Maria's Last Diet

Food Binge Causes

by Maria's Last Diet

What makes you go on a food binge? Have you asked yourself this? If you did, what did you come up with?

Do you go on an food binge because the weight-loss method you are using is too restrictive and too depriving? Do you binge after you have a diet cheat and because you can’t help thinking I got it wrong so what’s the sense of me being careful anymore? Perhaps you binge eat for neither of these reasons.

Maybe you get in really bad moods and your out-of-control eating is your way of staving off a bad mood. You bury yourself in eating and escape the bad mood that way, and the guilt you suffer afterwards from eating too much food isn’t anywhere near as serious as the bad mood that kicks off your binge eating. There is still another possibility. You could binge as a way of attributing your bad mood to the binge itself rather to the things that are truly causing you to be in a bad mood.

As you can see, there are lots of possible reasons for someone to binge eat. What causes you to binge eat?

 

Having a Problem Losing Weight with No Good Solution in Sight? Think of It This Way.

by Maria's Last Diet

When you are trying to lose some weight and it’s not working, what might you be doing to keep from losing weight?

See what you might be doing to upset the apple cart. For example, you could be bringing more pressure to bear on yourself, pressure to eat right for example. What might be ironic about pressuring yourself to eat right is the pressure you’re putting on yourself to eat right is just more of the same; that is, pressure you’ve been putting on yourself that has led to your weight gain in the first place.

It is ironic but highly likely that you select and use solutions with which you are most familiar (and adept at).

 

Unable to Lose Weight Despite Your Good Intentions

by Maria's Last Diet

Are you desperate to lose your unwanted weight, yet you repeatedly defeat your best intentions?

Such a conflict-filled and self-defeating position can’t be avoided if eating too much food or eating too many calorie-rich foods has become a necessary way of coping. Regulating your emotions, dispensing with unpleasant and unwanted feelings altogether, shoring up your self-image, reducing your social anxieties, and restoring your motivation are just some of the benefits that you may get from this dependence on food.

 

Lying About Eating

by Maria's Last Diet

Ted: Delia, where did you put the corn chips? I want to have some with salsa.

Delia: They should be right there in the food pantry.

Ted: That’s where I’ve been looking. I don’t see them.

Delia: I don’t know what happened to them.

What Ted doesn’t know is Delia is lying. She ate the chips, and since she is on a diet, she doesn’t want Ted to know about her diet cheat.

There are two kinds of lies that women tell when they are trying to lose some weight. They lie to others like Delia did, and they lie to themselves. They lie to preserve their image, to make themselves look better in the eyes of others and in their own eyes. They lie to keep the peace, and to forget something they don’t want to remember.

You might say that lying is a rather natural part of the weight-loss process. Little white lies. Big fat save your image lies.

If lying comes so naturally, is it bad? It sure is if you are trying to change the way you’ve been eating so you can lose your unwanted weight. Self-change always means that you have to face yourself squarely and truthfully, see what’s wrong with the way you are, and make the necessary change. Lying impedes this process.

So, when it comes to the weight-loss process, if lying comes too easily to you, make sure you include doing something about lying as well as doing your exercise and dieting.

 

Weight-Loss Anxiety. Here’s One Version.

by Maria's Last Diet

Layla: I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve already lost some weight. I can say that much. I’ve stayed true to the diet. But the better I do, the more uneasy I feel. That’s what is throwing me—this knowing that something bad is going to happen. It’s making me very uncomfortable, and I’m starting to doubt myself.

Bethany: But you’ve been doing so well. Why do you have such an awful premonition? Do you…

Layla: (cutting her friend off) I don’t know. It’s like whenever I’m doing well at something, I start to think things like “I won’t be able to keep it up”, “there will be some slip up”, “it’s too good to be true”, “something’s going to happen to spoil it”.

Bethany: Do you need some encouragement? I’ll give you plenty of encouragement. You deserve it for all the hard work you’ve been doing about losing your unwanted weight.

Layla: Thanks, but encouragement doesn’t seem to make a difference. I just can’t get past this premonition, as you called it. I’ve been here before, and what always happens is just what I’m feeling will happen; and it’s as if I can’t do anything about it.

 

Layla is feeling anxious. She has this belief that something bad is going to happen to spoil her weight-loss effort. It’s been a self-fulfilling prophecy in more areas of her life than just weight reduction. But it’s weight reduction that is being put to the test right now.

What Layla hasn’t figured out is that her experiences growing up were filled with the rug being taken out from under her. She was never good enough for her father, and each time she thought she was, he would cut her down to size—a very small, insignificant size that hurt her feelings terribly. This, as well as other of her father’s critical and demeaning characteristics, were picked up by her two brothers and used mercilessly against her. Her mother was ineffectual when it came to standing up for Layla. She tried, but she ended up disappointing Layla and not coming through for her.

The belief in danger coming her way, the premonition of the rug being taken out from under her had been all too real. But that was twenty years ago. Why is Layla still feeling this way? It makes her not trust herself. It has made for repeated weight-loss failure.

What’s the answer? Layla needs an answer.

 

Are You A Compulsive Eater? Here’s How to Tell.

by Maria's Last Diet

How compulsive is your pattern of eating?

When you eat too much food or eat too many fattening foods, is this an eating pattern that has taken on a life of its own?

Compulsive overeating or any compulsive eating behavior, while maladaptive, serves an important purpose. If you can, it’s best to think about what this purpose is. Is it to calm yourself and give you a sense of well-being? Is it to protect you from feeling certain disturbing feelings and thinking about things that will upset you? Is it a way to exercise some control over your life, even if ironically eating in these ways ends up making you feel more out of control?

Signs that your pattern of eating is compulsive is that you (1) have to do it (irresistible urge) and (2) it has a life of its own.

 

Eating Secrets

by Maria's Last Diet

Do you have eating secrets that you are ashamed to reveal?

Everyone, even people who have no weight to lose, have such eating secrets. It goes with the territory called eating.

The difference between normal-weight eaters and overweight eaters, when it coms to eating secrets, is the overweight eater needs to do something about the secrets she’s keeping.

A deep, dark, weight-related secret carries a lot of weight. Revealing such a secret is a way to shed some of that emotional weight. It’s one way to open up the gateway to permanent weight loss.

So, to whom do you tell your secret? Is there someone you trust? Do you need to build trust with someone?

If you decide to tell your secret, please choose someone who can understand that the behavior you kept secret, while not good for you, has also been serving a necessary purpose (example: to help you manage your feelings better until the time comes when you can manage your feelings without turning to food).

 

A Big Weight-Loss Problem is Not Seeing What You Did or Didn’t Do For What It Is

by Maria's Last Diet

What you see is what you get. Not true. What you see is heavily influenced by your values, needs, and expectancies. This means you go beyond or fall short of the information that’s given. This can be easily understood if you think of remembering. You most always add to or take away from your memory of what happened, of what you saw, of what you did.

This is especially true when you have feelings riding on what you saw, what happened, and what you did. The stake you have in your self-image when it comes to overeating and weight gain heavily influences your perception of how much you actually ate, for instance. The same goes for eating fattening food. Feeling guilty and ashamed, not wanting to feel like a failure, and many other feelings influence the way you see things, the way you see yourself and the way you see (and remember) what you ate.

So what’s the corrective? How can you have veridical (truthful and accurate) perception, especially if you’re trying to lose your unwanted weight? One common way in regard to how much and what you ate is to write it down right away. Keep a log of your eating. Note what you ate, how much you ate, and when you ate it. There’s no fooling yourself (or anyone else) when you write down what and how much you ate.

 

Do You Self-Medicate By Eating Too Much Food and Fattening Foods?

by Maria's Last Diet

It has often been said that overeating and eating calorie-rich food to the point of excessive weight gain are ways to self-medicate.

Exactly what does it mean to self-medicate? Self-medication is the act of giving yourself an experience that alleviates or prevents disturbing feelings and thoughts with the intention of making yourself feel good. While this can apply to all kinds of positive things you do for yourself, the usual meaning of self-medication is that you do something maladaptive to achieve the good feeling. You can do this with food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, gambling, smoking, sex, the Internet, and a number of other ways you can probably think of.

Do you self-medicate? What’s the test for self-medication?

Food, for example, definitely makes us all feel better, even if we aren’t self-medicating when we eat. Food not only quells our hunger, it also makes us feel better emotionally. So what’s the test for using food to self-medicate?

Most likely one benchmark of self-medicating with food is overindulgence. Another: there are negative consequences from the overindulgence. Still another indicator is continued use despite negative consequences. And finally, when food becomes a substitute for a more adaptive way of feeling good that is difficult or impossible for you, like having satisfying relationships or managing your life well.

 

Causes of Gaining too Much Weight and What to Do About Them

by Maria's Last Diet

What is it that makes you eat too much food or eat too many calorie-rich foods and gain so much weight?

Is it in your genes? Is it the result of you living in an obsesogenic environment? Yes, you heard right “obesogenic”, which means an environment that encourages you to eat and drink more calories than you expend and to become overweight or obese. Or did you gain all that unwanted weight because of some emotional cause like anxiety, depression, or emotional reactivity?

What you see as the cause of your overeating and eating too many fattening foods should make all the difference in what you do about it. But it doesn’t. What most people do about carrying around too much weight is start dieting.

What do you do, though, if you pinpoint the cause as an obesogenic environment? You could, if you like, put your environment on a diet, and avoid people and places and food that are obesogenic and frequent only places and be with people who offer normal eating or dieting possibilities.

What do you do about genetics? That sounds like something that is inescapable, but it isn't. People who have genetic disorders can, in many cases, compensate for their genetic disorder by special diet and modified lifestyle activities. If you think of your weight gain as genetic, then you will be able to compensate for it also by dieting and modifying your lifestyle.

And what about emotional reasons for gaining so much weight? Here is where using psychology to lose weight comes in. You can identify the emotional causes and then do something about them.  

If you need help using psychology to lose weight, please go to The Reading Room and the White Paper, both of which are in the left-hand column of this blog at MariasLastDiet.com. Or, if you want to have an actual book or an e-book to read through and refer to, check out the weight-loss books for women section on the right-hand side of this blog.

If you need more specific help, email us at hi@mariaslastdiet.com and we’ll point you in the right direction.