Ep. 31 Thinking You Deserve a Treat

Hi and welcome to the Mindful Shape podcast. When do we find ourselves saying, screw it, I deserve a treat. We think we deserve to have this piece of cake or ice cream or popcorn. When we’ve had a really long day. When we’ve made progress and feel like we need “a break” from our plan. When we’re out with friends and family and want to have a good time.  When I was growing up, my sister and I almost always, not every time, and we never knew when or why, but most of the time we go a “treat” from the store while my mom was loading up on groceries for the week. Of course it was always something sweet like a chocolate bar or something. So for me and I know for so many people, they’ll say let’s get a treat, or let’s get treats and they mean food - usually high fat, and or high sugar foods. And that’s not only in childhood. It can and usually does carry on into adulthood.

So today I want to unpack it, because what we are really saying is that we deserve some pleasure in life right? We deserve a break and to treat ourselves. We are owed something. We are owed some joy in life. Some relaxation, some fun. 

What we are doing is equating food with both a physical experience we want to have: pleasure (the food tastes good to us) and an emotion we want to feel when we have that pleasure: fun, joy, relaxation.

Now, there is nothing is inherently wrong or bad about this. But it’s important to see what’s really happening here so YOU can decide if you want to continue treating yourself with food and how much this will be a part of your life. If you are overweight or you are constantly thinking about food and having cravings, I suspect you aren’t in charge of your relationship with food to the degree that you want to be and it doesn’t serve you to treat yourself with food. 

First we need to understand what’s underneath this thought pattern when we think I deserve this food. It’s really the need to put ourselves and our desires first. And in that moment, it seems like putting ourselves first and what we desire is eating.  Is the food.

But as you know, that’s a lie. Because it comes at the expense of what we truly desire - feeling at peace with food and our bodies.

The real question to ask here is not why do I overeat but why do I constantly feel like I have to compensate for the negative emotions I experience and the output of my day? Why does my life require so many treats in the first place? 

Look at your day. Look at your work, your relationships, where you’re people-pleasing. Where you are doing things out of scarcity, out of fear, or with resentment. Maybe it’s your job. I know for me, the times when I’ve most leaned on food to cope with my emotions is when I was resenting my worklife. I had many thought errors around my job - that I HAD to be there. That I HAD to do the work. That I HAD to do it perfectly without making mistakes. And that of course, my employer didn’t appreciate how much I was doing. 

Because at that time I didn’t see that all of those thoughts were optional, I felt out of control. I felt like I was at the mercy of my life, of my boss, my long commute. And so to numb those unwanted feelings, I focused on food - either restricting or overeating. 

So it’s really important to take a 360 degree look at your life and see where you’re giving your power away. Then you have two options, you can change the circumstance, get a new job for example, or you can change your thoughts about your current circumstance. How can I do this in a way that works better for me, in a way that I don’t resist it so much and it drains me less? Maybe it’s taking more breaks throughout your day, getting up from your desk and doing some stretches. For some of you it may be even taking your full lunch break. Maybe it’s simply reframing your work, questioning if it’s true that you can never make a mistake, finding the real purpose you show up every day. It’s probably the case that your work is very much valued even when people don’t mention it, and making work mistakes is human - it’s expected.

Early in my career I did some temping work at a bankruptcy firm. And my boss gave me the task of taking a huge stack of papers to get made into copies - it was enormous - essentially a book. It would fill one of those huge binders. And so it seemed simply enough, he explained the task and I was like, sure thing, get them copied. No problem right. So I go across the street to the printing place and I tell them I need, I think it was like 20 copies of this huge stack of papers. So that’s all fine. Then I come back with the invoice and hand it to my boss and it’s like a couple hundred dollars or something and he’s like, why is it so expensive? And I’m like, I dunno, like that’s how much it costs. Then he asks me, you got them to print double sided right? I had not. So it they had printed these copies single sided meaning they used double the paper and that’s why it cost so much. I felt so bad. Looking back, it was like what, a $100 mistake. But I was making like $15 and hour at the time - it seemed huge to me. I thought about that for years! But really, no big deal right. I’m sure the bankruptcy firm carried on fine with their single sided copies. Mistakes are part of being human, but often whether it’s at work or with our eating, we demand perfection from ourselves. Instead we need to really examine our thoughts and see if what we’re thinking is creating the results we want in our lives.  But most of us don’t take control of our lives in this way. Most of us instead, focus on what we want to eat, (treats) what we ate or what we shouldn’t have eaten. 

So how can keep YOURSELF (not food) at the top of the priority list?

Get really clear on the areas of your life where you are giving your power away due to your thinking. 

Watch where you are people-pleasing, spending time with people you really aren’t that crazy about, or agreeing to do things in your evenings and weekends that you’re doing out of obligation rather than because you really want to do them. 

Look at your schedule and see where you’re making time for things that you want to do simply because you enjoy them, not because you should do it. Like working out is a great example, we can either change how we think about it so that we enjoy it more, or we can change the circumstance - we can switch up the workout, tweak it or change it to something else completely. 

I like to ask this question - what would you be doing if you were at your goal weight. So imagine you don’t spend any time overthinking food, bingeing or buffering emotions with food while watching Netflix. What would you be doing? Maybe it’s writing a book. Maybe it’s a dance class, redecorating your house or playing an instrument. There are so many things we could be spending our time doing if we’re not preoccupied with food and our bodies. Some of them we’re putting off until we’ve lost the weight. Or we simply don’t have the energy because our vitality is drained from overthinking our weight. But I’d like to encourage you to start now. Start now because it will fill you up in a way food never will. And if nothing else, when you’re doing a dance class or writing a book, you’re not sitting on the couch eating a whole bag of chips.

This brings me to what you can do instead of eating.

For some of us the best part of our day is meal time and that needs to change. Of course not every day is going to be amazing, but I’ve noticed that the more fulfilling my life is, the more often I finish my meal and don’t continue to think about food because I’m on to the next thing. If what happens after your meal isn’t interesting to you, or worse, you dread it, it makes perfect sense that your brain is going to try and keep that dopamine going for as long as possible. I think this is part of what happens when we finish eating but can’t stop thinking about having more or having dessert. For example, imagine you finished your meal and you remember there’s cookies in the cupboard and now all you can think about is whether you should have one or not, or if you have one you know you’ll want two, three or four. So you’re on the couch and this is all the mind drama going on in your head. Now imagine the doorbell rings and it’s someone with one of those giant cheques with a million dollars on it. And it turns out someone entered you in a contest and you won. You get a million dollars. Now how exciting are those cookies? Of course you’re not even thinking about them anymore. Obviously this is an exaggerated example, but it shows us that the cookies have no inherent power. When we have excitement, interests and pleasure in our lives, our brain won’t have to rely on cookies to get what it needs. 

Instead of eating, the best thing we can do for ourselves is process our emotions. Because when we  stuff them down with food, they don’t go away. It’s like they just get louder and now we bring on even more unwanted emotions due to not feeling like we’re in the right sized body. 

When we think, “I deserve to eat,” we’re really saying, “I refuse to feel anymore today. I’m going to bypass what I’m currently feeling and hit the emotional escape key so that I no longer have to feel like this.”

And of course no one really wants to feel bad. But this scenario of emotional eating simply stems from not knowing how to process the emotions. If you could just process them as they happen, and work them through, allow them to flow through you as a physical vibration, they’ll dissipate. No emotion lasts forever.

Because when we don’t practice this, practice processing what we’re feeling, we’re making a terrible trade off. We’re also saying, “I deserve to feel worse in the future.” I reject what I’m feeling and I deserve to feel better right now, AND I deserve to feel bad in the future, because that’s what’s going to happen when I choose not to feel my emotions and to eat them instead and to have a treat to feel better, to avoid, to numb, to neutralize. When you’re planning out your life, I doubt your planning on feeling worse down the road but that’s exactly what we do. 

And maybe what you’re feeling is feeling out of control with your food. Your brain is obsessed with food chatter, constantly thinking about food. That you’re not on the right plan. That your weight is a problem. Possibly your health is a problem. Just overall you’re not happy with your life. And your brain is like - get us out of here! Just eat something and we won’t have to think about that right now. 

And if you’ve been overeating or simply not doing what you say you’re going to do, you might be beating yourself up. And then you go through your days in this low grade dissatisfaction and by the end of the day, your brain is like, “it’s been hard, I need a treat.” So what’s really going on though is just a cry for attention from yourself. Yourself, within you, is just saying, “Pay attention to me. What do I really need? I don’t need to be eating to feel better. I need to be understood so that my needs can be met,” right?

I heard once that the opposite of addiction is connection. We require connection to survive so it makes sense that if we feel disconnected from the world or those around us; if we feel like others don’t appreciate us or understand us. 

What we need to be doing is connecting first with ourselves. What we really want is to feel connected between ourselves and our bodies. When you turn to food, you’re connecting yourself to food at the expense of your body. You’re sacrificing your body so you can have a connection with food. 

But food will never provide a true, meaningful, lasting connection and that’s why we always need more and more. But you can create that loving connection with yourself when you treat yourself with kindness and respect and lovingly find out what it is that you need. 

What we really want is to be on our list of priorities. We want to feel like we matter to ourselves. 

No matter how crappy your day is or how frustrated you are with all the responsibilities you have, you can decide that you matter, that you’re important, that you’re worth prioritizing while still serving all the other people in your life. 

There are so many ways we can treat ourselves when we need fun, relaxation and joy, that DON’T involve food. And I’ll give you some examples because I know your brain wants to go into confusion and tell you it can’t think of any. When my husband and I started dating he would often want to get treats on the weekend or buy me a little treat as a celebration and when he couldn’t buy something sweet anymore, because I was changing, he was at a bit of a loss. 

So now treats at our house look different. To be honest, there are fewer. However, we treat ourselves with things for the house, with something as simple as time together watching a show. If you really want to buy something, there’s tons of ideas, lip balm, flowers, little nice things for yourself and aren’t too expensive but that still feel like a treat. 

So the next time your brain is telling you that you deserve a treat, that you deserve to eat I want you to remember that you have options. And more importantly if your brain still wants the dopamine hit from a food treat, remember you deserve so much more than that. 

You deserve to feel in charge around food, and that takes practice at allowing urges and being in the river of misery for a while. It means accepting uncomfortable emotions instead of eating more. 

You deserve to maintain the weight you’ve already lost. Sometimes our brain likes to trick us and say, you’ve lost 5lbs you can relax - take your foot off the gas for awhile. And in some cases, that might actually be the best thing for you to do, but I think if this happens often enough for you, if you can be real with yourself, you’ll see that it’s another way for our brains to try and keep us safe. Don’t lose too much weight. Don’t be too fit or too pretty. What will happen then? It’s the unknown and to our habit brain, our safety brain, it’s scary and means pull back. Better to stay comfortable and eat the treats.

You deserve to trust yourself. When you say you’re finished eating after dinner, you keep your word to yourself. When you put your head on your pillow at night, you feel accomplished because you know you’re one day closer to reaching your goal.

You deserve to feel good in your clothes. This is one I hear a lot. For many women, fashion and how they look and feel in their clothing affects how they feel about themselves, how they show up and their confidence level. This is always about the thoughts you are thinking about how you look in your clothes and what tight clothing means. I really want to encourage you to notice what you are saying to yourself when you try on clothes and see if those thoughts are making you feel terrible, because if they are, throw them out. Seriously. Having these thoughts will move you farther away, not closer to your goal. And the reason is, we act differently when we feel terrible than we do when we feel even just okay - neutral. When we feel terrible we typically focus even more on food and what’s wrong about our lives. But if you can look in the mirror and think, “Yeah I’m not in my right sized body yet, but I have great curves or long legs,” or something else you like about yourself, it moves you toward feeling a little better. When we are feeling better, we are more likely to see ourselves and our lives more positively. We’re more likely to treat ourselves better that day and feel more optimistic about what we’re capable of and definitely less likely to need food to neutralize negative emotion. And if you’re like, yeah but my clothes are physically pinching me and are uncomfortable. Go out and treat yourself to the next size up. That can be very liberating. You’re thinking, no way - I don’t want to buy a size up because that’s accepting my size. But what’s wrong with that? That’s your size right now and it’s not permanent. It’s simply a number on a tag. You can think it means you’re not good enough, or you can think it means I care about myself enough to buy clothes that are comfortable and I know I’m on my way to my right size - THIS size is temporary. 

Okay let’s do a quick recap. The thought, I deserve a treat, to eat for any reason other than genuine hunger is a need to put ourselves and our desires first. Our brain has a thought error that thinks we can do that by eating more food. If you find yourself saying this often, it’s an opportunity to reevaluate where you might be giving your power away in your life and where you can take that back by thinking differently and or taking action.  Instead of eating, we can process all our emotions, stop beating ourselves up, find connection with our bodies rather than connecting with food and of course find non-food related treats. What you deserve is to keep your commitment to yourself  so that you get what you TRULY want.

Thanks, I’ll talk to you soon.