Eating Junk Food is Not Just A HABIT

When talking about the reasons for comfort eating, one of the things that people ask me the most, is "Isn't it just a habit?" In today's episode I talk about how comfort eating is a deeply embedded habit, influenced by emotional experience, our history and the chemicals in our brains.

This is the third in a quick tip series about comfort eating recovery.

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Transcript

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Hi, this is Shelley Treacher from Underground Confidence. Today I'm bringing you tip three in a quick tip series about comfort eating recovery. Today is about habits. As someone who works with comfort eating recovery, one of the things that people ask me the most when talking about the reason why they comfort eat is isn't it just a habit? So I want to mention this one early on to get it out of the way. It is something that you can start thinking about now in order to understand yourself and to begin to take back the control, but it's also going to be something that you'll be learning much more about all the way through your comfort eating recovery journey. The truth is that a large part of how we eat, and indeed how we treat ourselves across the board, is habitual. We form habits pretty quickly, and then they become deeply grooved. We repeat them for a long time, and then they become hard to break, without starting all over again by forming a new habit. It is important to start to understand and take notes about what habits you're forming and what habits you've had for a long time. This in regards to eating behavior but also to how you talk to yourself around food. So start taking an inventory of all the habits that you have around food and the way you talk to yourself about that. This'll come in handy later when I talk about the self-critic. The idea around habits, the way to to beat a habit, is to do something different and to start challenging your habitual behaviour. And to replace the reward that you get from your habit currently with something else that's rewarding, but healthier for your well-being. Just saying that in two sentences sounds really simple, but it can be quite complex. If you're listening to this thinking, I can't do that, it might be because your habits are attached to emotion or chemical addiction. Where a habit goes really out of control is when there's some emotional charge to the habit, or where chemicals in your brain are getting involved. Or both. If you think you might be influenced by all three by having habitual habits, by having some kind of chemicals that you're addicted to, and by having an emotional charge to your habit, you are not alone. Most people listening to this are in the same boat. Put simply, both pleasure chemicals and emotional charge encourage us to form habits based around feeling pleasure. We veer towards chemicals that feel good, and we naturally avoid discomfort or pain. Changing a habit is something that we might often choose to try and force. That's exactly what a diet is. But you can change habits in a natural way. And this possibly lasts a lot longer. As you learn to be more in touch with what's going on for you and you learn how to be kinder to yourself, your natural choices just change. I see over and over again how this transforms lives organically. But as I say, it's still a really good idea to just start watching what kind of habits you've got, to start becoming aware, to start making it conscious, what you choose, when you choose it, and what's involved in that choice. That way you'll start to see how unconscious this whole process is. Making it conscious means you have a choice. I will be talking about the chemicals and about treating yourself well and about the emotional side of eating in future bite podcasts. But if you can't wait to find out about all of these things, I have done podcasts on all of them, on habits, on the chemicals, on treating yourself well, so you can check those out. But I will also be touching on these things in the coming weeks, so please keep in touch. As I've mentioned, I'm taking a little break for the summer, so I am only producing these bite podcasts and quick tips sporadically. But I do produce other things, so if you want to be kept in touch with everything that I put out and be sent some really interesting quizzes which will let you know more about yourself, then please be on my mailing list. The details are below. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you again soon. This is Underground Confidence with Shelly Treacher.