Stop solving the wrong problem

I had a client a while back who started buying a sugary coffee on the way home from work every single day.

She didn't even like coffee.

She wasn't doing it because she had a sweet tooth. She wasn't doing it because she was hungry. She was doing it and she had absolutely no idea why, other than the fact that she just... did it. Every day. Without thinking.

So I asked her one question.

"What is the coffee actually giving you?"

And that's where it got interesting.

It was never about the coffee.

She was senior in her job. She worked in a male dominated environment. She had to be completely on it, all day, every day. Competent. Capable. Unfazed. She walked into that building and she put the mask on, and she wore it until she walked back out again.

The coffee was hers. It was a pause. A signal to herself that she'd got through it. A little bit of time where she wasn't anybody's anything. Just a woman standing in a queue, waiting for a drink she didn't even enjoy.

She wasn't comfort eating. She wasn't being greedy. She wasn't lacking willpower.

She was exhausted and she needed to decompress, and the coffee was the way she'd found to do it.

Once she understood that, we could actually sort it. 

We looked at what she needed instead. A longer walk through the park on the way to the station. Some planning around the parts of the commute that were making her anxious. A bit of space at the start of the evening rather than walking straight back into the chaos at home.

She doesn't buy the coffee anymore.

Not because I told her not to. Because she didn't need it anymore.

This is the bit that most people get wrong.

When something keeps happening with food, the instinct is to fix the food part. Stop buying the coffees. Don't keep chocolate in the house. Say no to the Friday night takeaway. Put rules around it. White knuckle it.

And sometimes that works. For a bit.

But if you haven't dealt with what's underneath it, it just comes back. Or it moves. The coffee becomes the wine. The wine becomes the biscuits. The biscuits become something else.

Because the thing you were using food for is still there. You've just taken away the thing you were using to manage it.

You can swap out the coffee for any of it, by the way. The chocolate in the office. The wine you were only going to have one glass of. The crisps while you're making the kids' tea. The biscuits with every single brew even though you weren't really hungry. It's all the same pattern.

Same question applies to all of it.

What is it actually giving you?

What I want you to do.

Think about the thing you keep doing with food that you can't seem to stop. Not in a judgemental way. Just notice it.

And instead of asking how you stop it, ask what it's doing for you. What need is it meeting? What feeling is it managing? What is it giving you that you haven't found another way to get?

That's the right problem.

Solve that, and the food stuff tends to sort itself out.

I talk about this properly in this week's episode of Chatting with Cara. If you recognise yourself in any of this, go and have a listen. Link here.

And if you want to work this out properly, with someone asking you the right questions rather than telling you what to eat, book yourself a free 30 minute call with me

. No pressure. No sales pitch. Just a proper chat.