Maria's Last Diet

by Maria's Last Diet

Changing your eating pattern so it is not weight gaining or excessively weight maintaining is by necessity a long-term process. A substantial change in your pattern of eating is the result of you learning new skills and using these new skills to replace a set of old, well-developed skills.

As you go along day after day, meal after meal trying to develop these new ways to deal with eating, with food, and with your feelings, don’t, whatever you do, lose hope. While skill building is a long-term process, keep a look out for hidden skills that are components of the skills you are trying to build. They are there, facilitating the skill-building process. But they may go undetected until you assemble them into a more obvious skill, so make sure you take a good look for them. Knowing that your new skills are growing is a way to keep your motivation and hope from taking a nosedive.

You wouldn’t think it, but when you gain a lot of weight by eating too much food or eating too many fattening foods, you have developed a sophisticated set of weight-gaining skills. The complexity of the skills and their strong attachment to the situations in which they were needed make these skills hard to dismantle. This, of course, poses a serious problem when you are trying to lose weight.

What losing weight means under these circumstances is that you must somehow take apart these overeating and eating calorie-rich food skills you so carefully and repeatedly built up over many years.    

For example, a bun-and-run breakfast before work can be a reward for going to work. The reward is not having to make breakfast because the day is going to be so busy. This seems simple and straightforward: a reward for a busy day. The calorie-rich breakfast, however, might at the same time serve more than one purpose. It not only provides a reward, but it also might be a way to counter last night’s boredom. It doesn’t end there either. The morning stop at the bun-and-run could also be a way to delay getting to work to counter a different boring situation, the initial paper shuffling of that workday.

You might say it is only a Danish and coffee, why make such a big deal out of it? If it turned out that this brief morning stopover is yet one more subversion in a string of subversions of a seriously intended weight loss effort, it is indeed a big deal.

As you can see, there is so much more to the morning stopover than meets the eye. There’s proficiency in the whole process. Various purposes are served. The skill of turning to substitute pleasures is honed. And, of course, being able to achieve reward, delay, and do something about boredom are skills that bring the user great relief.

Going to get the Danish and coffee may, for this same skill builder, meet many more needs like, for instance, having an extrinsic reward. The need for external reward could very well mean work is not rewarding in and of itself. Obtaining an extrinsic reward when something like work isn’t intrinsically rewarding is indeed an important coping skill that makes it easier and more pleasurable to work.

Looking a little further into this matter of Danish and coffee and work and extrinsic reward, you might find that the particular work situation isn’t the biggest issue. Unrewarding work may be indicative of something developmental that hasn’t taken place yet, like developing the capacity to go from playing and having a good time to working and feeling satisfied in doing a good job. The skill here that maintains weight-gaining behavior has to do with finding ways to play, using opportunities like the bun-and-run breakfast to satisfy a craving for play, not really for food.

See how it goes. The skills that make up weight-gaining behavior are complex and tied to situations in which they were needed. They serve purposes sometimes far afield from the surface phenomena of simply eating too much food or eating too many calorie-rich foods. Weight gain, in this case, is simply a byproduct of the many skills a person has developed to cope more readily with life.