Lesson 1: EvolutionEat

Your diet is just one piece of the puzzle of living healthily. The food you eat is important, but mastering your diet is really about everything else: your mindset, your attitude toward learning, your willingness to sacrifice immediate results for long-term success, your planning, your preparation, and most importantly your habits—the way you carry yourself in the world.

Go through the entire course. If you train the concepts and strategies into your everyday experience, you will heal your relationship with food, you will master your diet, you will cultivate and own a totally new set of skills that will help you lose weight, maintain your new body, think more clearly, obsess less about food, and stay in control.    

If you thought today’s lesson was valuable, then I can’t wait for you to experience the (Inner Circle).

Existentialism on a Binge Night

10:05pm. The doorbell rings.

Reflexively I rise, nerves dulled and fat. I don’t care to put on a shirt.

My cheeks are burning hot and sweat has gathered cold on my forehead, or it was already there.  

I open the door and there stands the same Mexican delivery boy from an hour ago, 20 years young or younger, holding a brown paper bag. I pretend not to acknowledge him.  

This is no time to be upset. Sweet baby Jesus, Chipotle has arrived. Dinner #4 for the night.

I say nothing, my eyeballs puffy, and hand the kid a $20 bill.

I proceed inside my apartment, kicking the door shut behind me, unpack the football sized mass I’d soon be ingesting and, standing in my kitchen, demolish the double-stuffed chicken burrito filled with absolutely everything that could ever fit inside one single tortilla: extra barbacoa, black beans, white rice, fajita veggies, lettuce, cheese, sour cream, fresh tomato salsa, and guac.

And I didn’t forget the extra guac on the side to go with my chips. What am I, some sort of amateur?  

In five minutes, the burrito is gone, and so am I. Exhausted, I find my way to the couch and feel an overwhelming sadness because there’s nothing left to eat.

Unthinkingly, I whip out my iPhone and pull up the Postmates delivery app for the 3rd time that night, and order Pinkberry. The exclamation mark on the end of a soon-regrettable night of no-holds-barred binging.   

Ever have a night like this?

When you eat and eat and can’t stop and don’t want to stop? A night that just somehow “gets the best of you”... and then goes totally demented? You wake up in the morning and can’t believe what happened, don’t understand how you allowed it to go so far, and feel an overwhelming sense of shame and disappointment. A remorse deeper than you want to manage.   

You pull the sheets over your head, metaphorically or literally, and sink into despair.

These sorts of nights used to happen frequently for me. They still do from time to time. Despite my quest to master my diet (and myself), I still battle the old addiction to binge.      

Can you relate?

Whether it’s an unexpected, seemingly random night by yourself, or a late night weekend free-for-all after partying with your friends…do you know what I mean when it feels like food takes total control over you?

When one bad choice, or one key trigger, sets off a domino series of primitive and impulsive self-sabotaging behaviors that seemingly have no end?

Can you relate to the experience when you eat and eat and can’t stop eating? When you wipe yourself out, or turn into someone else…something else? When you are no longer there?

What do you do? How do you bounce back after this one?

Check back on Lesson 4 to find out how to strategically overcome your manic, emotional, seemingly-impossibly-overwhelming compulsive eating habits.   

You’re awesome,  

Daniel Thomas