Ever hear of the term the Freshman 10? It refers to the ten pound gain when a new college student starts stress eating during their first few turbulent weeks in a new environment away from home.   

Welcome to the reality of the Covid19 or 20 or 30 who knows how many pounds will be gained before this is all over! Being isolated at home, worried about the health of family and friends and distraught at the condition of the economy, many people are trying to find any comfort they can and that can include several trips to the fridge or pantry.

The easiest way to lose weight is to not gain it in the first place, maintaining your weight in stressful times can be made a whole lot easier if you can keep your emotions on an even keel.  Try to observe what you are allowing yourself to be influenced by when it comes to food.  What are you feeling before you reach for that refrigerator handle again, anxious, desperate, cornered, frustrated or just bored?

Perhaps unconsciously you’ve found yourself once again rooting around the pantry shelves for the umpteenth time today, have you been watching the news? Calculating once again how much you can cut out of the budget if things get financially worse for the family? The stress pushes all your buttons at once.  This event the country and the whole world is going through right now is unprecedented.

So, here’s a little exercise for you: Study your thoughts, feelings, and emotions and I think you will be surprised.  Some of the influences on the patterns of behavior come as memories from childhood.  You can catch them if you decide to be aware.  Thoughts like, “I need some fun and food will provide that.”  Some of them come from friends, “I better eat what everyone else is eating or nobody will like me and I’ll be alone.”  And there are many other external and internal stimuli constantly influencing you.   

But how do you stop it?  How do you stop hyping food (like it’s going to save you), seeking stress relief with food, or romancing food? First, managing the stress and anxiety during this epidemic is important; the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) have tips on this on their official Corona Virus Covid19 website – (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prepare/managing-stress-anxiety.html) and Psychology Today has a new article out called “How to Curb Emotional Eating During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/naked-truth/202003/how-curb-emotional-eating-during-the-covid-19-pandemic). Both are great resources to start with to make you consciously aware of what your behavior may be caused by.

Unfortunately, being aware consciously is not always enough to change the response and moderate the behavior. Have you noticed that?  You know WHY you eat, but you can’t stop yourself.  Why is that?  The reason you can’t stop is that you are compelled by something held down deep.  And you need to go deep to figure it out and stop it.  

Consider looking for a good Hypnotist who can tackle and address the root cause of your weight issue. The root cause of weight issues is the reason why you have jumped from failure to failure on fad diets in the past; it’s the reason why even the best, most popular diets just didn’t seem to work for you, or they worked initially, but you couldn’t sustain it. 

Again, the problem is buried deep in your subconscious and that’s the workspace of a good Hypnotist.

If you’d like more information you can get a free 30-minute Hypnosis telephone consultation with me here at https://www.familyfirsthypnosis.com