Trigger foods spell diet death, you need to identify the foods that have a hold over you and eliminate them from your diet.
Trigger foods are the foods that you love, that you have an emotional relationship with, that make you feel good while you eat them then guilty when you’re done…that you can never eat just one of. Knowing full well that they’ll contribute to your weight gain.
Foods that you have a love/hate relationship with.
Can you eat just one chocolate? Or do you polish the whole box off? Think how often you eat those foods when you’re not even hungry.
You’re probably all too aware what they and there’s a list of the most common ones below.
You make all kinds of excuses to justify eating them…while you eat them.
If your consumption of trigger foods is out of your control, the chances are that you’re a binger.
Many of our clients over the years have been binge eaters with an emotional attachment with one or more trigger foods. You need to eliminate the urge to eat these foods by changing your relationship with food and changing your behaviours.
No one can take away your chocolates, donuts, cookies, nuts or whatever your trigger food might be. You need to make a decision yourself…to put them away and stop eating them. For good.
To do that you need to break that emotional attachment by addressing the causes of your binge eating.
So What Are Your Trigger Foods…?
The key to controlling your consumption of these foods is to identify them and accept that they are making you fat…then get rid of them! Change your behaviour.
We had a client called Laura who had a problem with chocolate. Any time she faced an emotional challenge in her life she ate chocolate…lots of it.
A lot of you can relate to that!
She normally ate chocolate at night. She never ate it during the day. We suggested she stop keeping chocolate in the house, but she had children.
The chocolate was not for her, she maintained, it was for them. She even had snack-size chocolate bars, kiddie-size bars.
But who ended up eating them? Of course, she did.
A key for Laura to successfully lose weight was accepting that she couldn’t keep her trigger foods in the house or she’d end up eating them.
Once she got rid of them she found it a lot easier to control her late night snacking.
Many our our clients when they view the list below identify one or two of the foods as a problem. Some identify them all! Take a look and be honest with yourself. Is your consumption of any of these foods out of control?
You’ll probably notice that most of them are sugary, starchy and/or fatty foods. Funny, you don’t get that many protein trigger foods – “Oh, I just can’t stop eating tuna!”. Largely because protein fills you up so you can’t eat much of it.
You can eat a lot of sugary, starchy and fatty foods before you get full.
Having said that, fatty, protein foods like burgers and cheese are a problem for a lot of people!
So Why is it So Hard to Control Your Consumption of Trigger Foods…?
Its not so much a physical dependency, its more a mental dependency. A way of coping. Its the emotional attachment to these foods that makes them such a problem.
Break the destructive pattern of eating and they become less of a problem.
Breaking the habits – often of a lifetime – is hard. It takes time, patience and a lot of will power to break their hold over you.
Check out the pages on binge eating for more information and some real world practical strategies that have worked with many of our clients.
Its not easy, but you can control your trigger foods consumption if you choose to.