The Ultimate Guide To End Your Food Craving

Malaysians love to eat. Due to its multicultural heritage, there is no shortage to the variety of food found in Malaysian homes and restaurants at any time of the day. It is no surprise that studies published by The Lancet and in the New York Times have found that Malaysia is the most obese country in Asia.

Mindfulness 101 At Breakfast

Without a doubt, I love my food. One day not long ago, I found myself in a café ready to indulge in a breakfast buffet. I thought it would be another routine morning meal for me but this time, it was not to be.

As with all buffets, there lay a selection of dishes. They were very tempting, especially at breakfast after not having eaten for 8 hours. Naturally, I was ready to wolf down a big meal.

I stood there surveying the spread before me. As usual, my wide eyes quickly zoomed in on my favorite dishes. I was silently telling myself, “I want that, and I want this…” and this inner chatter went on until all my favorites were on my plate.

But something else happened that morning. For some reason, this time I didn’t just walk back to my table to dig into my huge breakfast. Pausing, I asked myself, “Why do I eat so much? Is it because I’m at a buffet?”

So, I decided to do an experiment. Slowing down my thoughts, I subtly went into my feelings. I wanted to understand why I craved food.

An Unbearable Temptation

I continued to just stare at the food sitting on my plate. My mind started to loop, saying, “Grab it! Just grab the mashed potato and the braised mushrooms. It’s just this one last time. You can stop eating the next time. No need to stop now!”

The temptation was unbearable. Because I loved potato I would take it daily in any form – mashed, fried, in dhal, in curry puffs, in anything!

Again, I called upon all my mental strength to stop my inner chatter so that I could understand why
I wanted to eat the potato. I observed what was driving me.

Intense feelings were prodding me to just eat and not think about it. That’s when I suddenly realized that even thinking about consuming the food made me happier. I felt a surge of energy shooting upward from my sacral chakra, opening up a feeling in my heart, making me feel unbelievably good..

A Past Cause

For many of us when we eat, the satisfaction from eating actually replaces the relief from stress or even the pleasure of happiness. When I started thinking about that deeply, I had a flashback to my childhood in school.

I was a timid child who was fearful about many things. I saw myself in Primary 3, in the morning school session, living in an environment I would consider too stressful for a 9-year-old. The mornings were spent under the supervision of an extremely strict teacher who punished me for test scores that were less than the perfect 100. In the afternoon, I would be tutored by an equally-strict home tutor. Later in the evening, I went home to parents who expected nothing but the best from me.

Back then, my happiest moments were when I was transiting between school and tuition in the car.

That was when I had the luxury of time to enjoy my home-cooked lunch packed in a tiffin box. That trip was about the only time of the day that I could enjoy some relief from the stress caused by those dreaded teachers. Such simple happiness meant a lot to me then.

And perhaps this is why to this day, I still associate food with happiness. Food brings back memories of those tiffin-box lunches and relief. I was not just eating. I was eating AND feeling happy. I was consuming for emotional reasons or what I would regard as “emotional consumption”.

Why Dieting Can Be Difficult

My realization at breakfast and the memories of my childhood brought me to understand further why it can be difficult to diet, because food has emotional value. For many people, it’s not about the food. Making a person go on a diet is like taking away his happiness, leaving him feeling dissatisfied or even “empty”. He may suppress the negative feelings but still feel down. Then he would return to the normal unhealthy eating again to regain his “happiness” that is represented by food.

If you want to lose weight, you should understand that you are eating to cover something. It could be the black hole of your heart, unhappiness, feeling trapped in life, stress, guilt, bad careers, bad relationships or financial issues. You are using food to cover something that’s missing and you want to be happy for that moment through such comfort eating. This is why it can be difficult to go on a diet. It’s not impossible but difficult, which means you’ll have to find your happiness through other means other than eating.

Smart Dieting

It’s important to know this link between diet and happiness. Because even if you manage to diet successfully, you need to realize that you would need another way of being happy. Therefore, it’s good to know, acknowledge, and have a permanent fix for whatever emotional problem within. This could be stress, unhappiness or anything at all. Once you identify the emotional cause, it’ll be a lot easier to go on a diet and change your lifestyle. It comes back to knowing yourself.

But How Do You Find Out What Your Emotional Drive Is?

Before you eat any food that you crave, pause 5 minutes and look at the food to understand why you’re feeling that intense craving. You’ll realize that this isn’t easy and you’ll see how that craving is very emotionally-driven. You’ll realize that actually you want nothing less than love, or happiness, or freedom, or even peace.

You may need to go back to the time when you first liked that food. What were the surrounding circumstances then? Eating is like an instant release, and you are actually looking for all the positive emotional value from eating that favorite food that’s laid out before you.

What’s The Cause?

When you’re hungry, it’s a biological reaction. But if you are in touch with your body, it will tell you what it needs and you won’t need a nutritionist or a doctor to tell you.

The problem is that people have become disconnected from their bodies. They don’t know that they can actually communicate with their bodies to obtain vital information about what their bodies need.

However, before you can communicate clearly with your body, you’ll need to get rid of the unhealthy emotions that are causing you to comfort eat. If you don’t resolve those drives, it’ll be hard to believe what your body tells you.

Once you identify the unhealthy emotional drive, you’ll have to release those experiences that had brought you to this point. For me, it was the unconscious stress I had when I was a young child in school. If it wasn’t for that stress, I wouldn’t be eating so much and driven in such a way.

The bottom line is not to address the desire or craving. Instead, address the stress or unhappiness that caused the emotional eating. Once you address that you’ll be relaxed or happy from the inside. You won’t need anything else, e.g. food, to substitute those good emotions any more. There is nothing wrong with the desire, it’s the stress that causes the desire. When the stress vanishes, so too will the desire.

How To Release Stress From Your Body Cells

The easiest way is to communicate with your body. Say, “Hey, this stress and tension is no longer needed in my body system. I no longer need this in my life. I would like to surrender this up to the Light through
my breath.” Then breathe it out. That’ll help you to release it.

I would say that this is the easiest way on your own to do it. You’ll find that your diet will change. Plus, you’ll be less afraid to pay more attention to the needs of your body from time to time, rather than listening to all the “experts” out there. Eventually you’ll become One with your body. Then you’ll eat because you’re hungry, not because you’re tense or stressed.

Emotional Consumption Is More Than Just Food

Emotional consumption is a habit for many people in the world. It comes in many forms and not just emotional eating. It can be emotional shopping, emotional vacationing, emotional sex, etc., all of which are done to fill an “empty hole” within oneself. What is your emotional consumption?