Food was the glue that kept me together.
Some folks with excess weight just eat a bit too much. Emotional eaters like me, however, use food as a fix: I abused food, just as an alcoholic misuses booze, stuffing myself in an attempt to fill an inner emptiness. For many of us, though, there is not enough food on the planet to fill the gaping hole within our souls. I know—I tried.
During my compulsive overeating days, I spent my time bingeing; hoarding and hiding food; making food my best friend; sneak eating; taking pills to curb my appetite; going to diet doctors; gaining and losing a gazillion pounds; trying different fad diets; hating myself; loathing my body; making and breaking countless self-promises; and feeling helpless and hopeless. I ate frozen food that tasted like cardboard; I finished the food off my children's plates; I retrieved food that had been thrown away; I confiscated my students' candy and ate it myself. I expressed lots of dishonesty around food, masquerading as the supreme dieter in public and experiencing out-of-control bingeing in private.
My behavior around food was a closely guarded secret for decades. But not anymore. After years of psychotherapy, working the Twelve Steps, and doing focused personal-growth work, I have gained insight and understanding as to why I became an emotional eater at an early age and why compulsive overeating became such a driving force in my life. Fortunately, I have recovered from my binge eating disorder, and the tools I used are presented here. I share my journey candidly so that others may benefit from my experiences.
Tools
As I disclose my ordeals with food and out-of-control eating, I am telling the story of millions of others who use food to self-soothe. With the focus on recovery, however, I share the modalities that worked for me, including the spiritual approach I first encountered in support groups using Twelve-Step Recovery. No one method will work for every person, and rest assured that successful use of this book does not depend on adherence to a Twelve-Step Program. I didn't adapt the Alcoholics Anonymous program to my food issues by myself—it's served as a model for many over the years. Overeaters Anonymous (OA), for instance, began in 1960 and uses the same Twelve Steps as AA, substituting the word food for alcohol. It is open to anyone with issues around food, including those with binge eating disorder, bulimia, and anorexia. Other Twelve-Step groups dealing with food issues include Food Addicts Anonymous (FAA), Eating Addictions Anonymous (EAA), Food Addicts in Recovery Anonymous (FA), and Eating Disorders Anonymous (EDA). These, plus more, are listed in the back of the book under Resources.
Although many people, including me, have achieved remarkable recovery with the help of a Twelve-Step support group, I know that some of you are not drawn to that approach. And that's perfectly okay. This book introduces you to a range of wonderfully effective self-help tools, such as Inner Child work, creative visualizations, journaling, and various energy techniques that together can help you rewire your brain to stop craving food.
In my own work as a teacher and psychotherapist, I use some approaches that fall under the umbrella of energy psychology. Based in Eastern medicine, energy psychology is sometimes described as needleless acupuncture. It is a relatively new term to describe various modalities or approaches that use the body's energy systems to create change for the individual. Many energy psychology techniques employ repeating an affirmation while tapping or touching acupressure points to release unpleasant emotions or to eliminate cravings. These techniques are highly effective at diminishing anxiety and other uncomfortable feelings that send many of us directly to the cookie jar. In fact, without also working on the body's energy system, thinking and reason alone rarely work.
Using This Book
I recommend keeping a computer or notebook nearby while you read. Though you're of course free to mark up the margins as much as you like, this book isn't meant to be a workbook, so there's not much blank space. You can download the workbook for free, however, and have space to do your own writing. Go to www.stopeatingyourheartout.com/Workbook2.
The bulk of this book is devoted to my twenty-one-day program for releasing you from your emotional dependence on food, but first I want to tell you my own story. You'll find that in chapter 1. Each subsequent chapter (except the last) covers three days, with a new tool introduced each day to add to your own toolbox. You might choose to do an assignment in a day, or you might want to take a whole week to do one. That's entirely up to you. Of course, if you take more than a day, the process outlined here will take more than twenty-one days. But once you have completed all the assignments, you will have all the tools you need to recover from emotional eating. These are tools that you can use over and over again or just once. However you need them to work, they will. The final chapter of the program, Conscious Living, discusses ways to keep using the contents of your personal toolbox as you continue to forge your new life, free from emotional eating.
For many years, I thought I was terminally unique. But the more I shared myself, the more I realized that others had the same thoughts, the same actions, and the same beliefs I did. If you are anything like I was, you've been waiting a long time to conquer your battle with food and self-hatred. You're not alone. Begin this next phase of your journey by turning the pages and encountering many new techniques. Please try them all, and then pick and choose the ones you find most useful to create your own individualized toolbox. In so doing, you will alleviate the compulsive overeating as you transform yourself and your relationship to food. In the words of English novelist and critic Aldous Huxley, “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
Chapter 1
My Story: The Making and Breaking of a Compulsive Overeater
We must go beyond our history to arrive at our destiny.
—ALAN COHEN, DARE TO BE YOURSELF
“SEE THOSE FAT PEOPLE OVER there?” my father asked as we drove down the street, his finger pointing at a group of overweight people.
“Yes, Daddy,” I replied.
“You don't ever want to look like that!” he admonished.
I was an impressionable eight-year-old girl. It was the 1950s, a time when looking good mattered most. World War II had ended the previous decade, and with no external war to contend with, many families like ours focused on social appearance and physical attractiveness. Airlines had stewardesses, not flight attendants, who were obligated to conform to specific weight, height, and age requirements. They had to look good to keep their jobs. This was the time of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best—those happy TV families with the pearl-wearing housewives decked out in heels, even at breakfast. I was part of a looking-good family in a looking-good culture, most of us holding the belief that in order to be accepted, we must look acceptable. And, having weight issues ever since I was a little kid, I felt like the ugly duckling of the family.
Children like to please their parents; the praise it evokes feels good. I made my parents very happy by being an amiable and obedient child. And, as a charter member of the Clean Plate Club, I was commended at mealtime for eating and finishing all the food in front of me—beginning when I was a baby in a highchair. The conditioning had begun.
Always eager to do what was expected of me, I was mortified when, as a three-year-old, I misunderstood my parents and felt humiliation for the first time: My mother walked into the living room and saw my feet thrust into the playpen, which also contained my baby sister. When my mother asked what I was doing, I calmly replied that she had said
