Gals: For solutions to your challenges with emotional eating, take advantage of The Juicy Woman’s free offer of email coaching on Fridays between 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. Eastern.
http://thejuicywoman.blogs.com/my_weblog/2010/01/fabulous-fridays-with-andrea-open-house-for-questions-to-my-juicy-woman-yahoo-group-members.html
If you’re a gal struggling with emotional eating, tired of sitting on the fence fearing food, and hating your body, I’m here with some solutions for you.
Just wanted to let you know that today after I opened up my virtual office door and mentioned that I would be available this morning and the next several Fridays for a l’il bit of live email coaching, to support the members of my Juicy Woman Yahoo Group, I heard from a woman in the UK named Jan. Here’s an excerpt of the email she sent followed by my response to her:
Hi Andrea,
I find I really make myself restrict what I eat because I am so hung up and untrusting of myself around food. Then, because I am not eating as much as I need, let alone want, my poor old body gets so starving that I find I’m going round with my teeth clenched tight virtually all the time. This makes me feel so extra-tense, because I feel so ravenous, I think, “Goodness, my hunger is like a raging wolf, and if I ever let it out, it would eat everything in sight,” and then I get even more tense and untrusting. Eventually, of course, I always break and do eat everything in sight. Then I feel bad, restrict what I eat and…well, I don’t have to carry on, do I?
The thing is I know I should not restrict myself so much in the beginning so as not to start the vicious circle in the first place, but I just can’t seem to stop it because the fear of overeating/binging is just so huge. I try again and again to overcome this fear, but I just can’t seem to do it, and it’s ruining everything. I just can’t trust me. And if I tell myself, “OK, you don’t need to be perfect. Let yourself make a “mistake” and overeat, it’s not so terrible, and it’s a way to learn,” I just get so anxious, it’s a non-starter. I am terrified. I know this is the way, the only way, to go, but I am terrified, paralysed and like the proverbial rabbit in the headlights.
Here’s my response to Jan:
Dear Jan,
Thank you for taking the time to ask your question and kick off my first of my Fabulous Fridays with Andrea. I’ll do what I can to give you some on the spot coaching and some much needed relief.
Naturally I’m going to urge you to make the decision to stop dieting. But as a gal who’s already been in your shoes, and one who knows what it’s like to contemplate the decision that you’re facing along with the fear, I understand that you need to go at your own pace. In order for you to gain the ease that you’re seeking around food, it’s so important to take a new approach and to see food in a new light.
Up until now, you’ve probably been consumed with fear thinking about all the fat and calories in every piece of whatever morsel you’re about to eat. But now I want you to start thinking about what life would be like without all the fear and doubts connected to your many challenges and issues around food and your weight. Can you imagine all the space that would be left to think about other things besides the same old, same old?
My first question to you would be what would you do with all that time and if food and weight were not a challenge for you, what would you invest your thoughts and ideas on instead?
Is there a relationship you have in need of more work? or are you feeling challenged with an old belief, is there a position or job that you want that you just don’t feel able to get?
Since I don’t know of your particular circumstances, I can only share my personal experience. If someone would have told me 3 years ago that the problem was not what I was eating, but what was eating me, I would have been saved the headache of gaining 35 pounds because I just couldn’t stop eating.
I suppose that you could say that I’ve already lived your worst nightmare of gaining weight after deciding to stop dieting and I’m here to tell the story so that you won’t make the same mistake that I did.
The first and most important thing for you to consider is that unless you are willing to really take in hand whatever is bugging you in life, when you stop dieting you will most certainly gain weight because with a ravenous appetite and no restrictions, you will only be increasing the amount of your calorie intake.
Now I don’t want to scare you off completely from taking the leap to non dieting, but I want to ensure that you do so with your eyes wide open. In order for you to enjoy the same blissful and easy experience that my clients had when I was teaching them to integrate the intuitive eating techniques along with the stress relief strategies, you must do both at the same time.
Don’t make my mistake and just assume that making the decision to stop dieting will move you along the road to peace. As I wrote in my book, I believe it is the first step to making peace with your body and gaining self acceptance, but in order to truly appreciate it, you must use the stress relief techniques that I teach.
Also I completely understand why you are doing your best to undereat, but as you said, it’s a losing game, and not in a good way. Because you feel so deeply deprived and unable to trust yourself, it’s so understandable that the first moment your will power of steel cracks under the constant pressure of an ordinary stressful day, you’ll find yourself back at square one eating out of control.
I don’t know if you read my free 80 page excerpt of my book, but if not, you can opt into the list and get those free pages at http://andreaamadorcoaching.com But the story that I want to draw to your attention is one from my own personal experience. Like you, I swore that I had a raging appetite and left to my own devices, I would devour the entire contents of the kitchen, but a startling discovery with a single rancid potato chip led me to realize that belief, “I am a garbage can. I have a bottomless appetite was not true.
It came from years of being told that I had no self control, lacked discipline and all that nonsense. As a result my fear of trusting myself around food, not only played out by creating a severe dysfunction around my relationship with food and my body, but it also slithered into every other area of my life.
In NLP, this is called generalizing. It generalized and swept over my life and kept me believing that I was not in control. One of the things that led me to have that first Aha that I could be in control of food was the process that I created called the Mindful and Gentle Eating Process. Even doing it without the benefit of applying the stress relief techniques that I urge you to learn, I was able to learn how to be discriminating around food. This is one of the key elements that you need to acquire in order to gain the confidence with food that you seek. I highly recommend that you read and apply that process at least 3 times during the next week and let me know how it goes for you.
Perhaps you can relate to Jan’s quandary. Like so many women, Jan is terrified of the prospect of gaining weight so she sits on the fence afraid of her worst fears and unable to do anything but continue to starve herself for as long as she can until the moment comes and she can no longer hold on and she gives into her binges, later hating herself and judging this as her weakness.
If you like, you can join the group or if you’re a member, you can jump in and offer more solutions to Jan and ask for some yourself. Then maybe when next Friday comes ’round, I’ll answer your question. Here’s the link to join:
overeating, body image, Emotional Freedom Technique, The Juicy Woman, fat, diet,