How to handle Urges

 Before we can talk about Urges we need to talk about Desire.

Your desire for food is based on a healthy release of dopamine in the pleasure center in the brain when you eat. Your desire comes from the subtle reward healthy food provides and the satisfaction of hunger.

When you eat foods that release unnaturally high levels of dopamine, like flour & sugar, you get much more desire than you need to from our food. Your desire is artificially increased beyond your evolved ability to satisfy or even understand it.

It's a given when we are working on losing weight we have to change what we eat.  When we cut back on food to lose weight without addressing the underlying desire, we increase our desire for food by withholding it.

Often, we will feel as if we’re eating against our will or that we’re out of control. The truth is that false desire is making your brain run a “thought error,” creating an unwarranted urgency for food.

So your Urge is an emotion, a response to your desire and we have them because we have learned to desire foods that give us the unnaturally high levels of dopamine in our brains.

THERE ARE THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH AN URGE OR A FEELING:

••Resist it - this is like white knuckling it

••Avoid it - this is doing something to distract yourself from feeling the urge

••Allow/process it - this is when you recognize you are having an urges and you just let it be and after a few minutes it will pass.  It takes time to develop the skill and learn how to do this.

The goal of a weight loss journey is to learn how to allow and process your emotions.  When you learn how to confidently process your emotions, you stop needing to “escape” your emotions with food. 

Being able to stay present with your emotions and urges takes practice. It's one of the practices that you can use to overcome thought errors and urges in all areas of your life.

All urges are caused by thoughts, but initially, those thoughts are part of an unconscious loop. In the beginning of a weight loss journey, the best way to make those conscious is to accumulate “allowed urges.”

This means every time you have an urge you write it down and then you allow it and don't give into it. As you accumulate these allowed urges it will get easier & easier to not react to the urge and eventually you will get to the point where you don't need to write it down any longer, you will just let it pass.

When you feel an urge, and it feels “urgent” you respond to this urge by overeating. This overeating gives you an immediate reward and perpetuates the “thought error” cycle.

Here are some questions I use to help my clients understand the feelings of urges:

• What exactly does an urge feel like when it first appears?
• What does it feel like when you try to resist it?
• What does it feel like when you react and “obey” it?

• What does it feel like when you don’t react or resist, but you allow it to simply exist?

It's important to understand that Urges are just feelings and they can not harm you. 

If you would like to learn more about how to take control of your urges you can click this link and schedule a Free Life Coaching Session and learn more..  LifeCoachingWithHeidi.com