Chapter 15: Put the Brake on Automatic EatingStrategies 22–27 Have you ever opened up a bag of potato chips, ate the first chip,
and then hundreds of hundreds of calories later realized you ate
the whole bag? You probably don’t even remember eating after the
third bite. What happened?
That’s automatic eating. It’s eating when you don’t even realize you’re
eating. It is eating mechanically, without thinking, one bite after another. It’s
the exact opposite of Joyful Eating.
Who hasn’t had this experience in some form or another? It doesn’t have
to be potato chips. It could be cookies or candy or anything.
Imagine if day after day most of your eating habits were on automatic
pilot. You would eat automatically and without thought. You would eat more
than you wanted to, things you didn’t want to, and when you didn’t want to.
You wouldn’t stop eating when you should and would barely remember eating
at all. You would gain weight year after year.
Sound familiar?
Creating Safe Zones, which we’ll talk about in other strategies, helps
minimize the risk of automatic eating, but they can’t remove the risk completely.
To control your weight, at some point you need to learn how to deal
directly with automatic eating. And that’s exactly what you’ll learn in this
chapter.
The strategies in this chapter are: Strategy 22. Manage Your Triggers Strategy 23. Lifeguarding Strategy 24. Visualize Your Own Automatic Eating Scenarios Strategy 25. Bring Your Goal Picture to Mind Strategy 26. Play Big Goal Little Goal Strategy 27. Solving Emotional Eating with The Solution®
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