Susan Albers - But I Deserve This Chocolate!: The Fifty Most Common Diet-Derailing Excuses and How to Outwit Them

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world.

Buddha

To those who are always in my thoughts: Brooklyn Bowling, Jack Bowling, John Bowling, Jane Lindquist Lesniewski, Betsy Beyer Swope, Dr. Jason Grief, Eric Lingenfelter and Dr. Bronwyn Wilke Lingenfelter, Linda Serotta, Dr. Angie Albers, Dr. Eric Brooks, Dr. Thomas Albers, John Bowling, and Jimmer Bowling. A special thanks to J. R. for holding down the fort so I could type to my hearts content. Thanks to Susan Heady for her feedback on this manuscript. Many thanks to Rhonda Bowling for being Nani and Carmela Albers for being Mimi. As always, I am so grateful for and cant believe my good fortune in finding such a good friend in Dr. Victoria Gould.

Thanks to New Harbinger editors Catharine Meyers and Jess Beebe. Your ideas and feedback are always greatly appreciated. Thanks to Earlita Chenault for her efforts in promoting my books so that they could reach all those who are interested in mindful eating. Finally, Id like to thank the readers and my clients who continue to show me every day how important and life changing mindful eating can be.

Susan Albers, Psy.D., is a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic Family Health Center who specializes in eating issues, weight loss, body image concerns, and mindfulness. After obtaining masters and doctorate degrees from the University of Denver, Albers completed an internship at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN, and a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University. She conducts mindful eating workshops across the United States and internationally.

Dr. Albers is author of 50 Ways to Soothe Yourself Without Food; Eating Mindfully; Eat, Drink, and Be Mindful and Mindful Eating 101. Her work has been featured in many media publications including O, the Oprah Magazine, Vanity Fair, and the Wall Street Journal, and she blogs for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today. Albers has been a featured expert on many television shows, including Dr. Oz.

A member of the Academy for Eating Disorders, the International Association of Eating Disorder Professionals, and the National Eating Disorders Association, she enjoys blogging, jogging, watching the Sundance Channel, and traveling. Visit Albers online at www.eatingmindfully.com.

Chapter 1

The mind is everything. What you think, you become.

Buddha

Thought is the sculptor who can create the person you want to be.

Henry David Thoreau

Many great philosophers, writers, and spiritual teachers have come to the same conclusion: we are what we think. This idea has been around since the ancient Greeks and continues to ring true today. The nature and content of your thoughts greatly determine your behavior.

Some days its easier to feel empowered and in charge of your eating. On calm days, your thinking is clear and rational. You choose healthy foods, dont overeat, and avoid stress-driven eating. Excuses and procrastination dont get in the way. But when you feel stressed and tired, its difficult, sometimes impossible, to fight irrational thoughts and excuses that say its okay to snack on junk food or mindlessly consume empty calories. Its also hard to stop beating yourself up with harsh words for not eating the way you wish you could. This is how powerful your thoughts are. The way you think can either help you cope or sabotage your efforts.

How It Is

We often tell ourselves a story about how it is and stick to these thoughts no matter what. The movie The Upside of Anger is a good example of the storytelling we do in our heads that convinces us that because we think it, it must be so. And our reactions are based on this belief.

In the film, the main character, Terry, played by Joan Allen, believes that her husband has left her for his secretary. Full of rage, Terry leaves angry messages on her husbands cell phone, acts out toward her daughters, and drinks too much. Believing her husband has left her, she responds to her own thoughts with intense anger, ruining her relationship with her daughters and her new boyfriend.

The end of the movie presents an unexpected twist (warning: movie spoiler to follow). Terry discovers that her husband, while walking around their property, accidentally fell to his death into a well behind their home. He didnt leave her for another woman. The story she had told herself was one she had invented in her head. She had acted on her perceptions and thoughts, not the truth.

We all create stories about food and the way we eat. Maybe you tell yourself, Im not good at healthy eating, I cant change,or Everyone in my family is heavy. These thoughts and stories, even if partly true, drive the way you interact with and feel about food. Taking your thoughts as facts rather than mere perceptions can keep you locked in place.

Wishful Thinking: Go Away Thoughts

Why do I always have unhelpful thoughts like these? You dont think you can actually succeed long-term at losing weight, do you? Youve lost some weight, but since youll gain it back eventually anyway, why not go ahead and eat whatever you want? As soon as I think like this, its slip, slip, slip. I slide right back into old habits. These thoughts make me want to just give up. I keep wishing my mind would just shut up.

Cindy

Have you ever wished your negative thoughts about food or yourself would just go away and quit bugging you? You may feel that undesirable thoughts are totally beyond your control, which is, in some ways, true. You dont have any say over the random thoughts that pop into your mind. You might be busy at work and, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, find yourself daydreaming about someone from high school you havent thought about in years. Or, a disturbing thought about a tragedy in the news enters your mind. You cant erase or dictate your thoughts.

Similarly, you also have little command over what you think about food. You cant erase images that pop into your mind about tasty things to eat. Nor can you magically wish away excuses that railroad you into mindless eating, like I need another chocolate bar, because Im so stressed out! Like it or not, these thoughts just happen. So, when clients ask me to help them get rid of their thoughts, I tell them I cant really do thatexactly. What I can do is help them deal effectively with whatever thoughts enter their minds. When you dont let your thoughts take over, you fear them less. Consequently, they decrease over time and sometimes even fade away.

If you are human, your natural inclination is to avoid things that bother you: minimize pain, maximize pleasure. So wanting the thoughts to stop is totally understandable. But the more you try to push uncomfortable thoughts about food out of your head, the more they escalate. Its the dont think about the elephant in the room phenomenon. When you tell yourself not to think about an elephant, you cant think about anything else. So, if you tell yourself not to think about food, its probably all youll think about.

The notion of ridding yourself of uncomfortable thoughts brings to mind the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a science-fiction romance starring Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey. In this movie, theres a machine that can erase selected painful memories. The heroine gets her memory erased to forget a difficult breakup. While this sounds attractive, as the story unfolds, it illuminates the downside of getting rid of your memories and thoughts. Negative thoughts and feelings are uncomfortable but useful. They can deter you from making the same mistakes over and over again. They also help you to understand why you make the choices that you do. Painful or not, thoughts and memories move you forward.