If you are one of the 200 million overweight people in the United States, you are probably in hoping for an easy answer to the question, “How can I stop eating?”  Well, you have come to the right place. The quick and dirty answer is you need to stop thinking about food in a problematic way. There is a way of thinking about food that’s a problem and a way of thinking about it that’s not a problem. If you continue to think about it in the problematic way, you will always struggle with your weight. It’s that simple.

The way of thinking about food that will keep your weight on and make it hard for you to take it off, is thinking about it romantically, imagining what food will taste like in your mouth and imagining that food can give you things that it was never designed to provide.  If you think about food as a comfort, friend or greatest source of pleasure, you are barking up the wrong tree. Find other ways of providing those things for yourself, find other sources of pleasure that are truly satisfying and don’t fill you with shame and regret afterwards.

Thinking creates feelings and desires, which lead to action (or eating). The more you think about food, the more you will eat. Ultimately, you want to forge a mature, pragmatic relationship with food. This means thinking about food only when you are hungry and its time to eat. Other than that, if food thoughts arise, you form the new healthy thinking habit of noticing them and turning away. Diets and exercise are important in the battle of the bulge but to heal over eating at its core and finally answer the question, “How can I stop eating?” you have to fundamentally change the way you think about it. http://www.mind-bodyreset.com/

A feeling is red flag, an indication that you believed a stressful thought. But the opportunity inherent in a feeling is less about the feeling itself and more about what you do with it. For example, if boredom arises you could inquire into how you are spending your time and get motivated to find something else to do that’s not boring. If fear arises, you may want to ask yourself, “What is the worst that could happen if what I fear could happen, actually happens?” Making the fear more concrete usually has the effect of showing that its worst manifestation is not so terrible and cutting the power of the belief that gave rise to it.

If sadness is present, there is the possibility that it can motivate you to do things that moves you out of the sadness. But unless you ask yourself, “What do I need to do to get out of this sadness?” or “What is this sadness about?” the sadness doesn’t get you anywhere.
Sadness can also point you to a belief you have that is stopping you from doing something you would love to do, something that would make your heart sing. Maybe there is something missing in your life that you need to explore. If this is the case and you use the sadness as an impetus to inquire, the sadness is helpful.

For most people, when a feeling arises, it triggers an impulse to distract themselves—through eating, watching television, getting busy, or shopping. In the moment of following those impulses, the feeling has no value. Not only that, the impulse to distract can lead to a pattern of habitual avoidance through unhelpful behaviors.

Instead, if you can break out of this cycle and use the discomfort of the feeling to prompt you to inquire then you have given it a purpose. Asking yourself the following kinds of questions, allows you to make the best use of feelings: “What am I believing that is causing me to feel this way?” “Is there a misunderstanding or a mistaken belief that I need to question?” “Is there something I need to address in this moment or in my life?” Even if you follow the impulse to distract yourself from the feeling, all is not lost. It is never to late to inquire.

Skinny Thinking Chew on This

It’s only when we forget the whole picture of who we are and buy into the ego’s small truth that we suffer. Forming a painful myopic view is what the ego does best. If a thought causes you to feel bad, you can know that it’s too small a truth. To be blunt about it, it’s a lie and there’s no need for you to waste your time or give it your attention.

The thin sliver of truth about food is that it tastes good. There’s no problem with this except that once again the ego leaves out the rest of the truth: if you eat too much or consistently eat unhealthy food, you experience a slew of negative consequences. In exchange for the few moments of pleasure you spend overeating your favorite food, you experience much longer-term discomfort. You may be flooded with negative feelings like shame, blame, self-castigation, regret, anger, or sadness, not to mention damaged self-esteem, indigestion, listlessness, and potential weight gain. If eating this way is your habit, you are likely to create ill health in the long run.

Our ego hooks us with the thin sliver of truth about food—it tastes good—and leaves out the rest of the picture: all of the negative consequences of overindulgence. When you are in the habit of going under the ego’s spell, your relationship with food becomes the ego’s relationship. In other words, you value food based on the taste experience it delivers, rather than seeing it as fuel to meet the nutritional and energetic agenda of the body.

When you want to eat junk food, you imagine the pleasure of the taste experience rather than seeing whole myriad of negative consequences that ensue from this fleeting indulgence in pleasure. From essence, the wise part of ourselves, we see the whole picture of this lousy bargain. Occasionally we will still indulge, but from a place of awareness and conscious choice. There is a world of difference between this place and the self-deluded place of ego that plays the game “let me pretend that I can peal the pleasure away from the ‘pleasure/pain’ coin and only experience the positive consequences of my choice without the negative ones.”

This deluded perspective is called magical thinking. Thankfully, once we realize that we’ve been fooling ourselves, we can chose differently by seeing the whole picture of our choice. From this place of clear seeing, we form a new healthy relationship with food—one that includes the pleasure of eating because it’s part of the whole truth. The difference is now we’re free—free to choose consciously from the wise part of ourselves that values health and well-being.

The truth about egoic thoughts is that you don’t need them! While egoic thoughts are fear-based, negative, and untrue, thoughts from the functional mind are actually helpful. They enable you to balance your checkbook, formulate a strategic plan, and keep your appointments. Although you need your functional mind, you can move happily and elegantly through life without the so-called help of your egoic thoughts.

Because you are programmed to believe that you are your mind, professing that you don’t need your egoic thoughts is tantamount to heresy! Consequently, the only way to convince yourself that you don’t need it is to live without it and see what happens.

Start by paying attention to your thoughts. What are the thoughts that keep you riveted? Soon, you will see that most of the thoughts that arise in your consciousness are circular, repetitive, and stress provoking. They keep you contracted and distracted, carefully omitting the only guidance that could help to alleviate your suffering: stop paying attention to and believing your stressful thoughts. If you saw the truth about thoughts and committed yourself to ignoring them, the ego would be out of a job. Naturally, that’s the last thing it wants.

When you pay attention your thoughts, you will notice that they are busily creating stories, judging, evaluating, analyzing, and characterizing based on one criteria: how does this situation impact me? Is it good for me or do I need to take action to protect myself? How can I manipulate life and people to get what I want? How can I maximize my pleasure and minimize my pain?

If you see yourself as a “me,” as a mere body subject to illness, injury, and death, naturally you will live in fear. The sage, Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “Don’t you see that all your problems are your body’s problems–food, clothing, shelter, family, friends, name, fame, security, survival–all these lose their meaning the moment you realize that you may not be a mere body.”

The “me” or ego is not even a “thing,” per say. It’s the belief that you are a separate body/mind that needs protecting. From this belief it follows that if you don’t take care of this body and make sure it has what it needs to survive and be happy, other mind/bodies will move in and snatch up all of the planet’s limited resources. You won’t get what you need and you will be annihilated.”

The belief that you are separate stirs up fears and keeps you feeling vulnerable and off balance. This is the ego in problem generator mode. Because life never fulfills all of your desires by delivering all pleasure and no pain, when life doesn’t conform to your preferences, the ego leads you to believe that you have problems. Then, it comes to the rescue by formulating plans to solve those problems and keep you safe. Whenever you notice that you feel on edge, stressed, or afraid, you can bet that you bought into one of the ego’s problematic thoughts.

Yet living without the egoic mind’s guidance moves you into a different world where stress and contraction are transformed into peace, easefulness, and boundless freedom. You connect with life directly through your senses rather than through the veil of thoughts and feelings. In this way you experience the being that is looking out from your eyes and melt back into the spaciousness of your true self. From this place, essence, you realize that there is something much wiser moving inside you that has been guiding your life all along. When you surrender to this truly wise guidance and stop paying attention to your egoic thoughts, your life becomes a heaven on earth.

The problem with external solutions to the ego’s story of lack is that they ultimately turn out to be mirages. They satisfy or distract us for a few moments and then, either the old hole returns or a new one opens up.

When I finally reached my goal weight, I spent all of a minute and a half reveling in it before my ego was shifted its focus to all of the other problems in my life. The chocolate cookie distracts you for a few moments and then you are left with the situation and feeling that led you to reach for it, as well as your disappointment in yourself for giving in to temptation. You knew deep down that eating the cookie wasn’t the best choice for you, yet you went for it anyway. Why? Even though we have been conditioned to see it as weakness, going for the cookie was a loving impulse to shield yourself from discomfort, an innocent and natural gesture to self-soothe that has been your habit.

If you are reading these words, it is very possible that reaching for food to fill up the hole in your soul is your path to the truth. That is the gift in your food misalignment. The beauty of this egoic drive for fulfillment, is that like all egoic desires, it is a reflection of a deeper spiritual desire, essence’s intention for you to return home. The emptiness you feel is rooted in a deeper need, a true need for connection with source—the only thing in life that truly feels satisfying.

Thankfully, food issues are excrutiatingly painful. As odd as it may seem, this is another sign of life’s mercy, of a friendly universe. The shear agony of it means that you will look for a way out quickly and probably leave no stone unturned in your efforts to heal.

When you reach this point and you’re tired of suffering, it may also mean that you’re ready to move into deeper alignment with yourself. It is a sign that it’s time to look within for the joy that your outer searching has obscured. Up until now, fixating on the glazed donut distracted you and caused you to assume that what you want and need exists somewhere out there.

Yet, once you reach the place in your evolution of seeing the futility of outward seeking, you move within yourself through meditation, inquiry, reading spiritual books, going to spiritual gatherings, retreats or immersing yourself in creative pursuits. As you strengthen this inner connection with yourself, the world loses its ability to fool you with its story that you’re a needy hole that needs filling. Thankfully, being centered in your own truth undermines both the world’s power to scare you and to fulfill you. This is what the sages mean when they talk about moving beyond the world, being in it but not of it.

So rather than cursing your food issue and feeling like its victim, can you be grateful for it? If it leads you to liberation, would it all have been worth it? Reaching this crossroad and recognizing where everything in your life has been leading, use your food related suffering to propel you toward something greater. Use it to realize and fulfill the purpose of your life and come to know the truth about yourself. Use it to liberate yourself from all suffering and become the blessing to the world that you were meant to be.

As human beings, we’re programmed to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. We don’t like negative emotions because they create unpleasant contractions and agitation in our bodies. If food has been your drug of choice, when a negative emotion erupts in your body, your first impulse is to numb out with food.

But the discomfort doesn’t stop with the sensation of contraction. When a negative emotion hits, you step out of the joy of beingness and identify with your ego. It can feel like you are possessed by a crazed demon. Not only does this unseemly creature bring suffering, it actually feeds on it. The minute a negative emotion takes you over, it demands to be fed, and pushes you to create more pain, either for yourself or for others.

Identifying with your ego and a negative emotion causes you to become a pain magnet. You either pick fights with others, provoking them to identify with their own egos or you stoke your internal emotional fire with more stressful thoughts. With your help, the ego pens an even more painful story of woe than the story that created the emotion in the first place.

To better understand emotions, let’s look at how the ego operates. The ego is a phantom that only exists as the “I thought,” and the belief, “I am a separate entity.” Essentially, the “you” that you have come to know yourself as—the ego—is really just a concept—a concept holding other concepts. In other words, “ I am a person, who is separate from you, who believes this, that, or the other thing.”

Because the ego is not real, it can’t exist in only place that is real, the timeless present moment.  Instead, it uses thoughts and feelings to move you into its unreal, time-bound world of past and future. Notice that thoughts and feelings refer only to what happened in the past or might happen in the future. It judges, characterizes, and compares the present moment with its story about past moments, but it can’t actually enter and experience the now.

The more dramatic the thought and the feeling, the more the more it demands your attention, and keeps you identified as a separate “me” or ego. As long as you are paying attention to thoughts and feelings, you are living in an illusory world. From this place, rather than experiencing life directly, you are cut off from natural joy of your true self. This is hell.

Like everything else, the ego wants to exist, to stay alive. Every minute it is working overtime to keep you out of the present moment, because it doesn’t exist there. With the present moment safely obscured by a thick veil of thoughts and feelings, its survival is assured, and it can go on about its business, convincing you to heed its advice, and pretending to commandeer the ship of your life.

Hence emotions, because they manifest powerfully in our bodies, are the ego’s most potent illusion maintaining tools. Like the ego, they are phantoms—nothing more than painful thoughts that we christened with belief. Once you sprinkle the magic fairy dust of belief on a thought, you create an emotion and it lodges itself in your body. In other words, the ego presents you with stressful thoughts, one after the other, hoping to get your buy in. As soon as it has it, as soon as you believe a stressful thought, “voila,” an emotion is born.

Happily, there is a silver lining in this dark world of negative emotions. Whenever a negative emotion arises, it is a hopeful sign that you are ready to heal the conditioning that triggered it and gave it life. Somewhere, buried deep within your psyche, lives a mistaken core belief there that you are ready to see through. You do this by shining the light of your consciousness onto it so that it can be transmuted back into that consciousness.

The word, “emotion,” comes from a Latin root meaning “to move through or out.” Thankfully, when you feel sad or angry or afraid, that emotion is just passing through. Ramana Maharshi, a great south Indian Saint said, “What comes and goes is not real.” Because emotions and thoughts come and go, ultimately they are not real. Thankfully, like everything else in the illusory world of duality and impermanence, emotions don’t come to stay. They are just passing through, temporarily obscuring the reality of your nature, like a thunderstorm momentarily covering the blue sky.

This belief is so deeply entrenched that any change in your emotional landscape, any movement away from the status quo, whether it is due to sadness, anger, fear, or even happiness or excitement, puts you in roadrunner mode, racing toward the fridge.

An emotion is literally energy in motion—the energy of a thought as it moves into form and impels action. Negative emotions are the source of our suffering, causing us to expend a lot of energy and time. Luckily, it’s possible to sidestep them if you don’t buy into the thought that originally generated them.

However, the minute you christen a negative or stressful thought with belief, you transform it into an emotion and BAM! It hits in your body. The uncomfortable body sensation makes the emotion nearly impossible to ignore. At this moment, if you are like I was, you will likely find yourself elbow deep in their favorite food. While you are stuffing your face, you feed the emotion with more story—more upset thoughts. This pumps up the emotion causing it to feel even stronger.

You may tell yourself that you use food to avoid feelings, but if you really look at the experience, this isn’t what happens. Eating may initially blunt a feeling. But when you are shoving in fistfuls of food, you are busy thinking and feeling, barely notice how the food tastes.

Mentally attending to the situation that causes your emotional thunderstorm, your thinking may look something like this, “Betty Ann should have been more considerate. She should not have behaved that way. After all, what did I ever do to her?” The feeling is still there, you are pumping it up with more stressful thought and you have only made yourself feel worse by trying to avoid the feeling through eating.

One of the main growth opportunities for emotional eaters is learning how to tolerate feelings. After all, like everything else in the material world, feelings arise and subside. They come to leave. Although a feeling may manifest as a slightly uncomfortable contraction in your body, it really can’t hurt you. But to confirm this for yourself, you have to spend time with feelings, really allowing yourself to feel them.

When a feeling is on the scene, if you can, find someplace where you can be alone. Then, identify and welcome the feeling. For example, you might say something like, “sadness is welcome here.” Next, drop your story about the situation that caused you to tell yourself something that made you feel sad and focus instead on the sensation in your body. If thoughts come in, simply notice them, and bring your attention back to the sensation. Make sure you don’t have an agenda for the sensation to dissipate. As far as you are concerned, it can stay there as long as it wants.

Next, close your eyes and ask yourself, where you feel this sensation in your body. Is it okay to just be with this emotion? Can you tolerate it? If had a shape, what would it be? What about its size, texture, and color? Keep watching this form and get curious about what is happening to it. As you focus your attention on it, without any intention to have it leave, you will likely notice changes in the object’s shape, color, size, or texture.

The purpose of allowing a feeling to be present is that it moves you into sensation which allows you to shift out of your ego and into essence. In this quiet space, you have dropped out of the ego’s story and moved into alignment with the still core of your being. From this place, insights may arise that will give you clues as to the origin of the conditioning that this new situation triggered. These insights may also point to the core belief that gave rise to the emotion. When you have identified it, you can take it to inquiry, which will weaken and begin the process of healing this conditioning.

As an emotional eater, the more practice you can give yourself in feeling feelings, without trying to avoid them through food, the better. It is important to get into the habit of allowing feelings to present even if you continue to eat emotionally. After an emotional eating attack, you can still summon up the feeling and practice welcoming it. Even if you are not able to go off somewhere by your self and devote yourself to this practice, allow the feeling and mentally welcome it.

This practice teaches you that emotions come and go and are tolerable after all. Soon this new habit of allowing feelings to be present will replace the old habit of emotional eating. Reinforcing the practice of welcoming feelings and using them to move back into essence is a mature response to feelings. Rather than pretending that you can avoid them by going unconscious and eating pleasure food, when a feeling arises, if you can allow yourself to feel it, you are free of it, rather than at its affect.

Yet, in spite of how it feels, you are much more powerful than any of your conditioning. As a spiritual being with human conditioning, there is always the potential for it to create unhappiness, particularly if you buy into the belief that your life is fraught with problems. But if you interrupt the human programming that caused you to believe your negative thoughts and merge with the feelings they generate, you can create an entirely different experience, an entirely different relationship with life—an entirely different life.

When you are identified with your ego, you feel vulnerable and separate and resist life. Over and over again, you create problems for yourself when you find that you are not able to control life and bend it to your will. Yet, from the larger perspective of living in this world as a spiritual being that enjoys and learns from all experiences, so many of the things that you considered to be problems in the past, are no longer issues for you. When you realize and come to trust that the same intelligence that grows acorns into mighty oak trees is operating through you, you can relax, and let life move you.

It’s all a matter of perspective.  If you find yourself in an untenable situation, you notice whether you feel moved to take action to change it or not. If you don’t feel moved to change it from the outside, rather than telling an unhappy story about it as you might have in the past, you approach it with openness and curiosity to see what new learning life has brought to you. You don’t have to like the situation that is appearing now, but it’s irrational not to accept. Why? Because it’s here right now and nothing can change that fact.

As a spiritual being, the people you believed to be the bane of your existence all of a sudden aren’t a problem for you anymore because you stop seeing their behavior as personal. If there is something in your relationship with them that points you back to your own conditioning, see it as a gift. You look at the underlying belief that is causing your suffering, and liberate it through inquiry.

As for anything else in the interaction, take responsibility for your part in it, while realizing that often, people are just reacting to their own conditioning, which of course has nothing to do with you. If situations  and people aren’t a problem, you don’t have to feed your reactions to them with food. You don’t have sooth yourself, because you haven’t wounded yourself by believing untrue, painful thoughts.

In summary, as the unicity itself, it stands to reason that you are more powerful than your conditioning. You created it in the first place! As the creator of this conditioning, you have the power to dismantle it by debunking it and seeing through it, not just once or twice, but over and over and over again. Eventually, through your vigilance and your willingness to stop following your painful thinking, your conditioning dissolves and with it goes any power it had to create negative emotions.