Reframing Beliefs

Here I will talk about what I think is a cornerstone of normal eating and that is, understanding your irrational beliefs, reframing them to rational beliefs, and then using those rational beliefs to change your thinking to healthier thinking.  I will explain a little more and give some examples of my own.

What the heck does all this mean?  Well, as we are growing up we take in all kinds of messages, many of them are irrational.  For example, "being fat is bad" is an irrational belief.  Is it bad? No.  Maybe unhealthy, but not bad.  But we tell ourselves this over and over again unconciously because it's a believe we grew up with and it's a habit to believe it.  So we have to take each one of these beliefs and debunk them, make them into more rational beliefs and then force ourselves to start conciously saying the new belief.  Here's an example of how this is done:

Irrational Belief: I NEED to lose weight.
Rational Belief: I strongly prefer to lose weight.
Rational Belief: I am choosing to attempt weight loss.

You may be wondering, how do I know if I have an irrational belief?  The clues for me were that I would start feeling anxious, would start beating myself up in my head, start pointing out all the things that were wrong with my life, would feel the urge to eat or the urge to diet.  Linda Moran calls it a "fat and ugly attack".   These were all clues that I was feeling an irrational belief.  From there I would take a little break and think about what was going on in my brain.  Then I would sit down and write out the beliefs that were flowing through my mind and decide if they were rational or not.  If they were not I would write them down and then reframe them into rational beliefs.

Painstaking? Surprisingly not for me because it made me feel better and eased my anxiety.  That is what I wanted so I didn't mind this process.  It takes time and hard work but well worth it because I felt like I was making progress the whole time.

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