Holistic Weight Loss: Don’t Diet. Live It!
November 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Before my recovery, I was obsessed with chocolate chip cookies. I sometimes spent entire days driving to different places in my search of the perfect cookie (you know, the one that would satisfy you forever!). I sometimes spent entire evenings mixing up batter, only to devour it all before it even got into the oven. Of course, I considered cookies to be “bad” foods, and on my “good” days I never ate them. I thought that as fat as I was, I shouldn’t eat cookies if I truly wanted to lose weight like I said I did.
When I started my recovery, I couldn’t have cookies in my Live-It (program) because I was so fearful of them. My panic about eating even one would drive me to eat too many. Also, because I still considered cookies “bad”, the part of me that liked them always thought, “This is the last time I will ever eat chocolate chip cookies,” and, therefore, I wanted to eat as many as I possibly could. After all, I’d never get the chance to eat them again!
Eventually, because I could never seem to cut cookies out of my life, I began to realize that it didn’t kill me to eat them. In fact, the more I allowed them to be part of my Live-It, the less fear they instilled, and the less desperate I was to have them. My process of letting go of my fear and judgment about cookies, along with numerous calls I made for support, and working on the emotional issues that caused me to numb myself out with cookies in the first place, led me to freedom from my cookie obsession. I am no longer controlled by cookies. If I notice them becoming problematic, I turn to my support system until I can figure out what feelings I am trying to suppress. When I handle my feelings, cookies are no longer an issue.
Today, a cookie is just a cookie. I can eat one, or not eat one. I can even love cookies at times - because they’re not an obsession. Ironically, when cookies were a “bad” food, and I was trying to avoid them in order to control my weight, I weighed a lot more than I do today. Decriminalizing cookies (and other “bad” foods), and letting go of “weight-control” were important aspects to the eventual attainment of my natural weight.
Many of us have been living by rule books, and trying to manipulate our weight for so long that we have no idea what our natural weight is. Often we have an irrational fear that our body would just keep growing and growing if we didn’t control it. But, unless you have a medical condition that causes weight gain, this is only true if you are not addressing your emotional needs.
Also, many people have a distorted body image. We believe that we have gained weight, when in fact we haven’t. We believe that we’re fat when, in fact, we aren’t. This is because we connect feelings with “fat” and can’t tell the difference. We know we feel something, but since we can’t identify the feeling, we think it must be about weight. “Huge feelings” can make us feel huge!
If you feel out of control regarding your weight, and a doctor has ruled out any medical problems, the only solution is to focus on your inner needs. Weight control is not a solution. In fact, weight control leads to “weight out-of-control.”
Excerpted from The Don’t Diet Live-It Workbook:
Healing Food, Weight, and Body Issues
Andrea Wachter, LMFT and Marsea Marcus, LMFT
Gurze Books: 1999
http://holisticwellness.com/profiles/innersolutions