Core Value Eating

Who is more likely to sustain desirable weight, the valued self or the devalued self?

If you believe it is hard to lose weight and keep it off because you lack something, like discipline, will power, or just common sense, your efforts will come from shame of what you are, rather than value of your health and well being.

When the shame gets exhausting, distracting, confusing, or overwhelming, as it always does, human nature makes us revert to the familiar, which requires far less mental energy. That means the old eating habits.

Your problem in reaching and maintaining your desired weight is not due to personal failings. You have plenty of discipline – you have gone through so much trouble time and time again to lose weight. You certainly have will power or you wouldn’t keep trying after each failure.

The problem lies not in you, but in your weight-loss programs, which set you up to fail.

No weight control program can succeed by dominating your consciousness with food and weight. This actually increases the unconscious impulse to eat.

Setting “goals” for weight loss makes you fail in the long run. In other words, you win some, you lose some. In the long run, winning and losing even out and put you back at your original weight, if not higher.

No weight control program can succeed unless it helps you regulate the core hurts that make you overeat and attack food.

A successful program must develop a conditioned response to regulate eating automatically. Otherwise, you will have to do the near impossible: “stop and think about it,” when swept up in a rush to eat.

With Core Value Eating, you stop thinking so much about weight and start looking at yourself and others with more compassion.

Instead of making goals, you create more value in your life. You value yourself more, which automatically makes you value your health and well being.

You learn to motivate yourself with “Acts of Kindness,” especially when you relapse. (Who are more likely to repeat mistakes, those who punish themselves with guilt or shame or those who value themselves?)

Compassionate eating conditions Core Value to occur with the impulse to eat. The reflex of Core Value will then motivate whatever you do, including food consumption.
Begin Core Value Eating with a list of five “Acts of Kindness” you will do for yourself when you have a temporary relapse of overeating or an attack on food. The point is to change the motivation to eat from avoiding core hurts to experiencing Core Value. In making your list, think of what will help you eat from your Core Value next time.
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With Core Value Eating, you learn to view your cores hurts compassionately, and when they occur, to look for the light of Core Value.

In that light, emanating from deep within, you will not have to worry about “managing” your weight. Your Core Value will do it for you.

Core Value makes us worthy by motivating us to accept, value, love, and, most important, feel compassion for self and others.

Health and well being depend far more on how much we value than how much we are valued, even though we’re a lot more sensitive to the latter. You are probably quite aware of the times in your life when you didn’t feel valued in relationships at work or at home. What you did not notice is that those were times when you valued far less.

Here’s a little test to show the power of value. List of the qualities that you believe make a person worthy of love. Just think of people who you believe are lovable, and list their most lovable qualities.

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Your list consists of various aspects of compassion. You have described a person who is accepting, valuing, and loving, someone who makes an emotional investment in others, not just herself. You have described someone who is compassionate.

When you feel compassion for yourself and others, you cannot feel a core hurt and you do not have an impulse to overeat.

Dr. Steven Stosny’s most recent books is, You Don’t Have to Take It Anymore: Turn Your Resentful, Angry, or Emotionally Abusive Relationship into a Compassionate, Loving One. He has appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “CBS Sunday Morning,” and CNN’s “Talkback Live” and “Anderson Cooper 360″ and has been the subject of articles in, The New York Times, The Washington Post, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, O, Psychology Today, AP, Reuters, and USA Today. His website is http://compassionpower.com/compassionate_eating.php.

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