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PLANNING FOR CHANGE

a. Clarifying Your Motives

Before you can begin to implement a program to overcome your overeating, you must understand why you want to change. Are you making assumptions about what your life will be like once you do conquer your overeating? Do Exercise 2 before reading on.

Exercise 2: Clarifying Goals

1. I am unhappy about being a compulsive eater because:

a. ____________________________________________________

b. ____________________________________________________

c. ____________________________________________________

2. If I did not eat compulsively, then my life would change in these ways:

a. ____________________________________________________

b. ____________________________________________________

c. ____________________________________________________

3. Other people who are unhappy about my overeating are:

a. ____________________________________________________

b. ____________________________________________________

c. ____________________________________________________

4. The times in my life when I have eaten most compulsively are when:

a. ____________________________________________________

b. ____________________________________________________

c. ____________________________________________________

5. The times when I have been most successful at stopping my compulsive eating are when:

a. ____________________________________________________

b. ____________________________________________________

c. ____________________________________________________

* * *

Here are the most common reasons for wanting to stop overeating. Do these reasons correspond with your answers to the questionnaire?

• You feel out of control. Do you feel that you eat automatically, that there is no sense of choice about starting or stopping? Do you pride yourself on having control in most other areas?

• You feel ashamed of the way you eat. Do you think it is undignified, and do you label yourself a “pig” or “glutton?” Do you dislike yourself?

• You feel uncomfortable. Do you often feel tired and bloated?

• You worry about your health. Do you have medical problems such as edema, high blood pressure, or gallstones? Are you concerned about preventing future health problems that may arise from eating excess sugar and fatty foods?

• You are overweight. Are your clothes too tight? Do you dislike your appearance?

• You have no time for other things. Does food occupy all your time? Are you always thinking about not eating?

• You are home too much. Do you spend too much time alone because you are ashamed of your behavior or appearance?

• Your spouse or parent wants you to change (get thinner). Do you feel pressured to change? (Unfortunately, this last reason will not motivate you to change, but, more likely, will cause you to feel resentment. Then, you will eat even more than usual out of spite. You cannot change unless you want to.)

Are your reasons for being unhappy about eating compulsively more about your weight or your eating? Unlike other addictions, compulsive overeating shows on your body: you get fat. You may only be upset about the weight, or you may be more self-conscious about your eating habits.

Here are the most common beliefs about how your life will improve if you stop overeating and some comments on them.

• You will be more in control. Do you consider “normal” eating as being in control? Actually, in order to eat normally, you have to give up the control you now have over your body, and let your body dictate to you. Then you will eat when you are hungry and stop when the hunger is gone. Also, you need to be in control in other areas of your life, and that takes work.

• You will enjoy life more. It is true that when you are less obsessed with food and with being slim, you will have more time to enjoy life. It is also true that when you enjoy life more, you eat less.

• You will be less lonely. When you spend less time with food, you may feel better about your eating and your weight and so want to be with people. It is also true that overeating may be used as an excuse not to be with people when being with them is scary.

• You will like yourself better. You probably will feel better about yourself when you eat less and weigh less, but it is also true that when you like yourself more, you will eat less and weigh less.

• You will feel better. It is good not to overeat, but it is important to eat healthy foods. So eat more normal amounts, but also make substitutions for empty or unhealthy calories.

• You will be happy. Happiness comes from within, it depends on a positive attitude. Weighing less does not guarantee happiness

Are there times when your compulsive eating gets worse? For many people, stress and crisis are major triggers, as well as times of loneliness, disappointment, and rejection.

Knowing what seems to have worked in the past to lessen your compulsive eating can help you in the future when times get rough. Have you found that it was being with people, having fun, getting attention, or being busy? Have you only been successful when you went to workshops for weight loss or for emotional eating? Making changes in your life may be necessary for more permanent changes in your eating habits.

b. Why Not Diet?

The premise of this book is that what you do with food is a metaphor, that is, it is symbolic of the way you live your life and the way you deal with your emotions. Therefore, your overeating is a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself. Your weight is also a symptom.

When you go on a diet, you deal only with the symptoms. The cause of overweight is overeating and the cause of overeating is something amiss in your life. A diet may take away the overeating for a while but it still leaves the cause of the overeating.

Dieting won't work. In fact, dieting can increase your compulsive eating and weight. If you had been successful at dieting, you would not be reading this book. Here are some of the reasons dieting won't solve your problem.

• Dieting makes you feel deprived. As a result, you go off the diet and eat what you want.

• Dieting causes resentment. You feel like a child being told what to do, so you rebel and eat.

• Dieting is rigid and unnatural. It is too difficult to eat at set times and only set amounts and prescribed foods.

• Dieting ignores body signals. When you eat in a prescribed way, you have to tune out signals that you are hungry or full because they are contrary to the diet. When you ignore them too long, you soon are unable to recognize body signals.

• Dieting is a compulsive behavior. If you are a perfectionist at all, you probably demand of yourself that you diet “perfectly.” Eating any food that is not on the diet leads you to become so angry with yourself that you give up dieting. So when you diet, you exchange one compulsive behavior for another.

• Dieting makes you dependent. Unless you create the diet by yourself for your particular needs, you are using a diet some authority devised. This implies that you do not know what is best for your body and that you cannot trust your body to tell you when to eat and how much to eat.

• Dieting makes foods evil. A diet consists of a list of foods that are acceptable. Those not on the list are unacceptable. The implication is that only those on the list are “good” foods and that all others are “bad.” Depending on the diet, foods such as carrots and potatoes can be good or bad. This is true for many other foods too: coffee, liquor, carbohydrates, protein. Whatever diet you are on, you believe in the intrinsic morality of those foods. It is human nature to want what is forbidden, so no one can diet for long.

• Dieting can lead to increased weight. When you lose weight, your metabolic rate decreases to compensate. When you go off a diet and increase your eating, your metabolism is no longer high enough to burn up the added calories without increased exercise. So, unless you do exercise, you gain again and the new weight stays. Over a period of years, your weight goes up instead of down from inconsistent dieting.

• Dieting leads to compulsive eating. For all of the above reasons, you are unable to diet for very long. When you do go off the diet, even if it is just by eating one food at one sitting, you feel so upset with yourself that you decide to eat even more. Or you feel so deprived or resentful from not eating what you want that the diet becomes a trigger to overeat.

c. The Cart Before the Horse

Thinking that losing weight is the answer to all your problems is putting the cart before the horse. The same is true about giving up your compulsive eating. You may say you dislike yourself now because you are overweight and eat too much, but that when you eat normally and get thinner, you will feel good about yourself. You will socialize more, be more assertive, or express your feelings better.

Actually, the reverse is true. You eat because your self-image is poor and because of distortions and misconceptions you have about yourself and others. Overeating compounds the problem, and you feel worse when you are obsessed by weight and food.

You can see that there is a vicious circle between eating and self-image: when you don't like yourself, you overeat; when you overeat, you don't like yourself, etc. When you increase your self-esteem, you decrease your overeating. But if you decrease your overeating only and your self-image remains the same, you will soon return to your pattern of overeating.

Overeating is actually a compensation for the things you feel lacking, and simply eating less or weighing less cannot change that.

d. Steps Toward Positive Action

When you know what factors contribute to your compulsive eating, you can begin to arrange your life so you will have consistent success in reducing it.

There are 10 strategies for change. If that seems like a lot, remember that they are all related to each other. Doing one will affect the others.

(a) Gather information. You must understand what compulsive eating is and how you began. You have to look at what messages you were given as a child about food, about being thin, and about expressing feelings. You need to see how food was used when you were growing up.

(b) Increase awareness. You need to make your eating less automatic by pinpointing what you eat, how much, when, what triggers it, and what foods you crave.

(c) Know your motivation. You must know why you want to change.

(d) Change your habits. You must learn to replace junk foods with healthier ones, eat only what you love and desire, eat slowly, and eat only at a table.

(e) Increase trust in your body. You must become more aware of when you are hungry and when you feel full and trust that if you listen to your body's signals you will weigh less.

(f) Replace myths. You must get rid of misconceptions you have about food, feelings, and fat, and replace them with more rational ideas.

(g) Feed your emotional hunger. You need to identify your feelings and needs, and take care of them without using food to push them away.

(h) Replace negative thinking. You need to increase your self-esteem and give yourself positive messages.

(i) Take control. You must take control of your life by becoming assertive.

(j) Take action. You must replace self-pity and feelings of hopelessness with “doing” and “expressing,” instead of “eating.”

A diet of living, loving, and being makes a diet of overeating impossible.