by Libby Weaver
If food, certain beverages, your body, or your weight are areas that you struggle with and argue about in your mind, you can spend your life in search of the right diet or the magic bullet or a time in your life when you are not so stressed and will finally be able to focus on your health. These things never come of their own accord. We always plan to do it tomorrow.
Since you already know how to eat and drink, my words are simply to remind you of what you already know. Some of you may not actually want to hear it even though you tell yourself you’d do anything for better health, a slimmer body, or both. Nature gets it right when it comes to food. So mostly choose these foods. Sure, there can be areas where you might need some guidance for a specific health picture, such as estrogen dominance, anxiety, food intolerances, or insulin resistance. And that is certainly what health professionals are for. And if you are confused about what to eat, then we guide you with that, too. In fact, I always guide people with the practicalities of solving estrogen dominance, anxiety, food intolerances or insulin resistance (for example), so they can start achieving results and also because these changes can be a stepping-stone to the emotions we actually need to explore.
Some emotions don’t surface until you start going without what has been your numbing device: too many sweet foods, bread, coffee, and alcohol. What I am saying is that if you are physically too big for optimal health, then it is usually not a lack of knowledge that got you there. It is not a lack of education that leads you to polish off an entire packet of chocolate cookies. It is biochemical or emotional or both. If it were as simple as applying what you know, then you would have lost weight years ago. In fact, you would never have put it on in the first place. So the question is, why don’t you eat in a way that makes you feel your best? Why? And, as I said, this is not just about body size. It can be just as much about body symptoms such as reflux, sinus congestion, or diarrhea. If you eat or drink something, while in your heart you know it gives you reflux, blocked sinuses, or loose stools, what are you communicating to your body? You’re saying, “I’m not listening.”
Why do we do it? In my opinion, there will be a range of reasons, but they virtually all lead back to the same statement you are subconsciously telling yourself, “I don’t really care about you.” And why don’t you care about yourself? Why will you do more for others than yourself? One reason may be that you live in the cloud of false belief that you are not enough the way you are. Eating in a way that doesn’t serve you is a way to distance yourself from how things are when they are not how you want them to be.
The first way to begin to explore an emotional approach to eating is to go digging for what food means to you. The second way is about cognitively understanding your emotional landscape and the meanings and rules that you touch on regularly that fuel your life. The third is through the examination and the application of the principles and processes of your Em-Matrix (“Em” stands for emotional)—your emotional patterns. There is so much gold right here.
Food is…
As I outlined in the Calories piece of the puzzle, one of the first exercises I do at my weekend events with my clients when they want to get to the heart of why they overeat (or over consume alcohol, although we will focus on food here), is to ask them to complete the following sentence with the first word that flies into their head, no censorship.
I say, “Food is…” and they respond: “Yummy,” “Delicious,” “A pain in the neck,” “Life,” “Love,” “My whole world,” “Comfort,” “Amazing.” These are all words that quickly and easily fly out of people’s mouths. For someone who has gained and lost the same 45–110lb (20–50kg) over the years, food frequently falls into the “pleasure” category. If I am going to guide someone to change the way they eat, and food is their biggest source of pleasure in life, if I don’t delve into what else this person finds pleasurable and point this out and encourage them to experience more of this in their lives (such as connecting with the beauty of nature, their faith, or how playful their puppy is), the food changes will be temporary. Food either needs a new meaning, such as nourishment, or energy, or the other pleasure factors need amping-up in this person’s life. Even just being aware of what food means to you is a great first step.
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Case Study
One of my favorite examples to share about how this simple process changed a client’s after-dinner food frenzy comes from a precious lady for whom food was mostly comfort. Julie had experienced huge emotional trauma, and, afterward, food had become her friend, her sweetness, and her joy in life. When she came to see me, she said she was so desperate to lose the weight, she believed it had affected her work, as her job was in the public spotlight and she was embarrassed by her growing size. When I did the “Food is…” exercise with her, it become clear that what she wanted was comfort.
I asked her how else she might find comfort in a way that did not involve food. She had spoken about how much she treasured her beloved, young daughters, and from her descriptions they sounded very sweet. I felt that when she ate in the evenings what she really wanted was a hug, to be comforted emotionally by another human, or by something bigger (in a spiritual sense), rather than by food. I asked her if she ever stood at the door of her girls’ bedrooms and watched them sleeping. Tears immediately sprang to Julie’s eyes. As Mark Twain said, “Any emotion if it is sincere, is involuntary,” so I immediately knew this was meaningful to her. I suggested that, each evening after the girls had gone to bed, Julie complete her usual evening rituals in the kitchen and, instead of going straight to the refrigerator and then into the lounge for a private sweet feast and the TV, she go to her girls and watch them sleeping. I suggested she notice their breathing, the little lights in their rooms, their innocence, the delicate smell of their hair, and the way their arms poked out from beneath the covers. I invited her to take comfort from their presence in her life. I reminded her that she created them and that, for now, if the only way I could get her to appreciate how truly amazing she was, was by focusing on the little girls she had brought into this world, then that would be the best “medicine” in the world for her.
We both cried, and Julie knew with conviction that she had her perfect answer. After just four weeks of practice, her weight had fallen, and she had not even heard the call of sweet food. She had sweetness in spades watching her children sleep.
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Another point worthy of mention is that of food waste. So many people eat too much food because they don’t want to waste it, a behavior that is often derived from childhood experiences. A client once told me that she had chickens in her backyard so she could give all of her leftovers to them. That was how she “managed” her challenge with throwing food out. For some, it simply takes a change of perception: Whether you throw it out or you overeat, either way it is a waste.
Understand your meanings and rules: The fuel for your life
Humans store fat when they do not feel safe, whatever that means to them. I don’t necessarily mean safe from burglary, but rather psychologically safe. On a physical level, I can relate such fat storage back to cortisol and the many downstream effects of this catabolic, metabolism-slowing hormone. Yet to crack that cortisol challenge, emotions hold the true key.
Each of us have rules about what it means for us to feel safe—typically in the areas of relationships, finance, and work—as a result of the life experiences we have had to date. Trouble is, we don’t usually know what these rules are. The life experiences to which I am referring don’t have to be traumatic. Not in the slightest. What I am referring to are all of the experiences of your life, traumatic or not, that have shaped your personality, your bank balance, your relationships, your responses, and your body size, to name just a few.
Everyone creates explanations about what things mean based on their own experiences in life so far. They are created from the interactions we had as children with the adults around us. As adults, we continue to replay these same meanings, only we are not aware we are d
oing it. All we know is that we seem to react to people and what they say, or they always seem to react to us in what seems like an unpredictable or inappropriate way, or we forever find ourselves in conflict with certain people. It’s like an itch that constantly gets scratched. You are often unaware that this is what’s behind so much struggle or suffering in your life (and also the good stuff when the meanings serve you), including your relationship with food, your body, with alcohol, or with your partner. There are some meanings that serve us and some that no longer do. Some are simply outdated protection mechanisms that were set up because of experiences earlier in your life. And where once they might have kept you safe, now they simply hold you back.
The meanings and rules to which I am referring were (and still are being) written by your subconscious mind, the part of your brain that makes your heart beat and your hair grow without you having to tell them to do so. This part of your nervous system is estimated to process two to four million pieces of information per second, while your conscious mind only (!) processes around 134 pieces of information per second. Think about that. I mean, really think about that. Your subconscious is extremely powerful.
Specific meanings and rules
The psychology of eating is a fascinating area. In every person, there are emotions that, although we don’t realize it, are incredibly painful for us to feel. These are typically rejection, failure, and guilt. There are many more, but for simplicity’s sake I will keep it to these three. All three may be a factor for someone, but there is almost always one that stands out. Many women, for example, are what I endearingly call “love bugs.” Although men also, of course, find rejection painful, as adults the fear of feeling this emotion is often buried under another emotion they fear such as failure. Ouch!
A love bug functions between two polarities every day: love and rejection. Replace the word “love” with “connection” or “appreciation,” if that helps you relate to this idea, but I’ll keep using “love” to keep it simple. Without realizing it, we behave as if we want a life jam-packed with love—caring for others and ourselves, feeling appreciated and understood, living without conflict, the list is almost endless. Yet psychology 101 teaches us that humans will do more to avoid pain than they will ever do to have pleasure. So instead of behaving in a way that drives a life of love, we spend our lives trying to avoid rejection… and those two lives look very different.
Based on our life experiences, we have rules in our subconscious minds about what has to happen for us to feel love and rules about what has to happen for us to feel rejected. Most of us make it really easy for ourselves to feel the emotion we actually want to avoid—in this case—rejection. Simultaneously, our rules around love make it really hard for us to feel it easily or constantly. An example that has brought tears to countless women’s eyes during a session is this one.
You drop your son at the school gate and catch the eye of another mum you have previously noticed and admired. For the first time, you have a lovely chat and although there may be no conscious thought about this event lifting your spirits, you carry on happily with your day. But that afternoon, when you collect your son from school, your new acquaintance doesn’t speak to you. You feel like she snubs you. She looks straight through you. You wonder what you’ve done wrong. Did you offend her? Did you embarrass yourself? Did you mistake her interest in you when really she just had no one better to talk to? Did she only speak to you because not many other mums were around that morning? Are you not dressed well enough for her to connect with you this afternoon in front of others? You think to yourself that you’ve never fitted in with that crowd—with those types of women—anyway. Isn’t it exhausting what we put ourselves through?
What you’ve actually touched on in this moment is what I have come to call your “not enoughness,” an inkling—or a gaping wound—that you are not good enough; not OK the way you are. And for the millionth time in your life, you scratch this itch. Unfortunately, you don’t realize that this is what you’re doing—and what you have probably done many times in the past. All you know is that now you feel sad or irritated. You may start focusing on how big your thighs look in your jeans (not thin enough) or how you haven’t phoned your sister for weeks (not a good enough sister) or other negative self-talk. And you might decide you want some wine or some food that doesn’t really benefit you. As soon as you have even had this thought, you feel a little bit better because now you have something to look forward to and you’ve shifted your focus from your perception of your not enoughness to something that brings you pleasure. All you are doing is attempting to escape emotional pain.
Again, it’s unlikely that you will consciously make the connection between your new acquaintance at the school gate, your “I’m not good enough” button, and your mood, but rather than easing through your afternoon, you feel flat and frustrated. Or perhaps you are simply in a bad mood, despite looking forward to your cake, your crackers, or your wine—or all of the above—when your morning had been rather delightful or at least not emotionally eventful. Yet who is usually on the receiving end of your sullen or irritated mood? Most often, without thinking, you direct it toward yourself and also the people you love the most in this world.
Of course it’s obvious, you tell yourself, that your new acquaintance is too embarrassed to speak to you when certain other mothers are around because you’ve gained weight this year. So, just to prove to yourself that you really aren’t good enough, you eat. Without realizing it, you want to escape the emotional pain of feeling like you are not enough—and therefore won’t be loved—and prove yourself right; that you are, indeed, useless and have no willpower. No wonder you are fat, you tell yourself; that must be why people don’t like you and your mother/father told you that you were an embarrassment.
And it was actually way back then, starting with some throwaway comment your mother or father made, when you first felt “not good enough.” Not that they meant to hurt your feelings. As adults we consciously know that the way someone behaves is a reflection of them, not you, but your conscious mind isn’t running your life in these moments. In fact you can’t see any of this when you are in the throes of inhaling a box of crackers, half a block of cheese, and a few glasses of white wine…
As for your own family, or whoever else is on the receiving end of your change in mood, they don’t understand why you are quiet or why you are overreacting to things that didn’t bother you yesterday, or what they seem to have done wrong. Of course they haven’t done anything. The bottom line is you feel rejected by your new acquaintance.
Through food and/or wine, you have simply escaped from the “pain,” from the deep, human, primal fear that you are not good enough and therefore you won’t be loved. And built in to the autonomic nervous system of a baby human is the belief that love is essential to your survival—because it is. You can’t obtain your own food, clothing and shelter. Yet as adults, we know that a life with love in it is delicious, but we can also survive without it, as we can find our own food, clothing and shelter. Yet the vast majority of adults still live their lives as if love is essential to their survival. So when they scratch the itch of their not enoughness, the fear that they won’t be loved is triggered and to an adult brain and heart that has never explored this, that leads you to feel as if your life itself is under threat. So to escape from your pain, you eat or drink too much or engage in some other activity to distract yourself.
What if I told you that your acquaintance at the school gate didn’t see you that afternoon or she didn’t register seeing you? You will tell me that you saw her see you. I will then suggest you ask yourself what many have found to be a life-changing question… “I wonder what might be going on for her?” We react to situations as if life revolves around us, as if every person’s response or reaction is about us. That’s how children are: egocentric. Don’t take offense at the word “egocentric.” It simply means that you believe that others are the way they are because of you. From an emotional maturation per
spective, children are supposed to be egocentric. But we are supposed to evolve emotionally over time yet we aren’t really taught strategies to do this, so too many people don’t catch a glimpse of what is really at the heart of their overeating, or the other ways we employ to escape from emotional pain.
When we enquire within ourselves and wonder what might be going on for another person it opens us to insights and connection, rather than judgment and separation. Do you know what it is like to be her? How do you know that she doesn’t have a million things to do before she gets home, where she has to make sure the house is perfect and the children are bathed and fed so that when her husband arrives home he won’t raise his voice and tell her that she is useless and does nothing all day? What if a raised voice is her ultimate pain because her mother or father told her the same thing in the same way?
Her perceived “snub” had nothing to do with you and, whatever her story, her “snub” speaks volumes about her; her pain, her attitudes, her losses, her fears, her inattention, her loss of presence in that moment, her focus on her child, her to-do list… Love bugs need to ask, “I wonder what might be going on for them” quite regularly, until they can stop the daggers of “rejection” from penetrating their hearts. I had a client for whom this question changed not just her life but her body, and I will never forget the glee on her face when she told me it had freed her from what she called “agony,” which involved secret eating after dinner and awful self-talk as a consequence. She literally looked as though years had come off her face just from this new understanding.