Three Things to Stop Doing If You Want to Hit Your Food Goals

 

When I was trying to figure out how to stop eating in an addictive way, I must have made every mistake in the book.

It took forever for me to figure out what to stop doing and how to stick to my bright lines.

If you've been struggling with resuming, or getting yourself to eat according to your food plan regularly, here are some mistakes you too might be making:

(1) Focusing on your weight, not your days with bright lines.

Susan Peirce Thompson says this over and over because it's true: If you focus on your weight, you'll lose your bright lines. If you focus on your bright lines, you'll lose the weight.

But oooohhh, it's so tempting to keep weighing yourself regularly when the plan is working. It feels so awesome to see the scale move down and the pounds drop off. Hooray! It boosts your motivation and keeps you revved up to continue.

So what's the problem? Well, inevitably the scale stops moving. You hit a plateau. You've been doing BLE for a long time and the rapid losses slow down. You start struggling and breaking your lines. Whatever it is, the weight loss slows or stops.

For me, that meant a sudden and immediate plummet in my motivation and willpower. My addictive voice would jump in: "Why are you starving yourself if you're not losing weight? What is the point? Why bother with all this work if you're not even losing?"

Only after this happened multiple times did I realize, I just can't use the scale as a motivator. For every time it helped me, there are as many times it really hurt me.

So I hid the scale for a long time and even now only weigh myself once a week, if not once every few weeks.

I measure my success by the number of squeaky-clean days on my calendar -- I put a gold star sticker on my calendar for each clean day. I do NOT measure my success by my weight.

(2) Thinking you don't have to do the work.

Ever had a situation like this? You wake up feeling fresh and motivated. Today you will eat clean! You will eat only what you planned for the day! You will not break a single bright line!

Then your day begins. Stressful things happen. You get in an argument, your workload increases, you get stuck in traffic. Whatever. Your thoughts turn to food. By the time you get home, you've convinced yourself that "a little treat won't hurt."

I must have done this a hundred times. It was so easy to make those vows -- and so easy to break them.

And I was usually baffled. I was still doing all my tools -- writing my gratitudes list, committing my food, meditating, writing in my 5-year journal. Why weren't these keeping my lines bright???

It took me forever to figure out that keeping my lines bright takes work. The tools are useful, but they aren't the work itself. They're just the support for the work.

That means: You keep your bright lines bright and you do whatever you need to do to keep them bright.

For me, I have to make bright line eating a priority. Maybe not forever, but for sure for now. I have to use all my support tools. I have to blog, and read clean eating blogs, and follow Instagram folks, and listen to sober podcasts, and commit my food, and prep my food, and bring my meals with me.

I have to keep my bright lines bright. That's the work, and it's hard, but I have to do it.

(3) Thinking food is the key to happiness.

When I first considered giving myself a treat for every day that my lines are bright, I couldn't thinking of any treat other than food. [Read my post on treats HERE.]

Anything else -- a trashy magazine, a new kind of tea, a new lipstick -- I'd just buy anyway. I could not imagine anything giving me joy the same way food did.

And I get it. It's hard to imagine celebrating a birthday without a special dessert. What else can make Christmas or Valentine's Day a special celebration other than all the food treats that come with it? When you've had a hard day, what will calm you down and make you happy better than food?

And the sad thing is, food works. It does bring happiness and calm and joy in the moment.

I spent way too many years treating food like some kind of joy juice. It was the secret to making life special.

Except it's not.

Sugar and flour are (as far as I'm concerned) drugs. If all we needed to bring joy into our lives was some sugar and flour, then we'd be able to predictably get joy from it. But we don't. People who eat massive amounts of sugar and flour aren't leaping through their days on a joyful journey of perpetual happiness.

And, I know plenty of people whose lives are filled with joy who never eat sugar and flour.

Finding other ways to bring joy, happiness, contentment and peace to your life is critical to long-term BLE success for me. I'm doing everything I can to find other things besides food that make me joyful.

[Disclaimer: This blog is not affiliated with or endorsed by Bright Line Eating Solutions or Susan Peirce Thompson. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.]