He was so hungry he couldn’t take it!
About ten years ago, my wife asked me to go to the grocery store after work to “pick up some eggs.”
I had a crazy day and only ate half of my lunch and when I went into the store to buy eggs, it was as if the food was singing sweet love songs from the shelves. I ended up buying more than $150 in groceries.
When I came home, my wife slyly said, “You must have been hungry when you went shopping?”
Earlier this year, a client came in who had been on what he called a “starvation” diet for almost two weeks. He limited himself to one meal a day and only 500 calories. He could do this for three or four days and then would suddenly “lose control” and binge eat.
He said, “I have no self control,” as he hung his head in shame.
“Desperation eating.” That’s what I call it. You have been so focused on work or the kids or just getting things done that you don’t take time for breakfast or lunch. Finally, your body starts to whisper to you…”eat.” Before long, your body is not whispering any more. It screams, “EAT.”
Soon the body is shaking and you get desperate. Now you would do almost anything to get a hamburger, fries and a shake. Or maybe you go to the grocery store and junk food seems to magically appear in your cart.
The solution to desperation eating is to eat nutritionally dense foods before you get too hungry. Most of us are not wired to make good decisions about food when we get desperate to eat.
A good way to think about this is to use a 0-10 hunger scale. Zero represents no hunger, “I feel full.” Ten represents starvation, your body is screaming, “I am desperate!” Think about the last time you let yourself get to a nine or a ten on that scale, did you make good decisions or bad decisions about food? Most of the time, most people make bad decisions when they get that hungry.
The best place to make food decisions is when your hunger is around a five. You are neither too hungry or too full. Your blood sugar is stable. If you are like most people, this is the best physical state to make decisions about what to eat and how much to eat.
So the utah weight loss tip is this: eat before you get hungry.
That is what I taught my client. I then taught him to use hypnosis to reprogram his mind to become more aware of the hunger signals his body was sending him so he could stop being so desperate all the time.
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Hypnosis is one of the best tools that I know to change preferences and behavior. If you are ready to change your weight, contact Utah Hypnosis expert William Wood at 385-432-0729 or by filling out the contact form below. You can book an appointment by phone or Skype, or if you live in Utah, you can book a session in his Ogden office.
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