I am going to start this week by repeating myself. Yes, that’s right –here goes—“weight management is 80% stimulus control”. For those of you that have been reading my weekly emails for a while, forgive me, but I honestly feel I could say this every day for the rest of my life and I would not be saying it enough. I may even have to have it as my epitaph when they finally lay me to rest in my final Shift place. “Here lays Rita Black and she would just like you to know that 80% of weight loss and weight management is stimulus control!”
When we Shift and begin to practice the winning skills of long term weight management, this skill STIMULOUS CONTROL, keeping tempting and trigger foods out of your daily environments, stands out as one of the most effective and yet challenging of the 9 Skills. Why? Because, when it comes to keeping our world gak-free, we are not always in total control of our environments.
For example, as a mother of two children and someone who has been maintaining a weight loss for 15 years, I keep my home relatively free of gak. No that doesn’t mean you will only find tofu and kale in my refrigerator and jars of sprouted grains in my cupboard, but it means that the foods that I bring into my home, for the most part, support me in reaching for foods that nourish me and my family, but also allow me to feel like a I am living a full and tasty life of my dreams.
However, every week I open one cupboard in my house and I find some “thing” there that my husband has bought on a whim and I have to “deal” with it. You see, my husband gets carried away by free samples. Every week he takes our kids to piano lessons and next to the music center is a small gourmet shop with samples. He eats the sample, his eyes roll back in his head in a gourmet food induced trance, and he buys the thing that is on sale. He may not even really like it, but he buys it because that is what his brain is programmed to do (I think he is not alone). He then comes home and puts the free sample thing in this cupboard in our kitchen. Like clockwork, I find the purchase and say “why did you buy this gak?” and he will say “it was on sale and I thought it could be a treat for the kids”. I sigh because I know 90% of what he buys the kids won’t touch and neither will my husband once he has bought it—he has moved on to more free samples out there in the world and I am stuck at the cupboard with the thing he has bought.
Generally the “thing” stays unopened and will eventually get thrown away by me. Stimulus control rule #1: an unopened container is a lot less tempting than an opened one. Rule #2: get it out of sight. Occasionally the “thing” gets opened and if it turns out to be a trigger food for me I have to deal with it.
What are trigger foods??
Trigger foods are those foods that call our name. We know a food has an addictive hold on us if we eat one and won’t stop until the bag, the box, the whole thing is gone. Sometimes our attachment is emotional, sometimes addictive—mostly both. What matters the most is not the why but the how. How do I create a new shifted relationship with this food? For example, frosting is definitely a trigger food of mine. How I Shifted my relationship to frosting is I figured out if I limited my intake of frosting to very specific times of the year with clear serving sizes—then I could have the frosting that those designated times but be clear with myself that at any other time FROSTING IS NOT AN OPTION. Therefore, with frosting , I have created the LOVING BOUNDARY of allowing myself frosting on cake on the birthdays of everyone in my immediate family—otherwise, like I mentioned above, frosting for me is not an option. I go to a lot of birthday parties but it is easy for me to pass up frosted cake because in my mind frosting is not an option—for me this is a miracle given that in my “unShifted" past I would go back in the cake line at most weddings at least 5 times—pretending to get cake for other people and then eating it all myself!
Mastery Rule 1: Keep your trigger foods (or drink) out of your house.
Mastery Rule 2: Define times and places that consuming your trigger foods is safe. I call this creating a loving boundary. Example: If your trigger food is ice cream, (you can’t stop eating the ice cream till the carton is done) well, this habit probably isn’t going to serve your long term permanent weight release so maybe you can create a new habit with ice cream with a loving boundary:
Generally the “thing” stays unopened and will eventually get thrown away by me. Stimulus control rule #1: an unopened container is a lot less tempting than an opened one. Rule #2: get it out of sight. Occasionally the “thing” gets opened and if it turns out to be a trigger food for me I have to deal with it.
What are trigger foods??
Trigger foods are those foods that call our name. We know a food has an addictive hold on us if we eat one and won’t stop until the bag, the box, the whole thing is gone. Sometimes our attachment is emotional, sometimes addictive—mostly both. What matters the most is not the why but the how. How do I create a new shifted relationship with this food? For example, frosting is definitely a trigger food of mine. How I Shifted my relationship to frosting is I figured out if I limited my intake of frosting to very specific times of the year with clear serving sizes—then I could have the frosting that those designated times but be clear with myself that at any other time FROSTING IS NOT AN OPTION. Therefore, with frosting , I have created the LOVING BOUNDARY of allowing myself frosting on cake on the birthdays of everyone in my immediate family—otherwise, like I mentioned above, frosting for me is not an option. I go to a lot of birthday parties but it is easy for me to pass up frosted cake because in my mind frosting is not an option—for me this is a miracle given that in my “unShifted" past I would go back in the cake line at most weddings at least 5 times—pretending to get cake for other people and then eating it all myself!
Mastery Rule 1: Keep your trigger foods (or drink) out of your house.
Mastery Rule 2: Define times and places that consuming your trigger foods is safe. I call this creating a loving boundary. Example: If your trigger food is ice cream, (you can’t stop eating the ice cream till the carton is done) well, this habit probably isn’t going to serve your long term permanent weight release so maybe you can create a new habit with ice cream with a loving boundary:
Loving ice cream boundary: Once a week I can have a scoop of my favorite at the ice cream parlor.
Maybe you go as far to look up the ice cream calories online and see that one scoop of rocky road is 250 calories and you make it work calorically for you on that day—so that you can have ice cream but still remain within your calorie budget for weight release.
This week: Think of a trigger food that is an environment that you live in (home, work car etc.) that is taking your power away from you. Get that food out of that environment and now redefine a loving boundary around that food. Put it out of reach, out of sight, in the trash, in the freezer, in your kid’s smelly sock bin, or back at the store. Now sit back and ponder what is the new relationship going to be? You may have to try on a few ideas—but eventually you will create something that works for you and takes that trigger food out of the “bad food” file in your head and put’s it into the “manageable” file—giving you your power back and putting you a few steps further down the road on your journey to long-term permanent weight release.
Have a great week!
Oxox
Rita
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