Tomorrow is NOT a Fresh Start
Tomorrow will not be a blank slate, no matter how badly you want that to be true.
If you’re comforting yourself by thinking that tomorrow—or Monday, or the first of the month, or the first of the year—will be a new day, a fresh start, you’re deluding yourself.
I don’t say this with the intention to blame you or make you feel bad, but with the utmost concern for your success. The sooner you accept that you cannot just start over tomorrow, the sooner you’ll get back on the path toward your goal.
So, here’s why you simply cannot, no matter how badly you want to, begin anew with a blank slate:
Where you are today is a result of your past, thus, you are always bringing your past self along.
Your past habits of thought, habits of feeling, and habits of action will bubble up, no matter how badly you want to change or how firmly you’ve committed to not repeating your past.
But this is not meant to discourage you.
Rather, your past self holds the keys to the kingdom.
In order for you to change, you must use your knowledge and understanding of your past self in order to learn what and how to change.
As a Food Body Self® coach, that’s exactly what I support my students in doing. We examine their behaviors in light of the thoughts, feelings, actions, and environmental factors that preceded them.
As a result, our students don’t rely on sheer willpower or motivation to change. Instead, they examine the full context of their habits—physical, cognitive, and emotional. This is one of the most powerful ways that you can see that your undesirable behavior is NOT due to a character flaw or moral defect but instead a logical outcome of your circumstances.
For example, consider Food Body Self® student Charlotte’s (not her real name) story:
Charlotte is a stay-at-home mom who struggled with overeating in the evenings. Initially, she saw this as her own failure of willpower. She should have been able to just stay out of the kitchen after the kids were in bed—or at least that’s what she kept telling herself.
But here’s what Charlotte learned in our time together:
Charlotte constantly felt overwhelmed and underappreciated. At night, once the kids were fed, bathed, and put to bed, she felt a combination of anxiety and relief flooding her. She was hit with a wave of anxiety over her unhappiness and desire for a break in her responsibilities, and relief that she wouldn’t have anyone to worry about until the next day.
Charlotte discovered that food did a great job of fulfilling her desire to feel relaxed and soothed—but that it led to an additional heaping of guilt and a few extra pounds. Each night as she was cleaning up the wrappers and crumbs that symbolized the residual shame she felt, she vowed that tomorrow would be a new day. Her solution was to promise herself to be stronger.
But Charlotte’s willpower didn’t enter into the equation at all.
Because seeing your habits in context gives you the fodder to uncover exactly which factors need to be changed to give you the best possible results AND clues as to how to get there.
In Charlotte’s case, that meant using mindfulness to notice how her thoughts and feelings were leading to her actions, learning techniques to process her emotions and self-soothe without food, and creating an action plan to prevent the overwhelm from reaching a breaking point.
Not only did Charlotte learn how to cope with cravings that arose in the evenings, she found that eventually the urges disappeared altogether. This is because Charlotte had the courage to dig deeper with me. She was willing to examine her past behaviors and to accept her past self.
When you build a foundation for accepting your past self—and thus your present self—based on mindfulness, compassion, and emotional intelligence as Charlotte did, you’ll have the power to change all kinds of behaviors and tendencies, like:
Compulsively weighing yourself or your food
Reliance on food tracking
Chronic dieting/yo-yo dieting
Villainizing foods (characterizing foods as “bad” or “off limits”)
Skipping meals (or similar behaviors) to restrict calories
Emotional eating
Binge eating
“Making up” for overeating by restricting, purging, or over-exercising
If you’ve been stuck in the cycle of telling yourself, “tomorrow is a new day,” while spinning your wheels, trying to leave your old self behind is never going to work.
But if you acknowledge that your past self will always be along for the ride, and that there is a great deal you can learn from it, I guarantee you can break the cycle.
If you’re ready to stop walking the path alone, a Food Body Self® coach is ready to help give you perspective, clarity, and direction so you can clear your mental clutter around food and start focusing on your biggest priorities in life. Click here to check out our group and private coaching options.