"Normal" Eating

Feel, Then Think

2010-07-30T06:12:54-07:00

Lucky us! We’re born with the ability to feel and think, and we need to use both wisely to manage life’s problems and resolve our eating issues. Some people get stuck in emotions and rarely call upon good judgment. Others think 'til their brain hurts, but hardly ever experience authentic emotion. Are you one of these types?

Maybe you intellectualize—live in your head—to avoid experiencing painful emotions. You research, make lists, and weigh pros and cons. You chunk down problems and come up with well-oiled solutions. Yet you rarely know what you’re feeling. If you focus on emotions at all, it’s to brush them aside. When you experience them, you generally describe them with vague words like upset or stressed. Due to a childhood in which your emotions weren’t heard or validated adequately, you’ve closeted them away and that’s where they’ve stayed. Instead you rely on thinking exclusively to guide your life.

Or maybe a stew of emotions maneuvers you through the world: This feels good, so I’ll do it, that feels bad, so I won’t. If you’re angry, whether it’s appropriate or not, you let everyone know it. If you’re miserable, the world must be miserable along with you. You’re clueless about how to rein in your emotions and they rule you rather than the other way around. It’s hard for you to think rationally about dealing with life’s problems because your emotions are so intense and overwhelming. It’s likely that your parents also were unable to manage their emotions—either their feelings were out of control or hidden away unseen and unheard—so they couldn’t teach you how to do it.

In this culture, thoughts are more highly prized than emotions, so many people believe that you have to first think about a problem, then, only as an after thought, check in with feelings. How many of you go round and round in your heads to solve a personal dilemma, then ask yourself how you’re feeling about it—or never ask at all? The truth is this is the inverse way to do effective problem-solving.

To live happily and successfully, it’s essential to use your emotions and your cognitive abilities by first noticing your emotions in a situation and identifying them—anxiety, shame, fear, disappointment, loneliness, whatever. After you’ve recognized what you’re feeling, it’s time to enlist your frontal lobes to help you determine what to do—act, don’t act, think some more, dig for more feelings, etc. I can’t stress enough how authentic emotions are at the core of answering most of life's questions, as long as we use them in conjunction with good judgment and clear thinking.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

PLEASE NOTE: I encourage you to comment on my blogs and will do my best to address topics/questions you raise in future blogs. I cannot provide individual responses, but encourage you to post your questions and comments at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foodandfeelings or http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nicegirlsfinishfat.

Reinforcing Beliefs

2010-07-26T04:42:24-07:00

I cringe mentally when disregulated eaters reinforce their negative, limiting beliefs over and over, and don't even realize it. The worst offender is the word “can’t,” but many other words, phrases and ideas deter growth and prevent healthy thinking and “normal” eating skills from taking hold.

Everything you think and say, especially about what you can and cannot do, impacts your ability to do it. When you recognize that, do you imagine that you’ll never be able to keep track of everything that runs through your mind or slips out of your mouth? If so, you prove my point: You limit your growth when you think you “can’t” pay attention to what’s going on inside you most of the time when the fact is, you can, you can, you can.

People who practice mindfulness do precisely that—observe what’s going through their heads and their hearts—as a matter of course. Are they perfect at it? Of course not. But through practice, they become so used to being self-affirming and speaking positively to and about themselves, that their brain simply grooves and moves in this direction. Gone are the “can’ts” as well as the “shoulds.” Even when mindful people have done or said something they regret, they usually realize it afterward and stop and rework the belief.

To do this, you must always (yes, always) listen to your thoughts and words. Disregulated eaters often let their thoughts rule them and speak without considering the impact of their words. I frequently urge my message board members to reread their posts and count the times they (or others) say things like, I try but I can’t or I’m not good at or I’m not able to. Each time you utter these kinds of beliefs, you’re more deeply encoding them into your brain.. If you want change the message, you’ll have to be vigilant about altering your thoughts and the way you choose to express them.

Much of what I do as a therapist is correcting clients when they tell me what they can’t do, how impossible a task is, or what a failure they are. I am their ears until they can learn to hear themselves more clearly. I can tell when clients are getting healthier because they express limiting beliefs less frequently, or get out half a limiting belief, then turn it into a positive—or at least a neutral—statement. This work is not as hard as you might think. Once you get into the habit of listening to yourself, you’ll begin to catch your negative thoughts and correct them on the spot. After a while, you won’t say them as much and you’ll have new positive and productive thoughts to replace them. Start this process today, right now. Make it a point to stay tuned to the you channel 24/7.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

Getting out the word!

2010-07-23T06:17:24-07:00

I now have a YouTube channel, a Facebook fan club page, and am on Twitter. I encourage you all to join my Facebook fan club, especially, and help it get off the ground. Check me out through the links below:

YouTube

Facebook fan club

Twitter

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

Why Change Takes Time

2010-07-23T05:08:39-07:00

Here’s a piece of wisdom which really resonates: You can only move ahead as fast as the slowest part of you can go. It was said by a friend struggling with a thorny personal decision who heard it from her therapist and I’m happy to pass it on. Try reading the statement again and let it sink in before continuing with this blog.

Thinking about how to describe this truism, I picture a group of children waiting to be admitted to an event, but only when all of them, including the stragglers, are up at the entrance. No matter how quickly some of them get there, the fastest walkers will have to wait for the slowest walkers. Which leads to me recalling having gone out to dinner with a group of friends recently, some of whom were present at reservation time and some of whom weren’t. The hostess insisted that she wouldn’t seat us until our entire party was present. Again, one part of the group had to wait for the other.

In the same way that different people move at different speeds, aspects of ourselves zip or poke along on their own time tables. Often our cognitive abilities zoom ahead of our emotional abilities. We think, Ha, I can do that, easy-peasy. Then we sigh impatiently as our heart balks and refuses to take another step forward. All the while, of course, we’re yelling at it to get a move on. Or, alternately, our heart charges ahead and it takes forever for our thinking to catch up with it, alas, often too late. Both of these examples illustrate that we can only move as fast as the slowest part of us can go.

Nor is there a shortage of ways this concept plays out in the eating arena. For example, you swear you’ll never diet again and will follow the rules of “normal” eating for the rest of your life, especially the rule about stopping when you’re full. But when your good judgment made this decision, it hadn’t factored in your difficulty tolerating distressing emotions. Or your heart signs you up for a three-day crash course on intuitive eating and, when you get there, you’re overwhelmed with and frightened of all the hard, uncomfortable work your brain must do to change its thinking.

We act as if we must put our brains and bodies on a schedule to hurry up and change. Fact is, you can reason with or cajole yourself til you’re blue in the face, but there are parts of you that simply will ignore your pleas, prodding and threats and take their own sweet time getting wherever you want them to go. Which is not to say that you should stop trying to reason with or cajole them. It’s the locomotive’s job to press forward—as long as it accepts that the caboose will only get there when it gets there.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

Stop Replaying Bad Memories

2010-07-19T05:52:22-07:00

One of my goals as a therapist is to help clients unearth childhood memories so they can better understand themselves in the present. With other clients, especially those who’ve experienced trauma, my goal is to help them let go of powerful, hurtful memories. My focus depends on where they are in the emotional healing process

Events which we perceive as bad make an indelible mark in our memory bank. Our brains are built to recall them with special clarity and intensity to avoid similar harm in the future. Speed down the hill on your bike, then fall and break your arm often enough, and one hopes experience will teach you to slow down. In this way, recalling events which have hurt us is a beneficial process that leads to prevention. However, continuing to replay a distressing incident or period in your life over and over long after you’ve squeezed out every bit of instruction from it, is neither useful nor beneficial.

There’s a time to remember and a time to put away memories, but you can’t trust these processes to happen on their own. Too often your brain refuses to remember pain in order to avoid more of it or won’t forgot pain because it fears its reoccurrence. Deciding when you have finished working on, with and through painful experiences involves conscious decision-making. You must answer these questions: “What is the point of my thinking about this memory any longer?” and, “Will it benefit me to delve more deeply because there’s more to know or is it time to shut off this memory because I’ve learned all I need to from it?” Think of yourself as an archaeologist: At some point you’ll have found all the buried treasures in one spot and will need to close up shop and move on.

If you’ve replayed an awful experience over and over in your head and it still plagues you intensely, it’s time to stop the show. Replaying these memories is unnecessary and continues to reinjure you emotionally. You’re trying to make sense of what happened to you by going over the memory repeatedly, but, paradoxically, returning to your ground zero only entrenches it. Would you watch a movie you disliked repeatedly or would you turn it off when it comes on and go out of your way to avoid seeing it? When you drag yourself through memories of painful experiences—beyond what’s needed for healing—you’re activating pain circuits, not spurring on relief. After a certain point, if reviewing an incident or injury hurts, don’t do it. This advice goes for interpersonal mistakes and food binges as well as past trauma. You once may have been a true victim, but you needn’t be a victim of memory. You can choose where to place attention and awareness—and where not to. By all means, learn from the past, but please don’t stay stuck in it.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/Preview

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

Recent interview

2010-07-17T09:59:47-07:00

Check out my interview on cable TV. Here's the link: Alivelihood - Brookline Cable TV.

Childhood, Sexuality and Intimacy

2010-07-16T05:31:54-07:00

We may assume that only clear cut sexual abuse in childhood can cause problems with sexuality and intimacy in adulthood. Although there’s a strong correlation (not a cause and effect) between childhood sexual abuse and eating disorders, this is not the whole story. Abuse, neglect, or any kind of mistreatment—overt or covert—all fall on a continuum and can shape your attitude and influence your behavior as an adult.

Obviously, sexual abuse would have a strong impact on your view of your body, but what of other behaviors which may not fall strictly into the “abuse” category? What if your parents couldn’t keep their hands off each other in front of you—not just a quick kiss, hugs, or hand-holding, but touching each other inappropriately? What if a parent regularly got drunk and made sexual advances towards neighbors or relatives with you watching? What if you saw your parent making strangers uncomfortable by acting seductively with them? These kinds of behavior send the message that sex is not a private activity and give you the idea that sexuality has no boundaries.

Sometimes parents play a bit fast and loose with kids in age-inappropriate ways. For example, teenagers are especially sensitive and vulnerable when a parent expects more hugs and kisses than is suitable for their changing bodies. Parents who dress overly provocatively send the wrong message to children and frequently make matters worse by berating their daughters for dressing the same way. What a confusing double message this is! At the other end of the spectrum are parents who never touch each other or share any physical intimacy, or shame children about their bodies, especially about their sexuality. Parents may speak derisively of sexuality or sensuality, making it seem as if being attractive (or wanting to be attractive) for sexual reasons is sinful. The message becomes sex is bad, your body is bad—therefore, you are bad!.

Any kind of off sexual atmosphere for you growing up may affect you still. If you sensed that something was not right, it likely wasn’t. There need not have been out and out sexual abuse to generate the wrong vibes about sex, sexuality and intimacy. Often subtle messages are more difficult to pinpoint and identify than more overt ones. If you are uncomfortable with your sexuality or your body—and it drives you to eat—consider the atmosphere in which you were raised. You may find valuable information to help you better understand your eating patterns and weight concerns. By recognizing the basis for your thoughts and feelings about your body, sexuality and intimacy, you can start to rescript unhealthy messages from the past to make them healthier.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

Waiting for Answers

2010-07-12T06:16:27-07:00

Check out this quote: "...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 in Letters to a Young Poet.

This quote is for all of you who are living and dying for answers about the questions in your life. You ask me, you ask your friends and family, you search for certainty in books and seminars. You beg, you plead, Please, please give me the answers so I’ll know what to do! To say that this is the wrong approach to living a satisfying life grossly understates the problem. The point of life is not to do it right, but to do it joyfully--"to live everything"--with food and every other aspect of life.

I love the message in “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” This is what’s called following an organic process. It’s how change happens in real time, how therapy works. There are two key words in this quote—“gradually” and “far.” Unless you accept that all steps are baby steps and that achieving goals will take a long time, you will be constantly frustrated and angry. You will get there by doing what you have to do every minute of every day and by looking down at your baby steps not out into the future.

The other aspect of this enlightening quote is how much of life you miss by focusing on seeking answers. The more you look outside yourself for solutions to your problems—eating and otherwise—the farther away you move from finding them. When you stop seeking answers and “live the questions,” only then will you be on your way toward answering them. This paradox is at the core of living well. Forget doing right and being right and do what’s best for you in the moment. Trust that you can make appropriate decisions for yourself. Not every time of course, but that doesn’t matter if you know how to honestly assess yourself and correct your course. Life is not out there, but in here.

For one week do not focus on the future and or seek external answers. Whenever you have the need for certainty, calm yourself and look toward your inner wisdom. I promise that if you give yourself over to this practice, it will provide all the answers you need.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events

Vacation

2010-06-29T16:04:26-07:00

Everyone needs time off, and I’ll be taking a bit of it from July 2-10. My blogs will resume on Monday, July 12. Readers might want to use this time to check out my blog archives. I’ve posted over 350 blogs since 2007.

Best,

Karen

www.eatingnormal.com

www.squidoo.com/eatnormalnow

Visit the message board exclusively devoted to my new book, The Food and Feelings Workbook, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/foodandfeelings.

PLEASE NOTE: I encourage you to comment on my blogs and will do my best to address topics/questions you raise in future blogs. Unfortunately, however, due to time constraints, I cannot provide individual responses.

Pain and Pleasure

2010-06-28T06:01:47-07:00

A client made an interesting comment which strikes at the heart of receiving pleasure, with food or otherwise. We were discussing why she doesn’t go all out to pursue joy and passion, and she said, “Well, you know, the price of pleasure is pain.” Ouch! As soon as I heard her response, I knew this was a core belief that both inhibited her ability to eat “normally” and prevented her from creating a happier life for herself.

Do you believe that the price of pleasure is pain? Or that there is any price to pay for pleasure? You may not be aware that this is your assumption, so take a minute to examine it. Do you throw yourself into enjoyment or do you get anxious during or after you feel it? According to your belief system, how okay is it to feel joy and have fun? Are pleasure and pain connected in some way? This subject reminds me of another client who told me that she knew she was in love “because it was the most painful experience of my life.” Love painful? It’s obvious that something is deeply wrong with this thinking.

If you don’t welcome pleasure into your life in all its exquisite glory or if you link it with pain, please understand that you will not be able to take better care of yourself nor have a positive relationship with food until you unshackle pleasure from pain. Explore where you learned this belief. Maybe that’s what your parents said or implied or how they lived—pleasure must be denied or followed by suffering. Maybe your parents made you pay in subtle ways for the times you enjoyed yourself, so that you came to believe that fun times need always be punished. Or maybe suffering was a family way of life.

If you can’t delight in things pleasurable without imagining that you must pay a penalty, you will have difficulty not only enjoying food, but creating a life that is bursting with good feelings and good times. Pleasure stands alone and is a must in a life well lived. When you do things you enjoy, the reward circuits in your brain light up like a Christmas tree. If you ruin those moments with guilt or anxiety that you will suffer for happiness, you are purposely turning off those lights. Pleasure is an essential pursuit, a positive end in itself. I emphasize this truth again and again to counter messages you may have received in childhood that make pleasure seem selfish or excessive or downright sinful.

Make a list of your beliefs about pleasure. Now go through them and identify which ones are rational or irrational, and reframe the latter group. Keep working at these beliefs until you can feel pleasure free and clear with no strings attached. Decide how you want to view pleasure and make sure your beliefs support a positive relationship with it.

Best,

Karen

http://www.eatingnormal.com/

http://www.nicegirlsfinishfat.com/

Normal Eating talks and media events