Are you struggling with eating out of control?
Overwhelmed by feelings of sadness and shame, about your body, but don’t know how to give voice to your hurts? Is it easier to just stuff another extra bite of food in your mouth and pretend to call it a day?
It may seem easier for now, but doing that over the long term will only lead you into a life of heart problems and eventually you’ll die.
There is a better way to change your relationship with food and feel safe in and proud of your body at any size.
If you’re a sexual abuse survivor, you need to face your past and step into a place of power in order for you to break the cycle of self-abusive eating.
If this blog post upsets you, please take responsibility for your well-being and skip to another blog post better suited to your needs.
I’d like to share some discoveries I’ve made along the road that have given me a great deal of self-compassion, peace and ease around my sometimes still rocky relationship with food.
As the author of the book, “Lovin’ the Skin You’re In,” I give women tools to manage their emotional eating and teach them how to feel loving and respectful of their bodies at any size. I don’t advocate dieting and I take a strong stand against pushing your body to lose weight.
I have learned from deeply painful and personal experience that if you lose weight before your body feels ready to let it go, it will be a short matter of time before you regain all the weight you lost and more.
Studies bear this out and prove that up to 98% of all people who diet regain the weight back within 2-5 years of losing weight.
The reason why is because emotional eating can not be controlled by dieting.
Diets only teach people how to restrict and fear food. If you’re an emotional
eater, you must make peace with yourself in order to neutralize the many
triggers that encourage you to use food to soothe your hurts.
The following contains details about my sexual abuse which have been purposely omitted from my book, “Lovin’ the Skin You’re In”
How to Generate Feelings of Self-Compassion Despite Having a Sexually Abusive Background
When my parents divorced, I was separated from a dad I adored. My mom started dating a man who shortly after courting my brother and I with kindness and respect, revealed himself as one of a stable of sexual predators with a predilection for molesting little girls in general and me in particular. Soon after he married my mom, things went from bad to worse.
My mom suffered with bipolar and never had a clue to what was going on under her nose. Because she trusted her new husband, she left me in his care to attend her weekly Cancer Care meetings.
By the time I was 11 years old I had been sexually abused by so many
nameless and faceless men including my step father. It was as though I had a sex toy label on my forehead attracting every male pedophile in the neighborhood.
I felt so unsafe in my body, ashamed and filled with pain.
I grew up using food to hide in an effort to create a buffer of fat to protect me from all those prying fingers.
Because of that, my relationship with food became twisted and confused. I had learned how to use it to pacify my emotions and make the pain go away.
A couple years later, I finally got to move back in and live with my father and step mother, Rosie. I finally felt safe again.
Seeing that my weight had balooned out of control, my dad and Rosie took me to the doctor seeking answers. Dad was confounded and unaware of
why I had gained so much weight. After thoroughly discussing the gravity of my health condition with the doctor, dad and Rosie tried everything they could to get my weight under control and inhibit me from overeating.
Not having any clue of the dark secrets that I hid locked up in my heart, they assumed my weight gain and heart issues were due to a lack of self-control.
In a desperately misguided attempt to get me healthy and safe, dad used every method possible to scare me into losing weight. My body and my eating habits became a family obsession with each member of the family given a task to support me in weight loss.
My dad was in charge of keeping me active, running, playing tennis with him or jumping on a trampoline. In order to eat a healthy lunch, every day I went to my Nana’s and ate specially prepared foods designed to lower my calories and fill me up with fiber.
Each Friday before sitting down to eat lunch, I stood fully clothed on Nana’s bathroom scale and my dad weighed me and gave me a lecture, with me usually ending up in tears.
Rosie took me shopping and endured my fitting room frenzies. My nana was in charge of preparing healthy foods and making sure that I come home to lunch each day to a plate of steamed vegetables and fruit.
I felt like a prisoner, enslaved by my cravings for food and the fat on my chunky little body.
But I loved my dad so much and I’ll always be grateful to him and think of him as my savior and rescuer. I yearned for his approval so I justified that it was okay for him to talk to me with such disrespect and meanness in talking about my weight. Nana always used to say, “That’s the way daddy shows that he cares.”
Many experiences of being caught in lies and “cheating” on my diet to
support my junk food habit, made it clear to me that I was a bad girl and I
lacked will power and self control. I wanted to so much for my dad to approve of me and love me but the stakes were so high. I couldn’t seem to stay away from my beloved food.
To earn the gift of a gentle and loving pat on the head by dad and see his beaming and proud smile, all I had to do was to just fight my desire to eat everything that wasn’t nailed down.
I had to get tougher, pull myself up by the bootstraps and treat myself like a naughty child who was always in need of discipline.
Dad had a tendency to be very gruff, demanding and intimidating, and because he must have been so uncomfortable with physical affection, he never touched or hugged me. He was always very matter of fact in his monotone voice unless he was screaming
and cursing to intimidate. His words cut like knives.
I was never really very good at being gentle with myself. Wanting to emulate him, I
picked up a lot of his habits. By the time I was a teenager, I learned to
motivate myself by trash talking my body and taking the tone of a drill
sargeant, reminding myself that I was already as fat as a house and if I ate that
ice cream, I’d only get fatter.
In my
20’s, I thought that I was outsmarting myself when I made the decision to stop
buying the kinds of foods that had that hypnotic food frenzy effect on me.
Sometimes it worked. Othertimes it failed miserably and I found my spoon
hitting the bottom of yet another Ben & Jerry’s container of Mint Oreo
Cookie ice cream. All along I could hear my dad’s voice saying, G@@ Damn it,
Andrea, just stop eating.”
Then
after over 20 years of crazed dieting, I learned that it wasn’t the food that
was the problem, it was the way that I had learned to talk to myself. I learned
that having will power doesn’t necessarily ensure success.
Will Power: Short Term Motivation
In her book, Adventures In EFT, author Sylvia Hartmann talks about the role of willpower in relationship to goal setting. She explains that will power is only
meant to function on a short term basis, such as a mother running to rescue her
child from danger. An adrenal rush would give the mother the strength to lift up
a car to free the child, but if that amount of energy were required to be
sustained for any length of time, it would be impossible. It’s the same with
will power.
Hartmann
says, “for almost everyone in every society, having a “lot of
willpower” to run roughshod over one’s personal inclinations, emotions,
intuitions, fears and insecurities is some kind of perverse badge of
honor.”
It’s easy
to talk yourself into something and use tricks and mental rewards to reach a
short term goal like hurling yourself out of bed in the morning, but that kind
of grin ‘n bear it, “I don’t really want to do it”, mental-push
energy demand can’t be endured for long. If you want to get up and out of bed
easily and effortlessly, you have to be excited about getting to where you need
to go. You have to have something to look forward to, a goal that makes it easy
to get up. In order to create change without resistance, it’s necessary to
create a sense of flow and ease. Being hard on yourself and creating pain
talking to yourself with disrespect and meanness does not ensure a positive
result.
After
many years, living with and later working for my father who had no sense of
tact or emotional intelligence, I realized that it was necessary to set
boundaries with him and change the way that I allowed him to speak to me. When
I told him that was no longer okay and set limits on our relationship, soon
after he just disappeared from my life. It was heartbreaking and for years I
blamed myself for pushing him away. But now I know that he had his own
unresolved issues that made it impossible for him to relate to me in a more
gentle and respectful way.
It’s that toughness that comes with dieting that makes it so hard to stay on track. This is
why most diets don’t work. With all the restriction and don’ts, you end up
feeling like a prisoner, always wanting what you can’t have. It’s a constant
fight and struggle to maintain your will power to stay away from fattening
foods.
But
imagine what would it be like if you learned that you could trust yourself,
listen to your body, feel safe surrounded by the foods you love and know that
you won’t necessarily overeat? How would your life change if your relationship
with food and your body were built upon a foundation of love and trust?
How Do
You Want Your Motivation To Be Served Up?
Let me
ask you– What makes you feel better about yourself? Do you prefer to get your
slice of motivation by someone who barks at you and talks down to you or do you
feel more inclined to believe in yourself when someone you love speaks to you
with tenderness and respect? Now imagine how things would start to change if
you started speaking to yourself in that same way? Wouldn’t that degree of
support make you feel unstoppable. It sure does it for me. I’ve got to tell
you. By making the choice to transform my nasty inner critic’s grinding, whiny
voice and change it to my Nana’s softspoken, gentle voice, I am so much nicer
to myself than I’ve ever been. Who do you know, either alive or deceased whose
voice could inspire the best in you? Give this a try and see what comes up.
Leave a comment and share what you discovered.