“When you focus on your weight and the rules you must follow to lose weight, something very important is lost: your life!” – The Diet Trap
Christmas cookies, Christmas cakes, Christmas turkey, egg nog, …I’ve been thinking about how the stress of compulsive eating, emotional eating, dieting, and disordered eating affect so many people this time of year. I always feel sad when I hear Karen Carpenter singing Christmas carols, how her dying of an eating disorder was such a tragic backdrop to the gift of her voice. That is what happens in an eating disorder: your voice is lost.
It can be so tempting, during this time of year, to use food as a comfort for unmet feelings or to to diet/restrict food as a way to avoid or control uncomfortable feelings. However, it has been proven, again and again, that diets don’t work.
Diets don’t work
Here’s are some by now well-researched facts about how diets don’t work and yet how prevalent dieting and disordered eating continue to be:
95% of diets fail and most will regain their lost weight in 1-5 years
(Statistics on Weight Discrimination: A Waste of Talent, The Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, 2011).
And yet:
75% of American women surveyed endorse unhealthy thoughts, feelings or behaviors related to food or their bodies (Three Out Of Four American Women Have Disordered Eating, Survey Suggests, Science News, 2008).
In the book The Diet Trap (Lillis, Dahl, and Weineland, 2014), it is reiterated that our brains and bodies are set up to crave certain foods. We crave them whether we eat too much or them or avoid them. People experience food as being pleasurable, and when you deprive yourself of certain foods, they may actually become more rewarding (Saelens and Epstein, 1996). Eating sugary and fatty foods changes our brain chemistry in ways similar to taking addictive drugs (Volkow and Wise, 2005).
Myth: There is something wrong inside of you and once you fix it your life will be better. *
Have you ever told yourself that you’d initiate sex with your partner only if you felt freedom from all negative body image thoughts? Or what about that you’d go to a dance class once you lost weight? How about you’d eat dessert only if you were guaranteed to not feel anxious and completely free of guilt? What about, after eating dessert, thinking “I shouldn’t have done that. Now I have to start training for a marathon this January to make up for it.”
What I love about the “acceptance and commitment therapy” approach that The Diet Trap uses is that it really nails your mind into acknowledging its own craziness without trying to “fix” it. Like Buddhism, it closes the option on the fantasy that you will reach a point of no suffering. It also holds the perspective that you are completely whole and do not need to continue to suffer, fix, or be fixed. Though this may sound like the bad news, it can also be quite relieving to realize what some part of you has known all along. Diets don’t work, your mind as actually the source of where the suffering is, there is no escape from your mind, and also there is nothing wrong with you.
Let’s look at a few more myths:
If you lose weight you will be happy.
If you lose weight, your life will be better.
The more disgusted you are with yourself, the more motivated you will be to change.
Nope. I can reliably say from my own 20 years of recovery experience, and 15 years of working with recovering women, that these truly are myths, not reality.
You may ask, but how can I survive the holidays without resorting to using food (overeating, bingeing, purging, dieting, restricting, obsessing about food)?
Here are some tips for navigating the holidays:
1) Breathe diaphragmatically
This sounds like a simple thing, but is not always easy to remember. By breathing intoyour belly (think Santa NOT on a diet) and expanding it like a balloon on the inhalation deflating it on the exhalation you shift from sympathetic (fight or flight) into parasympathetic nervous system. This allows you to relax, get a bit more perspective, digest food more easily, pause on impulsive urges, and decrease anxiety.
2) Detach with Love
If you notice your mind obsessing about food – (or shopping, or alcohol, or your romantic relationship or lack of romantic relationship, or the exact right present for your child, or whether your in laws are going to talk about politics) – breathe and detach for a moment. Imagine that most outcomes about things the mind obsesses on turn out to be ok, even if they are not the scenarios your mind wanted. If you obsess about your mother making triggering food, your father making comments about needing to “exercise away his belly” after a meal, or you getting the wrong present for your mother in law, detach with love. You are powerless over changing other people. You can change you, not them. Practice distress tolerance for 24 hours, and know this, too, shall pass.
3) Do something you love that reminds you of contentedness or joy.
Whatever that something is, playing music, journaling, making a collage, practicing yoga, dancing, going to nature, do it! Even if it is just for a few minutes. Do it to remember the experience of peace and joy. If you have a part of the holiday, that you truly love
(singing carols in candlelight, seeing the lights, helping others) then make an effort to do that yourself or invite others to do that with you.
4) Practice Metta
Metta is a Buddhist practice of lovingkindness. You can practice sending lovingkindness to others as a way to help your own self. If you are feeling lonely, you can imagine all the other people in exactly the same feeling as you experiencing loneliness during this time. If you are with people but feeling not-belonging, you can imagine all the other people in exactly the same situation. If you are struggling with your eating disorder or alcohol, imagine all the other people that are struggling with this obsession. Practice sending lovingkindness to them as a way to bring compassion to yourself. Remember, no matter how much it may feel like it, you are not alone.
*Reference/Resource:
The Diet Trap: Feed Your psychological Needs and End the Weight Loss Struggle Uisng Acceptance and Commitment Therapy By Jason Lillis, PhD, Joanne Dahl, PhD, and Sandra M Weinland, PhD (New Harbinger Publications, 2014)
