Tag: body hatred

Foods we can’t stop eating

Sometimes there are foods that we find hard to resist, things that when we start eating, we can’t stop. It’s different for each of us. It might be white bread, or sugar, or chips or ice cream. Occasionally it’s breakfast cereal, even the so called healthy ones like Sultana Bran. It doesn’t matter what it is. When a food has a hold over us it can be terrifying.

We can both crave the food, and then feel as though we have no control once we start eating.

When I was struggling with food, I would test myself with the very things I found hardest to stop eating. And then, when had eaten beyond the point of comfort, almost beyond consciousness, as though I was an alcoholic drugging myself with my chosen poison until I was sedated and bloated and numb.

Many of the women who I coach, or who come to my classes struggle similarly. When I tell them that there are no rules and they can eat what they like, some of them go straight out and buy the foods that they haven’t allowed themselves for years, and then are distraught and horrified when they can’t stop eating them.

There are several things that come together to create this compelling urge to eat and eat. The first can be a physical one. Some foods, especially those high in sugar (or carbohydrates like bread and cereals) can trigger the pleasure centre in our brain that releases dopamine. Our brains love this sensation, as do we, and we want to keep getting more and more of this feeling, which means we want to keep eating.

Also physical, our insulin rises as we eat carbohydrates, and if we produce more than we need, we may feel driven to continue to eat so that we ingest enough glucose to mop up the insulin.

Psychological triggers also occur. Timmerman’s excellent research into deprivation shows that deprivation doesn’t have to be ‘physical or real’ (i.e. we don’t have to be starved) in order for it to be compelling. Just denying or forbidding ourselves something over a long period can be enough deprivation to trigger overconsumption once we are again within reach of it.

We also lose touch with our bodies, and what ‘enough’ feels like, especially if it’s a food that we don’t often permit ourselves to eat.

If there are foods you’re struggling with, don’t ‘test yourself’ when you’re lonely and hungry. We don’t want to set ourselves up to fail. You might try it in company, when you can enjoy it, and have a social surrounding that might help you stop eating. Or you might want to get stronger first, and by this I mean, have stopped dieting for a while, have fed yourself regularly, and begun to believe in the very depths of your soul that you won’t deprive yourself ever again.

Then, when you really know, in the very core of your being, that you could have this food whenever you wanted, if you really truly want it, you may find that its hold over you diminishes.

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I feel fat and panicky: Part 4

In this final article on feeling fat and panicky, we’ll explore the emotions that accompany it – which can be the most devastating part.

This is because if you’re feeling fat, the shame that accompanies this can be a terrible sensation. It extends beyond the physical and makes us feel that the whole of us is unworthy, that something is wrong with us as a person.

Dealing with these feelings is an important part of getting back to an even keel, as these feelings of self disgust can cause us to eat even more. We feel like giving up on ourselves.

We believe that we should have more ‘self control’ and that getting ourselves into this situation is entirely our fault. And sometimes we believe that we don’t deserve better.

It can be hard to work our way out if we feel like this. Not only have we given up on self-love and ourselves, we’ve given up on hope.

Before I found a different way of eating and of treating myself, I used to feel like this and sometimes the feelings would be so intense that it would seem that the whole of life was pointless. It took me to a very dark place.

When the feelings are bad, it’s best to just take tiny steps, steps that are kind, even when we don’t feel kind to ourselves. It might be something like taking a hot bath, or going to bed when we are tired. It might involve a trip to an art gallery, or taking the time to cook our favourite recipe. The important thing is to be kind to ourselves and to stop the cycle of punishment and hatred.

The weight will come off. It might take a little time, but the bloating that can accompany it, will vanish much faster.

Ensure that your meals are enjoyable. Take time when eating them and try not to nibble in between – promise yourself that you will eat when you are hungry so you don’t have to stave off hunger pangs with incessant nibbling. This will also allow yourself to feeling sensations and emotions that you may be uncomfortable with. These emotions might include sadness, anger, loneliness or even boredom.

Try welcoming these feelings, as though they were small children that you had lost and were rediscovering. Bring them close to your heart and treasure them, even if you have been taught that they are ‘bad’ or ‘unpleasant’. Gorge yourself on these, and watch what happens to your eating.

 

If you’re feeling particularly black, and the shame is too great to approach friends or family, there are lots of support groups from Samaritans to Overeaters Anonymous who are full of compassion for those who are struggling. Please reach out.

 

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I feel fat and panicky: Part 3

You can develop your own plan. It takes a lot more work that reading one in a magazine or buying one from a blog. I work with my clients to develop a plan that works for each of them.

Believe it or not, you already know exactly what will work for you. It’s just been buried beneath all the ‘shoulds’ and rules and guilt. Below all those rules and restrictions, beneath all of the body hatred and lack of trust, is a quiet voice, a still small voice of calm. This voice, the one that we bury with food, the one we don’t listen to, knows things about us that we couldn’t imagine.

It’s this voice that can help develop a way out of the maze of diets and restrictions, of overeating, feeling out of control and then trying to put the lid back on our appetites.

Any way forward, if it is to be successful, needs to be three things:

  • Kind
  • Enjoyable
  • Sustainable.

It needs to feel kind to ourselves – not punitive or restrictive, but loving and compassionate. Unless it is based on this, it’s destined for failure.

Enjoyable: when we enjoy things we do them, we stick to them. Think about what you enjoy eating, the foods that you love. Write a list of all of them and try to make it as long and comprehensive as possible. Then go through the list and think of how you feel when you eat those foods. If you don’t know, or can’t remember, then try them. Have the bowl of pasta and find out whether you feel energised and great afterwards, or tired and sleepy. It might be different on different days.

Sustainable means something that we can do every day. Rather than a diet, which is short term, this needs to be a plan that can last forever.

So, work out when it suits you to eat. When do you get hungry? Is your appetite highest in the morning or later in the day?

As you focus on your preferences for food and what, when and how you like to eat, start developing a plan around that. My clients do this, so that they nourish themselves in a way that works for them. For some, that means they aren’t that fussed about breakfast, whereas others wake up starving.

Make sure you include foods that you enjoy. If you really love chocolate, then banishing it is likely to result in a binge later. Give yourself permission to enjoy it when you really want it, as part of your plan.

 

 

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I feel fat and panicky: Part 2

When we feel fat and ashamed, it’s natural to want to punish ourselves. After all, we ate the food, so it must be our fault that we aren’t as slim as we’d like to be. And a diet is the perfect way to both punish ourselves (by depriving ourselves of what and how we’d like to eat) and to gain control (as we’re scared of how much we might eat if we allowed ourselves) and to lose the weight.

The reason we aren’t as slim as we’d like isn’t because we don’t have enough control. Its because we’ve been subjecting ourselves to TOO MUCH control. There are many many scientific studies that have shown that dietary restriction leads to excess eating, beyond the point of fullness, and beyond the body’s requirements.

The reason we aren’t as slim as we’d like is BECAUSE we’ve been punishing ourselves – depriving ourselves of what we’d like to eat.

We’ve stopped trusting ourselves, stopped trusting our bodies. And the media reinforces this. It tells us that we can’t know what to eat. We need diets, or nutritionists, or television programmes to tell us. No matter that for thousands of years before these existed we managed fine. These days, we’ve been told we can’t be relied on.

If we want to lose weight, we need to eat less than we have been. And if we’re eating less, I recommend that we enjoy every mouthful.

So the first thing to do is to wait until you’re hungry. This again might make you feel panicky. It isn’t about deprivation – this is about listening to when your body is ready for food.

And once those feelings of hunger start, then take some time to imagine what you might like to eat. Chicken salad? Or do you really want something hot? Ask yourself what would make you feel satisfied. Give yourself permission to choose.

Allow yourself food. Tell yourself that you can not only pick what you eat, but that you can take time to enjoy it too. And once you have decided what you’d like, ensure that you sit down, at a table, with a plate, and savour every mouthful. Stop occasionally and ask yourself whether you’ve had enough. It might be tempting to eat more than you want to, because part of you will be scared that a diet is about to start, and it won’t get any more food.

The problem with dieting (or clean eating plans, or whatever we call them), is that we cheat on them. We cheat on them because we don’t like the food, or we get hungry or bored. Or because something happens that means we can’t stick to them: a late meeting, a family dinner, or we’re too busy to do all the preparation required.

And when we cheat then the shame envelops us – it makes us feel as though we’ll never accomplish anything, if we can’t get through a day sticking to the plan.

So how about a new plan? We’ll talk about how to come up with a new plan next time.

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I feel fat and panicky and awful. Part 1

We all have those days (don’t we? Please tell me I’m not the only one…). The days where suddenly none of our clothes fit, when our stomachs bulge, and our upper arms take on the proportions of a Victorian cook pounding dough into submission. And speaking of dough – sometimes that’s exactly what springs to mind when we catch a glimpse of our thighs or our tummies.

Panic rises like vomit in our throats, and the only thing we can think of is to throw ourselves into another diet, to try and beat the body into submission. Because otherwise, we might eat the whole world and spill over our waistbands in a shameful show of excess: excess flesh, excess appetite.

Together with the panic comes a more insidious feeling: shame. We feel ashamed that we don’t look like the pictures in the magazines. We feel ashamed that we aren’t as slim as we used to be or could be. We feel ashamed of our bulges and rolls. We don’t want people to look at us, to touch us. We feel unworthy.

We feel as though we should be ‘in control’:

  • In control of our eating.
  • In control of our weight.
  • In control of our bodies and ourselves.

Yet we feel anything but. We feel as though all control has been lost. Some battle we didn’t even know we were fighting has been surrendered. Part of us wants to go and eat the world in revenge, for comfort, because we may as well, if we’re fat. No point in denying ourselves now.

And yet another part wants to strap on a straitjacket so tight that we’ll never move again. It wants to start a regimen strict enough that only the tiniest morsels will pass our lips, our hips will shrink until our bones show again. The unruly flesh with be controlled. The appetite will vanish.

Somehow, inside us, we know that this straitjacket, the diets or clean-eating and the self-loathing, the need for control, is part of the issue – it’s part of the reason we’re here, hating ourselves, feeling ashamed.

There is another way. A gentler way. How about we talk about that?

 

When we feel fat and ashamed, it’s natural to want to punish ourselves. After all, we ate the food, so it must be our fault that we aren’t as slim as we’d like to be. And a diet is the perfect way to both punish ourselves (by depriving ourselves of what and how we’d like to eat) and to gain control (as we’re scared of how much we might eat if we allowed ourselves) and to lose the weight.

The reason we aren’t as slim as we’d like isn’t because we don’t have enough control. Its because we’ve been subjecting ourselves to TOO MUCH control. There are many many scientific studies that have shown that dietary restriction leads to excess eating, beyond the point of fullness, and beyond the body’s requirements.

The reason we aren’t as slim as we’d like is BECAUSE we’ve been punishing ourselves – depriving ourselves of what we’d like to eat.

We’ve stopped trusting ourselves, stopped trusting our bodies. And the media reinforces this. It tells us that we can’t know what to eat. We need diets, or nutritionists, or television programmes to tell us. No matter that for thousands of years before these existed we managed fine. These days, we’ve been told we can’t be relied on.

If we want to lose weight, we need to eat less than we have been. And if we’re eating less, I recommend that we enjoy every mouthful.

So the first thing to do is to wait until you’re hungry. This again might make you feel panicky. It isn’t about deprivation – this is about listening to when your body is ready for food.

And once those feelings of hunger start, then take some time to imagine what you might like to eat. Chicken salad? Or do you really want something hot? Ask yourself what would make you feel satisfied. Give yourself permission to choose.

Allow yourself food. Tell yourself that you can not only pick what you eat, but that you can take time to enjoy it too. And once you have decided what you’d like, ensure that you sit down, at a table, with a plate, and savour every mouthful. Stop occasionally and ask yourself whether you’ve had enough. It might be tempting to eat more than you want to, because part of you will be scared that a diet is about to start, and it won’t get any more food.

The problem with dieting (or clean eating plans, or whatever we call them), is that we cheat on them. We cheat on them because we don’t like the food, or we get hungry or bored. Or because something happens that means we can’t stick to them: a late meeting, a family dinner, or we’re too busy to do all the preparation required.

And when we cheat then the shame envelops us – it makes us feel as though we’ll never accomplish anything, if we can’t get through a day sticking to the plan.

So how about a new plan? We’ll talk about how to come up with a new plan next time.

 

You can develop your own diet plan. It takes a lot more work that reading one in a magazine or buying one from a blog. I work with my clients to develop a plan that works for each of them.

Believe it or not, you already know exactly what will work for you. It’s just been buried beneath all the ‘shoulds’ and rules and guilt.

 

 

If you’re feeling fat, the shame that accompanies this can be a terrible sensation. It extends beyond the physical and makes us feel that the whole of us is unworthy, that something is wrong with us as a person.

Dealing with these feelings is an important part of getting back to an even keel, as these feelings of self disgust can cause us to eat even more. We feel like giving up on ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Neuroscience is proving what food manufacturers have known for years…

Until recently, research focused on physical hunger, and assumed that being obese meant you were just incredibly hungry and therefore had to eat loads. I suspect a number of us could have told them that eating dessert has nothing to do with feeling hungry or full. And at last, research is catching up.

Michael Lowe, a clinical psychologist at Drexel University coined the term “hedonic hunger” in 2007. He says: “A lot of overeating, maybe all of the eating people do beyond their energy needs, is based on consuming some of our most palatable foods.” No kidding! Please don’t tell me it took years of scientific research to work that out. Who gets fat on cucumber?

Research shows that extremely sweet or fatty foods light up the brain’s reward circuit in the same way that cocaine, drugs, gambling and other ‘addictive’ behaviours do. The brain begins to react to fatty and sugary foods even before they enter our mouth: just seeing them excites the reward circuit. As soon as such it touches the tongue, taste buds send signals to the brain, which ramps up dopamine. The result is an intense feeling of pleasure.

Over time, the brain gets desensitised, so to get the same ‘high’ or pleasurable feeling, we need to eat more. It’s the same with any addiction. We need a bigger and bigger hit. The brain needs a lot more sugar and fat to reach the same level of pleasure that it once felt with smaller amounts of the foods.

This isn’t a sign of us being weak. It’s us being in thrall to an addictive circuit in our brain. When dopamine levels drop, we feel down. So no wonder we turn to fat and sugar. They are literally acting as an anti-depressant. Food is acting like a drug.

Excerpt from ‘Why we Cheat when we Eat and how to stop’.

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When Food is Love…

Some foods can feel like love. They fill us, soothe us, comfort us. They are there for us after a hard day, no matter what. A few mouthfuls later and a sensation of bliss flows through our bodies. It can feel as safe and nurturing as a mother’s embrace, as sublime as a lover’s kiss.

Often, these are foods we have learned to crave since childhood. Strong memories and associations underpin some of the meanings they hold for us. Somewhere in the past we have had experiences where we made a connection between the food and the emotions.

A friend told me: “I’m going home and I just know that Mum is going to ply me with cake. She’ll have baked just for me, and I both want to gorge myself on it, and want to refuse it. Because I’ll feel crap the next day.”

Who wouldn’t want to gorge themselves on their mother’s love? To feel replete with worthiness, safe as a fluffy chick in a nest.

But food isn’t love. And cake isn’t worthiness.

They can feel similar physically, which is part of the mix-up. Both trigger dopamine, and can release endorphins and other chemicals that do indeed make us ‘feel better’. We have a physiological response both to hugs and love, and to certain foods, and that response in our body is close enough for us to get confused. In fact, it not only gets us confused, it can make us rely on  one when the other (usually love) isn’t available, or doesn’t feel like it is.

One of the first things we can do is to recognise that we have conflated the two, confused ourselves by mixing love into the pie.

Then, if we find ourselves turning to food, when what we really want is love, we need to ask what else might serve in its place? Would curling up under a blanket do it? Or walking in nature? Do you need to be with a friend, even if its on the other end of the phone? Or can you bear to be with yourself, take your need for love and treasure it, and love that need in yourself enough that all thoughts of cake fade away?

 

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Should I avoid carbs in the evening?

Some of us try to avoid carbohydrates in the evening, in the hope that it will help us lose weight. We’re told that we’re going to sleep soon, so anything we eat later in the day will just be stored as fat. If we want to eat carbohydrates, then we should eat them earlier, for breakfast, when we are going to burn them off.

Is this true?

The body doesn’t really work like that. If you eat more than you need on any given day, it will be stored as fat, whether it’s carbs you’ve eaten, or fat or even protein. Consume more calories than you’re burning and your body will store it. And it will store it as fat, even if you eat it all at breakfast.

Basically, your body works on physics. It’s a ‘closed system’ and the energy that goes in (food and drink) will be either stored as mass (fat or muscle) or burned as energy (either metabolic processes or exercise).

If you are training hard, are eating a set number of calories and have all of your ‘macros’ down pat (ie the proportions of fat, protein and carbs), then the timing of the carbs might make a small difference. But lets face it, very few of us are doing that.

What matters most to our bodies is calories. Clearly, a more nutrient-dense option is going to be better for our health (brown bread over white). However, if you really want carbs in the evening, then going without is probably going to lead to overeating later.

I really enjoy carbs in the evening. They help the brain release Serotonin, which is a relaxant and anti-depressant. They help me sleep. And I like a bigger meal then. It suits me and if it’s your preference too, then there is no reason not to have it.

What does suit you? Do you like carbs at night?

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Why you still fancy one last diet…

You do, don’t you? Just one last time. And THEN, after that, you’ll address the other things.

When I was in thrall to food, I wrote in my journal:

Another binge… three weeks now. What stops me from eating normally is:

  • Guilt from over eating in the last three weeks
  • Terror at the weight I must have put on
  • A feeling of helplessness and hopelessness that I’ll ever lose it
  • A consequent hatred of my body
  • Disgust and despair at myself

Overeating acts both to blott out those feelings and to punish myself. If I felt attractive and glamorous and interesting, I wouldn’t feel like bingeing.

The terror of the weight, and the terror that my life might be one long endless binge without the constrains of a diet, kept me locked into diets. And diets were the very thing preventing me from being thin.

But the lure, the promise that they make is almost irresistible. There are endless before and after photos, lists of science or pseudo-science that back up the claim.

And if only you could lose those kilograms/pounds, that everything would be alright. Wouldn’t it?

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