto automatic pilot with your diet?
• Are you overeating or eating the wrong foods on a regular basis?
• Do you over eat or stop eating when you are stressed, angry or upset?
• Wonder why you start off well with your slimming plan and then lose motivation?
• Do you talk yourself out of sticking to the healthy options?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then the following information may help you to regain some control with your food intake, transforming your eating habits and rebuilding your self-esteem and confidence.

The Creative Sub-conscious – could your unconscious mind have gone into over-protective mode?

Part of the role of your sub-conscious mind or unconscious mind is to protect you.

Based on your beliefs and values your sub-conscious helps you to behave in the way that is correct based on these beliefs and values.

Therefore when you want to make changes to the way you behave you need to change your sub-conscious first. If you try and make changes without first preparing your sub-conscious it will automatically dismiss the new you and try and keep you safe in your old ways.

From the moment we are born we build a picture of our world and this information is then stored in our sub-conscious mind and is used to form our values and beliefs. This information may be positive or negative and controls what you do and how you do it. We have the power to access this and make better choices.

Identifying the Triggers

Possible reasons for over-eating or under-eating may be:

• Guilt
• As a personal reward
• Chewing over a problem – it is difficult to get anxious when you eat
• To reduce unpleasant feelings such as fear, anxiety etc.
• To gain authority (feel bigger –throw more weight around)
• As a substitute for love and nourishment
• A fear of becoming too attractive and what that may attract; i.e. may be a upset in a relationship when slimmer
• Thinking that you must not waste food, so become the dustbin
• Confusing hunger for uncomfortable feeling or thought
• Not eating – starving yourself and then binge eating
• Addiction to sweet foods – need to wean yourself off
• Over-riding the “I am full” signal
• A lack of self worth making you think you are not important enough to bother
• Feeling that you have failed so it is pointless
• When there is not enough time, love or space we may try to fill it with food
• Focussing on what you must not eat – creating reverse psychology

How to make positive changes

• Visualisation techniques to focus the unconscious mind and to by-pass the logical mind
• Goal setting – allows you to get totally clear about your outcome
• Change your eating pattern and choose healthy food
• Anchoring technique – is a technique used to enable you to get into a resourceful and positive emotional state at will (happy successful, motivated)
• Introduce exercise that you would find enjoyable into your daily routine
• Positive thinking and affirmations – combats negative self-talk
• By identifying negative beliefs and attitudes to re-programme the sub-conscious mind in a way that supports you to achieve your goals
• By changing your thoughts and so changing your emotions to eliminate emotional eating