Tracking

Tracking, monitoring, and journaling are hugely beneficial practices as you begin to change your habits and patterns around food. Our experiences are very complex. Tracking and monitoring can help bring your awareness to the forces and dynamics that might be impacting you and your tendency to binge eat or emotionally eat. The general framework I suggest is breaking down your emotional eating experiences into thoughts (including memories and images); physical sensations and urges; behaviors/actions; emotions; and context (where you are, who is with you, your larger environment). You can also use chain analysis to discover which elements of the above tend to precede your binge eating.

Another area you might bring your attention to is the amount of time you spend engaged in what I call ‘Diet-Related Social Media’ (DRSM). This refers to posting about, reading about, and searching for information on diet, weight loss, and food. How much of your day is spent on these behaviors? How much time are you spending thinking about diet? How does thinking about diet, reading about diet, and scrolling through diet posts make you feel? 

It might be helpful for you to take a DRSM break. You could totally skip DRSM for a period of time, or cut it down to an amount of time that feels reasonable and manageable for you. Cutting back on DRSM can be challenging. What are you going to do with that time? You might feel a sense of loss, especially if a lot of your identity is wrapped up in DRSM. Perhaps come up with a list of other topics you might what to research instead, or other hobbies/activities you now have time for. Use this DRSM-Vacation as an opportunity to discover more of who you are.