If you’re overindulging on a regular basis, this question may help you.
I was a hard-working nonprofit CEO.
And I was overindulging in food and drink, pretty much every night.
Every day, I met the needs of diverse customers– the children we served and their parents, the teachers, the supervisors, the people doing all kinds of behind-the-scenes support work, the board of directors, the funders and donors, the regulating agencies.
And it was important to be supportive and professional with all those people, with their different, and sometimes conflicting, perspectives and needs and interests.
And I had to take care of the bottom line, too. For me, that meant building and maintaining a strong program in terms of quality, finances, and infrastructure.
Many times, by the end of the day, I felt pretty drained. I had used up any willpower I had at the start of the day.
My morning commitment to eat a healthy dinner evaporated, and I was back to “I deserve a treat.”
As I advanced in my career and earned a better living, that meant, whether I ate at home or went out to dinner, I was eating and drinking the most decadent, highly pleasurable foods and drinks pretty much every night.
More and more, I set out to try to change my habits. To cut back on my drinking and my over-eating.
Because I was 60 pounds overweight and aging rapidly and becoming increasingly concerned about my weight, my eating, my drinking, and my health. I couldn’t sleep well, I couldn’t walk well, and I felt so uncomfortable in my body.
I had lots of reason to change these overindulgent tendencies. But I couldn’t break through those nightly habits and my need to “indulge.”
My clients and I have been talking about over-indulging recently, especially in the Slender for Good Comprehensive Program.
My clients have their own version of spending their lives taking care of everyone else and then giving in to “I deserve this” thoughts and indulgent behaviors with their eating. (A large percentage also feel they’re over-indulging with their drinking, too, like I was.)
There are some secrets to managing this indulgence orientation, which I will share with you in an upcoming post.
For today, let me share a question I posed to myself which helped:
I keep committing to eating healthy, but then say “I deserve this treat” and end up greatly overindulging in food and wine. I end up continuing the habits that are making me ill and overweight and aging me too rapidly. I think I need to consider—how indulgent do I want to be?
It’s another way of asking the Dr. Phil question, “how’s that workin’ out for ya?”
