Food Addiction Recovery – #13
In food addiction you must be careful about emotional eating. You have to realize that while lapses or relapses are often part of the process of recovery, small lapses in behavior can result in quick weight gain and psychological consequences like blame, shame, guilt, giving up, and so on. Emotional eating is a big part of the game of recovery. When you look in the refrigerator for something to eat, if you are truly honest with yourself, you will often realize that there is nothing in the refrigerator you really want or need. As mentioned earlier, what you want and need in food addiction recovery is out in the world, not in the refrigerator!
There is a huge amount of work that a food addict can do done around “rational thinking.” Feelings come from thoughts, and you can control your thoughts, so you therefore can control your emotions, given some time, energy, and effort on your part and with the help of someone who “thinks rationally.” Dr. Albert Ellis who was a pioneer in the dominant field of Cognitive Behavioral Psychology taught that irrational beliefs create the negative feelings that lead to pain and upset in life. He said there were four main categories of irrational beliefs: (a) demandingness – where you demand that yourself, others or the world be something it is not; (b) awfulizing – where you blow something which may be an undesirable condition like being overweight way out of proportion to where nothing else matters; (c) Low Frustration Tolerance (LFT) – which is the belief that you can’t stand some discomfort or frustration like being a person who has a food addiction and is hungry, exercising or denying yourself your currently favorite foods; (d) self-downing – which stems from the demands you put on yourself and the way you define yourself by rating yourself on the basis of your current behaviors (like your less-than-perfect food addict eating behaviors). It is important that you begin to accept yourself as a fallible human being who is a mistake maker like the rest of us! You can learn more about rational and irrational beliefs by reading The Art & Science of Rational Eating by Albert Ellis, Ph.D., Michael Abrams, PhD and Lidia Dengelegi, Ph.D., which is a great resource for food addicts. Every person with a food addiction can benefit from this book so get it. After all, to have good consequences in your life you need to develop rational beliefs.