My 300lb life

lillykcstee

Looking for motivation please add

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Kullerva

"Motivation" is becoming my trigger word, so I'm just gonna leave this here:

Motivation is not a thing. Willpower is *not* a thing. Gah, these are *not real things*, but everyone thinks they are and it drives me nuts.

A while back when I was struggling to break a stress overeating habit (bordering on BED), I looked into the psychology of decision-making. I simply couldn't understand why I would continue to overeat when I'd made a strict, inflexible decision that I wouldn't do that. I'm a pretty disciplined person, so it made zero sense that this would happen--yet it would, over and over and over again.

It turns out there are two factors at work here. First, the brain is constantly making decisions. We're processing information even as we sleep. Though the research is in its infancy, most psychologists agree that we make the decision to do something a long time before we "pull the trigger" on whatever that decision is. It may feel like we make decisions in the moment, but that's simply not the case.

To take my overeating as an example: I would overeat because, throughout the day, I would be exposed to a great deal of stress, and I became habitually accustomed to work out those stressful feelings by eating food instead of doing something else. I had followed this pattern so often that it had become a habit--part of my daily life.

Which brings us to the second factor: habits. Habits are damn near impossible to break. Ask any smoker. You can't really get rid of a habit, but you can replace it with another one. When I realized what was happening, I set out to shift my overeating habit to something else.

Habits have three pieces: a "trigger" (something that kicks off a behavioral routine), a behavior (the habit) and a reward. For me, those pieces corresponded to:

(1) Trigger: Stress
(2) Behavior: Emotional overeating
(3) Reward: Satiation/fullness/comfort

Over the course of several weeks (yes, it takes a while--sorry), my habit became:

(1) Trigger: Stress
(2) Behavior: Play game or read book
(3) Reward: Fun/distraction/comfort

Putting a label on the worst emotions that caused overeating allowed me to appropriately set my new rewards. I slipped up plenty of times...but I've gone several months without even wanting to binge, so it's effective.

OP, motivation is fleeting. Make the decision to lose weight and base your habits around it. That's much more effective. Good luck!