How to Sustain A New HEALTHY HABIT - Part 4

SPEAKER_00: Hi, this is Shelly Treacher from the Binge and Overeating Recovery Podcast. Today's podcast is the final instalment in a four-part series about giving up refined sugar for a month. I've been talking about how to cope emotionally without comfort food. This is day 17. Here I talk about what happens after the first 14 days of my detox. This is usually when the enthusiasm and novelty of creating a new habit wears off for us. On this day, I talk about how I get different parts of me communicating. I talk about my rebellious, petulant child and my more broad-thinking adult. I also start talking about the physical benefits of my detox. If you've seen my habits podcast, my podcast about how to give up a very strong habit, you'll know that there is research that says, and it's very commonly known, that 14 days, after 14 days, it's really difficult. It becomes more and more difficult after the first 14 days. First 14 days, you're excited about it, you've got emotion about it, and you've got reasons and drive. After 14 days, apparently, it just becomes less interesting to us. We have less emotion attached to it. And I can testify that that is actually a little bit true. Day 17, I'm still not eating sugar, so I have managed it. But it has been different this week. There have been persistence, just kind of a falling back into an old habit of thinking, right, chocolate this time of day, which would be mid-morning for me. And then remembering that, oh no, I'm actually giving up sugar. It's kind of like I forgot that this is the big thing that I'm doing at the moment. And so it's been persistent. Again, there's this been this nagging voice wanting me to eat chocolate. And I have to say, sometimes that has been a petulant child voice that's been saying something like, I want it, but I want it. Why can't I have it? This is what I'm used to, this is what I want, it's going to make me feel better. I want it. Do you recognise that voice? Can you identify with that? So I've been treating my little girl voice with uh care, but I've also been her adult, and I've brought out my adult voice, knowing my new habit is to stop eating sugar this week. And I've been saying to her, I hear what you're saying. I get that you feel like you really need this thing and you're used to having it. I even get that you're having a little bit of a tantrum right now. That's okay, but you're not gonna have the sugar. We're gonna try something different this week, and still I've got bigger reasons to want to give up sugar, and they're important to me. So just bear with me. So I've been reasoning with my little girl, and that might sound like I'm crazy, but one of the techniques that you're gonna find useful is knowing that the part of you that wants comfort food is just one part of you, and the adult part of you that wants to do something different is another part of you. So the idea is to get your parts talking to each other, and that's what I've had to do a lot in the last week. It has worked. It has worked, thankfully. I just want to mention the word rebellion because I think this child, this inner voice of, but I want this, is a really familiar voice for comfort eaters, and it could be a teenager's voice, it could be a child's voice, but what I hear so often with my comfort eating uh clients is that there's a rebellion. There's I mean, it may be that you were starved as a child, so you're like, no, I'm gonna eat, or there may be other reasons that you grew up with where your primary caregivers might have been quite controlling in some way or another, uh, without wish to put them down, but they were probably acting out of their upbringing as well and how they were brought up. Um, and you might rebel against that. You might be like, No, I'm not gonna be told what to do, I'm gonna do what I want to do, and so that might be something you're still acting from, and I recognize that in my child. Um, there is a deep part of me that does not like being told what to do. I know that's rife at the moment with a lot of people not wanting to be vaccinated, not wanting to wear masks. Um, I won't get into that political debate, but we we each have a rebel inside of us, and if at any point we've been restricted early on in life, there's gonna possibly be a part of us that then rebels against that and says, No, I'm gonna do what I want to do. And you might be coming from that when you choose your food. So my adult came in and said, That's not a sensible option. I have something better, which is great. So, but the last thing I want to tell you about is uh my friend introduced a sugar-free cake to me. I'd completely forgotten about this, and when she introduced it to me, I'm like, oh, I can have cake and still have no sugar. This is amazing. So I thought I was gonna come on here and say, you know, you can cheat, you can have sugar-free cake or biscuits or even sugar-free chocolate. But I've got to say, I didn't feel really that good about having it. I felt like I was cheating for one thing. I could forgive myself of that because I have said all I'm gonna do is give up refined sugar, and I have done that to the point of not eating not drinking alcohol as well. But I I there was it was a chocolate cake, so there was caffeine and cocoa in it. I do remember I talked about having caffeine and not being perfect in the first week on the first Friday when I was so tired. Um, I didn't have coffee the following Friday because I was into this mode now of actually that's a comfort thing for me. I'm just I'm preaching, surrendering to tiredness and surrendering to emotion. So I'm gonna do it myself. I'm gonna not have caffeine last Friday, so I haven't had caffeine since, but I'd forgotten that if I have the sugar-free chocolate cake, there'd be a bit of caffeine in it. And it did make me a little bit wired, and I didn't like that. After two weeks of having a fairly clean diet, I could really notice that the caffeine made me just a little bit edgy and faster, and I felt like I wasn't really as in tune with the good benefits of giving up sugar. So I've chosen not to have caffeine in this month as well. And the thing I'm illustrating here is that the more mindful you become, the more uh well, the better you treat yourself. So that was a natural decision I made, having got more in touch with what my body actually enjoys and feels good with. And that's what can happen when you start giving up a comfort food. It happens organically, it happens naturally. So you really only have to cut out one thing at a time, and then other things come along. Um, there is one more thing I want to tell you because I have been telling you about the physical effects of what's going on for me. So last week and the week before, I had a kind of an aching in my legs and I was really tired. This week the aching is gone and I feel a lot more energized. I think I look better as well. If you look at my eyes under my eyes, I look less tired and my skin looks a bit better. So there's physical proof that giving up sugar is actually good for you. And I haven't done anything else, it's all about the food, I haven't done the exercise yet. I'm starting to want to do that, and I'm starting to do it like this week. Um, but that's another organic change that's happened from being more mindful. I really recommend this whole getting in touch with what you really need experience. This is day 26. In this final live recording, I talk more about how I feel nourished, clearer, and show physical signs of being healthy. I also talk about how I cope with a major emotional trigger without sugar. And this is day 26. This is my last recording, and it's been quite the month. I I part of me doesn't believe I've actually made it all the way through, and the other part of me is really proud that I've made it all the way through. So there's two things that I want to tell you about today. I haven't spoken to you for a week and a half. Um, and there's two sides to what I want to be honest about today, and to finish with today. And one side of it is feeling really good, feeling really healthy, feeling, I mean, look at my skin, it looks clearer. I think my eyes look clearer. I I just I feel better. And so I can testify to the physical effects of not having sugar, refined sugar, not having alcohol have been really good for me, emotionally as well as physically. Um and just as I was talking about last time, one detox has led to another. So I started with just unrefined sugar, that I was uh cutting out refined sugar from my diet. That led to me wanting to give up caffeine because I was becoming so much more mindful about what was going on in my body and what would help me, what would actually not help me, really. So I stopped drinking caffeine. I've stopped eating any kind of caffeine chocolate, and that has made me feel so much calmer and in control and clearer in my mind. I really like that, I've got to say. That's that's been feeling empowered. And then that lead to me wanting led to me wanting to exercise. That was the next thing. So I started exercise last week and loved it, loved going back to exercise. Um, again, I think it's one of those habits that possibly after two weeks I might think this is not as interesting as it was. But I still feel more motivated, so I imagine I will carry on exercising. That's what I'm hoping for, right? You've got to visualize the best. And then I started giving up other things. So then I was just getting so much more mindful of what I actually want in life and what I'm putting into my body and how I'm treating myself. I almost stopped watching television. This is like wow, never heard of really, because I was brought up on television. That was the first comfort I ever had, I reckon. And uh yeah, my mother was a single mother, she stuck me in front of the television because she worked all the time, and so I it's a massive comfort blanket for me. But I've stopped watching it so much. I do still watch it probably about two hours a week, which is hardly anything, I think. Um, but I'm just not as interested. And what I do watch, I'm really interested in. So it feels nourishing rather than just mindlessly watching something because I haven't got anything better to do, which I realized I'd fallen into. I again was brainwashing myself into thinking I needed this thing to wind down. I don't need it. Turns out I can wind down in other ways, actually, and they're more effective and quicker. So that's the first thing to tell you that of all the positive effects and the knock-on effect of me feeling quite good and doing other things that feel quite good. The other side of this coin is just ridiculously good timing for me to be able to tell you about this. I had the greatest challenge with this week because something dramatic happened to me in my personal life. Something really, really triggered me this week. Not into the worst of the triggering that I'm aware of in my life. I've I've felt worse. Um, but but something happened that really upset me this week, some relational difficulty that that really bothered me, and if I'm honest, is still bothering me. So I really got to put to the test, wanting or not wanting comfort, and sticking by how I really feel and managing my emotion in a different way to comfort food. And um, I you know, I even went so far as to have a dream, I had this dream about a cream donut, and it was the most gorgeous thing that I could possibly have imagined. But when I woke up, I'm like, oh no, I don't actually want that. But somewhere in my psyche, that's what I wanted, that's what I thought would make me feel better. So just to let you know that the food did come up, it was difficult. Um, but I just kept sticking by what I know about emotion. What I know is that if I stay with it and feel through it, it is gonna pass, and I'm probably gonna find something better to comfort myself with. So I really did that with this situation, and knowing what I do, I knew or doing what I do, I knew that I was in fight or flight, so I knew that I had to calm down. This took me a while, um, but I but staying with it, I did actually manage to calm down from fight or flight. That led to me making some good decisions and opening up a bit more with this person that I was having difficulty with and finding a way to be compassionate about them. Um compassionate for both of us, actually. It was so difficult. It was so difficult because my teenager, I talked about my child last week, but this time my teenager was up and indignant and furious about something, and I can do my own work on working out where that comes from in my teenage years and what that relates to for me. I don't need to tell you that. Um, but it it does, it does relate to something in my history. It is something that was triggered for me. Uh, it is a sensitive subject that I have lots of feelings about and lots of messages and lots of beliefs and lots of complication and sensitivity around. Um, so I had to be kind to all of that. I had to look after all of that and calm myself down from it. Um and it's worked. You know, I still haven't eaten chocolate, still don't want it, still exercising, still not interested in television, still quite aware that none of those things are gonna get me through the problem. And slowly but surely I'm getting through the problem in a different way, and I'm finding myself coming back and coming back to asserting what I need, asserting how I feel in a compassionate and kind and calm way. I think that's the key to all relationship for me. It may or may not be for others, but I can certainly recommend it because it makes me feel happier and more empowered. And I don't think I would have arrived at that if I'd had a drink, had some sugar, went into all the comforts. Another comfort can be trying to get somebody else to comfort me. But really, I feel like we need to do this for ourselves. Obviously, it's important to have relationships where you can find comfort as well and support, and to have good, supportive, lovely relationships. Um, and with the isolation at the moment, so many of us are lacking in that co-regulation with people, and it is important to have that. We are social creatures, we need that. But it is also, I think, extremely powerful and probably quite important to be able to comfort yourself without all the external things, without other people, without substances. And so that's what I've been trying to prove to you this month. I've done it for 26 days, I'm gonna still carry on doing it for the weekend, and then I probably won't have any more sugary chocolate for a long time until it just happens to uh cross my path. Probably I certainly won't be buying it because I just don't fancy it really anymore. It doesn't feel like it helps, and I have really found my way more than I ever did. I've reaffirmed my way of finding a way through emotion. I know that's gonna sound difficult to some people who are watching, and I guess I just want to really reassure you that it is possible. It it is possibly painful, possibly lengthy, plus it possibly takes some work and awareness and research and lateral thinking and opening a mind. But it is possible to deal with emotion in a different way, no matter how painful, no matter how traumatic. It is possible to learn this skill of working through emotion and understanding what you really need. In summary, these are the tips in this podcast about how I cope with giving up a comfort food in this last podcast in the series. Be aware that you might feel less interested after 14 days of any new habit, so renew and revisit your skills and your tools. Acknowledge the rebellious or petulant inner child in you that wants, expects, and even demands comfort food. Acknowledge the self-punishing inner teenager who takes anger out on themselves. Locate the adult in you that has a better way to deal with needing comfort. Get these different parts talking with each other. Stay in the mode of surrendering to how you feel instead of turning to a comfort substance. Walk yourself through emotion to find the comfort that you really need, even if it takes time and lots of different skills. Focus on getting through this problem differently and regulate your nervous system. I have talked about self-regulation before, so there will be a link to my previous podcasts in the notes for this podcast. So that's the end of my live reports about giving up a comfort substance, although I may give you reports occasionally on how I'm doing still. I want to tell you what it's been like since I finished this experiment. So on one occasion I did have a couple of glasses of wine, but the thing that struck out to me and something that I had never noticed before, is it really felt like I was spooning sugar into my mouth. I could really taste the sugar in the wine which I'd never tasted before. So that was really interesting to me, and I think it might have put me off wine until I forget that that's what it's like. And that's one of the points I've been trying to make really. I've been consistently mindful about what's going on in my body and how these things affect me, and not turning a blind eye when I taste that sugar and don't like it. So, what's also happened is I've realised that I brainwashed myself into thinking that I really needed or should have that alcohol at the end of my detox. It was so tricky because there was a new part of me that really didn't want it and knew that it would mess up this glorious new feeling that I had of feeling nourished, rehydrated, and well. But there was also the old addicted habitual part of me that fell into the habit of having wine with a friend who I associate with drinking. I've known this friend for over 30 years and we bonded over drinking wine through Italy on an art history degree as students. The great thing though was that my friend and I were able to actually have this conversation. Amazingly, we both realised that we'd gone back to old habits because we had both stopped drinking recently and had felt the benefit. We decided not to drink next time we meet, so I'm now looking forward to both of us being able to comfort and enjoy ourselves and each other without the wine. What I feel I've got from this whole journey is renewing and reconfirming a sense of moving through the brainwashing of thinking that I need sugar to be okay. And reassuring myself and enjoying life in other ways. Giving up just one comfort substance has also led to me organically choosing to reduce other comfort substances across the board. This has meant that I found a way through emotional triggering and habitual patterning to a sense of calm, clarity of mind, physical well-being, and a feeling of personal empowerment. What I want to leave you with today is the thought that although this process may not be as quick for you, I've been teaching this stuff for decades, it is definitely possible. One step at a time. So much for listening. I'll see you next Wednesday.