Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom (150 page)

So here’s the first step. Talk to your body with compassion and respect, not disgust or anger. Would you talk to a small child or loved one in the way you routinely talk to yourself about your body? Probably not. Look deeply into your eyes in the mirror and tell yourself out loud, “I respect you and I will take care of you today.” A commitment to body respect is an es sential step toward feeling and looking your best. Respecting yourself will actually help you reach your optimal size. That’s because the feelings associated with self-respect create a metabolic milieu in your body that is con ducive to optimal fat burning. By contrast, unresolved emotional stress tends to keep excess body fat firmly in place because the stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline drastically affect metabolism.

Step Two: Eat to Flourish—Stop Dieting

Having tried everything from Atkins to macrobiotics to the Zone diet, I can assure you that there is a kernel of truth in every one of them. But every “diet” out there is doomed to eventual failure unless you understand what kinds of foods your body was designed to function best with and then begin to enjoy them fully. As a matter of fact, eating a chocolate brownie slowly and with gusto and enjoyment does your body more good than gnawing on celery sticks while feeling deprived and resentful. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.

Studies have shown that weight loss and regain and the “diet mentality” have negative health consequences independent of one’s actual weight.
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And only a very small percentage of women achieve perma nent weight loss by dieting, despite the multibillion-dollar diet industry. We need to look honestly at our behavior around this and commit to change. Rather than going on a “diet,” you want to make slow and permanent changes in your eating that become a way of life.

DO YOU HAVE THE “DIET MENTALITY”?

Do you avoid eating all day so that you can binge at dinner?

When you’re standing before a buffet, do you routinely tell yourself that you can’t have what you really want?

Do you weigh yourself several times throughout the day?

If you step on the scale and weigh a pound or more than usual, do you routinely beat yourself up for it? Do you let it ruin your day and influence what you eat?

Do you allow yourself to get so hungry that you gulp whatever is available, rarely even tasting it?

Do you say, “I’ll eat this now, but I’ll start on a diet on Monday,” or after New Year’s?

Do you routinely drink coffee or caffeinated diet drinks during the day as a substitute for food?

Do you know the calorie count of almost every food?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you probably have inherited the “diet mentality.” Bob Schwartz, Ph.D., author of
Diets Don’t Work
(Breakthru Publications, 1996), did a study of people who had no problems with their weight or with their food intake to determine whether the “diet mentality” could be created by food restriction. The study subjects were placed on weight-loss diets to lose ten pounds each. In the process of dieting to lose weight, many of these formerly “diet-free” individuals actually developed a “diet mentality.” They became obsessed with food, often for the first time ever. After losing the required ten pounds, many gained back not only the weight that they had lost but an additional five pounds besides. These additional five pounds were even harder to lose than the original ten had been. By the very process of food restriction and dieting, these formerly thin people had been transformed into people with a weight problem.

My very first diet firmly implanted this “diet mentality”—and my body responded rebelliously with a physiologic “starvation response” mechanism that decreased metabolic rate, thus making each later attempt at caloric restriction that much more difficult.
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After reading about Dr. Schwartz’s study, I finally understood why I had been fighting the same ten to fifteen pounds since I was thirteen. I vowed then and there to stop, and for the next six years, I never weighed myself (except for an insurance physical). During that time, I began breaking free from a destructive cycle of body abuse started many years before. I, like so many, had allowed the number on a bathroom scale to tell me that I was good or bad and allowed it to determine the entire quality of my day. If I weighed less than 140 (or whatever my ideal was at the time), it was a good day; if I weighed more than that, it was a bad day.

Most women cannot reach the stage of eating to nourish themselves until they’ve made some progress moving away from this diet mentality. But once you tap into your inner guidance about food, you will find that the foods that are good for you and the foods you want to eat will become the same. I recently interviewed psychologist Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., on my Hay House radio show,
Flourish!
I knew that Gay had been a fat kid, and I asked him how he changed all that. He told me that back in the late 1950s, it was rare for kids to be fat. So his parents took him to many specialists—without results. Then one day in his twenties, weighing in at 300-plus pounds and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, he fell on the ice here in New England and hit his head. Lying there stunned, he somehow connected for the first time with the part of himself that was permanent and healthy—his soul. He told me that from that moment on, he decided to stay in touch with that changeless part of himself, not the 300-pound, chain-smoking part. So before eating anything, he would check in with his soul. And if his soul wanted that particular food, he ate it. If not, he didn’t. At the end of a year, he had lost 100 pounds, and he’s never gained it back. He also gave up smoking. I know that each of us has access to that kind of power if and when we’re ready to use it.

Sometimes we are motivated by an immediate health problem. A thirty-nine-year-old artist, a former patient of mine, improved her diet in order to help heal her chronic vaginitis. She said to me, “I feel lighter when I eat this way—and cleaner. My nose doesn’t run all the time. And I’ve lost eight pounds since I last saw you. I don’t feel deprived at all. I know that I can eat whatever I want. You told me to eat only whole foods and to experiment after avoiding all dairy foods for one month. So I went back to eating cheese after about one month, but I found that I didn’t like the way it felt in my body. I stopped eating it, and I feel better.
Increasingly, what I want is also
what makes me feel best.
This isn’t a punishment—it’s just a different way of looking at things. It’s a complete change of philosophy for me.”