A coworker and I went out to dinner last night to celebrate some
changes in our lives that were well worth celebrating. I ate a
lot! Bread sticks with roasted garlic and olive oil, salad with
ranch dressing, more bread, and then an entree with garlic mashed
potatoes. By the time our waitress asked if we'd like to hear
about the restaurant's 'incredible desserts', I felt like I was
going to explode. Still, my friend and I decided to split dessert.
Within
milliseconds of ordering dessert, those old familiar voices of
panic and shame filled my head. "What on this earth are you
doing? Do you want to restart that cycle of bingeing and gaining
weight all over again? You're going to screw it all up again!
This isn't worth it." Then amazingly enough, just as quickly
as those "all or nothing" panicky thoughts appeared,
they disappeared. They were replaced with more sane, calming thoughts.
"Hey, it's O.K.. You have good reason and every right to
celebrate! One meal is not going to kill you." I knew at
that moment that I would choose to do a little extra time on the
treadmill the next morning and that everything would be just fine.
And, that was that! It turned out to be a wonderful evening, free
of guilt and free of those hollow, desperate deals I used to make
with myself, "O.K. I'm going to eat this now, but I'll start
my diet again first thing tomorrow morning. I swear I will."
I don't diet anymore! I no longer believe I have to be a certain
size (often unrealistic) to be happy. What a relief! I now know
that dieting and diet pills like Fen-Phen and Redux treat a symptom:
the weight. But they never address the real problem – emotional
eating. Diets and diet pills can actually mask the real problem,
which for me was the use of food to calm myself, to reduce tension.
Today, as director of an eating disorders treatment center, I've
learned that there are a lot of emotional eaters out there just
like me. I am in very good company.
Janet E., who works in a scheduling department for two local hospitals,
found that she did a lot of her overeating late afternoons, during
her busiest times at work. When she'd leave work and go home,
she found that mindless snacking on potato chips and Cheetos helped
her to change gears, to relax before having to make dinner. When
Janet quit smoking three years ago and gained 20 pounds, on-again
off-again dieting became a way of life. "Always, I dieted
to reach a certain measured goal. I'd lose the weight, stop dieting
and then regain it, over and over and over again."
Marilyn K. always thought there would be some top weight that
her body would hit and then not go beyond. She was mistaken. Marilyn,
now 60 years old, says she had been a "compulsive overeater,
forever". She says, as far back as she can remember, food
had been her only source of comfort, just as alcohol had been
her alcoholic father's primary source of comfort. Her use of food
to "self soothe" became especially problematic around
the time of her divorce. "Whenever I felt any uncomfortable
feeling or sensation in my body, I translated that feeling into,
"I've got to go get something to eat." With her weight
still climbing, she ran out of diets and diet programs to try.
She says she felt totally out of control and hopeless.
Diets don't work because, for many people,this is not a body problem.
It's a head problem. What you do with a diet is you hassle the
body but you don't touch the head stuff. According to therapists
at my Acoria Wellness and Eating Disorders Treatment Center, the
structure of a diet gives an emotional eater an artificial sense
of control. If your life feels chaotic and you feel you can't
control your circumstances, your reactions to others, your feelings
or your own behaviors (let alone your food choices), the perfect
diet or diet pill will appear very attractive and seem like the
best way to gain control.
Then there's that moment for all emotional overeaters when the
strict diet ends and again you're back to experiencing the same
anxieties or loneliness or boredom that you were using the food
(or a structured diet) to avoid in the first place. And when the
diet fails, the overeating and internal tension come back with
a vengeance. The use of food as a person's primary tension reducer, "stuffs down the feelings". All that focus on the weight
and/or the diet, blocks the person from getting in touch with
the underlying problems, thereby insuring that the overeating
will have to continue to keep the real problems and feelings at
bay.
Whenever Marilyn K. experienced an uncomfortable feeling, it never
crossed her mind that she could manage her discomfort in any other
way other than to turn to food. Janet was not aware that she was
actually using Cheetos to smooth her transition from work to home.
Overweight, and a compulsive dieter since childhood, I first became
aware of this coping strategy when I was 30 years old. I'm in
this psychologist's office trying to figure out why I weighed
almost 300 pounds. He diagnosed me as depressed (who wouldn't
be). Week after week, I gained pound on top of pound. I'd sit
in his office and anytime he brought up something that made me
feel the least bit uncomfortable, I'd have what I now call "a
food thought". Sitting on his couch, I'd start to plan what
I was going to eat as soon as I left his office. Which fast food
restaurant could I drive through on the way home? The very second
my head was filled with a food thought, I was out of the moment.
I was no longer feeling the anxiety or fear or sadness, or whatever
it was I had starting to feel when the therapist approached any
subject that I didn't want to explore. Without ever being conscious
of this coping strategy, it had become a way of life for me, since
childhood... and it worked!
Years later, when I was working with a therapist who knew how
to directly connect my food behaviors with the underlying reasons
why I was using the food, I started to notice when, where and
why I had food thoughts. I noticed they came fast and furiously
whenever I was at my computer feeling overwhelmed by an overdue
project. I had food thoughts whenever I got angry at my Mom and
whenever I felt someone had disappointed or wronged me. From the
food thought...to the food acquisition and eating, to the numb
disconnected feeling I'd get after a binge, I could avoid feeling
anything and everything for hours. Food works!
Why food as a coping strategy? Maybe because, from day one, our
cries of hunger are met with our mother's breast or with a bottle
and we learn to associate food and being fed with being nurtured
and soothed.
Why me? Well, biochemically, it appears some of us are wired more
than others to get a calming effect from certain foods. Carbohydrates,
sweet and starchy foods (which are what most of us binge on),
lead to the production of the amino acid called tryptophan. Tryptophan
helps boost serotonin levels in the brain. Serotonin is a naturally
produced brain chemical that's responsible for feelings of calmness,
emotional well-being and satiety. Serotonin is also the mood-regulating
chemical that's in short supply when there's depression.
So, some of us, especially those of us prone to clinical depression
or who have a family history of clinical depression (like me),
found an effective way to self-medicate, to self-regulate our
mood biochemically, as well as emotionally.
Our Clients have this sense that their relationship with food
is like a relationship gone bad. Clients may come to the Acoria
Center with an awareness that they eat when they are tired or
stressed, but more often han not, the self-regulation piece is
new. Light bulbs start going off the minute we start talking about
this self-regulation piece, about the use of food to manage transition
times (like the transition from work to home at the end of the
day). When we talk about being disconnected from both their feelings
and from their body, about their use of food to manage and maintain
their emotional life, these are revelations people are stunned
by.
So if you are "using" food in this way, what will it
take to stop the cycle? How can you achieve and maintain a healthy
weight?
First, you have to stop dieting! For an emotional eater, a diet
is not the answer. (If you can reach and maintain a healthy weight
simply by eating a little less and exercising a little more, you
are probably not a serious emotional eater.) Secondly, emotional
eaters have to become aware of how and why they are using food.
What are you asking the food to do for you? What's really going
on when you mindlessly plow through a whole bag of cookies right
after a big meal?
To better manage the compulsive, emotional "unregulated self"
(the part of us that has not yet learned that we can calm ourselves
without using food), a person has to strengthen their "cognitive
self". Our cognitive self is the part of us that can think
and reason things through. It's the part of us that can help us
better manage and maintain our lives in all of life's arenas.
Through a nurturing relationship with a therapist, and through
group support, Marilyn and Janet have each gained more awareness
of the role food was playing in their lives. They have dealt with
the underlying issues and anxieties in their lives that were driving
the need for the food behaviors. Through therapy they began to
develop and use their inner strengths. Today they each have a
variety of coping strategies to use to self- soothe themselves
when emotionally stressed.
Marilyn says today, when that old familiar desire to binge hits
her at night, she has learned to stop and to think. She puts some
time between the "food thought" and the resulting behavior.
She now knows she can choose to do something else to calm herself.
After some experimentation, she found playing her piano works
best. (She says she tried reading but found it was too easy to
read and eat at the same time. Not so with the piano.) Over the
course of a year and a half, Marilyn stopped much of her bingeing
and has lost 70 pounds.
Janet has lost 30 pounds since last March. She too found she could
employ some healthier, practical coping strategies. Today she
is taking more emotional risks, expressing her feelings rather
than eating over them. Busy afternoons, rather than eating, she
now reduces her stress level with a 15 minute walk around the
hospital. On those days when she still needs something to buffer
her transition from work to home, she always has a yogurt or a
bagel at hand, rather than chips and Cheetos.
I too have learned to use my thinking/reasoning self to self-regulate,
to be less black and white, to remind me that it's not the end
of the world if I occasionally overeat at a meal. In the not too
distant past, the guilt I'd feel after a dinner like the one I
described at the top of this article, would have lead to at least
two full weeks of overeating and feelings of being totally out
of control.
I've thrown away my scale and I like knowing that the clothes
in my closet
will still fit me tomorrow morning.
A few final words of advice for anyone who is trying to reframe
the way
they think about their weight and their chronic dieting … Stay away from anything where the root word is die. That's never
a good sign!
