How to Practice Social Eating

Julie’s Stunning VT8 Transformation

Julie placed WAY back in VT8 and is still active in the Venus community as a veteran Venus member.

Venus ladies in Vegas

I had the absolute pleasure of meeting her in person at a Venus meetup held in Las Vegas last year. Julie was full of questions and had a genuine interest in each of our stories.  We found we had a shared love of multitasking when I admitted to reading while I blow dry my hair. Turns out we also share a very serious podcast addiction.  I hold Venus primarily accountable!

One of greatest things about Venus and our community is that we are so thrilled with our own results and being lifted up by others that we feel compelled to pay that forward.  We do that by telling our struggles and by sharing what worked for us.  Julie shared the following post with me and a few other Venus friends in that same spirit.  It was so good I knew I had to share with you all too because it was so profound and helpful. She credits a podcast called Mastering Fat Loss for putting the following ideas together about navigating social eating. Julie, take it away….

Social eating season is upon us

Dreading the holiday temptations? While I don’t think we should push our luck by hanging around the doughnut table, there are situations we can’t avoid or shouldn’t avoid since most people have families, work, and are hopefully not social hermits. What we can do is see these situations as “PRACTICE”.  Here’s a helpful tip I picked up from a couple of different podcasts this week.

The first is that you look at temptation situations/stress/lack of sleep/overworked, etc. as you would look at gym practice if you were on a basketball team. Imagine you are the star player in a game you love.  (Basketball, soccer, bowling, whatever)  You joined this team to help them succeed, but you really suck, which is pretty upsetting.  When it comes times to practice you are still pretty bummed, so you decide to skip practice. Then the next game rolls around and you suck again, because you didn’t practice.  How will you ever get better without practice? It’s so obvious in this situation.  The better choice would have been to pick yourself up after the sucky game and jump right in when the opportunity to practice presents itself.

Over time your game will improve because you PRACTICED. Holidays, social settings, all the situations that tend to derail us should not be dreaded, but seen as an opportunity to PRACTICE! (I think this is an amazing way to reframe these situations and change our attitude about feeling deprived or deserving of something that doesn’t take us to our goals.)

The mindset from a another podcast compared “positive thinking” to the concept of “power thinking”; choosing to frame a situation in a way that is both useful and empowering to you.  Blend the two and take it one step better by incorporating the idea above about PRACTICE with Power Thinking.

It would go something like this:

“I’m in control of my choices and I know it will be easier to make good choices when life isn’t easy, if I PRACTICE it.  And in order to get better, I need PRACTICE. In order to have the opportunity to PRACTICE, I need stressful situations in my life. I need situations to arise where everything doesn’t go according to plan. If those things don’t happen, if life doesn’t rattle me sometimes, I don’t have the opportunity to PRACTICE. I’ve proven to myself that I can make bad choices, and now I’m grateful for these opportunities to prove something different to myself, to change my body and in moments where life isn’t going according to plan, I am going to PRACTICE gratitude for everything that is going well in my life .  I am going to embrace the opportunity to PRACTICE making good food choices because making bad food choices only makes a less than ideal situation even worse.

PRACTICE makes it easier. Skipping PRACTICE makes it more of a challenge.

I am far more powerful than the temptations I face because I PRACTICE making good choices when the opportunity arises.”

 

Wow. What great insight, Julie! Thank you for sharing.