Is Your Eating On Auto Pilot?

If you wake up every morning, and go the your coffee maker and then go to your fridge and eat the same breakfast everyday, you may be engaging in auto-pilot eating.   And being on auto-pilot with respect to eating is not progress toward a Healthy Thin Mentality.

Every single morning when and if you eat, it should be in response to your particular hunger and cravings on that particular morning.  Comments like, “I always have toast and an egg for breakfast,” indicate a lack of respect for your body’s voice.

Unless your days are exactly the same in energy expenditure, it is highly unlikely that your body will crave the exact same breakfast or any food for that matter, day after day, week after week, month after month.  So, as you build your healthy Thin Mentality, throw away food routines.  Be open to the possibility that your body will ask for different food today than yesterday.  Be open that you need more, or less! food today than yesterday.

Be open to the possibility that less food will satisfy you than you thought…

In other words, reconnect with your voice many, many times every day to guide your eating choices.  Put away all of your assumptions about what you need. Silence the self talk that ignores your body’s cravings.  Instead of saying, “I should eat some low fat yogurt and granola,” ask yourself, “What is my body asking me to nourish it with?”

And nourish doesn’t mean you are looking for “perfect” food.  It means you are responding to the nutritional needs your body expresses to you through cravings.

And, as I sit here writing this, I am sipping on an ice cold coke.  I usually have coffee, but I was craving a coke.  No, not a perfect food.  But I am not perfect either.  I am just a person who trusts myself and knows that a coke is not poison.  And I also know that my body cravings come from somewhere and fighting them is futile.  So I drink a Coke and move on.

So, instead of judging  your food choices too harshly, stay focused on making sure those choices are “fresh” and not from a stale “auto-pilot”system.  You will arrive at nourishing your body in a healthful way.  And you too will realize that when your body craves an “imperfect” food, it is No Big Deal.

The next time you eat will be different.