Part 2, if you’re going to have the food.
After identifying your craving, welcoming it and proposing alternative ways to pacify it, you may still feel like what you need is those chocolate biscuits. That doesn’t mean you’ve failed, are doomed to be fat, and might as well eat some crisps once you’re done with the biscuits.
It just means that you and your craving have negotiated and decided that biscuits really are the best way to deal with the situation. That’s a totally reasonable and mature conclusion to come to. And something else: skinny women eat biscuits too. I asked my sister. She totally said so.
Here’s what to do if you and your craving decide to have some food.
All right, craving. Here we are with the biscuits/leftover takeaway/pizza crusts/leverworst. How much do I need to eat?
Decide this before you start eating. Don’t just take the packet of biscuits to the couch with you in the hope you’ll stop eating before they run out. That never happens. To anyone. Take an amount of food that seems likely to satisfy you, and put the rest of the food away again. If you do crave more after eating the first lot, you can go back to part 1.
Dear self, do I have your permission to eat these biscuits now?
A common problem with cravings is that you give in, eat whatever you needed to eat, and then punish yourself for not sticking to your diet. Punishing yourself makes you feel bad, so then you crave more comfort food, so then you eat more. Because you’re a reasonably intelligent person, you can see just how stupid this is, so then you punish yourself for being stupid and feel even worse and eat some more.
The way to break out of this is not to stop eating. It’s to stop punishing.
Dear me, after consideration, we have decided to eat this stack of biscuits. They will be tasty and sugary and delicious. And I promise you there will be no repercussions, no guilting, no stick-beatings. Go ahead and eat the biscuits. Would you like to go out on the balcony so we can look out over the city while we eat them?
Try not to sound sarcastic.
If you can’t give yourself permission to eat, then eating won’t improve your situation. You’ll just give your Mean Self a harder stick to beat you with. Peace-mongering is the way to go. And yes, sometimes this permission thing will feel like giving the sky permission to be blue. Do it anyway. It really does make a difference.
