Dear Kayla,
I was doing IF for 2 years and was doing great. My wife and I separated a year ago, I have gained 26 pounds and can’t get started again. How can I get started again?
Sincerely,
Eli
P.S I figured out I cannot eat my way to happiness.
Dear Eli,
First of all, I am sorry you’re going through this challenging time. I hope you and your wife can reconcile. Marriage is a precious thing, and difficulties in it can spread into other areas of life, as you’re unfortunately experiencing right now.
You said that you figured out you cannot eat your way to happiness, and that’s a good first step in the right direction. Food does a great job of comforting us when we’re having a hard time, but that comfort brings with it more stress in the form of unwanted pounds.
For two years, you were practicing intermittent fasting, and you were changing your habits around food. As you said, this was resulting in weight loss. But now you’re going through an extremely stressful event, and the pounds are coming back. Neuroscience shows us that when we’re going through a stressful time, we tend to fall back into old habits. That’s what’s happening here.
The good news is that you can go back to the new habits that were helping you lose weight. It’s more challenging during hard times to choose this path, but in the end, it’s worth the effort. So, how do you start?
First, understand that there are three component parts of a habit:*
- Cue
- Routine
- Reward
When we’re applying this to eating habits, we can understand it this way:
- Cue: anything that triggers you to eat.
- Routine: eating.
- Reward: varies.
The eating habit loop in successful weight loss looks like this:
- Cue: True hunger.
- Routine: Eat slightly less than your body needs so that you’re in a caloric deficit, but enough that you’re feeling good.
- Reward: Satisfied hunger, and sustainable weight loss.
Ideally, we never use the eating routine unless we are feeling true hunger. Weight gain happens when we go into our eating routine when we are cued to eat for other reasons. Cues fall into these 5 categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, and the immediately preceding action. Since your weight gain began when the separation began, you can be pretty sure that your emotional state is what is cuing you to eat. It’s not true hunger, even if it feels like hunger in the moment. My best advice is to always be suspicious of yourself when you think you’re hungry. Change your default setting. When you feel the urge to eat, do something else. Get up and go for a walk (around the office, around your house, or outside. The longer, the better.) You can also try reading a book, calling a friend, knocking out a task you’ve been procrastinating on, and journaling out your thoughts. All these things can satisfy what you’re actually craving, which is most likely stress relief. Try out several different strategies every time you feel hungry. This should eliminate a great deal of emotional eating.
However, you still must eat in order to survive. The reality is, when you sit down to eat during an emotional crisis, the risk of emotional eating is very high. What I’ve found to be the most helpful is to get rid of all distraction while eating. Absolutely no phones, no tv on in the background, no music playing, no work, no books, nothing at all. Just sit down at the table. Say a prayer of thanks before you eat. Ask God to help you eat the right amount. Endeavor, with every bite, to stay in the moment, and not let your mind wander to the worries that are plaguing you. And then, when you feel that little voice inside say that you’ve eaten enough, put down the fork, stop eating, and then get on with the rest of your day. This is not easy, but it makes eating the right amount more likely.
Going forward, focus daily on taking little steps and accumulating small wins. Every time you get yourself up and go for a walk instead of grabbing a handful of pretzels, that’s a victory. So too, when you reach out to a friend instead of for a cookie. Sitting there and fasting, and just letting yourself feel the sadness, instead of numbing out with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, is also a win.
Sometimes you’ll mess up. Forgive yourself quickly when you do, and try to learn from it. If you fall 7 times, you get up 8. Just keep going.
You can do this.
Sincerely,
Kayla
PS: I am not a marriage counselor, but my husband and I have found John Gottman’s work useful in strengthening our own marriage. If you’re so inclined, you can browse through his resources here.
*I am basing my knowledge of habit creation on Charles Duhigg’s excellent book, The Power of Habit.