Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (14 page)

KEEP IN MIND …

• Speaking your truth to yourself is extremely important, which is why journaling is a part of this program even after you finish actively working the four steps.

• Be honest with yourself about your eating patterns and emotions, such as shame and fear.

• Practice self-compassion.

• Getting overly involved in other people's situations in order to quiet your emotional turbulence and avoiding any and every emotion are just two of the ways people who feel too much try to manage their empathy overload. Two more are disordered eating and grounding yourself with food. This program will help you avoid these and other detours.

• Whenever you feel overwhelmed, use the From Here to Your Sanctuary exercise in this chapter to identify your feelings and use your imagination to experience them, then escape to an inner sanctuary. You can also use The Slick Blue Shield and Them's Grounding Words exercises, and get out in nature, and do physical movements (“heavy work”) you find calming and grounding.

• Be aware of the signs of anorexia nervosa and bulimia. If the people who care about you are worried that you have or are developing these disorders, please seek medical attention.

• Replace your negative self-talk with positive self-talk. Catch yourself being cruel to yourself and stop! Then affirm something wonderful about yourself.

5

Step Two: Own Your Truth (“Can't I just promise to eat better?”)

So, how are you doing? In Step One, doing the exercises and following the simple plan probably stirred up a lot of emotions for you. At the beginning of any new program for change, it's easy to be brimming over with enthusiasm and determination. Then we all know what happens. We start to realize,
Oh, wow, this is HARD!

If you're like most people who feel too much, you're used to detouring away from your emotions or being completely engulfed by them, and now you've got more emotions going on inside you than ever before. You're realizing you really do have to end the free-eating habit permanently. It's normal at this point to feel resistance.

Resistance is uncomfortable, but it's good: it's a sign that you're breaking through to something new. In the springtime, seedlings have to push through the hard shell of a seed to germinate, and through the pressure of soil lying on top of them, to reach the sun. It is the only way to reach their potential as flowers, grasses, and trees. Resistance is a sign of progress.

Resistance is also a sign that you have to pay attention to something you're used to ignoring: your emotional reality. Your feelings arise as a result of your conscious thoughts and your subconscious, instant reactions to events. Using affirmations, especially as part of EFT, allows you to acknowledge your self-sabotaging thoughts and replace them with deep self-compassion, which helps you change the patterns of your conscious thoughts.

Your subconscious thought processes are more difficult to manage because you're not aware of them. Also, your feelings move faster than your conscious thoughts do as a result of your brain's very efficient way of processing information indicating danger—well, at least, it was efficient back thousands of years ago when human beings were regularly in physical danger. Now that system is overreactive, so that you'll have the same emotional reaction to your partner saying, “Are you sure you really want to have such a big piece of pie?” that you would have if you were being charged by a wild rhinoceros. In time, as you use the mindful techniques in this book, you'll slow down that too-quick emotional response. Then, a thought such as,
He's not trying to hurt my feelings with that question, he's just trying to support me in my commitment to eating healthfully
will have time to form in your brain before the tears of rage and shame well up in your eyes.

My husband is an expert now at entering into the “should you be eating that …” war zone jungle with great agility. I will admit that I have, in the past, turned into a raving version of the possessed little girl in
The Exorcist
when he has—or let me rephrase that, when I
perceive
that he has—crossed the line and entered sacred territory as I am stuffing myself with a second helping of popcorn. He doesn't mean to be the food police, but I have been known to go into spasms of rage when he dares say a word about my moving to Snackville. These skirmishes are rare now, mostly because I don't really overdo it. That said, we have had a recent run in that makes for a good story.

Toward the end of writing this book, I developed a medical condition. I was having an ultrasound to check out a knot I'd discovered in my neck, when it was discovered that I had a large nodule on my thyroid. Now, I've taken thyroid medication for years for an underactive thyroid, and lately I'd been feeling cold a lot, had some memory problems, and been tired and wired, but I hadn't put it all together. I have been working out three times a week, and I didn't realize that I had some minor inflammation and water retention as a result. In short, I have definitely been having a challenging time with my weight, and I am aware that on a daily basis I have to practice self-compassion with a little more fervor than normal. I am normally comfortable in my size 8/10 skin, but not so much with the widening of the waistline that's been happening for months, partly due to menopause, partly due to my thyroid. The doctor said the presence of the nodule indicated I would have to change my medication, which led to a little more weight gain, which sent me into a tailspin of true paranoia and nightmares of having this book come out and being thrown off
The
Today Show
because I was fat. (I actually had a dream that I was set to go on a book tour, but when I arrived the room was silent and then all the press started shooting pictures that landed on the tabloids saying, “Fat Girl Fraudulently Pens Weight Loss Book and Loses Everything.”)

One would consider that would be enough impetus for super-clean eating and wonderful, consistent self-acceptance. If you believe that, then pigs have wings. After being told it would take around three months to get my thyroid issues under control, I somehow “decided” that my two cups of air-popped popcorn was just not going to be enough as my snack. (Carved into the temple at Delphi, it says “Know Thyself,” so since I do, and since I am by nature a glutton, measuring for me is a safety mechanism; I know that two cups is enough for me.) Marc watched me get up from the couch and head back into the kitchen to refill my bowl, which I convinced myself had shrunk in the dishwasher. He said in his very blunt Aries way, “Don't you have any willpower? Are you allowed to have a second helping?”

Now, for a moment I felt that rhino charging me across the savannah, and I went quickly over the edge to find my weapons. But before I opened my mouth for a sharp retort and crazy spear shaking, I was able to breathe and ask myself what I was hungry for and what I was trying to escape. I recognized that I was afraid, and that Marc was trying to support me. I managed to put the bowl down and return to the couch, where he sat all tensed up preparing for a fight; but when I squeezed his hand and said, “Thanks, honey,” he relaxed into the safety of the couch and managed a deep sigh. It was surrender—not just willpower—that got me to put the extra popcorn back in the bag. I surrendered to the truth that I am a person who feels too much, who detours through disordered eating, and I chose to love myself enough to do what I needed to do for myself at that moment. Denial of my feelings leads to powerlessness, and by now I know that no amount of food will relieve the anxiety; it will just make it worse.

I haven't always surrendered to the truth. I was overwhelmed by emotion after I'd lost my mother in a short period of time. I decided I just had to go out and buy cakes for people to consume after the memorial service. The more I thought about it, the more I needed to get them. I went to the bakery and felt jittery and agitated, and when the baker behind the counter asked what I wanted, it was as if my mouth had been hijacked by the Cookie Monster. I began lying to him about how I was having a party, and would two frosted layer cakes be enough for twelve hungry people, or would three be better? I feared there wouldn't be enough food, a primitive fear I'd inherited from the mother I had just lost. This fear kidnapped my psyche. He said two cakes would be enough, which made me upset; but too frantic and weirdly paranoid to insist on cake number three, too, I took the two cakes home and ate a huge piece of each one, freaked out, then threw the rest away after mushing them together and dumping pepper and salt on them so I wouldn't fish them out of the garbage. (No one said I was normal.)

Now, I started this manic episode feeling sure that I could control my cravings for those cakes. I had willpower, after all. I would inhale the scent of the bakery, imagine the taste of those cakes in my mouth, and be able to calmly and rationally place my order, take my goodies home, and keep them in the fridge until the appointed time. Uh, huh.

Willpower has its limits. It doesn't reach into your subconscious mind, where you have many self-sabotaging thoughts that cause strong resistance to change. At this point in the program, though, I hope that if you find yourself ripping open a bag of chips while feeling agitated, you're able to stop, catch your breath, and ask yourself,
Wait a minute. What's going on with me? What am I feeling right now? Is this what I'm hungry for?
Cravings can and do have a biological reality, and you can reduce them by cutting out gluten (or at least, refined flour) and alcohol, and limiting your sugars (you'll learn more about the physical basis of cravings later on). You can also reduce the cravings by avoiding highly processed foods with artificial flavorings, additives, and flavor enhancers known as excitotoxins such as MSG, which is sometimes disguised as hydrolysed vegetable protein, aspartame, or Nutrasweet. These flavorings seem to train the palate to crave more of those tastes because they powerfully affect the brain's pleasure center. However, cravings can also be mostly emotional. Let's face it: few of us have strong positive feelings for, say, lettuce. We associate parties, celebrations, holidays, and special times with sugary, fatty, carbohydrate-laden foods.

Recognize that there are practical ways to ease the intensity of emotional overload, that sense of not knowing where you end and someone else begins. Then you'll have more strength to resist temptation—more than you would have with mere willpower alone—because it's your out-of-control emotions that are driving the disordered eating. Calm the emotional storm, and the junk food won't be so noisy.

Because we feel emotions more intensely than others do, we people who feel too much need to regularly turn inward and experience a place of inner sanctuary. We're not used to doing this, so it may feel uncomfortable, or seem unnecessary, to check in with your inner emotional landscape before you eat—but it is. Perceiving any emotion as a landscape allows you to feel that emotion without being completely caught up in it. This puts you in the seat of the observer: the very important yet rarely accessed part of your consciousness remains aware of your power to notice your emotions, and consequently, learn what they might have to teach you. No learning, growth, or progress happens when you're so caught up in your emotions and freaking out.

And what about the food? If you're frustrated by having to stick to new habits of mindful eating, and with wrestling the strong emotions that keep popping up inside you, that's okay! This is exactly what you should be experiencing at this point, so don't be hard on yourself. Your frustration and resistance will melt away into acceptance if you own the truth of what a huge shift you're making, and the challenge of making it. Then it becomes easier and easier to shift your state of mind.

You may be used to pretending you have your emotions under control, and that you can change a few eating habits, or sign up for a diet program that will result in permanent weight loss. However, if you've read this far and have worked Step One, you're ready to own the truth about yourself: you have a chronic problem with managing empathy overload and you respond with disordered eating. And there is no quick fix. You may have to instill new eating habits that take time, even as you're learning to manage your porous boundaries.

Now, you don't have to keep clinging to the lie that you can operate the way you always have and still lose weight, as long as you avoid the cookies at least some of the time. Accept that “watching your weight” and vowing to stay away from sweets or fried foods were never going to make a big difference in your ability to lose weight and keep it off. That situation is way more complicated than that, but there is a solution and you're discovering it here!

THE PROCESS OF GRIEVING AND ACCEPTANCE

Acceptance involves a loss and a grieving process. The late psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross identified the stages of loss as denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. Resistance is what temporarily stops your progress and sends you backward into denial, or square one. When you don't resist your resistance, you remain in the process (which is certainly better than slipping backwards into denial!). Resistance makes you uncomfortable and nudges you to practice ruthless self-honesty. It makes you face what you're feeling. Maybe you need to admit that you require more time to work through your anger and resentment about your situation, or your sadness about having to let go of the illusion of control, and your frustration over not being able to manage your emotions perfectly.

Letting go of the lie that we can continue as we always have, only making a few tweaks to our eating habits, isn't easy. Because we tend to be confused by emotions—What are they? Whom do they belong to?—the grieving process isn't always so clear-cut for us. We can vacillate between sad and angry, sad and angry, taking an indirect or circuitous route toward acceptance.

The bargaining part of the process of grieving takes a few different forms. You may try to talk yourself into tweaking the program to get around the most difficult parts of it. Are you avoiding the salt bath because you know that the emotions that flow while you're sitting there will be intensely painful? Are you avoiding the evening writing because it's hard for you to admit that you do anything right without being overwhelmed by sadness that you've spent a lifetime feeling no one notices you unless you screw up? If you're trying to bargain with the program in order to avoid your emotions, you may need some more time with Step One. Reread the exercises about managing your emotions and bringing in positive thoughts using the EFT and the IN-Vizion Process, and do them (did you skip them? That's okay—maybe you were scared of churning up strong emotions. Go back and do them now.)

Bargaining also takes the form of talking yourself into stopping the program altogether. You know that's not a logical choice but an emotional one. What you're learning is a new way of asserting yourself and your needs in a way that is not self-sabotaging but, rather, self-nurturing. It's going to be difficult to change your old habits because it will seem more comfortable to go back to the reliable ways of avoiding difficult emotions. It can also be hard to trust yourself to develop new habits when you've failed in the past. It might seem easier to just dump this book and try a restricted-calorie diet again. Skepticism and distrust are typical forms of resistance to doing the work of feeling your emotions, accepting yourself, and committing to a new way of meeting your need for control over your porous boundaries.