If you want to have a real transformation, you need to learn to listen to your body’s signals, work on your mindset and update your beliefs.
A big portion of this inner self-work involves positive affirmations, visualization and meditation.
You can use these affirmations like personal mantras. Every time you notice a negative thought emerge about your body, your eating, or your life (that normally would make you feel bad and drive you to comfort yourself with food), you replace those thoughts with affirmations you purposefully chose for those situations.
Instead of going through each day on autopilot and thinking about food and your body as you’ve done for decades, you’ll remind yourself that you’re changing your mindset now.
It takes time to finally start believing more positive thoughts about yourself and override the lessons learned in your youth. It takes time to overcome the fear or shame instilled in you by misguided people.
To be honest, it takes a great deal of effort to change your mind after following diet culture rules for such a long time.
You need to train your brain like you train your muscles.
The good news is that it’s completely worth it.
I specifically designed this collection of meditations and affirmations to reprogram your mind around food, your body and your life. They are the antidotes to the most common negative beliefs and thoughts about body image, weight loss and habit change.
My clients absolutely love these affirmations. I make personalized affirmations videos and audio recordings for my private clients to reprogram their thoughts and beliefs that are holding them back.
Now you can have a taste of these for free.
These affirmations can really help you change the script. The beliefs we cling to and the stories we tell ourselves really matter.
What we tell ourselves shapes and creates our life.
Fortunately, what we tell ourselves also happens to be one of the things that we can actually change!
Use this meditation when you feel the urge to overeat to suppress uncomfortable feelings or distract yourself from negative emotions.
For many people, expressing difficult emotions or admitting they have “negative” feelings like sadness or anger feel difficult or even impossible. Most people, understandably, don’t want to feel anxious or hurt, or upset. So they choose to ignore or suppress these feelings. They numb their feelings with food, or distract themselves with the neverending cycle of overeating and restricting.
And the most significant reason they do this is that they’re afraid to feel their emotions.
It’s not simple to understand why so many people are afraid to feel strong, intense, or so-called negative emotions. But the primary reason is that, for whatever reason, they were taught that these feelings are simply not acceptable.
This message might come from your parents or other caregivers at an early age, from a spouse or partner later in life, or a supervisor at work. A common mindset in our society is that you should just be strong and get over it. Period.
Mental health professionals around the world will tell you that “suck it up” is not a valid coping mechanism.
In fact, dismissing or ignoring feelings doesn’t make them go away. Instead, they’ll linger, unprocessed and misunderstood, and eventually, they’ll find new ways to manifest themselves. Over time, they’ll affect your mental, physical, and emotional well-being.
As a coping mechanism, you may start eating your feelings, i.e. suppressing or numbing them with food or distracting yourself with eating.
This is the beginning of your emotional eating journey.
In our society, emotions are often seen as a sign of weakness.
And when you don’t have much practice at handling these intense feelings, even just a small expression of them can feel terrifying. You may feel like you’ll suddenly fall apart and not be able to recover.
So, you just end up stuffing it down with food. Eating can distract you for a while and it makes you feel numb too.
We have been taught to suppress our feelings.
Especially women. If a man is angry he is simply angry. If a woman is angry, she is a “bitch” or “hysterical”. When a man is sad, he is just sad. When a woman is sad, she is “being emotional” and “hormonal”.
Fear of how other people will see us is another reason why people choose to suppress their feelings. If you are perceived as emotional, you could be hurt or betrayed by others.
Our culture values happiness, and when we see others expressing sadness or fear, the most common reaction is to see them as weak instead of strong.
We value happiness so much that many believe that if you have other emotions, your life is dysfunctional and you won’t be able to become satisfied or fulfilled.
When you stop suppressing or numbing your emotions with food and learn to really experience and express them, you’ll see that it doesn’t make you unhappy. It actually gives you more energy and joy.
Always bottling up your emotions takes a lot of mental strength. When you learn to recognize and understand your emotions and FEEL them, you also learn that you can then move on from your feelings. Consequently, you’ll become much more productive and happier too.
Spending just a small amount of time experiencing, acknowledging, and processing all your emotions, not just the positive ones, can leave you with much more mental and emotional space than you would imagine.
Why?
Because you aren’t always worried and anxious about how you’ll deal with the unexpected or handle setbacks and disappointments anymore. You’ll know that you can handle any emotions.
Many people can´t stop eating their feelings because they’re scared if they let themselves feel their emotions that feeling will stick with them for a long time. Once you start feeling your feelings, you’ll experience that all feelings are temporary.
Neurologists found that emotions last only 90 seconds. The chemicals causing you to feel a certain emotion are flushed out of the system in ~90 seconds.
If you let the feeling just wash over you without acting on it, it will go away after a few minutes. It’s possible to sit with the feeling and watch it disappear after a while. It needs some practice but you can do it!
Feelings come in waves. They build up to a peak when they are most intense, and then they subside. It’s the same with your “positive”, pleasant feelings too. Have you ever been constantly happy or relaxed? Even during a happy, relaxed holiday, something can happen that shifts your mood. Your kids start to argue, it starts to rain, you lose something, or you don’t like the food you ordered in a restaurant. Your feelings change more often during a regular day. The waves of different emotions rise and fall frequently. They are all temporary.
Some feelings, like grief, heartbreak, and stress appear persistently but they are also temporary. They also have a peak, and then a less intense phase. It´s completely safe to just let them wash over you and let them subside.
But, if you live in fear of your emotions, they have too much power and control over everything you do.
Most women are not even aware of how often they swallow their emotions until they’re asked to not do it anymore. So I want you to regularly check in with yourself.
What are you feeling now? What do you feel most often? Worried, sad, surprised, amused, tired, annoyed, loving, lonely, resentful, insecure, joyful, happy, hurt, helpless, jealous, glad, calm, excited, suspicious, angry, relieved, depleted, safe, comfortable, radiant, resentful, guarded, aroused, depressed?
Several times a day check in with your feelings and say to yourself: I feel ………………., and that´s ok.
It may feel silly and awkward at first, but this acknowledgement of your feelings will really help you quiet your self-critic, and help you stop suppressing your feelings with food, i.e. you’ll stop eating your feelings. As an added bonus, it´s easy to practice anywhere and anytime.
Don´t judge your feelings. All emotions provide value to your life. Accept them and just let them be.
When you try to resist a feeling is like keeping a beach ball underwater.
You can keep it down for a while but then you get tired.
The beach ball “explodes” above water.
The same happens with your suppressed feelings too.
After a while, they “explode” and the experience is much more uncomfortable than it would’ve been if you let yourself feel them.
This is another reason for fearing our emotions. As we always resist them, we only experience this intense feeling when they explode.
So sit with your uncomfortable feelings without fighting or “eating” them. Most of the time they pass in a few minutes, just like clouds moving across the sky. Your feelings can´t harm you. Even the worst feelings are only feelings, nothing more.
I’ve made a meditation to help you sit with your feelings when you have the urge to overeat. Listen to this meditation often and you’ll learn how to process your feelings. You’ll be presently surprised to find that you won’t need to eat to suppress or numb them anymore.
After a while, you won’t need to listen to this meditation. Feeling your feelings becomes automatic and you will be free from emotional eating triggered by negative feelings. You’ll start eating your feelings much less often.
This meditation helps you find out wether you are physically or emotionally hungry.
If you’re physically hungry it will help you figure out what kind and how much food would satisfy you the most.
If what you feel is not genuine hunger it will help you discover what you’re really hungry for.
It helps you decide what unmet need you’re trying to subsitute with eating and what should you do instead of eating.
(If you find the pace too slow you can also try to listen to this at 1.25 speed.)
If you ever wish to become a normal eater and stop eating emotionally, it’s important to change your identity and reprogram your subconscious mind to that of a normal eater.
The real key to losing weight is not setting S.M.A.R.T. goals, or following a diet or exercise plan.
The key is: changing your self-image.
Your self-image/identity is how you identify yourself, how you see yourself, and your thoughts about yourself.
“You can never outperform your own self-image” – Maxwell Maltz
If you identify yourself as a person with eating issues, you will struggle with eating issues.
If you identify yourself as a woman with weight problems, you will have weight problems.
If you identify yourself as a woman with financial issues, you will have financial issues.
If you identify yourself as someone with relationship issues, you will have relationship issues.
Your self-image/identity is like a thermostat. It keeps you in the range you can identify yourself with.
You cannot extend outside the barriers of your self-image because you immediately self-sabotage yourself to get back into the “box” you created for yourself.
When I struggled with my weight, I saw myself as a girl with a weight problem (that´s what I saw from most of my female relatives; women struggling with their weight was normal for me).
Later on, when I changed my self-image to being a naturally slim woman, the struggle ended. How you see yourself is determining your whole life.
Listen to this audio every day to reprogram your subconscious mind and create the identity of a naturally slim woman. You don’t have to be fully present while listening. You can simply listen to it in the background of your day, while you’re doing other things that don’t require mental processes, like cooking, doing the dishes or laundry, going for a walk, etc.
(Don’t let the Mindful Eating title trick you. It’s not only about mindful eating.)
Day to day, our thoughts and feelings shift quickly, as does the busy world around us. It’s hard to keep up with our minds’ inner workings in the most basic sense, let alone analyze and understand them.
But as you develop your mindfulness practice, you’ll notice different aspects of your mind. Like muddy water that gently settles, your mind slows down and becomes more transparent, allowing you to access your inner wisdom.
With more practice, your observational skills improve.
These skills will help you as you learn to understand your thinking process and, more important, to relate to yourself in a kinder and wiser manner.
And then you can examine and understand your mind—which helps you examine and better understand your eating habits, your health, and your life.
According to a model developed by Sasha Loring Psychotherapist and meditation teacher, the mind has three layers.
(If you started meditating only recently, don’t be discouraged if you haven’t experienced all these layers of the mind. Remember the muddy water metaphor—clarity takes time.)
The top, most accessible layer, also known as the “monkey mind”, or chattering mind, is made up of the constant stream of thoughts and judgments that can be difficult to settle.
The second, deeper layer of the mind, the reactive mind, is made up of the thoughts, beliefs, sensations, and emotions that tend to drive our behaviour.
These thoughts and emotions (which are usually the product of beliefs) often put up a screen, clouding our view.
The deepest layer of mind is your wisest self.
Our wisest mind, our inner wisdom, can be accessed only when the other two layers are seen clearly for what they are and quieted down.
With regular meditation practice, you can quiet the busy mind and access your inner wisdom.
Think of your wise mind as your Inner Compass, an internal guide that has your best interest at heart.
Following your Inner Compass gives you a sense of direction that helps you behave in healthier ways that align with what you most care about; it helps you live according to your values.
Your Inner Compass is at the heart of inner motivation—as opposed to motivation based on ideas about what you “should” or “must” do.
Practice distinguishing it from the other forces in your mind—the Inner Critic, the lizard brain that “wants what it wants, now” and the voices that tell you what you “should” do for some unclear reason.
Let’s connect with your Inner Compass!
Sometimes we have so many failures and associations with pain related to our weight and body image that we start to form the belief that we can’t do anything to make it better.
You may start to feel that it´s pointless to try anything new because you will fail again anyway.
If your internal belief system clashes with your goal of losing weight, it will never happen.
Our beliefs are filters we see the world through; they are information we heard, memories, and old behaviours that our brain stored and then became our reality. Our brain constantly looks for evidence to strengthen these beliefs and filters out everything that would weaken them.
Now, these beliefs create our thoughts and feelings about everything, and they drive our automatic actions. And most of the time we are not even aware of them.
If you want to change your behaviours/habits, focus on the beliefs that drive these behaviours first.
Our limiting, disempowering beliefs stop us from taking action when we want to do something new based on past (negative) experiences.
If you tried to lose weight before and failed, your brain sees that as pain and wants to protect you from this pain. So it creates beliefs that cause you to think “I can´t do this, I don´t have enough willpower, nothing works for me”.
These limiting beliefs about yourself, your weight, and your body can originate from fear of failure (you tried to lose weight and always failed, why would it work this time), fear of success (people will not like you if you change), lack of self-worth (you don´t deserve to have everything you want in your life) and many more reasons.
It is important that you acknowledge these disempowering negative beliefs about yourself and replace them with positive, empowering beliefs.
As long as you believe something, your brain automatically searches for references to validate your belief and filters everything out that would question it.
With my private clients, we discover their limiting beliefs, I help them rewrite these beliefs, and I make audio recordings for them to reprogram their minds. As I don’t know you personally, in this mini-course I can only show you the positive beliefs counteracting some of the most common negative beliefs around eating, weight loss and body image.
(If you would like to work with me to uncover your own beliefs check out my 1 on 1 coaching package here.)
Listen to these affirmations daily to rewrite common limiting beliefs around eating, weight loss and body image.
I recommend you read these affirmations or write them out regularly. Notice if any of them bring up uncomfortable emotions or resistance and if so – take a deeper look at what is behind that resistance.
After listening to these affirmations you may find yourself feeling much lighter and more open to accepting goodness.
Don’t worry if the very first time you feel a bit worse. It’s like detoxing negative energy from your system that was stored there for years. As usual, be patient with yourself.
Practice forgiveness daily.
Next time someone hurts you, you can forgive them immediately instead of holding onto a grudge and ruining your whole day.
And please don’t forget to forgive yourself!
The more you forgive the better you feel. The better you feel, the less you need food to improve your mood.
A huge weight loss block I see is frustration, resentment and anger towards self and others about the current situation around weight and past dieting
experiences.
It feels like your effort doesn’t bring you the desired result and you’re frustrated and angry because nothing ever works for you.
But you are creating your own reality around your weight. Holding onto frustrations, resentment and anger will make you take action from a place of frustration and panic.
You’ll rely on strict rules and plans and expect nothing less than perfection. But this way of living depletes you – it’s not sustainable for anyone!
If you feel anger and resentment about being where you are at with your weight or that weight loss is hard for you then this audio will help you forgive
and let go and create the reality around food and weight that you desire.
A key habit to help you stick to your healthy habits is to stop beating yourself up if you fail.
It’s more satisfying to stick to a habit if you don’t bully yourself into it but instead, you are a compassionate loving cheerleader for yourself.
Dwelling over a mistake for extended periods of time can be very detrimental to you. Especially if you comfort yourself with food to feel better.
Human beings are literally programmed to make mistakes. We are not given an instruction manual at birth detailing the correct way to handle the vast array of decisions and events we experience throughout our lifetimes.
Therefore, it makes no sense to go through life with the intent of being absolutely perfect.
Of course, you should strive to make the right decisions and handle situations to the best of your ability, but only with the knowledge that you will not always do so.
Any mistake you end up making should not come as a total surprise, but should instead serve as a reminder that you are a fallible human being, just like the billions of other people around you.
Being human is a beautiful thing. We are capable of so many emotions, creations and discoveries. However, we are far from perfect and mistakes are sure to happen. Always keep that in mind.
Our time here is limited and each passing moment cannot be replayed or started over. It is difficult to enjoy the newness offered each day when your mind is constantly troubled by regret and negative self-talk.
When you think of your “failures” during this journey to be healthier and lose weight, what do you consider a failure?
You might think not losing weight fast enough is a failure, or getting fast food in the middle of the week because you were too tired to cook.
These are not failures! You still have to strive for balance and make exceptions in your life when you need to. Stop with the black-and-white thinking, and it will be much easier to get through this journey.
Mistakes are a mandatory part of the learning process. Consider this: every single thing you have ever learned how to do with any level of expertise has been achieved through trial and error.
Have you seen a child learning to walk? They don´t give up and think “Oh well, I´m such a loser, a fell on my nappy again, I´m never going to learn to walk, I’ll just sit here instead.”
They try and try again until they learn to walk. This process in no way ends just because you have become an adult. For as long as you live, you will continue to encounter new situations.
That being said, it is silly to think that, as an adult, you will somehow be able to respond to new situations the right way from the start.
It is important to consider each and every mistake as a lesson that allows you to adjust, modify your actions and do better the next go around.
Almost all of us do our best to forgive other people after they have messed up. This is especially true for the people closest to us.
Sure, we may be upset and even angry for a while, but we usually don’t hold the issue over the offender’s head for long periods of time.
Ironically, we struggle to forgive ourselves.
Considering this paradox, try to change your vantage point the next time you are avoiding granting yourself forgiveness. After all, nobody is closer to you than you.
Forgiveness isn’t only an important part of maintaining good relationships, but also a requirement for nurturing your own mental environment.
So forgive others and most importantly forgive yourself. Forgiveness sets you free.
I help my private clients discover their triggers for overeating, their limiting beliefs and negative thoughts about their bodies, their life and weight loss and help them come up with better coping strategies, build their emotional tolerance, and choose better beliefs and thoughts.
Then I create video and audio recordings to update their mindset and plant more helpful thoughts and beliefs in their mind.
This way they reprogram their mind to reach their body and food-related goals, including becoming a naturally thin person who can eat freely without guilt and shame.
Without changing your beliefs you cannot change your behaviour because you will always self-sabotage yourself.
Your negative beliefs will pull you back to your old behaviours so your life remains congruent with your beliefs. You need to change your beliefs to be able to change your behaviours permanently.
This is however only one part of my 3-month 1 on 1 coaching program. You can learn more about it here.
If you have any questions or you would like to work with me feel free to book a free 60-minute call to talk about your issues and see if we’re the right fit for each other.
“I had a life-changing experience working with Rita May in 1:1 coaching sessions!
I had the pleasure to work with Rita May over a period of 12 weeks and it was a life-changing experience for me.
I will be eternally grateful to Rita May for all the teaching, coaching and support she gave me!
I started working with Rita May to help identify the root cause of my life-long diet/loss/gain cycle with my weight.
I knew that there had to be an underlying reason for my repeated pattern but none of the programs or diets I tried ever helped me understand the “why” and “how to succeed long term”.
Trust me: I had tried it all and Rita May’s program was finally the solution.
Throughout our sessions, Rita listened intently and helped me come up with a variety of strategies to help me change my thoughts and patterns.
I learned invaluable lessons about mindfulness, behavior patterns, creating new habits, emotional eating triggers, identifying and creating strategies to address my barriers to success, and beating self-sabotage.
Most importantly, I have a healthy new relationship with food where it no longer controls my thoughts and actions.
I like myself again and feel a sense of freedom with food in addition to now having a wide variety of tools and techniques that allow me to have freedom and trust myself.
I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders every time we discovered something and created action plans.
Everything Rita May did for me was customized to what I needed and was far beyond what I ever imagined!
Rita May listens intently, is very empathetic and is extremely passionate about her work and giving you tailored information to help challenge you to learn, grow and succeed.”
Sandy- Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA