Overcoming Compulsive Eating. Alice J. Katz
OVERCOMING COMPULSIVE EATING
Eat for the Right Reasons
Alice Katz, MS
Self-Counsel Press
(a division of)
International Self-Counsel Press Ltd.
USA Canada
Copyright © 2013
International Self-Counsel Press
All rights reserved.
PREFACE
Do you eat compulsively? Are you overweight as a result? Do you keep trying different diet programs to change your eating habits and to weigh less?
This book is not about dieting to lose weight. It is, rather, about having a life without compulsive eating by changing your beliefs about food, feelings, and being fat. It is based on the concept that your thoughts and ideas affect your feelings, which are the link to your emotional eating. Replacing irrational ideas and distortions in thinking with more realistic ideas can break that link and lead eventually to weight loss.
If you are like most emotional eaters, you often feel that you are a victim in most situations — of abuse, rejection, isolation, injustice. This means you often feel upset. You also believe in avoiding pain and anxiety, and you see food as something to distract you from feeling upset and give you comfort. It is your mind that triggers your eating, creating emotional hunger that gets fed with food.
The way you think often determines how much pleasure and freedom from stress you experience. When you change the negative messages you give yourself, you have less stress and less need to use food to feel better.
The focus of the book is on changing those messages by using the same concepts and written exercises used in the AL/CE Program for A Life minus Compulsive Eating. Many men and women participated in the program and took the mental journey prescribed here. As a result, they were able to make significant changes in their eating and their lifestyles.
As you read this book, you can help yourself by doing the exercises, keeping a journal of your feelings and your eating behavior without judging yourself, and by reading related material. You might also want to seek counseling or join a group that specializes in dealing with the emotional basis of compulsive eating.
1
WHAT IS COMPULSIVE EATING?
a. Eating As a Compulsive Behavior
Compulsive eating is just one type of addictive behavior. Alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, and caffeine use are other common additions. Both psychological and chemical factors contribute to them. Using these substances triggers a physical desire for more, and overuse leads to physical dependency.
Some compulsive behaviors have a psychological basis only. For example, compulsive spenders buy on impulse and cannot save their money. Compulsive gamblers don't stop when they run out of money; they may steal to continue. Compulsive cleaners become upset by any disarray and spend hours keeping everything in order. Compulsive savers never throw anything out.
Both psychological and chemical factors contribute to compulsive eating behavior. When you eat some chocolate, caffeine, or sugar your body needs more. Sugar and carbohydrates elevate your blood sugar level; when that level drops, your body needs more to elevate it again.
However, despite the chemical factors that complicate compulsive eating, this behavior is primarily a psychological problem. Compulsive eating is any eating done in response to your mind instead of your body. Your body will respond to hunger and internal cues, but when you eat beyond the point of satisfaction, it is your mind that keeps you going. When the contributing psychological factors are very strong, even the knowledge that a certain food is harmful may not be enough to prevent your eating. Since total abstinence from food is impossible, compulsive eating is the most difficult addiction to overcome.
Compulsive eating has several things in common with other addictions:
(a) It involves much of your time to the exclusion of many other things.
(b) It occupies your thoughts, even when you are not doing it.
(c) It cannot be given up unless you have help.
(d) Giving it up usually leaves you with withdrawal symptoms.
An addiction, in a sense, controls you, which means that you have no choice about it. But in another sense, you have made a choice. Because you derive some benefits from doing what you do, you choose to keep doing it.
The “benefits” gained from compulsive behavior include such things as:
(a) Time spent obsessing about the addiction leaves less time to think and worry about things that cause anxiety.
(b) The addiction provides a diversion from unpleasant chores like laundry or term papers.
(c) It removes you from reality and leaves you in a stupor, so you can blot out anxiety. This is especially true about alcohol, drugs, and sugar, but even excessive cleaning can do this.
(d) It gives you a temporary high, a kind of euphoria, until guilt sets in about what you did. Food does this when you feel full; gambling and spending money give a sense of danger and power.
(e) It brings a sense of order to your outer world, which you need if your inner world is chaotic. This refers especially to compulsive neatness.
These benefits are not usually recognized or acknowledged consciously, but they may be powerful enough to hinder change.
Eating compulsively is a way of indirectly taking care of emotional needs. It may result in unhappiness about weight or control, but unless your needs are met directly, the alternatives to eating may seem worse to you.
The negative consequences alone are not severe enough to stop the behavior. As an addiction, compulsive eating is probably the least harmful. It usually affects your health less than other forms of substance abuse, and any effects on your appearance are usually based on distorted ideas about beauty and its importance.
b. What Triggers Compulsive Eating?
The desire to eat is triggered by hunger — a physical sensation. But compulsive eating is triggered by signals in your mind, not your stomach. If this happens too often, you lose touch with your normal body signals.
Some of the triggers for compulsive eating are:
• Food: seeing it on a plate, in the market, in the refrigerator, in a pot, at a buffet, in an ad, on television. When you see it, you think, It is there, so I must have it.
• Time: eating by the clock, instead of when hungry. This starts with rigid scheduled feeding as a baby, followed by having to eat at set times in school and then at work. You look at the clock and determine if it is time to eat, ignoring your body signals.
• Habit: eating while watching television, reading, riding in the car, or cooking. Snacking in front of the TV comes from years of buying popcorn and candy at the movies. As a child, you may have been given food in the car to keep you quiet. Now, you eat when you drive.
• Associations and memories: being given ice cream as a child after a hospital stay, for a birthday, or as a reward for good behavior, or being given cookies when you cried may lead you to want them now. When you