• blarghly@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I think the biggest key here is to realize that the purpose the unhealthy food serves is not to resolve hunger or a desire for something tasty, but emotional turbulence.

    My first tip is always simply “don’t keep junk food at home”. This and similar tips and tricks can go a long way towards healthy body comp. But it’s difficult to fight against the tide of difficult feelings long term. So long term body comp plans should focus more on learning to process difficult emotions, reduce stress due to lifestyle, and creating a sense of meaning attached to overcoming various life challenges.

    For example:

    • You pass the snack food aisle in the grocery store, and feel the urge to buy a package of snack cakes. Noticing the urge, you stop and count 10 breaths, noticing all the intricacies of the feeling of your urge to buy the cakes. Importantly, you should not force yourself to not buy the cakes - the point is to get to know and become comfortable with the feeling, and over time it will have less power over you. Fighting it tends to backfire in the long term. And since we are thinking long term here, your actual descion on this particular day doesn’t matter.
    • As you drive home from the store, your urge to eat the cakes gets stronger and stronger - in fact, you can barely stop yourself from eating the whole package on your commute home. This is because operating a motor vehicle is stressful. So you start researching new places to live, possibly even changing cities or jobs, so you can live somewhere where you almost never or never need to drive.
    • When you get home, your place is a mess. The mess stresses you out, and the idea of cleaning it up stresses you out even more. You force yourself to clean, each action exhausting your willpower as you know that this is truly a sisyphean task, and plop down when you are done to binge on whatever junk food you can find in the house. So as part of your planned move to a walkable place, you find other like minded individuals to move in with you and share the cost of the space. Every monday and thursday evening, everyone gets together and cleans the house - vaccuming, scrubbing, doing any dirty dishes, and having a delightful dinner together. The cleaning feels fast and easy - not just because you are doing it with others, but because you are doing it for others, allowing them to live in a clean and pleasant home.