Fear

I love Eleanor Roosevelt quotes about facing fear! 

I know for myself, fear plays a huge motivating role in my life --sometimes more than others -- fear is the thing that pushes me into action and fear is sometimes what keeps me from action.

Fear is a primal emotion -- put there and honed over the milena to protect us.

However, when fear goes awry, we can get trapped in behaviors that are no longer helpful and can be downright hurtful.

The other day I happened upon this post (***beware -- LOTS of swearing in this one!) and it got me thinking about what I fear.  Unlike the author from the post above, I'm not going to share my fears here (well ...except the one that I'm afraid of public ridicule for things I'm afraid of) and I don't think it's necessarily imperative that fears need to be acknowledged in a public forum.  What I do think is important is to give some of our valuable time to understanding what it is we fear.

Because our fears are such powerful drivers of our behaviors, if we don't understand what fear feels like -- all the small feelings we seek to avoid -- we'll never get to the bottom of where many of our negative eating habits come from.

Eating is one of the ways we block out our fears.  Eating (and planning what we're going to be eating, with whom and when) can be an absorbing activity -- ever noticed that  as a side effect of being on a diet?

Eating allows us to block out the uncomfortable fear feelings:

of rejection -- or potential rejection

of loss -- or our potential of loss

of failure -- or our potential to fail

etc.

But when we don't understand what specific fear is driving us to eat, we can't deal with the fear.  We only deal with the eating part, which is a symptom -- not the root cause of our problem.

So here's my challenge to you:

Write down every one of your fears (on paper!).  And then spend some time paying attention to see which of those fears routinely sending you running to the nearest vending machine, refrigerator, fast food outlet, etc.

Need help getting started with your list?  How about your first fear being:

Afraid to list all my fears on paper because I am not sure I want to deal with them

???