Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much (9 page)

To maximize your chances of sticking to at-your-best eating, don't skip meals, be sure you have access to healthy foods when you're likely to be hungry, and eat mindfully. Serve yourself the food, sit for a moment, and either do the Landscape of Your Hunger exercise described earlier in this chapter or go through the steps of “how to eat” before you take a bite. The more off-days you have, the more important it is to slow down and work with the exercises in this book, which will help you melt away your resistance to changing your eating habits and will teach you better ways to manage your feelings of being overwhelmed. Practice self-compassion and be radically honest with yourself about what you're eating and why.

In her 1982 book,
Calories Don't Count if You Eat Standing Up
, columnist Barbara Halloran Gibbons introduced the idea that we tend to ignore the excess calories we consume by coming up with absurd excuses for why they don't count. The idea took off and many people have added to it. See if you've been kidding yourself by subscribing to the “dieter's rules” below.

Fortunately, as you learn to better manage your porous boundaries and be mindful of your body's needs, it'll be even easier to stop kidding yourself about the movie Milk Duds and the leftover pizza on your child's plate.

That's it: kindness, IN-Vizion exercises, salt, and simplicity (simple plans for eating and movement, simple emotional field). They are the four key ingredients for making this program work for you. So, get a hold of the salts and essential oils; make a trip to the store to stock up on healthy, natural foods (mostly plant-based); find two journals, one for the Dumping Grounds and the other for Solutions and Insights; and let's get started with Step One: Speak Your Truth.

KEEP IN MIND …

• People who feel too much tend to go back and forth between being very emotional and avoiding emotions altogether. As you learn to manage your emotions and your porous boundaries, these wild fluctuations will decrease. Your emotions will settle down and you won't feel so compelled to ground with food.

• Disordered eating leads to weight gain, eating the wrong kinds of foods, and blood sugar fluctuations that tax our bodies.

• Besides grounding with food or eating in a disordered way, we detour around painful emotions by obsessing over food and weight, and setting up unrealistic goals for eating. Working this program will help with this unhealthy eating pattern. Pay attention to any signs that you have an eating disorder and need professional help.

• Avoid noisy foods: those you crave for physical and emotional reasons because of their associations (such as salty processed foods, or the sweet treats you used to make with Grandma).

• While working this program, hide your scale. How your clothes fit is a better indicator of whether you're losing or gaining weight.

• Eat slowly and mindfully. Every meal has to have a beginning, middle, and end. No eating standing up or kidding yourself about calories consumed while you're on the run and avoiding your emotions!

• Every morning, write in your journal what you intend to accomplish. Each evening, write in your journal about how well you did and why, and identify at least one thing you did right.

• Do any daily journal writing required the first week of each step.

• Be kind to yourself. Battling your weight or your body is counterproductive. Be loving and self-compassionate and you'll see better results.

• Use the IN-Vizion Process. IN-Vizion exercises, scattered throughout the book, are great ways to access your hidden, inner wisdom and process painful emotions using prompts for visualization.

• Do a Himalayan salt bath ritual daily at 4:00
P
.
M
. (when you can) incorporating the Emotional Freedom Technique of using affirmations and tapping to clear up disturbances in your body's energy field caused by your thoughts or emotions. You will wash off the detritus of the day and relax as a result. If you need to, do a saltwater spritz and change an article of clothing at 4:00
P
.
M
. and do the bath later in the day. Use a combination of pure essential oils, Epsom salts, and the highest quality Himalayan salt.

• Keep it simple. Follow a simple eating plan, do simple movement, and maintain a simple emotional field. Avoid stimulants and depressants such as coffee and alcohol and consider cutting out sugar and gluten, which can be noisy foods that trigger disordered eating. Don't worry about exercise; just move your body to stay healthy. Avoid stimulating your emotions by consuming media.

PART THREE

Four Steps to Managing Your Porous Boundaries

4

Step One: Speak Your Truth (“Yep, I'm a Person Who Feels Too Much!”)

You have probably suspected for some time, maybe even most of your life, that you're a little different from other people. You feel more deeply and are more sensitive. You have difficulty separating yourself from other people's emotions. You are powerfully affected by anger, grief, and fear that isn't your own. Somehow, you're just more vulnerable to the emotional energy that surrounds you.

Can you own that? Can you admit to it? Can you say aloud, “Yep, that's me, I'm a person who feels too much!”

Speaking your truth is difficult because it requires that you acknowledge your vulnerability. You have to be honest with yourself and then, eventually, be honest with others, too. That's especially scary because you have to carefully choose the people you'll confide in. I'm asking you to speak your truth to yourself so that one day you can speak your truth to those who are closest to you.

When you're not honest with yourself, when you desperately hide your truth from others out of shame, you inadvertently set yourself up to experience even more misery. You start to think you're doing just fine keeping a lid on your feelings and then
smack—
emotional overload hits you like huge wave, engulfing you. You detour into disordered eating, caregiving for others' emotions, isolating yourself, or other unhealthy behaviors in an attempt to escape that tsunami of emotions.

It's human nature to overestimate how easily we can manage our feelings, our thoughts, and challenging situations. We adopt a “can do” attitude and ignore the little voice whispering,
Actually, I'm not so sure. After all, I've failed before
. What we need to do is hear that voice, hear our doubt, and consciously choose to have faith in our ability to establish new habits through practice.

Our willpower and our capacity for denying the truth about ourselves can be quite strong and impressive. Without realizing it, we put all our trust in the power of our conscious mind and its “can do” attitude, and we rely on willpower to keep us on the path we want to be on. We forget the influence of our
subconscious
mind, that shadowy place where we store the truth; that we've tried again and again to lose weight but failed; that we've tried to manage our anxiety, but it still gets the best of us, that we haven't completely rid ourselves of low self-worth. Deny the truth and it will always surface, usually in a way that makes us very uncomfortable.

Step One in managing your emotional and empathy overload, and in learning to control your porous boundaries, is to speak the truth
unapologetically
, without shame or embarrassment. You've had a problem for as far back as you can remember: you become easily overwhelmed by your emotions, you eat to manage the distress you feel, and you've lost faith in yourself. None of that makes you weak, bad, or inadequate.

Speaking your truth is liberating and empowering. All the energy you've been spending in denying that you're emotionally overwhelmed can now be redirected in a positive way. You can love yourself as you are right now, and at the same time, you can eagerly embrace the process of learning to manage your feelings and your porous boundaries.

If you think back to times when others have taken advantage of your vulnerability, of course you're going to feel upset and embarrassed, and you fear that you'll be taken advantage of again. Deep down, you're wondering,
What if I speak my truth and look into the abyss of no solution? What if I'll always be so sensitive, and I'm destined to experience suffering more than others do?
Now there's a series of thoughts that will lead you to obsess about cupcakes.

It's hard to admit to patterns that have caused you pain, but once you do, that marvelous quality of empathy can begin to serve you instead of enslave you. When you speak the truth, as you will on your journal pages, you value your feelings and, by extension, you value yourself. Then, when you've spilled your pain and anguish onto the paper, you can make a conscious choice to hold on to the emotions or to let them go.
You
have the power of choice when you're not operating out of denial and shame.

Some of you have already discovered the incredible tool of journaling: recording your thoughts and feelings in a private notebook. You know that you feel better when you acknowledge what you're experiencing and write your truth. However, if you're like me, you've also gone back to those journals later and thought,
Oh, wow, am I a mess. How depressing. Am I really that screwed up and unhappy? Ouch!

As I explained in Chapter 3, I want you to journal in two separate books during this program (more during the active weeks than during the processing weeks). I want you to hold on to your beautiful, empowering affirmations and to the insights that give you strength and comfort. Keep those in your Solutions and Insights journal and revisit them. Just be aware that some of what you'll be writing—maybe much or even most of it—will be venting and belongs in your Dumping Grounds journal. Later, you'll reread the Dumping Grounds journals to look for insights and revelations and will write about those in the Solutions and Insights journal.

Journaling is a practice that will get you into the habit of observing yourself. In Step One, you will begin by telling the story of your struggles with empathy and your weight.

YOUR STORY OF EMPATHY AND WEIGHT

One of the most common detours of people who feel too much is isolation. We withdraw from others because intimacy is incredibly intense for us. It's not that we don't love or want to be with others, but that confusion over “Where do I end and you begin?” is scary and makes us feel unsafe. Avoiding people seems like a good option, and it can be at times—sometimes, we just need to be alone—but it's not good to isolate yourself too much. It's far better to have enough control over your porous boundaries; you make a conscious choice about whether you want to pull away from people temporarily or allow yourself to be fully emotionally present with them even though they are angry, sad, or anxious.

Over time, if we isolate too often, we learn to hide our feelings not just from others but even from ourselves. The longer we go on avoiding difficult feelings, the harder it becomes to experience
any
feelings. Instead of avoiding suffering and being happy, we just feel … nothing. Being numb is no way to go through life, but neither is being in a constant state of emotional agitation. You have to manage your emotions so you can feel joy, delight, amusement, faith, gratitude, and so on—all the emotions that get stifled when you isolate yourself and cut yourself off from the risk of suffering.

If your story has many painful elements, it may be difficult for you to write it, but it's important to speak your truth. You can't change the past, but you can change the present and the future by choosing to validate and honor yourself for having the strength to survive what you have survived. You don't have to get stuck in the story of your past, playing the role you have always played. Your history should be a guidepost, not a hitching post. In speaking your truth, in writing your story, you free yourself to tell a new one: A story of a person who suffered but learned, and grew, and changed. It is a unique story, but at the same time it has universal elements. When you realize that, you'll find it easier to believe that all around you are people who, if they heard or read your story, would reach out to you with love, compassion, and acceptance.

One of the most powerfully healing aspects of AA is that people share their stories and speak their truth, without varnishing it, and they find acceptance and fellowship. You may not be ready to share your story publicly, and you can choose to keep the details to yourself if you like. However, recognize that if you do reach out to others who have had similar experiences, and to others who simply have a great capacity for compassion and kindness, you will find that you don't feel such a need to isolate and be secretive.

As I said before, all of us have stories that are unique but that have common threads. None of us is alone in having porous boundaries and in experiencing empathy overload. You might be surprised to find out how common your story is, and how many people understand why you are the way you are, and would readily accept you as is, not as “inferior goods.” I think we often are so hard on ourselves that we can't imagine other people would have a different opinion of us—one that's much kinder and more loving.

So what is your story? Below are the questions for you to answer in your journal this week. I suggest you answer three or four every night until you've answered them all. Also, be sure to start each morning by journaling your answer to the question, “What is my intention for the day?” and end each night by journaling your answers to these questions:

How did I do?

What is one thing I did well today?

What is one thing I am grateful for?

DAILY JOURNALING FOR STEP ONE: SPEAK YOUR TRUTH

Write the answers to the following questions in your Solutions and Insights journal (not the Dumping Grounds—save that one for venting later on). Allow at least 20 minutes for this process each day for 7 days, and answer 3 to 4 questions a day.

1. As a child, were you oversensitive? Hyper-vigilant? Give examples.

2. What does it feel like to have no boundaries?

3. How have you tried to distract yourself from your feelings?

4. As you look back on your life, what was happening the first time you gained weight?

5. What was going on when you lost weight, if you lost it at some point?

6. Have you ever gained or lost weight without changing your food choices?

7. What thoughts have you had about your body?

8. Have you ever tried to control your weight consistently? How long were you able to sustain that sense of control?

9. Do you eat at night? What are your night-time eating habits?

10. What are your noisy foods, the ones that trigger disordered eating?

11. What happens when you begin to eat a noisy food? What happens after you've consumed it?

12. What would your life be like if you were able to consistently manage your porous boundaries?

13. What would you lose?

14. How would you be different?

15. How do you think others would treat you?

16. How does being someone who feels too much serve you?

17. What does “cheating” on a “diet” do for you?

18. How do you try to manage your empathy?

19. Do your methods for managing empathy work for you? If so, what happens when you use them? Are there long-term effects? And are those positive or negative?

20. When your techniques for managing empathy don't work, what happens?

21. If the coping and self-protection practices you've used were not effective and healthy, can you accept that you need to replace them?

22. If the coping and self-protection practices you've used
were
effective, and healthy, can you accept that you need to use them regularly?

23. What would your life look like if you could love and accept yourself and find a way to reduce the empathy overload that feels overwhelming?

Take a look at the themes in your story. The participants in my Weight Loss for People Who Feel Too Much class found they had one or more of the following experiences:

1. They seemed to have been wired since early childhood to be very sensitive and empathetic.

2. They experienced a great loss, such as the death of a parent, brother, or sister in their childhood.

3. They experienced abuse as children and perhaps as adults, too.

Any child who has lost someone close, particularly if it's a parent or sibling, will naturally feel unsafe, as will a child who has been abused. In response, she will become hyper-vigilant, wary of the next painful experience. She'll become attuned to what others are feeling, to the point where she can pick up on tension as if she had antennae sticking out of her head. She will also have difficulty trusting others and either avoid intimacy or try to achieve it too quickly, extending trust instantly in the hope of securing it and settling her fear. Is this ringing any bells for you?

The stories of people who feel too much also have other themes in common:

1.
Caretaking for others at the expense of yourself.
We all need to help out other people at times, but people who feel too much take on far more than they can handle, to their own detriment. They have trouble saying no to requests for help, and are the first to jump in and offer it.

2.
Standing up to bullies.
Even as young children, people who feel too much were likely to stand up to kids, or even adults, who bullied other children. They can't stand watching someone suffer and feel they have to get involved. Sometimes, they are more upset by these incidents than are the actual victims of bullying or teasing.

3.
A strong sense of justice.
People who feel too much are keenly sensitive to unfairness. As children, they may refuse to play musical chairs because it just seems so
wrong
that the aggressive kids get chairs and the gentler kids end up losing their seats.

4.
A habit of isolating.
Isolation can take the form of avoiding people or simply avoiding emotions, conflicts, and difficult discussions—whatever it takes to hide from painful feelings!

5.
A tendency to avoid stimulation.
Some people become night owls to avoid the stimulation of busy days filled with people. Others avoid crowds and gatherings, even happy or celebratory ones. Parties and gatherings can be overwhelming because of the influx of emotions and stimulation, or because the person who feels too much wants to make everyone happy and comfortable and is terrified of disappointing anyone.

6.
Difficulty receiving support and guidance.
Not wanting to appear vulnerable, or not feeling deserving of help, or both, often prevents people who feel too much from reaching out for help or accepting support when it's offered.