How to overcome cravings on a raw food diet – part 2

If you recall, yesterday the lovely Brian wrote a fabby guest blog about what lies behind emotional and mental cravings.  That was part 1, today is part 2, giving you some juicy infoid on things you can do to deal with those cravings

 

So what do you do about it?

 

Well, here’s where I can give you some options.

 

As I said earlier I help people make good choices all the time and I say the same thing to everyone who has a decision to make, no matter how big or life changing; if this is the totally right choice for you, if you’ve explored it, you know that this is what you want to do and you know it will get you what you want then I say make the decision. Don’t play at it, don’t pretend, stop cocking about and do it 100%.

 

In every day of your life, in every situation you have choice and, if this is your choice, stand up tall and proud and say ‘This is who I am and I like it’. How you live your life is no one else’s concern, have the courage to make the decision now and play full out. You deserve to give yourself the chance.

 

And, do you know what, if it doesn’t work it’s cool.  You have the choice to stop, or to change, or to do whatever the hell you want to make sure that every day of this life you are living is a happy one.  Don’t do it because you should, do it because you want to.

 

When you make a decision at that deep a level, and I know this from experience, the chocolate stops talking, you become focused on exactly what you want and you will find it easy to do what you need to do.

 

I’ll give you another wee bonus, a way to ‘trick’ your mind and make it totally easy for you.

 

When your mind thinks about something pleasurable it plays a wee movie of that thing on the inside of your head.  When you see cake, for example, you don’t salivate about cake, you salivate about your thoughts about cake.  For example, you and I could both look at exactly the same plate of food, you look see a medium-rare steak and think ‘bleurgh!!’ and I look and think ‘scrummy’.  The thing that’s different there is our thoughts about the steak, not the steak itself, does that make sense?

 

This is where we can employ a wee bit of mind trickery.

 

When we think about things we enjoy we tend to think of them, inside our heads, as big, colourful, bright, sometimes moving, 3D pictures that are close to us as we look at them through our own eyes.

 

The things we like also tend to cause a very specific set of pleasurable sensations in our bodies even when we don’t have the actual ‘thing’ there.

 

Try it now.  Think about your favourite food.  Notice the picture you have.  Get a feel for the sensations.  See!  Told you!!  If you are good at this your mouth will be watering now, not about the food but about your thoughts about the food.

 

Now the things we don’t like are the opposite.  They tend to be dark, small, fuzzy pictures and, especially when I deal with food issues, dark unappetising colours like faded yellows and mouldy greens.  Any sensations tend to be heavy, churning feelings like nausea, washing machine stomach etc.

 

So here’s the mind hack.  See the thing you’re tempted by; when you think of them the next time, stop for 20 seconds, get the picture of that thing in your mind’s eye and deliberately change it to a small, dark, fuzzy, mouldy green picture and push the picture far, far away from you.  If that isn’t enough to change how you feel then find the sensation and imagine it turning into a lead weight, sitting heavy and stagnant in your stomach.  As you change the qualities of the picture, pay attention to how the feelings change at the same time and, once you get good at this, you’ll be able to do this to fine tune your mind to where you want to go.

 

This simple 20 second mind trick is one of my favourite things for helping people with food issues and I promise it is immensely powerful.  Try it.  Why wouldn’t you?  I thought we’d agreed to play full out, no holds barred?

 

So anyway, I’ve gone on long enough and taken up enough of Emma’s blog!  I hope you learned something today and I hope, which was my sincere wish, you think about your motivations for doing what you are doing and, if it is right for you, you make the decision and go for it.  No more talking chocolate.  Lots more living life the way you want to live it.

 

Keep doing good things…

 

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How fabby is that man?  When I went to one of Brian’s Breakthrough events he actually facilitated the above exercise with me in front of the audience.  Wow, it was so powerful!  It’s AMAZING what our minds are capable of.  Be sure to check out his awesome site by clicking the link below or stalk him on the Headstrong Facebook page.  I hope you enjoyed our little delve in to the inner workings of some of those emotional/mental cravings.  I’d LOVE your feedback on this post!