How I Accidentally Became A Size 8 - An 8 Week Program To End Dieting by Jasmine Skee - HTML preview

FOOD DIARY

The most important thing to remember throughout these eight weeks is that you are working to get to a point where you are only eating food when you are hungry.

For example, if you are hungry and all you can think about is eating cake, then eat cake. Take your time with it, don’t shove it down quickly because you feel guilty. Make sure you taste it, every mouthful. If you do this, I  can promise you, after enjoying that cake you won’t feel  the need to eat cake all the time.

If you’ve been restricting yourself from the foods you truly desire, you probably find yourself binging on those specific foods once you actually have them. Stop doing this! It’s time for you to listen to your body. When we eat the foods that we think we should be eating, rather than what we want to be eating, we never feel truly satisfied; and so we end up eating more than what we would have in the first place. Let me give you an example:

Just the other day, I felt like eating raisin bread but I thought I should have dark chocolate instead because I know it is healthier for me. After a battle between my  brain and my stomach, I chose the dark chocolate but  after consuming it, I still felt the need to eat more and ended up having both the chocolate and the raisin bread. Get what I mean? If I would have just eaten the raisin bread like I had wanted to in the first place, I would have been fulfilled and I wouldn’t have eaten the chocolate also. By depriving myself from what I really wanted, I ended up eating more. I am sure you can relate to this.

Let me remind you, there is no good food or bad food. What is bad, is using food to distract us; using food for love; using food instead of feeling our feelings.

So, for the eight weeks, it’s very important for you to complete your own food diary. This isn’t about seeing if you are eating good foods or bad foods; the role of the food diary is to:

• Identify what you are eating. Most of us don’t document every food choice we make so by writing it down, you are held accountable for your decisions.
• It  allows  you  to  see  when  you  have  a  tendency  to  over eat, e.g. snacking in the afternoon or late night.
• It  might  show  you  where  you  aren’t  eating  enough  which can once again lead to overeating to compensate for what you skipped e.g Do you skip breakfast a lot and make up for it during lunch?
• It shows what types of foods you are eating, such  as junk food, and how much of that particular type you are consuming. It may be more than you  thought.

There is no right or wrong way of doing this exercise. For the next eight weeks it’s about seeing how  you progress and what your relationship is like with  food. So to get you started, I’ve created a weekly  food diary template for you to use. Make sure to record not only the food you eat, but the times that you  eat them.