Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (3 page)

Looking at your life as a tapestry, you'd find that all the troublesome issues you've faced would finally make sense, because you could follow the threads woven into the pattern and find the place where the pattern changed into something new.
Here's where I lost weight; here's where I started to gain it again; here's where I kept hating my body, which made me get even fatter; here's where I tried to control things. Here are the same conditions that repeated earlier! Here is where I dieted and gained weight; here's where I ate well but couldn't lose the weight. Right here is where the threads got all twisted and balled up and left a hole.

“What's this?” you ask. “Did some crazy phantom weaver wreck my tapestry? How did I not notice this?”

Somehow, another colored thread got in there and changed the pattern. When you look closer, you can separate that thread, finding its beginning and tracing how it parallels all the other threads in the pattern. Why didn't you or anyone else notice this rogue thread? It's always there when the pattern gets twisted or a hole appears. This is the thread that represents empathy: the ability to sense the bonds between all living things and, especially, the emotional energies of others. As you peer closely at this thread, you ponder why it wrecks the pattern or leaves a hole in the tapestry.

Wouldn't it be great if it were that easy to discover the roots of our problems and behavior patterns? Find the thread, untangle it, fill the hole. Snip, snip—tapestry repaired. We'd have instant food control, wouldn't hate our bodies any longer, wouldn't isolate ourselves or be too sensitive to the moods of the universe and its breathing population. If understanding how weight issues and tendencies to feel overwhelmed by the world were as easy as following the threads in a tapestry, you wouldn't need this book.

But if you identify with my story and with others in these pages, you will start to see how the unique and confusing strands in the tapestry of your reality form a pattern. Then you'll get the relief, understanding, and information you need to stop the struggle to release the excess weight sticking to you like a puffy coat. You'll learn to love and accept yourself, and to find ways to manage your emotions, especially the emotions outside of you that have gotten all mixed up with your own. So, bear with me while I show you the individual strands that make up the most perplexing and challenging patterns that lead to the dysfunctional relationship many of us have to food, feelings, and fat.

I know I am not alone in this because, as an intuitive counselor, coach, and life strategist for the past twenty-three years, I have met thousands of people who are just like me. Maybe you are one of them, too? We are people who have three things in common that up until now have not been correlated:

1.
We have little or no control over our weight.
Weight can fluctuate without changing what we eat, and dieting does not work (and we've tried everything).

2.
We feel too much!
It's hard for us to be around people because the feelings we experience are not always our own, but in fact may be ones we've picked up from others. We get cuckoo going through a crowd because we feel bombarded by their emotions. This makes us feel mixed up, and by the end of the day, we're overwhelmed by the multitude of feelings we've taken on.

3.
We generally have a disordered relationship with food and our bodies, although we've had periods of relief from this that may or may not have resulted in weight loss.
Nutritional nourishment isn't the number one reason why we eat. We may even have stretches when eating healthfully is not an issue and we feel on top of the world, but then it all goes down the toilet.

Have I gotten your attention? Could you belong to the People Who Feel Too Much Club?

I know I do. And I have found a way to manage the feeling of being overwhelmed that comes with that membership package. I can help you release the excess weight you're carrying, whether it be on your thighs or butt, or weighing down your mind.

Before we continue, I want to ask you not to compare your story to mine, or the others in this book. Rather, see what you can identify with. It's the essence of the story that counts, not the details. Also, remember that these threads are sometimes so tightly woven that it takes a while to pull them apart, so be patient with yourself.

MY STORY: FOOD, FEELINGS, AND EMPATHY

Looking back over my life, it's easy for me to see how I have always had a deeply passionate and wildly dysfunctional relationship with food. I am, in fact, a flag-flying, self-confessed foodie! I love food! Food has been my friend, my medicine, and my answer to boredom, rejection, and fear of rejection. It has been a celebration of happiness and an antidote to sadness. Until I learned what I share with you in this book, food gave me a reason to avoid and procrastinate, and to escape anything that I could imagine needing escape from—responsibility, accountability, sex, and power—although I couldn't see it at the time. I never gave eating much real thought. Eating was my go-to instinct whenever I craved safety. The fact that food had something also to do with nutrition interested me only when I was trying to control my weight. Food was a festivity, an encounter, a senses-filled experience! Food was a living companion with a personality.

I even argued with it!

Why are you doing this to me?

Ooo! Yummy! I love you so much!!!

Then right, afterward:

I hate you! Blechh! You're going in the garbage!

Wait—don't go. I need you now. I can start again, and never taste you for the rest of my life, on Monday!

You are disgusting and you make me sick!

If I eat you standing up, you won't hurt me, right? Just a little?

I don't think it's normal to have such heated discussions with a chocolate cookie.

At age three, whenever I cried, the only thing that would shut me up was to give me a crust of bread or a cookie to suck on. Then I would happily gurgle away in the corner. I also didn't like to be hugged. I would push everyone away, but if someone did manage to grab me for longer than a few moments, I would immediately beg for a sweet or anything else that I could put in my mouth that was edible—including dog biscuits, much to the chagrin of our golden retriever. Take note of this, as I will discuss this very important parallel thread of sensitivity later; that was an early sign that I was a person who feels too much. (Hint: I needed to eat something after I had contact with another person's energy.
That lady hugged me and squeezed my cheeks! Help! I'm being invaded!
)

Part of my complex emotional relationship with food was based on my relationship with my mother. She hid from me a secret past of being a Holocaust survivor, and her subsequent fears of being unsafe and starving; in part, I continuously intruded on her psychic space (which I wrote about at length in my first two books). There was intense connection and much love between us, although it seems to me that the love was almost always expressed through food. For me, “mother” was associated with food and nurturing—and there was confusion about where I ended and she began.

For many people who feel too much, food is become a substitute for the missing maternal force, whether it's because they grew up without a mother, Mom had her own issues and couldn't be nurturing, or she couldn't keep her baby safe from abuse and harm, for all that she tried.

Like many people who feel too much, my relationship with food changed at adolescence, a time when we assert our own, individual identity and discover our autonomy and sexuality. Freak me out! I chafed at my parents' control over me and the lack of personal privacy and boundaries in my home. I began to connect with the frightening truth of my sexuality, and I sensed the “otherness” of my own self and my body. To regain control, a few weeks after I started menstruating, I began bingeing and purging. Then I discovered diet pills and spent years trying every diet or intervention I could find. Even so, my feeling of not knowing where I ended and others began continued to haunt me.

As I moved toward adulthood, I couldn't tell if I was feeling my feelings, if I was reacting to sensing others' feelings, or what was going on. My hunger was to feel safe inside my skin and to plug those holes I couldn't see. I knew they were there, though. People who feel too much always know their boundaries are porous; they just don't know how to say it, how to manage it, or what it really means to them.

I hope by now you're beginning to identify some things we have in common. Although my story is extreme—you may not have been obsessed with food, addicted, bulimic, or anorexic—the pattern of distorted eating, emotional agitation, and confusion about boundaries is the same for all people who feel too much. The patterns begin long before they reveal themselves as a problem.

By age twenty-seven, I was a full-blown drug addict and alcoholic, on top of having many issues with food. My life wasn't working, there was no escape, and by the grace of Spirit, I hit bottom. On January 2, 1986, I woke up clean and sober, and have been so a day at a time ever since. Though I continued to struggle with food, weight, and empathy overload. I began to sort out all my addictions and issues. I learned a lot about controlling my weight and eating when I was in Overeaters Anonymous, which I joined after I stopped drinking and I began to gain weight. There, I heard from many people who shared the same experiences I'd had—weight gain that couldn't be explained by a simple equation of calories in, calories out. We all knew and understood that out-of-control emotions often led us to overeat, or to eat mindlessly. For me, that mysterious-weight-gain piece just hung out there, a cipher that I hoped would explain itself someday. Meanwhile, the numbers on my scale went up and down, which challenged my self-esteem. I hated not being able to control my weight, and I wore my shame and frustration in every extra pound.

Then, as I became more confident in my sobriety and worked through some of the more painful issues, thereby developing a stronger sense of self-worth and self-esteem, I found that with very little effort on my part, the pounds just started coming off.
Wow, what was that about? Who cares? Something's working! I'm getting thinner! Woo hoo!
I was lead singer and songwriter in an all-girl group called Isis, and I was loving my life. Singing was medicine. The more I sang, the more grounded I felt. I was finally doing what made me happy and inspired me. One of my musician friends was a student of Tibetan Buddhism, and he seemed always “chill” and relaxed; since I was definitely
not
that, I joined a meditation group as part of my new healthy lifestyle.

A health food store near my home sold Himalayan salts for the bath, and in conversation with the owner one day, I told him I was on a clean-living path. He suggested using the baths as a detox and calmative, and I started to meditate while taking salt baths before bed as the final part of my daily routine. I ate well, without too many restrictions (I avoided white sugar and flour, but that's about it—although that's a key to my maintaining a healthy weight today, too). I exercised moderately, walking for about an hour a day. Each day, I had a plan. As suggested in twelve-step programs, I turned my will and my life and my food and my body over to a higher power. I'd created this structure to ensure my mental, spiritual, and physical wellness, and I found it made me feel liberated regardless of the outer conditions of my life that were mired in stress.

My father had lost all the family's money in a bad business venture a few years before this, and both my parents became ill from the stress. My father developed rapid-onslaught of Alzheimer's disease and then died of a stroke. Somehow I stayed sober and clean and numb, without too big a detour into foodville. It appeared I could handle everything that life threw at me—no problem. Then, a year later, everything changed.

I was 138 pounds the day my mom was diagnosed with cancer. By her funeral four months later, I weighed 219 pounds. I did not eat enough calories to have gained 80 pounds in less than four months! This bizarre weight gain when my mom died was the first, most obvious sign that there was some mysterious thread affecting my life tapestry that I needed to discern and understand. The fact that feelings alone could make me fat was unthinkable, unscientific, and impossible—yet I couldn't deny what had just happened. I stayed very heavy for another couple years, ignoring many of my good habits other than not picking up a drink or drug. Nothing miraculous occurred the day I surrendered, but I guess you might say I just got sick and tired of being sick and tired; and so I began to embark on a new journey of self-acceptance, working with a therapist, meditating again, and being honest with myself about my detours.

Things improved again, I met a man, and I married him, in spite of the warnings from friends (and his mother, now a dear friend). Of course, the weight started climbing back on, slowly but surely like a creeping vine. The marriage was steeped in sarcasm and lack of mutual respect, and food yet again became my solace. I relentlessly dieted, to no avail. One day, I finally just stopped fighting and accepted that I had no power to change anything. I was defeated, and I surrendered to the real truth of what was happening me and to my strained relationship with my husband.

To be true to myself, and to stop the cycle of suffering, I walked out of that marriage. I looked at myself as I was, and I figured that if this was it, I would learn to love and forgive myself, and treat myself the way I needed to be treated. No one else would be able to do that for me. I took out a photograph of me when I was a little girl, and I propped it up by my bedside and promised that little girl that I would love and protect her.

I simplified my life, I began meditating again, and I limited sugar and flour in my food. There was no diet; I just went back to what I knew worked from my core, and not because I had a too detailed plan. I started to use the gorgeous soaker tub in my new apartment. Salt baths were my nightly treat! The more I loved myself just as I was, the faster things changed. I began exercising moderately again—a little yoga, dancing, walking, and doing some light weight training. The pounds began to drop off as if by magic.