How to get a handle on your food addiction.

I did not give up my food vices overnight, it was a long process that I would like to share with you. I do not believe in going cold-turkey when it comes to giving up unhealthy foods. I have tried many times before to give up sweets and low-quality fats by forcing the issue, “Today you will stop eating this crap!” It was almost always a Monday morning when I was telling myself this and I was usually hungover (bellyache, headache, groggy) from the previous nights eating.

The cornerstone of my method to beating food addiction is ‘delayed gratification’. Instead of saying, “I will not eat these foods starting right now until the end of time!”, I am training myself to say, “Do not eat that candy bar right now! You are going to eat it soon, just not at this moment!” In the early phases of my clean nutritional program all I needed to do was tell myself to put off that cheat-food until the end of the day. More often than not the evening would role around and my mindset would be different, the craving easier to deny. Sometimes I wouldn’t even eat that cheat-food until the next day!

I started with short delays of gratification and extended the length of time between cheats as my body and mind got used to it. The next time you decide to go off your nutritional plan and eat some cheat-food try and put off that food for 1 full hour. I like to look closely at that delicious morsel of food and then store it away in the fridge/cabinet for just 1 hour At the end of the hour go ahead and eat it! Now you have a baseline of “1-hour I resisted a craving”. Next time you crave something try to extend the actual eating of the food to 2 hours. Keep extending that delay of gratification as long as you can! It took me a long time but I can delay gratification for days at a time. I typically cheat every 3-4 days and feel it absolutely necessary.  To be honest, the longer I delay the gratification the less satisfying the actual eating of the food becomes.  It is almost like the craving, the anticipation of eating the cheat food is better than the food itself!

I learned this from my friends who go to 12-step meetings, “Cravings eventually go away whether you fulfill them or not!”