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FRIDAY, APRIL 23, 2010
FULL FROM THE INSIDE
I was talking to a patient today who had been struggling with her weight for decades. She had come to see me about other issues, but as we continued to work together the issue of weight and the rest of her life were so closely woven together that we couldn’t talk for very long about one without the other.
Today she was a different person. She was calm, self assured, and spoke more slowly with a greater sense of deliberation and self awareness than I have ever seen, or that she herself ever remembers.
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She had crossed a mental threshold and made the mantra we often use in the Shrink Yourself program come to life once again. She was thinking instead of eating. She had incorporated the pause exercise into her moment to moment style of living. She had integrated what she struggled to learn into who she had become. She was being her “best self”, the one with confidence in her own mind as her best friend, that replaced food as her best friend.
I have been around long enough to know this won’t last forever in this pure form. But I also know that once she has made it here, she won’t lose it, and will always be able to come back to it.
What happened, I asked. “ I decided to lose weight. It just happened, and I have not been hungry since then, and I have already lost 4 pounds.”
That’s right, I said. That is the way it happens. All the exercises and thinking work that lead up to this are processed by your brain, and suddenly a new way of looking at food emerges. It seems like magic, but it is not. It is the way the brain learns, and new habits are formed.
Hundreds of Shrink Yourself members have reported this very same experience…suddenly the hunger is gone and their best self emerges.
“I started cleaning my closet and giving away the clothes I would never wear and plan to buy clothes that fit after I lose all the weight I want to lose.”
I can’t tell you how many times I hear the story about the closet. It seems to be what people do as the final step of coming to reality about food in their life.
You look in your closet everyday, and there is the history of your weight fluctuations. Everyday you have to decide what you can wear, what to save in case, and what you hope to wear. The closet is a projection screen for your ambivalence about losing weight, and your fears about never being in control. When you clean out the closet by making decisions about what to discard, it represents your intentions and shows the strength of your conviction to change.
The contrast between the anxious food seeking diet obsessed person and the calm person was so striking, she had to ask herself, ”what have I been doing to myself all these years? “
The answer is too long and complex to elaborate here in the detail it deserves, but let me tell you the principle at work in her, and so many other patients I have treated.
Overeating and starving cycles (being fat or thin), represent the larger struggle of being your own person who is in control of your life and your body; or being your parent’s child who is supposed to be either fat or thin.
We all stay tied to the illusion of being loved and cared for forever (the illusion of safety) by staying connected, one way or another, to our family past. Food and fat is one way to stay connected to the past. We do this well into the adult part of the lifecycle, and slowly let go of this illusion in favor of owning and controlling our life and body by dealing with reality rather than illusion.
When you finally make the “decision” to be in control of your weight, you have made the decision to be an adult who owns her own body and can live fully in reality without using food to connect to the distant past. You have given up the illusion of being protected and safe in some magical way. Instead you have learned to value and rely on your own mature mind to provide real safety by solving problems in daily life.
That’s when you become calm and full from the inside. So full, you don’t need food to fill you up from the outside.
POSTED BY !DR. GOULD! | 7:13:24 AM
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The Shrink Yourself Blog
The Shrink Yourself Blog, hosted by Michelle Fiordaliso, clinical director of Shrink Yourself, gives you expert info on emotional eating.
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