There will always be bad days..
It is easy to believe that everything will be so much better if we could only lose weight. And it is true that there are things that feel much better at a lower weight. The satisfaction of achieving a goal and feeling confidence in your self is one of the best. But a lot of things feel the same regardless of what weight you are at.
At a smaller size, you can still expect to feel stressed, irritated or sad at times. You can still get physician burn out and wish things were different in your schedule. You can still feel overwhelmed at the demands of being a doctor and still taking care of yourself. And that is totally normal and fine. It’s part of being human.
The problem comes from our tendency to avoid feeling the negative emotions. We look for escape. Anything to feel better. That’s what we are told to do through media, advertising and other modalities. So we turn to food or other methods to drown out the negative feelings. This is called emotional eating. It is so pervasive that most people do this in some form. Lots of times it is second nature and happens almost subconsciously. You may not know why, but if you are looking for food at the end of the day and only a particular food will do, there is probably an element of avoiding emotion going on.
Have you ever been on a weight loss plan and felt like you were killing it? Just on fire and feeling no issues with sticking to it, then all the sudden old habits come flying back to your life? That is the power of avoiding negative emotions with food. It can completely derail long term weight loss efforts.
Learn the Skills of Tolerating Negative Emotion
In this episode, I will teach you how to start building the skills to uncouple your brains response to negative emotion from eating. You need to recognize the negative emotions and learn to let them be in your life without running away from them.
This isn’t an easy skill. But it is a worthwhile one to master. Any efforts you put in to learning this, will help you in the long term. While you are learning it, there may be days that don’t quite go as well you you want. Check out my post on dancing through missteps in your weight loss journey.
Send me any questions you may have or post a comment below.
If you are enjoying this podcast, please leave a review on iTunes and remember to subscribe so you get any new content as soon as it is available!
Need Help? I’m here to support you.
Losing weight while living a busy physician life can be really hard. When do you find time to figure it out amongst all the other demands on your time? I can help simplify the process and take away the struggle for you. Book a free introductory session to see how I can help you.
Recent Comments