Day 42 – Thursday
The elephant on the plate of any over weight person isn’t that they are over weight, it’s that they over eat.
Cherrie Herrin-Michehl left a comment here to the effect that diets don’t work in the long-term (true enough) and that we over-eat because we have ‘issues’ (I paraphrase). But there can be less to over-eating than that.
I think we over-eat for four reasons
- There has been no evolutionary pressure not to over-eat
most of us don’t have a ‘stop eating’ mechanism
- We live in an obesogenic society
highly addictive products loaded with fat, sugar and salt are easier to obtain than actual food and we are taught it’s rude not to eat up everything on the plate
- Food can be used to handle difficult emotional issues
relating to anger, control, power, comfort, sexuality, being a child, and so on
- Food is physically addictive
some foods more than others and for some people more than others, but even so
We compensate or cope every day with whatever genes we were dealt and we can devise strategies for ignoring or avoiding the products that are offered all around us. How successful these strategies are depends on where we are with items 3 and 4 – emotional issues and physical addiction.
Emotions
Whenever I asked myself why I overate in my late teens, 20s and even in my 30s I concluded it was to do with social nervousness and sexual inhibition. I wasn’t the fat kid but I was speccy four-eyes, and as Dorothy Parker pointed out, “men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses”. Which suited me fine, thank you, because I lacked social graces and the ability to deal with sexual feelings, both mine and other people’s. So easier not to have to, really. But then I got contacts and men began to make passes. Another slice of bread and butter? I loved bread and butter. Bread and butter was my friend.
However, since then I’ve learned to enjoy and express my sexuality, but this isn’t that sort of blog.
So with that one fallen by the wayside, the emotions driving my eating are rather petty, really:
- rebelliousness or stroppiness
- boredom
- a displacement activity
- to be soothed or distracted
- physical comfort (enjoying the ‘internal hug’ of a full tummy)
Silly to pretend that they don’t need facing up to but equally silly to pretend they need therapy.
Smoking and eating
Of course, what this does leave us with is the physical addiction to food and yes, I have that in spades. In fact, I have now concluded that I was never really a smoker, I was an eater who managed her addiction to food by smoking.
- Early 20s – smoker – 10 stone
- Mid 20s – nonsmoker – 11 stone
- Late 20s – dieter – 10 stone
- Early 30s – nonsmoker – back to 12 stone
- Mid 30s – smoker – stable at 12 stone
- Late 30s – nonsmoker – up to 13 1/2 stone
- Early 40s – smoker – stable at 13 stone/li>
- Mid 40s – nonsmoker – up to 16 stone
See what I mean?
Physical addiction
Since I stopped smoking, and before I started Lighter Life, I would get the nibbles late at night and I wouldn’t make a cup of tea and light up a cigarette. Ho no. I would wander round the kitchen looking for something I could roll between my fingers and crunch in my teeth like cashews. I became afraid of hunger-pangs and would do almost anything to make them go away. I tended to gobble and had come to prefer the seratonin hit of eating fast to savouring the flavour and texture of what I am eating. I would at times put food into my mouth before I had swallowed the previous mouthful. If I ate bad food, I started craving bad food, but I could go for months without eating chocolate or pringles or whatever it might be.
Eating Less
I had been dealing with these physical addictions fairly successfully for almost a year before I started Lighter Life. In fact this is the main reason I felt safe doing so. My husband found a book called Eating Less by Gillian Riley which treats eating as an addiction similar to smoking. One of Riley’s tenets is that you concentrate on the eating not the weight and it feels slightly dirty saying that I lost about a stone and a half during the year or so I was successfully facing down my addiction. I was however still 41/2 stone (63lbs) overweight, and lacked the patience to lose it at the rate of a stone a year. Hence Lighter Life.
I see losing the weight as the easy bit, the re-calibration. The challenge will be starting to eat again and then keeping it off. I am nervous about that. I’d be stupid not to be. But I do know that when I stare my addiction in the face it’s the addiction that blinks first.
