TRIGGERS AND CRAVINGS AWARENESS
The key to figuring out when you experience cravings and what your triggers to overeating are is to start taking notes of situations when cravings and triggers occur.
Use the Trigger and Cravings Awareness Worksheet in the materials section to help you identify your specific occasions when you experience cravings.
Triggers can be broken down into 5 categories:
Environmental
For example, walking past a bakery, watching a cookery programme on TV
Biological
Physical hunger, cravings
Social
Going to a BBQ, Night out drinking, invited to a dinner party
Mental
Sabotaging thoughts – “I deserve it”, “It’s not fair”, “Ill never lose weight” etc.
Emotional
Stress situations, anger, boredom, hurt, etc.
In the material section, you will find the “Trigger and Cravings Awareness worksheet. The best time to fill in the Trigger and Cravings Awareness Worksheet is when you are either experiencing a craving or you are experiencing strong emotions. It is easier to capture your feelings and thoughts at the moment you are experiencing a craving, rather than trying to remember what happened during your last craving or trigger situation.
When you are filling in your worksheet, try and fill in as much detail as you can. Take a scientist’s approach and try and collect as much data as possible. Do this every time you experience a craving or a trigger. Once you have collected data on a few occasions, look back at your worksheets and see if you can establish a pattern where your cravings and triggers occur most often.
Once you are aware of what your triggers are and when you are most likely going to experience them use the “Brainstorming for alternative activities” worksheet. Those alternative activities that you have come with will be your coping strategies.
As you are aiming to unlearn unhelpful behaviours and learn new behaviours that will enable you to reach your weight loss goals, it is important that you write your coping strategies down on an index card, and read over them as often as possible. This will help to rewire your brain and in time you will have established new habits that have become automatic.