It’s time to wrap up the 15-week series that I’ve been writing for you as my self-experiment with Lucinda Bassett’s Attacking Anxiety and Depression program.
If this is your first time reading one of my posts in this series please go back to the introduction where you will not only learn why I willingly offered myself up for another experiment, but also you will learn how well this relates to the symptom of overweight, especially if you are an emotional eater.
Week 15
Week 15 is a wrap-up, which includes an attitude inventory and some self-assessments. They also point out that even when you comple the 15-week series for yourself that it’s not so much an end but a beginning – it doesn’t mean that you will never feel stress again, in fact you don’t want to erase all stress from your life because then you wouldn’t have any challenges at all, and how boring would that be?!
You are also reminded that you and only you hold the key to overcoming your stress and anxiety. One thing that I like about this program is that they advocate you making yourself your own “safe person” instead of projecting outside of yourself, looking for someone else, someplace else, or something else (food perhaps?) to be your “safe place”.
It’s you who is in control of your stress and anxiety because you are the thinker of your thoughts – it’s your negative thinking that starts all stress, anxiety, and depression (what stress and anxiety creates). Once you take full responsibility for where you are today and accept that you are the thinker of your own thoughts and therefore you are the one in control of your stress and anxiety then you are very far along the path of living a life under your own stress-management.
And you know what this means – if you are an emotional eater who eats over stress, the less chronic stress you have the less triggers you will have to use food for something other than fuel for your body.
What I Learned
Week 15 in Lucinda Bassett’s Attacking Anxiety and Depression program isn’t the end of your process of managing your stress and anxiety but instead it’s the beginning of your continued growth and self-management of stress. You are never done becoming you and you’ll notice growth spurts in your progress along the way. And remember that this is only the beginning – as long as you continue to use the tools you learned in the program you will continue to improve in your overall healthy lifestyle by managing your stress and anxiety.
It is recommended that you go through the entire program again at least once more – you’ll be surprised at what you hear the second time that you didn’t hear the first and you’ll also be able to see just how far you’ve come since you started the program. After going through the program 2 full times you can pick out tapes from the program here and there when they apply.
The Goal
My goal in writing this 15-week series for you and going through the program myself as a self-experiment was to show how easy it is to connect the symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression to the attempted solution of overeating. Using food to try to soothe your anxiety is a self-destructive way of attempting to deal with your stress and anxiety while learning how to control your stress in a productive way is what Lucinda Bassett’s program is all about.
If you haven’t read my introduction to this series yet that is where you will learn how it’s been my experience of meeting far too many peopl who are both overweight and stressed/anxious/depressed for it to be a coincidence. You see overweight is never the problem anyway, although it becomes another problem for you to deal with. The real problem in this case is the stress, anxiety, and/or depression and instead of trying to put a bandaid on your overweight with the latest diet fad the best solution is to solve the underlying problem.
If you find that you use food in an attempt to quell your stress, anxiety, and depression I do recommend Lucinda Bassett’s 15-week course Attacking Anxiety and Depression. You can also get my overview of the program by going through my 15-week series, which you will find a full list of links to in my introductory post, however it is by no means even a close substitute for the program itself. My series is my experience and overview of the program, which while informative cannot take the place of the full program by Lucinda Bassett.
