Читать книгу Only Fat People Skip Breakfast: The Refreshingly Different Diet Book - Lee Janogly - Страница 14

It’s easy to become a ‘food victim’ and put the blame elsewhere: your job, your mother, the kids, money problems, holidays. Sure, these can all cause stress. You can’t control other people—only yourself. You can’t control events—only your reaction to those events. The events will happen whether you deal with them calmly or stuff yourself with food.

You are not stupid. You know that if you eat 1,000 calories of food and only burn off 500, the other 500 are going to make their way to your fat cells and stay there. So you don’t need someone to come along and tell you not to eat that extra 500 calories. Yet in spite of knowing it, you still turn to food for comfort.

And food is comforting. One of the first sensations any of us can remember is being held and fed, so you equate love and food. Food is instant relief, calming, soothing your jangled nerves, banishing stress, an antidote to feeling lonely, sad, angry or depressed. So what you are doing is medicating yourself with food. You are using food to change the way you feel. As one of my diet clients explained, ‘I feel as if it is the only time I can have what I want, when I want it and I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.’

If you settle down in front of the television with a pile of biscuits, chocolates, crisps, fizzy drinks and ice cream, it provides instant gratification. But what you are doing is actually abusing yourself with food, the same as other people abuse alcohol or drugs. You come to rely on this type of food almost as a recreational drug to attain, fleetingly, a pleasant state of mind. By doing this you also create the need for more and more of those foods as an antidote for how they make you feel after the eating marathon—nauseous, bloated and dispirited about the effect on your body.

What you have to try to discover is why you are doing this. Before you start going in the right direction, you have to stop going in the wrong direction. The last thing you want is to be fat, so ask yourself if there is some aspect of your life that throws you into the kind of despair that makes you turn to food. Sometimes it can just be a stressful day, but often there may be deeper, ongoing situations that you can’t change, like taking care of an elderly parent. In this case, you have to learn to deal with them without resorting to food. If you continue to binge or simply overeat regularly as your method of coping, it stops you dealing with reality. You just get instant false relief and the stressful situation remains the same.