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22.
Eat
what you want and forget about dieting By
Tom O'Connell Would
you like to arrive at your ideal weight and avoid dieting at the same time?
Well, here are two of Geneen Roth's suggestions: "Eat only what
you want" and "Eat until you are satisfied." And that's it?
That's it. "Won't I swell up like a blimp?" Roth doesn't think so.
Not if you take the rest of her advice. Roth
was a compulsive eater for 17 years and says, "I went on every diet I
heard of or read about: the prune-and-meatball diet, the
one-hot-fudge-sundae-a day diet, the applesauce and chicken wing diet,
Stillman's, Atkin's, and Weight Watchers." She
lost weight on all of the
diets. "Usually I spent three weeks losing ten pounds and four days
gaining it back," she writes. But that changed when she stopped
dieting. "The determination not to diet was the most frightening
decision I had ever made," she recalls in her book, "Why Weight? A
Guide to Ending Compulsive Eating." In
time, by following the guidelines in her book, her body reached its natural
weight. And she's thinner. But that's not the best part. "The best part
is living a life in which I am not obsessed about food. The best part is
knowing that the answers are not outside me, in any prescribed diets. The
answers are within me, in my head, my heart, my stomach." In
her "Breaking Free" workshops she tells people to be kind to
themselves. "I tell them to listen to their hungers, to practice
nourishing themselves in ways other than eating, to find support for
themselves in something other than food." She
says we become compulsive for a reason. "Remember that compulsive
eating is always an attempt to care for yourself....The first step is to
become aware of what you are doing and how it is serving you." Obviously,
the compulsive eating/compulsive dieting cycle doesn't heal whatever our
wounds are. Quite the opposite. Even though we are attempting to heal
ourselves, or at least ease the pain of life's challenges, we're in a
self-destructive addictive pattern. We're caught up in the Five Cs of
addiction: Craving. Compulsion
to satisfy the craving. Losing control even though we are trying to stay in
control. And continuing the behavior in spite of life-damaging consequences. How
does Roth suggest that we should work our way out of this trap? Her Eating
Guidelines are the core of the Breaking Free program: 1.
Eat when you are hungry. What,
no guilt? No guilt. No fear. No deception. In
her Breaking Free process, the first stage is acknowledging that there is a
problem. Next comes the stage of beginning/rebelling against the years of
deprivation. Then comes the "The Middle" nitty gritty/learning to
trust and befriend yourself stage. And finally there is the joy of breaking
free. In
"The Middle," she says, "You learn that food isn't all that's
good or pleasurable about life. You learn many other ways of nourishing
yourself: • Taking walks, baths, naps. • Reading. • Going to movies. • Meeting with friends. • Getting massaged. • Doing something you've always wanted to do. • Writing. • Dancing.
And
this leads us to a more natural approach to weight? Yes. But it requires
behavioral change as well as changing patterns of thinking. Roth
says, "Those of us who are compulsive about food share a common fear:
We are afraid that we will never get enough. Of anything. Food. Success.
Attention. Love. And one response to that fear is to develop compulsions
that protect us from feeling the pain of emptiness: storing and hiding food,
eating after we are full, saying 'yes' when we want to say 'no,' making love
when we really don't want to." Roth says, "Learning about your hunger, tasting a raisin as if it were the first you ever saw, stopping when you are satisfied, not stopping and noticing how you feel, it's all part of the process of waking up to be alive. |
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