This is Day 13 of Live a Healthier Life in 21 Days Challenge, Jan 2012 run. Subscribe to the free newsletter for lifetime access of personal development articles and future challenge announcements like this one.

Welcome to Day 13 of our 21-day healthy living challenge.

Having evaluated your relationship with food yesterday, today we are going to practice unbuckling eating from some of our emotional eating triggers. Be prepared to get some interesting answers/revelations from the exercise today.

Today's exercise is very much a simplified version of the exercise from How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating. This is part 5 of the 6-part series on emotional eating.

If you have not read the exercise yet nor the emotional eating series itself, I highly recommend you do so, starting from the first part: My Journey with Emotional Eating, Part 1: Food as a Symbol of Love, to get a thorough understanding of what emotional eating is, why it's not good for us, and how to resolve it in our life. The heartfelt series shares many personal, open examples of how I unbuckled eating from the situational triggers in my life.

Step 1: Identify your eating triggers

In the ideal world, our relationship with food will be one where we eat only when we feel hungry and we stop eating immediately once we are full (vs. eating to finish the plate etc). We do not eat based on any extrinsic factors (such for as a celebration, or stress, work, boredom, to feed a feeling of depression, etc), but based purely on intrinsic factors (i.e. whether we're hungry or not).

For many of us though, a lot of our eating/non-eating occurs outside of hunger. It's because of this that there are problems such as obesity, underweight, anorexia and bulimia are prevalent in the society.

If you think about it, what are your triggers for eating/not eating? Below are some common examples:

• Stress - Do you eat when you feel stressed / under pressure? In the past, I would constantly reach out for food whenever it's time to work or study. In my mind, food was my companion that would give me strength while I worked.
• Frustration - Do you reach out for food when you are frustrated? When something is not going the way you want? When you overate and you are beating yourself over it?
• Boredom - Do you eat when you feel bored? When you are at a loss of what you should be doing?
• Guilt - Is food an outlet to release your guilt? This is an area I fell under in the past too, though not to the same extent as my natural reaction to eat when I was working. If I ever fell off track in my diet/plans, I'd forget it all and just binge for the whole day. After all, if I had already eaten that pastry, how would it matter if I ate a dozen more? It was a bad, all-or-nothing mindset.
• Happiness - Do you eat as a way to celebrate?
• Depression - Do you eat when you feel down/unhappy/depressed?
• Social - Do you eat when you're out with friends, even though you don't feel hungry?
  

Step 2: Understand why you eat under those situations

Why do you eat during those situations you identified in #1? For the answer that comes up, continue to ask "Why" until you have arrived at the underlying root cause. This is also what I call as the digging exercise, as you're literally "digging" to uncover the fundamental reason why you're triggered to eat when you feel stressed/guilty/frustrated/bored/happy/etc.

For example, when I did this exercise in the past on why I would eat when I worked, these were the answers I got:

Why do I eat when I work, even though I'm not hungry?
- Because I need to eat while I'm working
Why?
- Because I can't work without eating
Why?
- Because it's my source of life
Why?
- Because food is like my companion. It accompanies me as I work.
Why?
- Because I feel empty without it.
Why?
- Because when I eat food, I feel love.
Why?
- Because food is a reward. Because when I was young, dad and mom would buy lots of food to show their love. They had always said it was important to eat to stay alive and healthy. Because of all the conditioning when I was young, I grew up with the notion that food = love.

Keep digging across the different contexts relevant for you and you may find some mind opening answers. The power of your realizations is dependent on how deeply you're willing to dig. The deeper you dig, the more powerful your realizations will be. You know you have reached the underlying root cause when you get an a-ha moment and when you reach an incident(s) that led to the belief being formed vs. the belief itself.

Step 3: Identify how you plan to restore a healthy relationship with food

Given your answers in #2, what can you do moving forward to develop a healthy relationship with food? List down your key action steps. The results may not be immediate, but this is the start of a journey to creating that healthy relationship with food, and to living a truly healthy lifestyle.

For example for me, while I was working hard on improving my relationship with food last year (2011), some of my steps were:
1) See food for what it is - something to sustain life vs. a companion or friend (The exercise in How To Stop Emotional Eating, A Crucial Guide, Part 1: Tackling the Causes of Emotional Eating is extremely useful for this purpose.)
2) Do the digging exercise whenever I eat in spite of not feeling hungry
3) Love myself more, vs. using food as a tool for self-love (Day 20 of 30DLBL)

Day 13 of Your 21-Day Healthy Living Plan

What are your tasks listed for today? Do them with excellence and report them in your 21DHL Journal.

Also, read your group mates' 21DHL journals and cheer them along! Pick a few members' journals and make it a point to post meaningful replies there.

Update Your 21DHL Journals

Once you are done for the day, update your 21DHL Journal. You are also welcome to update your 21DHL Journal multiple times throughout the day. Post all your results for today's task and your 21-Day Healthy Living Plan directly in your journal.

If you have any questions specific to today's task, post them here.

What if I eat because of the taste? I feel it's like listening to music - a really fulfilling experience, except it uses a different sense. Just like we developed taste to judge the quality of food, we developed hearing initially for survival purposes. Yet now we also use hearing for pleasure, which is totally acceptable.

So what about food? Let's say I love the taste of ice cream and eat it weekly (a quality brand that uses real cream). Staying within my daily calorie limits. Ice cream is not very nutritious for its calorie amount but man, the taste, the taste!

In case someone isn't convinced: see this (strawberry cheesecake - my favourite flavour).

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."

I think it's fine as long as you are eating in line with your caloric and nutritional needs. Ultimately emotional eating is eating to feed one's emotions. If the eating is *triggered* because of emotions, say eating *because* one feel upset, that's emotional eating. Eating should be triggered by whether one needs to eat or not, since that's the instrumental reason why we eat. If one keeps eating because he/she keeps craving the taste, to the extent where he/she constantly overeats vs. his/her requirements, slowly gaining weight, and ultimately becoming overweight or even obese, that's clearly an issue.

Eating purely for pleasure presents itself as a more immediate issue because there are direct implications from overeating, such as weight gain, cholesterol build-up, arteries clogging, etc - these implications aren't present with listening for pleasure (However, if one listens for pleasure via blasting music at a very loud volume, beyond what's a healthy decibel range for our ears - which quite a handful of people seem to do nowadays - it'll equally be as unhealthy for our bodies). Most people are worried about the aesthetic effects of overeating, but the other issues (which are more long-term) are equally important. The increasing rate of people having heart diseases, illnesses, etc over the years isn't a coincidence.

"If you want to get something you have never gotten before, you've to do something you've never done before."
Personal Excellence - For people passionate about achieving excellence in life

(01-18-2012 09:34 AM)Celes Wrote:  However, if one listens for pleasure via blasting music at a very loud volume, beyond what's a healthy decibel range for our ears - which quite a handful of people seem to do nowadays - it'll equally be as unhealthy for our bodies

Hmm, good point! And there must be plenty of tasty food that doesn't cross the boundaries of healthy/unhealthy, so it's probably okay to enjoy those in moderation

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."