As Geneen Roth, author of Feeding the Hungry Heart, so eloquently puts it, “compulsive eating is a reaction to a set of circumstances about which we feel hopeless and helpless, about which we feel defeated.” In other words, compulsive eating is not a lack of will-power or lack of discipline but rather a response to a series of situations in our life that we feel we can’t control.

We are also bombarded by the media showing us thin women eating all the foods typically associated with bingeing. The message we get as women is to be thin and starve ourselves, but to eat and we will be happy. Therefore, we internalize the double message of “have your cake and eat it too. Eating will make you happy, eating will make you miserable.”

Since thinness is an obsession in this country, it is important to understand that, in order to lose weight and gain control over your eating, you must first work on the other areas of your life that you don’t have control over. Secondly, it is important to create a better image while losing weight by changing your attitude. For example, there is a temptation to postpone buying clothes until you lose weight, which only leads to more self-hate and bingeing. This season, you can start losing weight by following some of the techniques we use at Solutions:

1. Clean out your closets of all the clothes that are too small for you.

2. Buy yourself one or two pretty outfits now. Today, designers are making beautiful clothing in larger sizes. Remember, you are a worthwhile person. It is another form of self punishment and deprivation not to respect yourself enough to dress as attractively as possible, whatever size you are.

3. If you woke up today at your ideal weight, how would your life be different? What would you do with all the time and energy you have spent being obsessive about food and your body? How would you spend the day? Instead of getting up each morning hating yourself (which only perpetuates more bingeing and low self-esteem), spend a few minutes visualizing yourself with a perfect body before you get out of bed.

4. When you are able to do these visualizations daily, notice how you walk and carry yourself with pride, pretending that you are already at your goal weight. The more you practice this technique, the easier it will be to create and achieve your ideal weight.

5. We now understand that doing visualizations and making positive affirmations is not just hocus-pocus, but has been scientifically proven to help depression and a number of immune diseases. Self-hate, in my opinion, is a disease caused by low self esteem and negative attitudes. It can be changed by creating a new image of your self, and developing a more positive attitude.

6. Finally, I share with you three of the many kinds of visualizations I have personally used to help me lose 250 pounds:

“I am getting thinner and thinner every day.”

“I eat like a naturally thin person.”

“I love myself and respect my body.”

Say them over and over to yourself each day; write them down and place them in strategic places around your home and office to remind you to repeat them. And remember, they don’t work overnight. Give yourself at least a month and you will be surprised at the changes.

GENES FOR MORE FAT CELLS
FAT CELLS UNDER CONTROL

Clermont-Ganneau Mission, 1898

“Betty can eat anything and not gain an ounce! I hate her!”

Everyone knows someone like Betty. She is the one at the bridge party who arrives looking slim and elegant, and then proceeds to eat the sandwiches, bridge mix, nuts and anything else that the hostess has to offer. Everyone else is self-consciously turning down anything caloric and opting, instead, for the no-cal seltzer.

Betty leaves the table to powder her nose and, as soon as she is out of earshot, the complaining begins.

“How does she do it? I’d be embarrassed to eat a tenth of what she just put away.”

“I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and I haven’t lost an ounce. But I swear to you, Betty looks as if she’s thinner this week.”

“Don’t you wish you had her genes?”

Freeze Frame! Stop the Action!

How often have you heard that question? How often have you said that the reason that some people are thin is because of their genes? And how often has someone shot back with the remark, “why don’t you just zip up your mouth and stop eating. People are fat because they eat too much!”

Well, maybe that observation is only half wrong.

A scientific study completed in Denmark suggests that some people are born with more fat cells than others. This means that they have more storage capacity for holding on to fat and growing fat, or adipose tissue, than others. If this is so, consider those four women at the bridge party.

As a group, they exercise together, play tennis together and meet daily for lunch. Of the four, only Betty remains thin without having to count calories. The others notice that, despite their wholesome habit of daily exercise, when they eat as much as Betty does, they gain weight. They have gradually come to realize that Betty is different in a number of ways:

1. Her natural metabolic rate is higher than theirs so that, even when she skips exercise, she continues to burn up calories. They, on the other hand, become sluggish without exercise, their metabolic rates returning to so low a level that eating “normally” causes them to put on weight.

2. Her body frame is narrow, evidence of an ectomorphic body type, and there has always been very little fat on her. They, on the other hand, are large framed with broad hips that have always had considerable body fat which, with great effort, remains minimally evident.

Whether Betty’s friends know it or not, they have adopted ideal eating behavior. True, they will continue to envy Betty for not having to care about calories or exercise or overeating. But they have their fat cells under control. They exercise daily, thus raising their metabolic rates to burn up more calories, and are eating sensibly and only when they are physically hungry. At times they speak of Jane, a former bridge partner who, like them, had all kinds of issues with food and experienced the same jealousy of Betty, but who had lost all control. . .but that’s another story.

Emotional Eating and Binge Eating: A Personal Insight

Peanut Butter, by Maria Raquel Cochez

From my own personal journey since I was a young girl struggling with binge eating and being overweight, and as a professional working for the last 21 years with binge eating and compulsive eating men and women who struggle to lose weight, stopping binge eating has taught me over and over again that it is their emotional issues, their emotional hungers that they keep stuffed inside of their bodies by eating that keep them living in the binge eating world. It is their emotional hungers that keep them from incorporating and practicing normal healthy eating habits that would allow them to feel physically healthier, psychologically happier, have more energy, lose weight and be able to move more freely in the world. Emotional eaters who suffer from binge eating spend most of their adult life trying to stop their binge eating by going on one diet after another rather than addressing the binge eating disorder directly so they can live a happy and normal life. What I teach my clients at Solutions Program for Binge Eating Disorders is to do exactly that. Stop binge eating!

Binge Eating Ideas That Work:

How to Stop Binge Eating Idea #1

• Give a voice to your feelings. The more you give a voice to your feelings the less you will attempt to swallow your feelings by binge eating.
• Learn healthy, nurturing, ways to ‘feed’ your emotional hungers without using food.
• Learn to give a “voice” to your uncomfortable feelings such as anger, fear and sadness instead of “swallowing” those feelings by bingeing and overeating.
• Learn to differentiate between your physical and emotional hungers.

How to Stop Binge Eating Idea #2, 3, 4

Do you know how to perform self-soothing? Most people with binge eating disorders don’t. They didn’t learn how to self-sooth as young children for various reasons. Instead, they have learned to use binge eating of food as a way to self-soothe. But, it doesn’t work. If you want to stop binge eating, learn these self-soothing techniques as an adult. (Taught in our 6 week course Binge on Words©)

• What are your favorite foods when you are binge eating? Do they have any early family memories attached to them? Think about what you are trying to get from that emotional connection now.
• Don’t stop at “I don’t know”.  Most people are stuck in what I call the “I don’t know syndrome”: they don’t let themselves think beyond this point. There is valuable information that you need in order to stop binge eating. Ask yourself the following question: “If I did know how I feel, what would I be feeling”? Some thoughts will come up. Even if you think you are making these up, it comes from you, so it’s a good starting point.
• Write down how much time in a 24-hour period you label yourself in a demeaning or derogatory way. Many people with binge eating problems refuse to nurture and respect their bodies and themselves until they lose the weight. However, beating yourself up and demeaning yourself is not the way to build up your self-esteem and confidence. What feels better, praise or criticism? If you think the way to lose weight is by criticizing yourself, look at who in your life taught you that. If you want something from other people, you need to start giving it to yourself first.

How to Stop Binge Eating Idea #5

Binge eating disorder and emotional eating is not about being out of control with food. It’s about needing to control uncomfortable emotions that you want to avoid. If you change your focus and learn the skills to give voice to your emotions and your feelings, rather than try to control your food, you will be amazed at how much easier it is to set limits with food.

Lilith with Doughnuts, by Maria Raquel Cochez

Binge Eating Ideas That Work:

How to Stop Binge Eating Idea #6

Are you an all or nothing person?  Are you either on a diet or off a diet?  Are you either binge eating or not binge eating?  Changing your binge eating habits is also about changing your life.  Ask yourself if you are ready to make changes in your life.  Permanent changes.  Taking care of yourself is not a short term project that stops when you get busy with another project.  Are you willing to devote the rest of your life to your personal self-care no matter what else interferes?  If your answer is “I am not sure”, than you might seek out some counseling to explore the other issues that are keeping you from taking care of yourself.

How to Stop Binge Eating Idea #7

Make your binge eating failures into motivation. Successful people are motivated.  They have plans that are manageable, which include failing, which is a pre-requisite to learning to change. Yet, most people with binge eating disorders stop trying because they see failing as a weakness.  Failing is the only measure we have that what we are doing needs to be changed.  If one doesn’t fail, one is not trying hard enough.  Read a few books about successful people, and notice that failing is a part of what made each one successful.

How to Stop Binge Eating Idea #8

Search for the ‘secret’ ingredient in your favorite food.  Do you have special foods you eat when you are binge eating?  Make a list of these foods.

For example, do you need to go out and buy a certain brand of ice cream if you want to binge?  Do you eat a particular brand of cookies or chips?  Do you make sure you have a certain snack in your house at all times?  For some people, it doesn’t matter, they just want ice cream, or chips, or sweets, but for others, it’s a very particular brand of food.  Whether it’s the general category or particular brand, there is a secret emotion that you need are looking for.  It usually goes back to a something you got in your past where you also made the connection to a certain food.  Try the following exercise to help you connect to your “secret ingredients”:

a.  What foods do you want when you think of the following feelings?
Angry
Sad
Lonely
Frustrated
Depressed
Guilty
Disappointed
Happy
Anxious
Powerless

b.   Next, think back to when you were young and try and connect each food with a family occasion or particular memory you have about your family or family members. For example, Jane always wanted chocolate jelly rings when she was upset.  They had to be a special brand that she could only buy at two specialty stores.  So she would stock up on them for those ‘just in case times’.  When she thought about the jelly rings, she had a memory of her grandmother sitting on the couch calling her to sit next to her, feeding her the jelly rings, and stroking her hair.  It was always a special time for Jane, because her mother was always too busy to sit with her.  So the emotional reason why Jane needed to have jelly rings not because the jelly rings were so special, but because she connected it to the closeness and soothing she felt from her grandmother every time she sat next to her and ate the jelly ring while she stroked her hair.

Today, after doing the above exercise, Jane has learned to stroke her own hair, think of her grandmother and can get in touch with those same wonderful warm fuzzy feelings and bring those special memories back without eating the jelly rings.

These are just a few of the many ideas we discuss in my special program Binge on Words.  I invite you to join us for our six week program, or on a telephone conference call, or for a telephone phone consultation.

Do you always feel hungry?  Put down the food. Your inner child is starving!

Take a moment to listen to yourself.  That’s not hunger you are experiencing, its your inner child who wants you to listen to her.  You are not paying attention to her. She doesn’t want you to shove food down her throat.  What she wants and needs is for you to binge on words.

Breathtaking, juicy, big fat dripping, wonderful, salivating, well done, binge words to feed your inner child of love.  Binge on words that will fill up that empty pit of hunger in her stomach with warm fuzzy feelings that you have been searching for your entire life.  Binge eating people so often spend most of their lives hating the way their bodies look and refusing to be kind to themselves because of the hatred they have for their bodies.  That self-loathing is not just about your body, its also a statement about yourself.

If you had a small child standing in front of you looking up at you with an innocent face, would you tell her how much you hate her because she is fat?  Never, so why is it OK to tell yourself that?  It’s not.  So think of your inner child (give her an age) standing in front of you, starving for your (parents) attention.  You can ignore her, verbally abuse her, or soothe her.  Think about what your parents did to you.  Today, you have a choice, don’t continue to verbally abuse yourself with harsh words and criticisms that only make you the cycle of self-hatred continue.

You can heal those wounds, Think of it this way:  Adopt your inner child, she’s STARVING, she’s been neglected, criticized and emotionally abandoned.  If you saw a five year old on the street, your heart would go out to her, well that’s what your inner child feels, too.  It’s not hunger pains you feel, it’s the child who never heard those words of love from the parents who raised you.

At a recent retreat I gave, when the women talked about how much they hated themselves and what they looked like, and told me that they refused to be kind and say nice things to themselves until they lost weight, I gave them this picture of their inner child.  I told them to sit quietly and think of themselves at that young age, and think of who said those mean and cruel words to them and how it felt.  Look at this innocent child who did nothing wrong.  The tears came pouring down their faces as they realized that little girl was still inside of them, and how hurtful those words still feel today.  If you want to stop binge eating food, start bingeing on words.  Words of love and praise go a long way in helping build self-esteem.  Even if you think yours is broken, it can be repaired. Not by continuing the hatred, but by nurturing the wounds.  Binge on your kind words, they are non caloric and they don’t cost anything!

Make a copy of this picture, and start feeding yourself with the following words:

You are special
I will always love you
I will protect you
You are wonderful
I love you because you are my child
You are the best
You are soooooo beautiful