Visualize each of your automatic eating trigger situations and imagine how you would handle them.

There’s an old saying: luck favors the prepared mind. You can improve your success of dealing with automatic eating by visualizing how you want to handle your these situations before they even happen.

Don’t Skip Visualization! It works.

When most people see a section on visualization, they skip it and move on to something seemingly more important. That might be a mistake. Visualization trains your brain almost as well as doing the real thing and without all the physical effort. And because you can visualize a scenario far more times than you can perform it, visualization is an incredibly cheap and efficient way of changing your brain. That’s why world class athletes are taught visualization as part of their training. Please give it a try.

There are three steps to visualizing your automatic eating scenarios:

1.      List Your Triggers

2.      List Your Replacement Activities

3.      Visualize How You’ll Handle Each Scenario

Step 1: List Your Triggers

Earlier we listed a number of possible eating triggers. Now it’s time to create a list of your own triggers so you can visualize how you will handle them.

Ask yourself: when are you likely to eat automatically? Take some time with this one. Think back to when you’ve done so. What have you eaten when you didn’t want to? What were the situations? Where were you? Who was with you? Why do you think you ended up eating? Please write down your answers.

Hopefully you can handle many situations by removing your trigger foods and avoiding trigger situations, as we talked about in the Managing Your Triggers strategy, but unfortunately, not all scenarios are so easily solved.

Step 2: List Your Replacement Activities

Next, create your personal list of possible activities you can switch to when responding to an automatic eating trigger. We listed several in the Lifeguarding strategy, but you’ll also need to think of some of your own that fit your life and personality.

By creating your replacement activity list ahead of time, you won’t have to think when you need to switch activities. You can just do it.

Keep in mind that you can drop any unwanted thought. You can just ignore the thought and let it pass right through you and out of your mind.

Step 3: Visualize How You’ll Handle Each Scenario

Now that you’ve created your list of triggers and possible replacement activities, it’s time to visualize each of your trigger situations and imagine how you would react to them.

Think about a trigger. Think about what you are going to say and do when you encounter it. Keep going through all the trigger situations you’ve identified until you are confident that next time you will know what to do when they happen. If a trigger does come up you should be in an excellent position to counter it because you will have already practiced handling it. Your brain will have already started making changes toward the new behaviors.

When you find new trigger, run through this same process again. Find an appropriate replacement activity and visualize how you will handle it when it happens.

Here are a few triggers we’ll use in examples:

·        Food Advertisement Comes on While Watching TV

·        Hungry in a Meeting

·        Urge to Stop Halfway through an Exercise Routine

·        I am Stupid or Fat or Ugly or a Failure

You will certainly be able to come up with many more of your own.

Scenario: Food Advertisement Comes on While Watching TV

Lusciously shot commercials of cookies and candy bars can immediately excite your mind with cravings that if left unchecked may turn directly into overeating. What can you do?

Watching less TV is a good answer, but what else can you do? Go through the Lifeguarding steps.

On seeing a food advertisement, go on guard immediately and start scanning for signs of cravings thoughts using mental note taking. Then respond skillfully to the advertisement.

One possible skillful response is to skip past the commercial if you are watching from a recording. For live TV watchers, consider changing the channel so you won’t be affected by the commercial.

If neither if these responses work and your thought scans reveal a buildup of unwanted binge provoking cravings, it’s time to move to move to step number two of Retraining Your Brain.

Say to yourself: It’s Not Me; It’s Just an Unwanted Message from My Brain! Then immediately switch behaviors.

Maybe you can leave the room (stay away from the kitchen!). Try breathing deeply and dropping the thought. Or try something else from your replacement activities list.

Using Lifeguarding, you don’t have to let commercials compel you to eat. You can do something about it. You have the power.

Scenario: Hungry in a Meeting

You are in an important meeting with ten other people and it happens: you suddenly get ravenously hungry. Oh no! Making an active response to the thought is impossible because you must stay in the meeting.

In this situation start deep breathing, drop the thought, and bring your goal picture to mind (see the Bring Your Goal Picture to Mind strategy). You don’t have to react to the thought of being hungry. You don’t have to pay it any attention. It’s just a thought. Let the thought flow through you. The more you think about it the more energy that is pumped into the thought and the bigger it gets. When it gets big enough you’ll be forced to act on the thought. Shrink the thought. Ignore it and it will shrink to nothing and go away.

Scenario: Urge to Stop Halfway through an Exercise Routine

You are about halfway through your exercise routine and all of sudden you’re starting to get thoughts like these:

You’ve done enough already and you are tired, it’s time to stop now...Hey, you can stop now...Oh, you can go eat that piece of leftover birthday cake, after all you deserve it, you exercised so hard today.

I get thoughts like these all the time. What can you do about them? Lifeguarding to the rescue.

When you start exercising, go on guard. It’s quite likely that almost every exercise routine will at one time or another prompt your brain to tell you to stop before you’re done.

While exercising scan for signs of thoughts about stopping using mental note taking.

If you become aware of an impulse to stop, first determine if it’s an unwanted thought. Sometimes you may really be hurt or drained enough that stopping is exactly what you should do. But most of the time, quitting in the middle of exercising isn’t who you want to be, so it’s an unwanted thought.

It’s time to respond skillfully. What are some possible responses to thoughts demanding you stop exercising before you are ready? Drop the thought is one possible response, but you may prefer a stronger, more active response, something positive that will help pump you up and motivate you.

There are three pump-up-the-volume type strategies: Repeat Your Power Phrase (available on the website), Bring Your Goal Picture to Mind, Play Big Goal Little Goal. Take a look and see if any of these might work for you.

You don’t have to pick just one strategy, but can use them all. And I’m sure you have strategies of your own. Lifeguarding helps you realize when it’s time to use a strategy. A lot of the time you might just accept a thought to quit exercising and stop. Using Lifeguarding you will realize when a thought is unwanted and then you’ll be able to implement your plan to deal with it.

Some people may be tempted to use a negative strategy like repeating something horrible to themselves like “I’m so fat I have to keep exercising.” Avoid this. Always keep it positive. Negative motivation never lasts for long and it does a lot damage along the way.

Scenario: I am Stupid or Fat or Ugly or a Failure

This scenario is to let you know that Lifeguarding helps you to deal with much more than automatic eating. You can respond to these unwanted thoughts using the same techniques. You don’t have to let your brain put you down. Fight back. Retrain these thoughts out of your brain so you can have a better, more positive life. You deserve it.