Break the cycle

Do you struggle with emotional eating episodes that seem to come out of nowhere? We often find ourselves in these moments wondering what happened and how we arrived there. Most people just chalk it up to stress and throw their hands up. The good news is that we can change these moments.

Nothing happens in isolation. While it may seem as if you just “lost your willpower” in that moment, in actuality these events begin long before the event. I will spare you the mindf*ck of my recent fascination with the concept of free will but, suffice it to say, we aren’t making a choice in these moments. We are fulfilling a chain of events that began seconds or minutes or hours or even days before. While it may seem that we are doomed to repeat our difficult decisions, this bit of determinism can actually help us to break the cycle.

A technique I endorse at FOTM is one of chain analysis. We utilize the idea of identifying and describing across many domains and this is no different. We need to identify a triggering event so that we may better understand the chain of events that lead to our emotional eating moment. The steps to creating a chain link analysis are as follows:

Chain Analysis

1. What exactly was the problem behavior?

2. What event in the environment started the chain of events?

3. What were the vulnerability factors for that particular day?

4. What was the chain of events, link by link, that led from the triggering event to the problem behavior?

5. What were the consequences of the behavior in the environment?

The next steps are:

1. Identify skillful behaviors to replace problem links in the chain

2. Develop prevention plans to reduce vulnerability to prompting events

3. Repair the negative consequences of the problem behavior for the environment and for oneself 

While this is not a panacea for curing your woes, it will provide a cognitive oversight to an emotional issue. We know that in order to really repair a problem we must both understand it and be able to identify and describe. From there we can objectively look at where we can do better. This won’t be a fun practice but if you are truly dedicated to change you will have to do things that are uncomfortable. Change, and in turn growth, is not a pretty process. But the sausage ain’t gonna make itself.