your eating, your metabolism is no longer high enough to burn up the added calories without increased exercise. So, unless you do exercise, you gain again and the new weight stays. Over a period of years, your weight goes up instead of down from inconsistent dieting.
• Dieting leads to compulsive eating. For all of the above reasons, you are unable to diet for very long. When you do go off the diet, even if it is just by eating one food at one sitting, you feel so upset with yourself that you decide to eat even more. Or you feel so deprived or resentful from not eating what you want that the diet becomes a trigger to overeat.
c. The Cart Before the Horse
Thinking that losing weight is the answer to all your problems is putting the cart before the horse. The same is true about giving up your compulsive eating. You may say you dislike yourself now because you are overweight and eat too much, but that when you eat normally and get thinner, you will feel good about yourself. You will socialize more, be more assertive, or express your feelings better.
Actually, the reverse is true. You eat because your self-image is poor and because of distortions and misconceptions you have about yourself and others. Overeating compounds the problem, and you feel worse when you are obsessed by weight and food.
You can see that there is a vicious circle between eating and self-image: when you don't like yourself, you overeat; when you overeat, you don't like yourself, etc. When you increase your self-esteem, you decrease your overeating. But if you decrease your overeating only and your self-image remains the same, you will soon return to your pattern of overeating.
Overeating is actually a compensation for the things you feel lacking, and simply eating less or weighing less cannot change that.
d. Steps Toward Positive Action
When you know what factors contribute to your compulsive eating, you can begin to arrange your life so you will have consistent success in reducing it.
There are 10 strategies for change. If that seems like a lot, remember that they are all related to each other. Doing one will affect the others.
(a) Gather information. You must understand what compulsive eating is and how you began. You have to look at what messages you were given as a child about food, about being thin, and about expressing feelings. You need to see how food was used when you were growing up.
(b) Increase awareness. You need to make your eating less automatic by pinpointing what you eat, how much, when, what triggers it, and what foods you crave.
(c) Know your motivation. You must know why you want to change.
(d) Change your habits. You must learn to replace junk foods with healthier ones, eat only what you love and desire, eat slowly, and eat only at a table.
(e) Increase trust in your body. You must become more aware of when you are hungry and when you feel full and trust that if you listen to your body's signals you will weigh less.
(f) Replace myths. You must get rid of misconceptions you have about food, feelings, and fat, and replace them with more rational ideas.
(g) Feed your emotional hunger. You need to identify your feelings and needs, and take care of them without using food to push them away.
(h) Replace negative thinking. You need to increase your self-esteem and give yourself positive messages.
(i) Take control. You must take control of your life by becoming assertive.
(j) Take action. You must replace self-pity and feelings of hopelessness with “doing” and “expressing,” instead of “eating.”
A diet of living, loving, and being makes a diet of overeating impossible.
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