"Normal" Eating

Taking Care of Your Health

I’ve noticed over decades of treating compulsive, emotional, and restrictive eaters that many of you do not take care of your bodies very well. Disordered eating is only one symptom of poor self-care which includes many ways you don’t keep your body healthy and in good working order.

Perceptions of Stress

An article on emotional eating (What’s Your Relationship with Food? by Karen Collins, RD, American Institute for Cancer Research, at MSN.com/Health and Fitness) focuses on possible causes of emotional eating. Collins describes one school of thought which maintains that it’s caused by dieting and deprivation, ie, the rebound effect. She also explains that people who head for the Häagen-Dazs when they’re upset may have faulty perceptions of stress, meaning they work themselves into a tizzy when they don’t really need to. While it’s old news to most of you that chronic dieting and food restriction lead to overfocusing on food and overeating, you may not have considered that how you perceive stress and your ability to cope with it is a major cause of emotional eating.

As a cognitive-behavioral therapist, I’ve known, written, and talked about this link for decades. Irrational thinking leads to irrational behavior; rational thinking leads to rational behavior. Of course, biochemistry also plays its part in the process, and people who are depressed and anxious because they lack an adequate balance of neurotransmitters will feel not only more intense emotions, but have difficulty calming themselves down when they’re upset. Still, at the root of the problem is our perception of stress and, as the article points out, our particular understanding and perspective of our ability to cope.

Some people view life as an adventure and will try almost anything once. They don’t much care if they do it right and don’t get bent out of shape when things go wrong (as they inevitably will). They’re not upset when life isn’t perfect because they don’t expect it to be. They don’t get stressed out when they make mistakes because they’re not all that attached to outcomes. Other people feel stressed because they have faulty assumptions about life and themselves: they must be perfect, never make mistakes, need to be in control, have to be liked, can’t fail, must win, should succeed. Nonsense! This perception itself is stressful, never mind when life throws a curve ball.

Think about what gets you stressed and what you believe you and life should be like. Imagine having a healthier set of assumptions that are more realistic. It’s often too late to handle stress effectively in the moment—to make yourself take a walk, call a friend, or do deep breathing rather than eat or obsess about weight. It’s far easier to change your beliefs so that you don’t perceive events as stressful or perceive them only as minor stresses. Changing your perceptions of stress requires motivation, effort, time, and oodles of practice. But I guarantee it will help reduce emotional food abuse.

Best,

Karen

Normal Eating web site

Normal Eating talks and workshops

PLEASE NOTE: I encourage you to comment on my blogs and will do my best to address topics/questions you raise in future blogs. I cannot provide individual responses, but encourage you to post your questions and comments on The Food and Feelings Workbook message board at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foodandfeelings.

Not So Sweet

Proving once again that what seems too good to be true probably is, a recent LA Times article sheds new light on the use of saccharin for weight loss. A study in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience found that saccharin appeared to drive rats to overeat by “breaking the physiological connection between sweet tastes and calories.” In experiments funded by the National Institute of Health and Purdue University, rats received yogurt sweetened with either saccharin or glucose, which is pretty close chemically to good old table sugar. Because body temperature typically rises after digesting food in the production of energy, the researchers evaluated rat temperature after eating. Interestingly, the rats fed the sugar substitute had a smaller increase in temperature than the ones fed glucose. Moreover, the rats consuming yogurt and saccharin gained more body fat than those eating yogurt and glucose. In short, the sugar substitute not only failed to help the rats lose weight, but made them gain it. 

 

Restitutive vs. Substitutive Reprogramming

At a lecture on aging last month, two approaches for rehabilitating stroke victims—restitutive versus substitutive—were mentioned. Restitutive therapy was described as strengthening the limb/s which are paralyzed, while substitutive therapy helps build up the limb/s that have not been affected. The more I thought about them, the more I realized that these approaches also could be used by people recovering from eating problems.

 

Abuse or Disease?

What’s in a name? A recent letter to the editor in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune made the case that people should think twice about using the term substance abuse because alcohol and chemical dependence qualify as diseases. Of course, my thoughts immediately jumped to people who have an unhealthy relationship with food, so I spent a while thinking about the terms we use to describe them—anorexic, bulimic, binge-eater, food abuser, and disordered, dysfunctional, restrictive, over- or undereater.

Calorie Labeling

I read recently that the New York City Board of Health will adopt a regulation on March 31 to make restaurant chains post calorie counts for the food on their menus. I’m unsure of the ins and outs of the regulation, and confess to having mixed feelings about its usefulness for both personal and professional reasons.

 

Acknowledging Feelings

I try to avoid thumbing through women’s magazines, but sometimes when I don’t have a book handy, I succumb. Occasionally, I find an irresistible tidbit of information that makes slogging through the ads and beauty tips worthwhile. For example, in the February issue of Allure, there’s a brief column on emotions that reinforces what I’ve always known in my gut and through therapeutic experience.

 

Stop Focusing on Food

You know the old question: Do you live to eat or eat to live? Well, no surprise which attitude is held by “normal” eaters. If you’re highly food centered—even as a restrictive eater, controlling your intake while obsessing about it—it’s difficult to develop a positive relationship with food. The goal is to enjoy it, without food itself or thoughts of it becoming the focus of your life.

Ending Food and Body Abuse

A client caught my attention recently when I asked how her purging was going and she replied, “I don’t do that any more.” I asked what she meant and she said she simply decided that she was no longer going to engage in bulimic behavior. Sure, she admitted, she’d been tempted, but she kept telling herself that the part of her life when she would binge and purge was over. She described how she’d handled the urge to purge by telling herself she’d just have to quit bingeing if she didn’t want to throw up and that she wasn’t’ going to die if she ate “too much.”