Diet Survivors: September 2006 Archives

Joe stands at the refrigerator, grazing on whatever he can find. His girlfriend broke up with him a week ago, and he hasn't gotten over it yet. The week would have been deeply sadder--too sad--but he's managed to distract himself much of the time with his old friend, food. .

Do you eat to distract yourself? All of us reach for diversion from the intensities of life. Sometimes feelings are too strong for too long, and we need something to help us escape temporarily from the pain. But if overeating is your only form of distraction, you probably have a problem--you're overweight and unhealthy as a result.

You might be thinking you really should face your feelings instead. You might be believing that it's not okay to distract yourself from the raw, intense feelings of the human experience. If that's what you've been thinking, these beliefs are false and unfounded.

Psychologists tell us that humans need to take strong feelings in small doses. We visit a feeling, then leave it, then visit it again.

When we experience intense feelings of sadness, anger, frustration, fear, embarrassment, worry, anxiety, or just about any other strong emotion, it is hard, and even unhealthy, to stay in that emotional peak for any extended period of time. You know this if you've ever grieved the death of someone close to you.

When a loved one died, did you spend every waking minute of every day grieving? No. More likely, you grieved within the brief fissures and cracks of a busy schedule. You allowed yourself to ponder and cry in the short quiet moments. The rest of the time, you were eager to be diverted by shopping, cooking, work, and all the business of life. Those things were a relief amidst the sadness. You even welcomed light moments in which you could laugh, temporarily forgetting your terrible loss.

So, what makes us think we have to face everything in its full intensity all the time? Who knows. Perhaps a therapist or friend overemphasized feeling feelings. We thought they meant full throttle all day. But nobody ever meant for you to do that.

If you're believing that distraction is somehow illegal, then your normal human need for distraction is bound to manifest in another way. Eating seems easily justified as a necessity of life rather than a distraction, and so we legalize it as our one means of distraction from intense feelings.

After all, we have to eat, right? And so we teach ourselves to turn again and again to overeating. It's self-reinforcing, too, because overeating numbs our nervous system a bit, serving as a fine suppressor of those intense feelings.

We don't have to be grieving a loss to have intense feelings. Even the ordinary frustrations or mishaps of the day can create strong, sometimes overwhelming feelings. And some folks feel feelings more strongly than others. Perhaps it's this inborn trait in yourself that got you into this predicament in the first place. Maybe you're the kind of person who feels all feelings quite intensely. And you've been depriving yourself of needed distraction!

What to do? If this sounds like you, it's time to legalize distraction as a form of coping, and get more creative about it. Pick something that really works for you as an individual, not what works for other people. Choose some diversions that you perhaps once allowed yourself, but then shut out because you thought they weren't okay.

They don't have to be terribly productive, either. Remember, these are meant to replace all that time you used to spend unproductively overeating, so why must your new diversions suddenly be ultra-productive? Sometimes we just need to waste some time.

Here are just a few ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

1. Read consumer magazines, flipping through the pages without really concentrating. Those tiny little columns and two-paragraph articles are especially light and breezy.

2. Watch the Cops show on TV, (so you can feel superior) or old episodes of Star Trek on Spike TV, or some sappy emotional movie on Lifetime (feelings someone else's feelings instead of your own can serve as a distraction for some folks.)

3. Watch the stupidest soap opera you can find, or that television tabloid called Extra, the one that manufactures or sensationalizes the news.

4. Read true crime.

5. Clean something in your house that's already clean. In other words, allow yourself some of your old obsessive behaviors if they comfort and distract you.

6. Go for a drive around the neighborhood instead of exercise. (It's still better than overeating, right?) Isn't it amazing how hard we are on ourselves? As soon as we seek an alternative to overeating, we think it must be something that's a value-add. Not true! Why must we exercise? Why can't we go for a stupid drive in the car?

7. Find your area of expertise, (we all have several) then join a message board on the subject. Perhaps you know a lot about refinishing a basement because you just finished yours. Join a message board about home repair, and then, when you need distraction, help out others on the board.

8. Play pool or video games.

9. Listen to music from the good old days (whenever that was). Mine's Todd Rundgren or Led Zeppelin.

Your ideas may be very different from the suggestions above. But what's important is to find distractions other than eating. Maybe the stupider the better. You can also get some ideas by talking with others on the Yahoo! Diet Survivors message board. I'll be there too.

Why must we always replace a destructive behavior with self-improvement? Take the pressure off. Sometimes we can replace it with something neutral. Consider this meditation for today. Maybe repeat it several times out loud so you can hear it:

"I'm not going for self-improvement. I just want to stop this stupid addiction to food."

In the world of weight loss, the tide is turning from dieting to non-dieting. But what does this mean? Depending on whose book you read, and whose message board you join, you might be told it means quite different things. Some non-dieting gurus won't even let you utter the words "weight loss." Others point to a more natural means of releasing weight. Still others fall somewhere in-between.

Our free Yahoo! message board, Diet Survivors, points its members to themselves for the answers, not to some external rules. Everyone who joins wants to quit the diet life, but they all have their own goals and desires.

Some of us want to concentrate on another way to lose weight. Others want no more of weight loss. They instead want to find body acceptance and self-love. They want to move on with their lives. Still others might prefer to lose weight, but are not attached to the outcome of becoming normal eaters.

At Diet Survivors, all are welcome, all goals are welcome, and all members' personal food wisdom is honored. Nobody tells you what to do there, but we do help you to know what normal eating, and even normal eating, might look like.

Are you ready to ditch your diet but you still want to lose weight? It may help you to investigate what normal weight loss looks like.

I'll describe my recent weight loss as an example. As some of my readers already know, it's been five years since I've been in the diet trap. I've maintained a good healthy weight since learning normal eating. That is, I eat when hungry, and stop when gently satisfied.

But in the last year, as I'm nearing the age of fifty, I'm finding my clothes getting tight. Keep in mind I had to learn normal eating first, I had to find my sense of hunger and fullness, and for a while, I even had to ignore the weight issue. All that happened over four or five year's time.

Then there came a time recently when I was ready to do something about my weight slowly creeping up.
Here is what I did:

1. Thought through in a sober way how I've been eating in the last year. Is there something simple, like too many desserts? The answer is yes.
2. Asked myself what I could do that would be livable for me, now knowing myself well. Asked myself what kind of old-fashioned advice I might give myself.
3. Asked myself whether it really makes sense to lose a few pounds. I decided I'd like to try to drop just a little bit, but if my body refused, I would take it as a sign not to try too mightily.
4. I decided to cut back on the desserts and sugary stuff. I still put real sugar in my coffee in the morning, (I love my coffee sweet and light) but after my morning coffee, if I want something sweet, I can make something healthy, such as a cup of warm milk with a touch of honey, or I can have a small glass of juice.
5. I decided that I'll have desserts sometimes, but not every day. I didn't come up with any kind of schedule for dessert-eating. My schedule is "sometimes."
6. I made no changes in my fat intake and didn't doctor any foods. I reduced the amount of cereal I'm eating, which is loaded with sugar.
7. Remembered that as I hit mid-life, my body may want to gain a little bit. I decided this is okay with me.

As a result of these little tweaks in my eating and my thinking, my clothes now fit nicely again. I have no idea how many pounds I lost and I don't care. Certainly not a lot.

What matters to me is that I accomplished this with sober thinking and a self-awareness of what I could tolerate in terms of slight changes. I had no number-goals, no obsessions, and no bad foods. I'd like to now stay a little more aware of the amount of sugar and desserts I'm getting. I feel great.

What I've described to you is just one example of how a normal eater approaches normal weight control. I'll give you one more example, which I refer to in my book.

My neighbor explained this to me, "Sometimes I will have eaten a whole sandwich, and I won't feel as though I've eaten at all. At that point I say 'I gotta get outta here.'" Then she runs out of the house!

That's my neighbor's approach to normal weight control. It works for her, and it certainly doesn't govern her life. Just once in a while, she runs out of the house, or at least imagines herself doing so. I guess sometimes she just runs out of the kitchen, or out of the work cafeteria.

Do you have an approach to normal weight control? Tell us about it on the board!

"I eat when I'm lonely." Does this sound like you? Loneliness, after all, is self-explanatory, right? We only need say the word, and others understand why we must eat. Being alone is awful.

Isn't it? Messages in your mind probably got recorded early on this one. As a child maybe you were a loner, and were teased over it. Maybe you were admonished by grownups to try harder to keep your friends. When you misbehaved, you were sent to your room to be alone. Being alone became banishment from something else, something better. Thus you associate being alone with loneliness. Being alone, for you, is terrible.

Here are some words we may mistakenly connect with being by ourselves:
1. Isolation
2. Rejection
3. Abandonment
4. Awful
5. Stress
6. Shoulds (as in "I must be constructive while alone")

But do we have any positive associations with being alone? Have we considered it's not always bad to be by ourselves? When we're alone, away from people, we can re-fuel. We can think. We can ponder our beliefs, opinions, strengths, and prefers. It's time we connected some positives with being alone.

1. Meditation and journaling
2. Wanting to be with our best friend (ourselves)
3. A step back from people-overload
4. Peace and quiet
5. A chance to work on a personal project, or do nothing, or watch whatever channel we want on TV

It's true that we're not always the ones in charge of when we're alone and when we're with people. Work schedules and the schedules of other people seem to often dictate the "when" of being alone vs. being with others. But as long as we have some kind of balance, that's what matters. All humans need balance in all things. But we don't all need the same balance as each other.

Some of us are, by nature, more outgoing than others. Some of us are energized by people, while others are drained, and need some time alone to get that energy back. Some of us need a little alone time each week. Others need a lot. But all of us need both--time to be with others, and time alone.

Here's what all of us do, to some degree, and it's quite healthy. Those of us who need more alone time than our schedules dictate, tend to schedule in some extra alone time. Alternatively, those of us who need a little more time with others than our schedules afford us, will tend to schedule in some extra social time, perhaps on the weekend or in the evenings.

So you see, we each have some wiggle room. In rarer cases, some folks realize they need a change in jobs, just so they can be with people more or less of the time.

Perhaps being alone is stressful for you. For an over eater with not much recovery, stress is thought to be something one must avoid at all cost. But we can re-frame stress, too. Stress can be tolerable after all. Start by saying "stress is tolerable. I can tolerate a little stress."

So we can look at being alone in two ways. First, we can try and attach new, more positive meaning to being alone. It doesn't have to feel so lonely. It can feel energizing, and doesn't need to have any of the old negative associations attached to it. On the other hand, since we may not make this leap in thinking perfectly or right away, we can also remember that when being alone is stressful, stress is tolerable.

Try meditating on the balance you have in your life of being alone and being with others. Is it just about right? What adjustments might you have a little control over? Do you strongly prefer at this time to make any changes, in order to find more of the balance you need? These are heady questions, and may take some time, as in days, weeks, or even months, to answer. Do some journaling on these questions. It can be helpful to see your own words written down.

Perhaps also ask yourself this "Just because the alone times happen outside of my control, does that mean I've been rejected or abandoned?" Think about what it means to be alone with you.

Personally, I've changed my general modus operandi with age. As a young adult, I needed to be with people almost constantly. I thought this was simply how I was built. But looking back, during those forced alone times, I did think "abandonment" and it was, indeed, stressful to the point where I turned to addictions for comfort.

Over time, however, I've noticed that I need alone time. Moreover, I need, crave, and enjoy quite a bit of it. I've learned about myself that too much social time is what's stressful. It's not easy being with people all the time.

This change in myself may reflect the natural aging process, or it may reflect a change in my self-esteem and basic recovery from poor self-image. It could very well be that hidden inside me was always a gal that liked her alone time, but because of some faulty beliefs, it took until my forties to discover it.

Whatever my own reasons for the change, you may not undergo or need as drastic a change as I did. But little adjustments are often what brings happiness, peace, and more contentment in life. Tweaks in how much alone time, or tweaks in our perception of alone time could bring about revolutionary change. Who needs the comfort of overeating when we're content in the moment?