You really can think yourself slim

What we eat – and how much – is ruled by our minds, NOT our tums, argues a health psychologist. And in a fascinating book, she shows how...

AROMANTIC candlelit dinner, that family roast on a Sunday afternoon, sharing out the birthday cake — throughout our lives we find ourselves in situations where food is closely associated with love, wellbeing and a deep sense of security.

As children, food is often provided as a source of comfort, even when we’re not hungry — the biscuit to stem the tears when we fall over, the sweetie tin at Granny’s house — so it’s hardly surprising many of us grew up to associate ‘treat foods’ with reward, whilst viewing vegetables as a necessary evil.

Then, in adolescence, we’re surrounded by conflicting messages — constant advertising of high fat and sugar foods, but also pressure to have perfect bodies. These conflicting messages can cause psychological distress when we’re developing our sense of self and lead to harmful eating patterns.

As young adults cooking for ourselves for the first time, we often don’t have a huge amount of education about what ‘healthy’ food is, and so we model what we do on what we see friends and partners doing. For some of us that can be positive, but it leads others down a difficult path.

I believe it is these links between life experiences and appetite — our emotions and our stomachs — that determine how we relate to food for the rest of our lives. They can be the reason we put on excess weight, and struggle to diet.

Everyone knows that the biggest problem with diets is sticking to them. But the answer lies not in what we’re putting in our mouths, but what’s going on in our heads.

In my experience, it’s very rarely a lack of willpower or gluttony that causes diets to fail, but rather deep-seated emotional and behavioural traits which lead you to subconsciously sabotage your efforts.

Understanding this is the missing piece in the weight-loss jigsaw. Women need to stop focusing on what they eat, but rather the reason why they’re eating it.

Take one of my clients, Sarah, a very busy full-time working mum who had yo-yo dieted all her life. When we explored her eating behaviours it emerged that unconscious ‘reward eating’ was a common occurrence, trashing all her best attempts at weight loss.

In discussing some of Sarah’s early life experiences we discovered that her mother’s preoccupation with Sarah’s weight had resulted in a sense of love being conditional — ‘if I’m good and stay thin, I’ll be loved’. This lightbulb moment allowed Sarah to see the emotional connection between food and her mood.

CERTAIN foods have a drug-like impact on the reward systems of the brain, triggering the release of a chemical called dopamine which compels us to repeat the behaviour in a bid to get that pleasurable feeling again.

That’s because our brain is hard-wired for survival and so any behaviour — such as eating calorie-dense foods (laden with sugar and fat) which would have given our caveman ancestors the energy to fight rival clans, hunt and get through tough times when food was scarce — triggers this reward system.

But beyond that, aspects of our psyche, such as self-worth, can very easily become bound up with our eating habits.

Take a teenage girl who restricts her food intake, loses weight and gets positive reinforcement for this — ‘You look great!’, ‘You’re so slim’, ‘I wish I had your figure’.

If she then puts the weight back on, she begins to feel that she’s worthless, and this can lead to a negative cycle of behaviour that we often see played out in adults with low self-esteem who make unhealthy food choices and see weight yo-yo as a result.

If someone doesn’t feel they are worth taking care of, they will struggle to stick to a healthy eating plan, as they can be plagued by thought patterns such as: ‘It doesn’t matter if I eat this as I’m rubbish anyway.’

It’s surprisingly straightforward to tackle this mindset using positive affirmations.

It might be hard at first, but telling yourself: ‘I am worth taking care of’, forces the neural connections in the brain to re-form in a way that boosts your self-esteem.

Stress can be another trigger for women to overeat or fall off the dieting bandwagon. So can what I call the ‘I deserve this’ mindset.

I am reminded of Anna, a company owner in her mid-60s, who had been very fit and active in her youth with a work hard, play hard mentality.

But as the years progressed, so did Anna’s waistline — we discovered that the key to her diet sabotage was the association she’d developed between eating and feelings of success, established over countless business deals made over boozy lunches. When, later in life, her business was on the slide, the eating and drinking continued in an unconscious effort to feel good.

The changes we introduced centred on making health — rather than work success — a priority, and developing distraction techniques to overcome cravings.

Humans have a finite cognitive capacity, and while a craving may be powerful, it doesn’t last long, so if you force the brain to focus on something else — reading a paragraph of text backwards, singing a song in your head — the brain forgets the craving.

Anna has so far lost more than 7lb, reduced her total percentage of body fat, and seen improvements in sleep quality and energy levels. So while these emotional eating triggers may seem ingrained, you’re not stuck with them.

Scientists used to think that the brain was permanently altered at key developmental phases throughout your life, but we now know that the brain can be reprogrammed at any time, using techniques such as CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), mindfulness and repeating healthier behaviours.

I call my work to reprogramme negative influences ‘shrinkology’ — understanding what’s really behind your eating behaviours.

And it really does help to break destructive cycles. Through my research, I have established that there are six personality types when it comes to food. Once you’ve identified your emotional and lifestyle triggers, you can change the way you think about food and think yourself slim using my guidelines. Want to know more? Start by taking the quiz then read on to find out the best diet for your personality type and why.