Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

My friend Anna came over yesterday and complained about being unable to lose weight. This is not something we usually talk about because Anna is very sensitive about her weight. Nevertheless, there we were talking together about Anna’s trouble losing weight.

The conversation got around to feelings and food, and Anna said when she sneaks a fattening snack or overeats, she doesn’t know what she’s feeling. She made such a point of not knowing what she’s feeling that I couldn’t help but say to her that this in itself is a feeling. And I was right. I followed with, “why don’t you tell me what not knowing what you’re feeling is like.” Joining Anna like this opened the door for Anna to explore her inability to know her own feelings.

Guess what? It turned out that Anna was afraid to know what she was feeling. And there were good reasons for her being fearful. But that’s for another time.

by Maria's Last Diet

Danitra was having a lousy life. She was angry all the time. Angry at her husband who was never home. And when he was home, he isolated himself in one of his many pursuits and paid little attention to Danitra. Guess what Danitra did? She ate.

Over the years— because that was the length of time it took to live this lousy life—Danitra ate herself silly, to the tune of sixty-some extra pounds. Oh, she tried to lose weight, time and time again, diet after diet, with successes here and there, but she always gained her lost weight back.

If you were Danitra’s weight loss advisor, what would you recommend she do in order to lose her unwanted weight?

by Maria's Last Diet

Is this you, too?

Libby made no real attempt to take a hard look at herself. She was eminently cooperative, but she didn’t dig deeply enough. She didn’t even try to relate the emotional parts of her life to the weight she is carrying. Libby was acutely emotional about being too heavy, not looking like she wanted, having to wear larger and larger sizes, being embarrassed. She was psychologically tuned in to the emotional effect that being too heavy had on her, but tuned out when it came to the emotional cause. Such irony. Libby had no idea what had propelled her into such heaviness.

by Maria's Last Diet

I have been confronting the mystery of my eating.

The question is, why is it so hard for me?

I’m starting to see the answer is within my grasp.

My method of inquiry into my eating problem consists of finding out

the silent tune to which it dances.

Why do I say silent tune?

Because the inner workings of my eating problem are secret, even from me.

But when I pay a lot of attention, I see patterns woven into my overeating.

There is a sub-plot here. On a deeper level of my reality, it makes sense.

So, why do I keep eating when all I want to do is lose weight?

Because that’s not all I want to do. I also want to ease my pain, calm my tensions, feel satisfied, feel taken care of, and get some rewards out of life.

That is what the eating is for.

    excerpt from Stop Your Emotional Eating by Kenneth Schwarz PhD & Julie North Schwarz

by Maria's Last Diet

You emotionally eat, so the research says, because you are trying to quell or distract yourself from negative emotions. Negative emotions are emotions that are unpleasant or even disturbing for you. These are emotions you don’t want to have, so you turn to food to make yourself feel better.

While food is an adaptive short-term remedy that lifts the spirits for many people, it is a dysfunctional solution when it leads to being overweight. In the latter case it is better to tackle your emotions directly without resorting to overeating or eating too many fattening foods.

What emotions might you be working on? Would it be feeling ashamed, powerless. trapped, left out, judged, afraid, untrusting, invalidated, controlled, bored, lonely, underestimated, pressured, misunderstood, depressed, anxious, intimidated, or worthless? Or would it be some other unpleasant or disturbing emotion that is not on this list, but it is on your personal list?

To pursue a more direct route to dealing with your negative emotions, you ought to try a number of approaches, none of which you would have to use by itself. You could certainly combine these different approaches. First off, you could develop better coping skills to contend with whatever negative emotion is causing you trouble. Secondly, you might practice tolerating the negative emotion better so you won’t experience it with the same old, overwhelming force. Thirdly, you could go back up the chain of events from the negative emotion that led you to emotionally eat to the situation that caused you to feel like this and think of how you might engage differently or even think differently about that situation. The idea being that behaving differently or thinking differently in the causative situation would result in feeling less negative, more positive at the far end of the chain.

by Maria's Last Diet

Do some of your feelings make you want to eat? Indicate the extent to which the following feelings make you want to eat by checking one box for each of the feelings listed below. If there is another feeling not listed below that makes you want to eat, please make a note of the feeling and the extent of your desire to eat.


 

from   Arnow, B., Kenardy, J. & Agras, W. The Emotional Eating Scale. International Journal of Eating Disorders. 1995. Vol. 18, No. 1, pages 79-90.

by Maria's Last Diet

A tough weight loss challenge is emotional eating? Does it seem like you're so tethered to emotional eating that you’ll head straight for some fattening snack food, indulge in overeating, or have a binge? Emotional eating is not the way to handle your feelings, and everyone knows this. And yet it’s as if the connection between your feelings and food makes it so you can't stop emotional eating.

While emotional eating is most often thought of as a way to deal with negative feelings, you must also have done some emotional eating in relation to more positive feelings like happiness, joy, rejoicing, and so forth.

Do you know which emotions make you susceptible to emotional eating? Check on the different emotions  below and see. Rate how frequently each emotion leads to emotional eating, Then, if you like, make a bar graph to fix the results firmly in your mind.

                   Sad   Worried   Frustrated   Discouraged   Lonely   Guilty   Excited

Always

Often

Sometimes

Rarely

Never

There are plenty of other emotions and emotional states that lead to emotional eating. Some of these are: angry, bored, jealous, on edge, and irritated.

Do you have specific emotions and emotional states that are your personal slippery slope to emotional eating? If you do, try rating them right along with the emotions in the table above.

by Maria's Last Diet

Everyone has emotional disturbances in their lives. What is a small disturbance to one person might be a large disturbance to someone else. And you probably know someone who suffers from too much emotional disturbance. You might even think of her as being disturbance prone. In any case, emotional disturbances are there for everyone to reckon with and do something about. You process and deal with these disturbances and try not to let them disrupt your quality of life.

If you want to check out how you process your emotions, try answering the following items* using the rating scale.

Often     Sometimes       Seldom          Never

1. I smother my feelings

2. I want to smash something.

3. I find it hard to know if I feel ill or if I'm being emotional.

4. I can’t stop thinking about how I feel.

5. I can’t tolerate unpleasant feelings.

6. Talking about my bad feelings makes them worse.

7. I try not to let my feelings show.

8. I can’t control what I say when I’m upset.

9. It’s like I don’t even have feelings.

10. I get overwhelmed by my feelings.

11. I try to avoid what makes me upset.

12. My unwanted feelings keep interrupting.

13. I react too much to what people say or do.

14. I keep my emotions bottled up.

15. My emotional reaction lasted more than a day.

How did you do? If you gained weight from overeating or eating too many fattening foods, can you see how mishandling your emotions might partly account for this?

*These items are taken from The Emotional Processing Scale.

by Maria's Last Diet

Emotional eaters take heed! It may not be the emotion that leads to emotional eating. Instead it may be the way you regulate the emotion that results in emotional eating.

If you are an emotional eater, have you checked recently to see how you go about regulating your emotions? Do you, for instance, adjust your emotion to fit the situation? Are you aware of your feelings so you can do something about them? What about being accepting of your emotion(s)? Being accepting is yet another emotion regulating strategy. Can you accept a certain amount of emotional distress if that’s what the circumstance calls for? Do you anticipate how you will feel and do something about it beforehand? Or do you try to regulate your emotion as it is occurring?

It is obvious, isn’t it, that there are many ways to regulate emotion. As an emotional eater, why don’t you see how you go about regulating emotion. And while you’re at it, determine just how effective your emotion regulating strategy is.

by Maria's Last Diet

Is your weight right out there where everyone, including you, can see it? You might hide your weight under a big loose blouse over a tighter-fitting tee shirt underneath. But you know there is an overweight woman there and so do other people who see you.

You are desperate to lose weight, and you set about doing just that. After some hard work and quite visible weight loss, you begin to feel moody. You notice your self-esteem is much lower than it has been. Recently you’ve even had days when you’re pretty much down in the dumps, and it has been hard to work on these days. What does this sound like to you? Could it be that you’re depressed?

Why depressed? You just did something you wanted to do—lose weight and get thinner. If you are depressed, why in the world are you feeling this way?

Here’s one answer. Sometimes your weight is your best line of defense. You can always blame it on your weight. For instance, you might think any of the following: “I wish I wasn’t so fat so I’d look better.” “I can’t possibly go out looking so fat.” “If only I was thin, I wouldn’t be so self-conscious.” “Maybe I didn’t get the promotion because I’m so overweight.”

Well, guess what? Some people lose weight and they find that the thinner version of themselves doesn’t measure up either. But now they can no longer blame it on their weight. They have to face their insecurities and shortcomings dead on, no layer of fat to cushion the blows. So this is when weight loss depression can rightfully creep in.