Hard Weight Loss Truth; Your Food Triggers Aren't Going Anywhere
Hard Weight Loss Truth; Your Food Triggers Aren't Going Anywhere
Accepting this truth will give you the power to create the personal change needed to transform your life.
Losing 123 pounds has taught me something important.
We need fewer 75-Day Hard challenges and more 365-day yoga challenges.
What I mean is the whole go big or go home approach to fitness is a setup for failure for the typical person!
You would be much better served to pick an activity or plan that you can do consistently for 365 days than trying to grind your way through 75 days of rigorous pain to force yourself to accomplish some arbitrary goal.
Not to say you shouldn’t do the 75-Day Hard if that’s where your edge is; If your intention is right, go for it!
However, most people I’ve observed attempting this challenge are doing it for the wrong reasons.
Does reaching a goal require pushing yourself? Absolutely!
In the past, every time I took on a challenge like 75 Day Hard, my intention was superficial. It was the magic bullet that I thought would fix what was wrong with me.
I took on countless diets and fitness challenges, looking for the golden ticket to health.
The catch is my intention was never to BE healthy; I was looking for a way to fix what I thought was wrong to GET healthy.
In my fantasy world, I believed I would find the solution to my triggers with food and make them go away.
I would somehow find the magic equation to discipline and effortlessly push myself to an extreme fitness level — forever.
What has changed in the past year for me in my 123-pound weight loss journey is that I am no longer looking to fix what I perceive is wrong.
I have learned to cultivate a consistent approach of being actively patient with myself.
What I mean is I am gently pushing my edge daily.
For example, when I started running again, I did not just go out and run fives on day one at a nine or ten-minute-a-mile pace; I began by running just five minutes at an eleven or twelve-minute-a-mile pace. I did this consistently and was patient with myself as I slowly expanded my edge toward my goal.
Today, after almost two and half months of running, I’m finally running five miles at a nine to ten-minute pace. I still haven’t reached my goal of a full 10k, but I have the patience to stay at my edge and actively work towards 6.2 miles.
One of the ways I have cultivated this active patience is by taking time to bring awareness to both the parts of me that want to numb out and the parts of me that want to push myself to extremes.
Create awareness through curiosity
Being aware of your inner world requires being open and curious about yourself. In my journey, I have found self-inquiry in the form of open-minded questions as one of the most effective ways to generate curiosity.
The questions I ask myself often are:
What do I need to let go of to accept these parts of myself that drive me to numb out or push myself to extremes?
What are these parts of me trying to communicate? What is the unmet need?
If I accept that my triggers with food and my instinct to respond to shame with controlling behaviors will always be present for me - what do I need to do differently so that I can respond rather than react to those triggers?
Changing the game of my life
At some point on my weight loss journey, I realized something huge.
I had been playing the wrong game my whole life.
Before this journey, the game I was playing in life was how do I never become triggered to numb out with food again and control myself to be healthy at all times.
I am playing a new game now.
Now the game I play is — How fast can I become aware that I am triggered in a way that wants me to numb out with food or feeling shame that is evoking my controlling behaviors?
When I realize I am triggered to numb out or feel the internal pressure to push myself, I can respond in that space I’ve created with love and compassion.
Often the most loving action I can take is not taking the next bite of food, scrolling on my phone, or trying to push myself harder but taking the next slow, deliberate breath.
In the clarity of that breath, I often find the patience and clarity to take actions that are truly needed for my growth and healing.
My food, diet, & exercise triggers are not going anywhere.
I recently finished reading the book "Radical Acceptance," by Tara Brach.
After reading this book, I have been working on practicing three things.
#1 - Bringing awareness to what my inner world is communicating.
#2 - Responding to what my awareness shows me with compassion.
And
#3 - Saying "yes" to whatever shows up for me.
One of the places I have been saying yes is when I feel tension in my legs. The tension is an underlying anxiety that always comes up when I feel the urge to get it right.
When I let this tension drive me, it causes me to internally clinch and push myself — disconnecting me from my joy in the process.
When I try to push the tension away, it intensifies, making me feel overwhelmed and creating the urge to numb out — cue my addictive tendencies with food and my phone.
When I first became present to this tension in 2020, I kept trying to find a way to make it go away by solving it and fixing it.
Then in 2021, I started the practice of welcoming it in mediation. To just let it be there. Later, while doing Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, I finally began to listen to what this tension was trying to communicate to me.
However, despite all this newfound awareness, I still had an agenda. To make this tension leave me alone by somehow solving its underlying problem. I lacked a general sense of compassion for myself.
Only in the last year, amid my weight loss journey, have I finally surrendered to this part.
I have learned to say "Yes” to this part of me by asking myself, “What would it look like to accept that this part of me isn't going anywhere?”
In the space of this acceptance, I have brought compassion to this part by seeing it as a trauma response I learned as a child when facing the craziness of my Mom’s alcoholism.
The lifelong lesson awaiting me has unfolded in this surrender and acceptance.
There is nothing about me that I need to fix — I am perfect the way I am.
By accepting that my triggers with food, diet, and exercise are a challenge I will face for the rest of my life, I have found the grace to surrender to the truth that my weight loss journey has no end — it is a lifelong journey.
Healing is a lifelong journey.
One of the gifts of my weight loss is seeing that my healing is a lifelong journey of continuously cultivating awareness of my inner world, bringing compassion to what I find, and saying yes through surrender.
In yoga recently, during the ending meditation called Savasana, I felt the tension of trying to get it right come up.
As I lay there breathing slowly and deeply, I saw this as an opportunity to say “Yes” to my experience.
I let myself see this younger version of myself, just trying to get it right. When I saw this, I felt gratitude and said, "Thank you." Thank you for protecting me. You are always welcome here.
When I did this, the tension was released and changed to a vibrant comforting energy.
A personal reflection during Savasana
What if we said yes to the broken parts of ourselves?
What if we took time in stillness to say thank you to our protective parts?
What if we met them with love instead of pushing those parts away?
What if instead of trying to fix the parts of ourselves we do not like, we saw those parts for what they are, a wounded child just doing the best he can to survive his dangerous world?
What if we listened to those parts with empathy and love, seeking to understand the unmet need they are trying to communicate?
What if instead of pushing ourselves to extremes, we provided loving discipline by recognizing our limits, offering the flexibility to press our edge gently and the intuition to know when to relax?
What if we treated our broken and protective parts like we would treat our own child?
What would the world look like if we all loved ourselves in this way?
Saying yes to what shows up allows me to view the lessons behind my challenges.
For example, I practice alternate-day fasting as part of my health and fitness routine.
Recently I had a rough fasting day.
Rather than try to grind my way through it, I paused to breathe and bring awareness to my feelings.
I noticed wanting to comfort myself with food and then being pulled in other directions to distract myself from this discomfort.
Sitting in this discomfort, I took time to ground myself and become present with my emotions. In this space, I found I could respond to what I was feeling with compassion.
Doing this showed me a more important lesson. It showed me what I needed to see to give me faith in maintaining my weight loss for the rest of my life.
I can do one day of fasting three times a week, no matter what. It might be challenging, but it will never be so hard that I can’t make it for 36 hours. By accepting that there always be occasional difficult days, I saw the light — I became aware of the inner strength to maintain my fasting lifestyle.
And in those 36 hours, I will find space to cultivate the awareness and compassion to say yes to the wounded parts of me once again.
Closing Thoughts
I will close today with a note I shared with my brothers in the Man Talks Alliance early in 2022. It was the moment I began to surrender to the idea that my emotional triggers were not going anywhere and that I would be better served to surrender to them than try to make them disappear.
Intentional Dialog with your inner thoughts…
February 16, 2022
I’ve had a lot of success using intentional dialog and the tools from the book Getting to Zero with my eight-year-old son. Really sitting with his feelings, listening to him, validating him, and saying, “That makes sense you would feel XYZ, buddy; what else are you feeling?”
Yesterday instead of doing my normal breath work routine, I switched it up and did something different, unguided and self-led. Afterward, I felt some negative emotions, and tension came up in my legs. I was feeling stressed.
I had a thought, “What if I related to this part of me like I do my son?”
So I sat and listened.
A thought played, “You didn’t do the guided routine like you normally do; you are losing your edge,” so I said to myself, “That makes sense you would feel that way, you do that routine consistently every day, and today was different”...
A memory flashed…
I was sitting in the highway patrol car right after my mom had jumped from my truck on the freeway in Wyoming when I was in college. My girlfriend at the time, and I were driving her home after she relapsed in our apartment. On the drive, she went into the delirium tremors, flipped out, and kicked us both. In an attempt to keep my mom from killing us, I had gotten into a wrestling match with her in the car.
At one point, I was forced to punch her in an attempt to subdue her and protect myself. Somehow she had gotten the back window of my truck open, and she slipped out of my arms and out the window. A feeling of failure and panic came over me as I felt my empty arms and watched my mom leap from my moving truck onto the freeway, a semi-swerving at the last minute.
As I saw myself sitting in the highway patrol car following this event, I felt the same feeling I felt earlier during and following my meditation. I said to myself, “It makes sense you would feel overwhelmed and failure; it was traumatic when Mom jumped from your truck like that….” Instantly I felt a “letting go,” and energy replaced the tension in my legs as if that part of me was saying, “Finally, after all these years, I feel heard”...
This morning I had a thought.
What would happen if I began to treat my inner world this way every day?
What if I didn’t treat the shadow of my inner world like some criminal on the street?
What if I strive to treat my shadow sides like I strive to treat my spouse and my kids?
What if, instead of resisting my negative thoughts, pushing them away, or negating them, I validated them as real and listened for the unmet need they are trying to communicate?
What if instead of trying to fix and change the parts of myself I do not like, I accepted them as they are and instead looked to change how I react to them?
What if I got to know those parts so well that I could anticipate how an environmental queue would trigger them, and I could be there, already prepared?
What if I could create a structure in my life that accommodated those parts instead of minimizing them?
What if I stood for three with myself, tying my metaphorical boat to the boat of my inner child, and sailed the seas of life with them instead in spite of them?