Five Steps To Beat Overeating

1. Stop actively trying to lose weight

Realise that no amount of wanting weight loss will impact on your overeating and see that compulsive overeating can’t be controlled by a weight loss diet.

A compulsion is exactly what the name suggests it is – you are compelled to overeat against your will, and that comes about as a response to dieting.

2. Replace weight loss as a measure of your success with how happy you feel on a daily basis

This is an instant reward and you don’t have to wait for it like you do with weight loss. If you feel you’ve eaten well and not overeaten, really focus on how this makes you feel in the now.

Future rewards such as weight loss are much less likely to remain strong motivators than immediate ones like daily happiness levels. Make this immediate reward of instant increasing daily happiness your main motivation to stop overeating.

3 Be self responsible and make your own choices

Choices about food must be made based on what’s best for YOU. Not someone else’s diet plan. Cutting out any food because someone else advises you that it’s bad for you or makes you gain weight will only make you crave and you will give into those cravings compulsively.

Compulsive overeaters who try to cut out chocolate, for example, eat more chocolate than people who don’t restrict it. Sometimes chocolate is exactly what’s best for you - because nobody else in the world (apart from dieters) thinks that what’s best for them is only about health.

What’s best for you does actually sometimes include your own pleasure. (And very luckily for us, most healthy food is also pleasurable.)

If you don’t see the reasoning behind this think about a world where you’re forced to eat only chocolate, pies, chips and crisps and all fruit and vegetables are strictly off limits. What foods do you think you would desire the most?

Eating a broad range of foods is essential if you want to stop overeating. Variety and enjoyment of the food that you eat will help you to stop feelings of deprivation and the compulsion to overeat will calm down.

4. Build up self trust

When you get used to making your own choices and listening to your own wants and needs, you can then work on building up evidence that you can be trusted around food.

Every time you make a good decision you are learning to trust yourself, meaning you’re more able to relax around food and not let fear of loss of control take over your mind.

When fear takes over it leaves you feeling stressed and anxious, and this can make you shut down and overeat compulsively. Remaining clear headed around food is the result of self responsibility and self trust, which leads us on to step 5…

5. Eat mindfully

As often as you can, be mindful and focus on the experience of eating. Concentrate on taste and texture and feel how much or how little you’re enjoying the food.

This will give you an indication of whether you want to carry on eating or not or if you really like this food enough to try it again. When overeating compulsively, it’s easy to block out the experience to get the food down as fast as possible.

Remaining aware will help you with the other four steps: focusing on eating and not weight, using happiness as a measure of success, being self responsible and building up self trust around food.

All of which will leave you well on your way out of the overeating trap, and the result of that is inevitable weight loss. Voila!