This has been a two-pronged attack for me. The first thing is to disentangle food from reward, trying to find other rewards that aren't made from food. The other is to stock up on things that you can fall back on when you are in the situations that are normally your downfall (I stayed late at work and now everything is shut, I need to go to bed, nothing is open, I'll take a drive-through) so you have an alternative. Ready meals aren't great for every day, but a lean ready meal is much better than a BigMac and fries, so if you know you've always got your favourite broccoli and chicken bake sitting in the freezer that can be nuked and eaten then you've covered that base too.
I made a list of things that made me happy and found depressingly few of them were non-food items, because I grew up celebrating a good day with food and consoling a bad day with food, good or bad, my mum always went in the larder.
Food also has the advantage of being cheap, when you feel you need an instant reward you can spend 60p on a chocolate bar, it doesn't break the bank, a new top will be £35, you can't blow that every day. Sometimes it helps to break it down into smaller rewards - I did my overtime today and I'll put that overtime money in a reward jar (physically find the cash and put it in) so that I can spend it rewarding myself with something fantastic I really want, whether you work towards a pair or pants or a parachute jump doesn't matter.
Oh, and find a few food rewards that will not blow the diet sheet - a basket of fresh strawberries, a nice ripe melon, a giant smoothie... And if you do feel the need to keep food treats then try to get ones that come in individual wrappers, fun size chocolate bars, individual ice cream tubs. Sometimes if you really need that reward then nothing else that you eat is going to fill the void, you need to have ice-cream then have some, but if you don't have it in stock then you go and buy whatever there is and if it's a huge carton you eat it.
I'm trying to phase out food-based rewards in the longer term, but in the shorter and medium term for me it's about damage limitation, if I need a pick-me-up reward and it has to be chocolate then it's 110cals of chocolate instead of 600.
|