"Normal" Eating by Karen R. Koenig

Are We How We Look?

A Newsweek article (4/6/09), “Tales of a Modern Diva,” made me sick to heart how women will ever shake societal pressure to be thin and beautiful. It describes how younger and younger girls are obsessively focused—moreover, being focused by the media and their parents—on their appearance. I’m not saying that men don’t have pressures to look good, too. They do, but nowhere near the burden that women feel.

Challenging Hurtful Remarks

One of the hardest parts of being over- or underweight and recovering from eating problems is figuring out how to deal with unkind or merely unhelpful remarks. While some assertive folks never put up with inappropriate commentary directed toward them on any subject, others stand up for themselves in every aspect of life except eating or weight. Learning how to handle improper comments is an essential life skill.

Pain Is Unique to Individuals

It’s time for another reminder that we are highly unique individuals. Although we have a great deal in common physically and emotionally, each of us has a different emotional pain threshold that may promote or encourage tolerating discomfort in the eating arena. This is why it’s so dangerous to compare your progress to that of others. Remember, your psychological pain may be greater or less than someone else’s.

Identity

How exactly do we acquire our identity and how does it shape our eating? Much of who we are is dictated by our genes—temperament and talent, for example—but what of other factors? Are you who you think you are, who other people think you are, or a composite of both? If a major part of your identity is feeling unloved and unlovable, how does that affect your ability to overcome food and weight problems?

Attunement

Recently I read a book describing attachment styles and was reminded of the importance of our earliest relationships which teach us how to connect to and trust in ourselves and others. Not only is your learned attachment style predictive of how you will relate to people in adulthood, it also plays a part in how you attach to yourself—to your internal world—and has a direct bearing on how you may use food in your life.

Needing to Be Sure

Many disregulated eaters hold dysfunctional beliefs about needing to be sure and dong things right. They must be absolutely certain a choice is correct before making it, or need assurance that previous action was what they should have taken. Although it’s important to make well informed choices and refrain from regularly acting impulsively, we can’t know that what we do or have done will work out the way we hoped.

What Are You Really Ashamed About?

I was talking with a client last month about her history with multiple aspects of shame regarding eating and weight. She’d initially thought that what she felt most strongly was shame about being fat, but it turned out that her feelings were more complicated (they usually are!). I bet there’s more to your story of shame as well.

Healing Old Wounds

When people come to me for therapy, it’s most often about eating and weight (although I treat the gamut of mental health and relational issues). Clients generally recognize that their poor relationship with food is rooted in childhood dysfunction, but may not know what to do with that information. In fact, understanding the dysfunctional events in one's history and connecting to the emotions they evoke are two different animals. Clients frequently become stuck because they have difficulty facing the past or doing whatever is needed to heal from it. Don’t let that be you.

Focus on One Change

Changing longstanding eating patterns can feel like an overwhelming job. Sometimes there’s so much to pay attention to and get a handle on—hunger, food selection, nutrition, mindfulness, satisfaction, fullness, emotions—that you don't know where to start. It helps to find one focus and stick to it for a while until you make progress. What you pick doesn’t matter very much, only that you make a commitment to that choice.