"Normal" Eating

Eating, Fat, and Punishment

How many of you self-punish to regulate your eating? Punishment starts with fear, self-judgment, and self-anger. Many disregulated eaters get stuck in this rigid, misguided approach and never move on to more enlightened, self-nurturing, self-loving ways of regulating eating. Here’s what self-punishment does: After you’ve done something you feel badly about, you use words or actions to make yourself feel worse. Double ouch! Fortunately, there is another way of changing behavior.

More on Self-love

Part of being an emotionally healthy, mature adult means achieving permanent self-love so that you don’t channel energy into looking to others for approval, validation and love. I blog away on this subject because it’s essential to eradicating food abuse and establishing healthy body attitudes and because self-love is difficult to come by if you’re a disregulated eater who had a childhood in which you were emotionally mistreated.

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?

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.

Stable Sense of Self

Many disregulated eaters lack a stable sense of self—an ongoing, permanent self-reflection of being okay and a good person all the time. Internal stability helps you tolerate negatives feelings about yourself because you view yourself as basically good enough. Because people with food problems often eat when they aren’t happy with themselves or to  punish themselves, a stable sense of self reduces unwanted eating.

Thinness and Lovability

If you believe you must be thin to be lovable, I’m sorry to burst your bubble. Two interesting things happened during a recent afternoon which prove my point. First, there I was on the supermarket checkout line gawking at trashy magazine headlines and photos of unhappy looking, but thinner than thin, celebrities. Some of these sad souls were being ditched because their spouses or partners had found someone new, while others were being abandoned because their lovers had had enough of their nasty dispositions, bizarre behavior, or running around.

Be Yourself

I get a kick out of the expression, “Be yourself. Everyone else is taken.” What a hoot! But the last time I read it I got to thinking about how difficult it is for some of you to, well, actually be yourselves. Doing so means knowing what you feel and think and savoring your uniqueness. So many disregulated eaters hate themselves one minute, then love themselves the next or chameleon-like, change their opinions depending on the people they’re with. So, here forth, it’s time to know yourself so that you can be yourself.

Believing in Your Rights

What are your rights? I don’t mean regarding voting or free speech. Rather, what are the unalienable human rights you believe you have? My hunch is that you aren’t convinced you have very many, and that’s why you spend so much time trying to establish that you do—with food, your emotions, with people, and engaging in behaviors which are nothing but self-destructive. Sadly, all your chronic efforts to prove to yourself and others that you have rights only attests to the fact that you’re not convinced.

Defining Yourself

I can’t think of better way to start the new year than for you to choose how you’re going to think and act in 2009. You can’t make yourself over in an instant, but you can make decisions about the person you want to become and begin practicing new behaviors right now. Although genetics and environment are powerful factors in promoting or inhibiting change, your beliefs can override them. Of course, after deciding how you want to think and act, you have to immerse yourself in your new attitude and behaviors.

Self-Love and Acceptance

I’ve been thinking about love. Not romantic love. Self-love. I hate to sound simplistic, but if we love something, we lavish caring on it and if we don’t, well, we it neglect or misuse it. Of course, there are gradients between treating yourself well and poorly, but if you love yourself wholeheartedly, you can’t continue to have a destructive relationship with food because self-love and self-trashing are mutually exclusive.