Welcome back to the podcast today. I wanted to talk to you about what we should do if we overeat, if we go off-plan on our eating, if we just let food get the best of us. Where do we go from there? I think it’s important because lots of times I used to find myself spiraling a little bit after I would have one off-plan eat. After I would eat something I didn’t want to eat, didn’t plan on eating. Something that the urge got the best of me. I would then have this idea of, "Well, I've already ruined the day, right? So if I've already ruined the day, what difference does it make? I might as well get in all those foods that I've been depriving myself of and kind of have like a free-for-all face down for the rest of the day." Inevitably what would happen is, then I would feel bad. I would feel shame about doing that. I would have all kinds of negative self-talk: "Why can’t you control yourself? How did you do this? Especially if I had been doing well for a few days. You were doing so good. Now look what happened. Like you could’ve stopped at one donut. That’s not what happened." Just this whole spiral of garbage that happens after one indiscretion. So, I’m sure there are some of you out there like me where this happened, where sort of one discretion leads to multiple indiscretions. And I listened to a book one time, and I thought this concept was really interesting, and I thought the author had a really funny take on it. But if we did this anywhere else in our life, we would not just say, "Sort of effort, let’s keep going," right? If we broke one egg on the floor, we wouldn’t say, "Oh, that’s it," and just throw the rest of the eggs on the floor, right? If we skipped our eggs, we wouldn’t say, "Awful, that’s it. I’ve ruined my drive for the rest of the day," and just keep driving to infinity, right? We would just quickly forgive ourselves for little mistakes. We would clean it up and repair the damage and get back on with our original plan. Somehow with food, that just doesn’t happen. I don’t know if it’s the dopamine. I don’t know if it’s just all the things surrounding food and how good it tastes and how good it feels to eat, but one dietary indiscretion generally leads to multiple indiscretions. So I’m kind of calling this having an overeating recovery plan or how to bounce back. OK, so I learned this concept. There’s a book called "Influencer," and it talks about influencing behavior, and the first part is when we want to influence a new behavior, change of behavior that we don’t want, we have to make it desirable, but then we also have to have our recovery plan. So things are not gonna go right 100% of the time. We are not gonna stick to a food plan 100% of the time. We are not perfect, so we need to have this recovery plan, this bounce-back option, ready to go. We need to make this plan when we’re in a good headspace so that we know we can just jump right back on. OK, so we need to recognize this pattern, this "I’ve already messed up. I might as well keep going" sort of effort. I’m just gonna eat. And know that it’s actually not that hard to break free from it. So we want to have a structured strategy of how to recover from an unplanned overindulgence. It’s like a safety net. OK, so we have this moment of weakness, and we’ve already created this rebound, bounce-back plan for ourselves, so it’s a safety net to sort of get us right back on track. The first part of our recovery plan: we have to forgive ourselves, right? Food temptation is high. Food manufacturers have made our food very desirable. That is how they make money. I know we’ve talked about this. They really don’t care if you eat the food. They want your money, so they will make food irresistible. That is their job. Our job is to just recognize it. Sometimes we’re gonna mess up. No one is perfect, and that’s perfectly OK, so we forgive ourselves. Then we need to reflect and make a proactive plan. So I actually teach this, and I have an evaluation worksheet that I do with my client, so I’m gonna walk you through what to do after you’ve had an unplanned...You wanna go through this process for any and all unplanned eats, no matter how small. We want to think of this small mistake as an opportunity to learn so that we’re better armed for next time, we want to have more skills for the next time that temptation comes. So the first thing we want to ask ourselves is sort of the what, where, and when. What did I eat? Where was I, and when was it? We’re asking ourselves these questions to uncover some patterns that we might have. So if I keep track of all my unplanned eats, I might start to notice that maybe I’m always eating in the kitchen after dinner, so then I can recognize that pattern, that this is an over-trigger, and come up with a plan. Change in my routine, something to make it easy for me to not have that same overeat consistently, so wanna ask what, where, when. I think that’s the easier part, and you can see why it’s so important for every overeat because if we don’t do it for every single one, we won’t find those patterns. The next one’s a little bit harder because we want to ask ourselves what thought was I telling myself at the time. So was I telling myself I’m stressed? Was I telling myself I need to relax? Was I telling myself I deserve this? Was I telling myself it doesn’t matter, it’s just a little bit? What was I telling myself at the time? I do think this part might take a little bit of time, what I’m gonna do is make sure that there is a link to a PDF of this worksheet. You can print out as many as you want. Just do this, just try it for a month and see what you uncover. So after we try and figure out our thought, the next thing we want to ask ourselves is in the moment that I was overeating or off-plan eating, was I excusing my behavior, justifying my behavior, or blaming my behavior on anyone else? And if I was, what is something I could think instead, so looking for opportunities that if after dinner in the kitchen is always when I’m overeating and I am thinking, it doesn’t matter, that’s an excuse, right? What could I think? Instead, I could start to practice the thought, "Every decision matters. This decision matters because I want to create a new habit. This decision matters because I want to undo this pattern of behavior." When we do this, I want you to uncover the recurrent themes. The last question, two more questions are ask yourself next time what I think, feel, and do differently, so this is where if we’ve come up with an alternative thought, but which we just went through, right? It does matter. What can I do differently? This is where if you’ve noticed I’m always overeating at dinner or I’m always eating off the kids’ plate when dinner is done, what can I do differently? I can ask someone else to clean the dishes, I can make my kids dump their plates in the trash before I get their dishes, I could just leave and go for a walk before I clean their dishes. What would I do differently? How can I undo the pattern? How can I change the thoughts so that I feel differently so that I do different? And the last question was the most important thing I learned. There’s always a learning opportunity if we take the time to go through this exercise and uncover why we’re eating. I think it’s mindless a lot of the times, so that’s why I think but the thought component might be difficult but it’s so important, so I want you to do it, but what did I learn? So in the above example, maybe I learned I can’t clean the kids’ food. I can’t clean up the table if they have leftover food. I just can’t do it right now. I’ll revisit it in 30 days, but for right now, I don’t seem to be able to clean their food off the table without taking a taste. I’ve learned that is a trigger for me, and so I know I’m going to do differently by whatever things we want to put in place. OK, once we’ve done that, we just let it go and move on. We are proud of ourselves because we have taken the time to learn something from that overeat and we do it every time for a certain...For a certain amount of time, whatever do you want to give yourself, do it every time for a week, do it every time for 30 days, every single time, and see what patterns you can find, this reflection is so necessary otherwise it’s really hard to make proactive steps that are gonna make a difference. We always think we know what actions we need to take. Our actions come from our thoughts, so if we don’t go back and do this work and look for what was the thought that started it all, it doesn’t matter, I’m stressed, I deserve this, we have to find that if we don’t go all the way back to the thought, we’re not really gonna be able to accurately decide what proactive steps we need to take to change the behavior we want to influence the behavior, so we have to forgive ourselves, reflect, and make educated proactive steps of how to handle it differently next time. This is like your personal recovery plan. OK, it’s gonna be your strategy that’s gonna work for you depending on your triggers depending on what you need depending on what your thought is starting us all implementing this plan is not that hard and you’re most likely not gonna catch yourself overeat it’s gonna be one of those things that if you are sort of tracking what you’re eating you know at the end of the day like I had some bites off those kids plates today I didn’t mean to do that and then we want to go ahead and as soon as possible sort of do that exercise where we what did I eat? Where was I? When was it? What was I thinking? What could I think differently and how can I set myself up for success next time? What did I learn? Recovery plan it’s just one more tool in our pocket to get us to the goal that we are trying to achieve in any time we can go back and find these little thoughts that are sabotaging us and unwind them is just such a win so we are going to forgive ourselves we are going to reflect and we are going to make an educated proactive plan that is unique for us and our triggers and that way we come up with that educated plan is by doing this exercise this worksheet and I’ll go through the steps one more time we’re gonna go through this for each and every unplanned, we’re gonna ask ourselves. What did I eat? Where was I when was this so we’re setting the stage? What was I telling myself at the time? What could I think? What could I feel or do different next time and what did I learn? I’m happy to put the PDF in there but I know you can just remember it as well set the stage what did I eat? Where was I when did this happen? What was I telling myself to a little bit of work on that? Is that something I wanna tell myself I told myself something different, what can I do different? How can I I like that question just how could I set myself up for success next time and what did I learn so set the stage? What was I thinking? How can I set myself up for success next time what would I do differently? What have I learned each and every over if you do this for a week you were going to learn something about yourself if you do this for a month you’re gonna completely change your relationship with overeating if you do this for 90 days you’re gonna be a different person and it’s gonna be amazing. All right I hope this is helpful. Remember we’re not trying to be perfect. We are trying to be us. We are just working our way through it and when we have a little step we’re gonna learn from it. Mistakes are gonna happen and that’s OK progress not perfection learn from our mistakes, have a wonderful week and I will see you next time. 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