Emotional eaters often have negative thoughts about their bodies, weight, eating behaviors, and themselves. The more you focus on the negative, the more you will continue to experience the negative in your life. By using creative visualization, you can set goals and use the power of your imagination to create what you want rather than what your negative thoughts might continue to bring you. Although it won't happen overnight and will involve work on your part, it is possible to use this tool to begin to design your new reality, one free from emotional eating.
Using the creative visualization technique is more concrete than daydreaming or just writing down your goals. When you do creative visualization, make sure you think in the first person (I), as if it were happening right now in the present time. Pay attention to as many senses as you can — concentrate and heighten each one. If you are unable to visualize a scene, focus on the feelings that arise as you imagine your intention has come true.
How about trying the following exercise right now to experience creative visualization for yourself?
Weight Loss Visualization
Imagine you're stepping on a scale after you have released some of your excess weight. Make it a realistic amount. If you have a hundred pounds to lose, see yourself on the scale with a twenty-pound weight loss. Or maybe a five-pound weight loss would thrill you. See yourself reacting to the weight loss with excitement, joy, and gratitude.
As you picture yourself on the scale, use all the senses you can to vividly create this image for yourself:
- See the numbers on the scale. Make them large and clear so you can really see them.
- Feel the excitement, the thrill. Where do you feel it in your body? Make it bigger, so you can really sense it.
- Hear yourself making some whoopee noises or cheers or a big YES! Hear your internal voice congratulating yourself: I DID IT!
- If there are any smells or tastes associated with this experience, heighten these also.
- Again, feel the feelings — contentment, joy, exultation. Do your little happy dance!
Once you are really sensing the feelings and visualizing the scene you've created, imagine encasing it in a large pink bubble (a technique suggested by Shakti Gawain). Then let go of this beautiful pink bubble, sending it up into the air, watching it float up into the Universe, where it attracts the energy for manifestation.
Weight Loss: Feel It & Make It Real
How did that feel? If this is a new experience for you, it might feel awkward and strange at first. With practice, it will become easier and easier. You have taken a goal (weight loss) and visualized it, created it, felt it, asked the Universe to give it to you, and then released it.
What do you want to create that is within the realm of possibilities? Is there an event you'd like to happen? A behavior you want to incorporate? A reaction you'd like to change? For instance, let's say that every time your boss asks you to work late you get angry inside and reach for a candy bar or a handful of cookies to soothe yourself. In the creative visualization, you might want to see yourself with a different reaction (e.g., happy to be working overtime to earn extra money), or you might envision yourself finding an alternative to sweets for solace (e.g., deep, relaxing breathing).
Vision Board: See It & Make It Real
After successfully using creative visualizations for many years, I took it one step further and designed vision boards to have pictorial representations of my goals and dreams. Also called "treasure maps" or "dream boards," they are usually constructed as a collage of pictures, images, and affirmations (positive statements) to help clarify and maintain focus on a specific life goal.
On my first vision board, for instance, one of my goals was to shed excess weight. I pasted a picture of a woman with a huge grin on her face as she stepped on the scale and another image of a woman wearing pants that had inches and inches of excess material because they were too large on her. As I looked at the vision board each morning, I said to myself, "This or something better, whatever is for the highest good."
Creative visualization takes place in the mind, and the vision board takes it one step further as a tangible representation of your intentions. Seeing it and energizing it each day helps you to stay positive as you envision the manifestation of your desires.
Assignment: Making it Happen for You, Really!
The goal of this book is for you to have freedom from emotional eating. This means your relationship with food will change; it will no longer be your best friend or your worst enemy — food will be just food, used for pleasure, at times, and for nourishment.
Being freed from emotional eating also means you are able to feel your feelings and deal with them rather than numbing yourself with food. Can you imagine yourself being free of the compulsive eating? Here are some steps to help you generate your own creative visualization:
See yourself as the person who is free from emotional eating with few cravings or urges.
- What does this look like?
- How are you relating to food?
- What do you do when you have big, uncomfortable emotions such as loneliness, fear, disappointment, or anger?
- Who are your support people?
- What is your relationship with your Higher Power?
- What positive messages are you telling yourself?
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Conari Press,
an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. www.redwheelweiser.com.
©2011 by Meryl Hershey Beck. All rights reserved.
This article was adapted with permission from the book:
Stop Eating Your Heart Out: The 21-Day Program to Free Yourself from Emotional Eating
by Meryl Hershey Beck.
Stop Eating Your Heart Out speaks to anyone's challenges with food, weight, and emotional eating. Compulsive overeating is conquerable. If you, or anyone you love, want freedom from emotional eating, this book is for you. In her wisdom as a licensed professional clinical counselor, the author enumerates methods that have worked for her and her clients over the past twenty years.
Click here for more info or to order this book.
About the Author
Meryl Hershey Beck, MA, M.Ed., LPCC spent her early professional life as a high school and community college teacher. In 1990 she became a licensed counselor (LPCC) specializing in 12-Step Recovery and eating disorders and soon designed and implemented a successful outpatient Food Abuse Treatment week. After she discovered energy techniques, Meryl began writing about and teaching energy modalities to mental health practitioners nationwide beginning in 1998. An authority in this field, she has presented at workshops and conferences internationally. Visit her at www.StopEatingYourHeartOut.com.
