Renegade Yogi

Avoiding Snacking

Too much snacking

I’m trying to stop snacking. I go overboard with it and grab a handful of nuts or dried fruit every ten or fifteen minutes. No matter how healthy that might sound (fruit and nuts!) it’s not healthy to constantly intake food. Who knows how much I ate? And do my organs ever get a rest? Plus, it’s very pleasurable to be hungry just before a meal. If I’m constantly eating between meals, I never really get hungry. Food tastes better when you’re hungry!

So, I’m trying to stop snacking. To do that, I am using the swish. The swish is a Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) technique for altering a behavior. It associates a new thought with an existing one. Here’s the swish I’ve been doing. Feel free to modify it for your own special case.

1. I visualize passing by the snack drawer (this usually means me opening it and grabbing some nuts).
2. Quickly, I send the image away and replace it by a picture of me at my fattest. Ugh.
3. I repeat this five or six times, very quickly.
4. I take a little rest. I do something else to clear my mind for a few minutes.
5. I test the effect by imagining the snack drawer. If I immediately picture my fat self, then it worked and I’m done. If I don’t, I’ll repeat it more times, until it works.

I want to associate unconscious snacking with getting fat, which I know is true but somehow I have never internalized.

You might have to renew the association occasionally. Like every couple of months.

I know it seems too good to be true, but this really can have a profound effect on how you think. I haven’t touched caffeine in a month or two because of this. I used to be an addict and now I don’t even think about it. Try it and see.