Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

For losing a lot of weight, can you use your guilt feelings to help? Think of using guilt as an opportunity for guilt to help rather than hinder. Can guilt, for instance, help you stay on a diet or keep you from being tempted or prevent you from doing something stupid to spoil your weight loss effort?

Guilt can indeed work to control what you do, how you think, and what you shouldn’t do. If you can, put feeling guilty to work helping you to lose excess weight.

by Maria's Last Diet

Feeling ashamed of yourself and feeling guilty go right along with weighing too much. Do you realize this? See how you respond to the following statements.

Rate each of the following statements on a 5-point scale.*

                0 = never, 1 = rarely, 2 = sometimes, 3= often, 4 = always

1. I feel guilty when I eat more than I want.

2. I am embarrassed about my body when I’m with other people.

3. I know I did something wrong when I eat fattening food.

4. I don’t go shopping for clothes because I’d be too mortified if people knew the size.

5. I’m embarrassed to do anything physical in front of other people.

6. I blame myself for not having better weight control.

7. I feel guilty when I see my own body.

8. I don’t ever want anyone to know how much I weigh.

What did you find out about yourself? Do you feel guilty and ashamed? If so, how strong are these feelings? In other words, how high did you rate your shame and guilt? Were they all 4s or all zeroes or did they vary from item to item. Once you see how ashamed and guilty you feel, take the next step and see if feeling like this motivates you or discourages you from doing something about your excess weight.

*Statements are based on the Weight- and Body-Related Shame and Guilt Scale by Conradt, M., et al. 

How are you? Guilty as charged?

There is no way to avoid the guilty thoughts, the guilty deeds, and the self-reprisals from feeling guilty. The weight loss process is filled with all sorts of emotional traps, guilt being perhaps the biggest ensnarement of all. You can’t help but fall victim to it.

You feel guilty if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, what you set out to do, what you definitely thought you would have no trouble doing. Guilt by omission. You feel guilty if you did something you weren’t supposed to do. Guilt by commission. If you did something you were supposed to do but you got it wrong, then it’s guilt by disposition. Or if you actually held up on doing something you weren’t supposed to do but again got it wrong, it’s guilt by redefinition.

Guilt, guilt, guilt. Why do you always have to be guilty as charged for your weight loss mistakes? Can’t you live without feeling guilty? What’s so good about feeling guilty anyway? Yes, it helps you to get your act in gear. And yes, it’s the punishment you need to get you back on the straight and narrow after you let yourself be tempted and lost sight of your weight loss commitment.

If you use guilt in these ways, you probably think guilt is a mentor of sorts, an advisor who keeps you in check and you’d be far worse off without her. Maybe there’s some truth to this, but you must remember too, this advisor of yours is who throws you under the bus. “What the heck, ” you say when your beloved mentor has piled on the guilt beyond what you can endure, and in a flash you give up all you’ve been striving for. Your weight loss routine is down the tubes and your unwanted weight, well, it’s still unwanted, but it’s back.

Let’s talk about eating guilt. Everyone knows what it means to feel guilty if you do what you are not supposed to do or you don’t do what you are supposed to do when it comes to eating. If you eat too much food or eat too many calorie-rich foods and you are trying to lose some weight, you probably will end up feeling guilty. The same is true if you don’t stick to your weight loss regimen that you swore to yourself and even told your family this is what you were going to do. Yes, you feel guilty.

Feeling guilty is not all there is, though. First there is feeling guilty and then comes a bunch of other behaviors intended to expiate your guilt. One of these behaviors is direct reparation: you eat less at the next meal. Another way to redeem yourself is to punish yourself. This can take the form of a vow of total deprivation, such as you will never eat this kind of candy ever again, or a more limited deprivation, such as not eating the candy again until you eat healthy food for two weeks. A third way of atoning for what you shouldn’t have done or what you should have done but didn’t, especially in relation to food, is to make a flight into health: eat healthy, think healthy, live healthy.

You will probably do better while dieting or attempting some type of weight loss regimen if you find ways of relieving yourself of some of this guilt and its ramifications. A very natural way, believe it or not, is the diet cheat. Just like eating guilt, everyone cheats on a diet. And, psychologically speaking, it’s a good thing to cheat on your diet. Only let’s refer to the cheat as “going off your diet”, for this is what it really is if you remove the ring of dishonesty from it.

Going off your diet or weight loss routine now and again is a very good method of learning what it is like to give up some of the tight control of the weight loss regimen and see if you can go off and then go right back on again. In any case, this is what you will be doing when you reach your goal weight and are trying to maintain weight loss without a diet or weight loss regimen. You will be eating more or eating some fattening food now and again, and you will have to balance this against your desire to maintain your hard-earned weight loss.

Going off your weight loss routine and getting right back on now and then during the process of weight loss itself can be an exciting experience. Through such an experience, you can see what you are capable of and you can discover what you still need to learn. This form of experimenting with your eating behavior works wonders on your eating guilt as well.

It’s a terrible waste of energy and morale to suffer from eating guilt and then have to atone, and it makes it more difficult to lose weight than having a diet cheat now and again.

by Maria's Last Diet

I know you’re supposed to feel guilty after you eat too much, or eat unhealthily, or eat too many sweets or salty fattening snacks. But I feel guilty before I eat and that’s what makes me feed my face like there’s no tomorrow.

I’m one guilty woman, always have been and always will be. I felt guilty as a child, terribly guilty all the time. My parents just thought I was shy. They couldn’t see what was going on inside of me. I took from my little brother…and felt guilty. I stood up for myself with my big sister…and felt guilty. I never answered my parents back…and still felt guilty.

Adolescence was one big guilt-laden time. Smoking, drinking, eating, sex, not enough studying, switching friends, avoiding my parents, spending too much time in my room. Yes, adolescence was guilt, guilt, and more guilt. By then my parents got over thinking I was shy. They didn’t know what to think anymore. I was always wishing I could say how sorry I was for this and for that, but my parents didn’t hear my wishes.

Twenties: that was a time. College first and afterward starting to work. By then people had been taking advantage of the fact that I felt so guilty for a long time. In my early twenties is when I began to eat and eat, everything and anything. And, of course, I felt guilty about that too. But my point is that it was feeling guilty in the first place that propelled me into the eating frenzy that made me about seventy pounds more than I should be.

Two attitudes prevailed: one was to keep feeling guilty at bay any way I could, and that was primarily through eating; although I did do a lot of compulsive buying as well—clothes (coats mainly) and couches. Strange combination, I know, but there you have it. The other prevailing attitude was eff-it. I just didn’t care. If I was going to feel guilty anyway, I’ll just go ahead and do what I damn well please.

That's the long and short of it—my guilt feelings and how they made be get to be a really fat woman. That’s guilt before, not after. Guilt after is something all women have. Guilt before is my own personal recipe for self-destruction.

by Maria's Last Diet

Tara, who was definitely too many pounds overweight, often ate like there was no tomorrow. Her particular downfalls were her frequent desire to eat out and her nighttime eating. After overeating, she always felt guilty. This pattern was so set that it was as if she ate too much food in order to feel guilty. Could that be? Let’s see.

Tara was brought up to do the right thing. Boy, was she ever. Everything had to be just so: every hair on her head when she went to school, every homework assignment, her manners, her interactions with her parents and others. Her family followed a pattern of excellence in every aspect of their lives, and Tara had been taught to do the same. Feeling guilty was something that had been inculcated since Tara was a baby. When she didn’t get it right, she felt guilty. She knew no other way.

This is not to say that life wasn’t good. Life felt really good to Tara. People were impressed by Tara and the family. They saw the excellence that was there to be seen. Tara was proud of herself and her family.

Things began to go south for Tara when she was eleven. She started to eat too much food and too many fattening foods. Weight gain followed pretty quickly, and the weight stayed with her into adulthood. Yes, she dieted from time to time, and she even lost weight. But she always gained weight back, and the pattern of eating followed by guilt feelings continued. It continues to this day.

Do you think Tara eats too much in order to feel guilty?