If you’ve been following along with me the last couple weeks, you know that I’m in the midst of helping you work on your relationship with yourself.
Last week I talked about acceptance and this week I’m talking about trust.
Have you ever said to yourself or someone else, “I can’t be trusted around food?”
I used to think that all the time. I had a mental list of all the foods I couldn’t be trusted around. It was basically anything sweet or anything that comes in a multi-serving bag or container.
I had this belief that anytime I was around those things that I was going to binge, or at least overeat.
The reason why I didn’t trust myself was because I was looking at all my past failures as evidence that I couldn’t control myself.
“I always binge on that food.”
Have you ever had that thought?
This is you looking to your past to prove what you’re capable of, which is not at all useful if you want to create a future that’s different from your past.
You are capable of doing something you haven’t done.
You just need to figure out how to do it.
But you’ll never figure it out if you’re stuck in thinking that what has always happened will always happen.
Imagine if you kept on thinking, “I’ve never been able to drive a car so I guess I can’t do it.”
No way. Instead, you went to driving school, learned how to drive, practiced, and now you do it effortlessly.
You have total trust in your driving abilities.
This is the same as how you can build trust in your eating habits.
You learn how to eat properly, you practice doing it, and then you can do it effortlessly.
This is what I did and this is also the work I do with my clients. I show them how to not binge and how to eat in a way that will serve them long term. Then they practice and become amazing at it.
To build trust with yourself that you can be around your binge foods without overeating them, begin by making a commitment.
Trust is all about doing what you say you will do, so declare to yourself something that you will do.
A few weeks ago I talked about making small goals; you can start there.
Make a small goal, and follow through on it.
The more times you do what you say you’ll do, the more trust you will have in yourself.
It’s the same with other people. Why do you trust the people you do? Because they do what they say. You trust they’ll show up for you when they say they will. You trust they will keep your secrets when you ask them to. If you have a significant other, you trust that they will stay monogamous with you and be honest with you.
It’s no different with yourself. If you make a commitment to yourself and honor it time and time again, then you will have absolute trust in yourself.
How nice would it be to walk into a buffet of all your favorite binge foods and trust that you’re not going to eat every last one of them?
Amazing.
You can put yourself on the path to making that happen by starting with a small commitment to not do something that usually leads to a binge, following through on it, and practicing it.
Commit, follow through, repeat, trust.
Become a person you can rely on.
