How to fight food cravings when you are feeling weak

I am sitting here with a cold.  I hate colds, really, really hate them.  Mostly I am congested and my body feels heavy and my brain seems to be in a fog.  It is times like these that I find myself the most tempted to forget about eating right and just eat for comfort.  I know you guys understand where  I am coming from.  It is the times when we are stressed, tired, sick, or just depleted that our willpower is at its lowest point.  That is when slides into unguarded, free for all eating can be most dangerous.  We are weak and our demons want a piece of us.  We start hearing internal dialog that goes something like this, " We deserve a break", or " just one will not change anything, I will be good when I feel better".   We deceive ourselves into surrender because the "hero" inside of us is just to tired to keep fighting this fight.  So what do you do?  How do you turn this around and inoculate yourself against this before you slip up?  Here are a few things that work for me; I would also love to hear from you and what you do or say to yourself to get you through these times.

1) I tell myself that I can have some of this food, just not right now.  Later, after I eat my protein, I can have a few bites.  I usually forget all about it later or really just need a bite or two.

2) I drink, and then drink some more.  I tell myself that I can have the food after two mugs of tea.  Again, I usually forget about it, or not really want it later.

3) I tell myself to do an alternate activity and then eat.  Again, time usually works in my favor.

4) I might just eat a low calorie snack, like a veggie and dip or a cup of my soup.

When all else fails, I might just go to sleep.  Sometimes sleep is the best way to get my equilibrium back.  What do you do?

In my group the other day we had a session on calming cravings.  One thing that surprised me at first, but made sense on reflection, is that cravings are a form of anxiety attack.  Cravings will typically go away in 1 minutes or so if not acted on.  

 

They gave us a tool for working with cravings that I fund really instructive.  It uses the Acronym C.A.L.M:

 

C- Connect to Conciousness - Admit you have a craving rate it from 1 to 10

A -Alleviate Anxiety, Deep Breathing, Relaxation, Distract Thoughts

L - Logical Liabilities - Pros and Cons of giving into craving, journaling impact, reading nutition labels, etc.  Come back to reality

M - Mobilize/Move On - Find something else to do.

 

I had been doing some of that before, but this was a really nice way of systemizing what I had kind of cobbled together from other tools.

Love. It.  I will definitely be keeping this handy to refer back to.

Thank you Rob.  I basically do the same thing, but it's great to have a specific tool.  I always learn something new from you. 

I have to consciously move to the reasoning part of my brain and talk it through with myself (not verbally). Sometimes, on the rare occasion, I will give in to the craving and take a bite and tell myself that's it. It prevents me from lusting and lusting and lusting and making whatever it is the focal point of my day. Also, after taking a tiny bite ( and I do mean tiny, like teaspoon full), I am cognizant that my feelings haven't changed...meaning the anxiety is STILL there. This is something I have started doing as a form of my therapy and not something I'd recommend to everyone.It's phasing out the bad foods in incremental stages to avoid the binging of past years. Controlled bites and then cognizant analysis of the feelings after. Typically, I don't feel "good" like I anticipated and it takes time to reprogram that.

This was sort of the subject of a post I made a few weeks ago on "Ego Depletion."  Being tired (mentally mainly) leads to bad decisions. It's been proven.  And fighting both a cold AND cravings is really depleting.  

I think your "get some sleep" is possibly the best answer.  Gotta replenish the decision making part of your brain with rest.

Good idea, too bad I still have to work from 7-9 tonight.  I could really use some RR just about now.  Sniff, sniff.  I might just have to drink a ton of tea until I can get comfy in bed.

Having a cold really does take all the steam out of one, doesn't it?  You're other coping strategies will have to kick in until you can crawl under the covers !

 Feel better Princess.  As always you posted great tips on how to avoid being sucked into the food pit.

Prim going to remember CALM.

 I  love reading your  posts! i  m  pre-op and  everytime I  see some words of  wisdom on here I copy and  paste them to a  document.  I  love that  you guys  share them!

One tool that I  use is a laminated card I  have in my purse. On  one  side is a  list of  reasons I want to lose weight and a few statements about avoiding temptation rather than  struggling in the  snare. on the otherside is this picture:
http://pinterest.com/pin/163185186468073061/


It usually  helps to  keep me on track.  I am  hoping the  same will apply post op!