We’ve all said to ourselves: I’m never going to do that again. We make resolutions. We vow. We promise.
I’m never going to smoke again. I’m never going to binge again. I’m never going to drink again. I’m never going to eat “x” again.
Then the following week (or okay, a few hours later) we’re doing it. Again.
Someone asked me recently how you could ever make a single promise and keep it?
While you can never know the future, it made me reflect on when I’ve known a promise was keep-able.
What an interesting question, because a positive, supportive and enduring “promise” is very different than a promise made out of fear, anxiety, desperation or rage.
It’s not a “diet” promise. It’s not a violent promise. It’s not a promise that feels forceful and like imprisonment.
It’s important to give foundation and support to a deep commitment and do it with a mind that’s clear, and a heart that’s understanding.
One of the most painful experiences I had in my early days of trying to find peace with eating (and with life) was my efforts to control the chaos.
I attempted to control my food, my exercise, my cravings, my thoughts, my emotions, and my experiences.
I had recognized the insanity of my thoughts and my eating, so one of my first solutions was to apply MORE force, control and rigidity to my behavior and plans with food. Food was frightening and should be kept at bay.
This is not uncommon. It’s the mindset where “dieting” comes from. Activate willpower, discipline and control, and you’ll find peace.
The problem was, I was so at war internally….I was full of anxiety, even when I no longer binge-ate for a couple of years.
One day, I cracked. I ate for hours, like a wild rebellion cut loose like a geyser. I felt so awful, I wanted to die.
This is when I decided there has to be another way besides dieting or controlling what I’m eating. Because even though I had been “abstinent” from binge-eating for a couple of years, I was miserable.
In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone. True mastery can be gained
The debate about following food and eating plans or not following a plan is strong.
Some say if you’ve been a compulsive overeater, you’ll always be one. You can’t take “one bite” kinda like an alcoholic can’t take one drink.
So you need to follow a plan that’s given to you by someone else. Because left to your own devices, you’re a mess and you’ll screw it up. You need boundaries given to you.
Others notice greater anxiety WITH a food plan. They feel boxed in, rebellious, or sad, and like they’re missing an important journey in restoring a sense of self-trust.
I think there are two key questions you might contemplate around your relationship with eating;
1) What’s your ultimate goal, feeling, purpose in balancing your relationship with eating? Is your goal to be thin or at a certain weight? Do you want to quit binge-eating, quit dieting, and stop any sort of eating that’s whacky or unnatural? Or do you want inner peace, beyond this predicament of eating or even thinking about food or your weight?
2) What is the most kind and gentle thing you can do for yourself right now in your relationship with food, eating or your body? This may seem like an obvious or trick question (doesn’t anyone want kindness?)…but it’s not.
In the past, I thought change occurred through control or discipline, not love. Without rules telling me what was “good” I felt really lost because my self-esteem was shot to hell. If this is the case for you, it’s OK to have an eating and food plan that you follow for awhile.
Very early on in my wonderings about eating, weight, and food….I knew I wanted to understand ultimately why I was doing what I did.
I wanted to address the compulsion at the root.
I knew I wasn’t born with something missing. I was born a full human being, capable of eating normally. I could feel this was true. I knew something was going on that led me to eat wildly, then starve myself, then stuff myself again, then look for diets endlessly.
It wasn’t really about food.
But since this is a healing process, that takes time, there may be some ways you can have your hand held before walking on alone.
Under compulsive eating or an urge to engage in any addictive process, if you want to call it that, is something that’s upset, troubled, unresolved, off-balance.
Feelings. Beliefs. Memories. Mind. Thinking.
To get to the bottom of it, you’ll have to deal with messy, chaotic things like emotions. You may have to refuse to keep eating when you aren’t hungry and wonder why it feels so hard.
You may have to see how you look at the world, and life, at a very deep core level….
….your attitude towards being here on planet earth….
Thank you all of you who answered the survey questions I sent last week. So, so much.
Now, we’re taking it a level deeper. Another 4 questions.
Even if you’ve never answered a survey, or filled out anything I’ve sent before, I’d love to read your answers to these four questions.
I find communicating and hearing and reading what you deeply have to say about your experience as an eater….can clarify for me and ultimately for all of us our needs, our emotions, our experiences we’re wondering about and wanting to understand when it comes to eating.
Answer the questions here (and yes, if you answered the first survey, this is a new one and I’d love your answers to these questions, too–thank you):
Communicating has a strong energy in it. It’s wondering with words out loud, or in writing. Making contact. Being honest. Telling the truth.
Speaking and clarifying, and telling the truth about our experiences and our perspectives–even if they aren’t necessarily “True” for all time–is so powerful.
Accessing strength, clarity, or power in a really solid, energetic, sharp, beautiful way is sometimes what is called for as we seek peace with eating and compulsive behavior.
The feeling of powerlessness is so harsh and difficult. Sometimes when we feel like there’s no power anywhere in sight, we feel completely resigned and in prison with this eating thing. No way out.
But there is a way out.
We can say “No more!”
We can pause, and not hit the drive-through fast food places, or eat a whole bag of something. We can stop.
There is another way.
Today, I’m sharing a simple way to access power. You can find your own touchstone or inner picture or word or name that helps you notice power.
This is the good kind of power, where you stand up for what feels true for you. Where you can listen, be, and hold your love and integrity clearly.
My eating was war-like because my thinking was war-like and oppositional and fearful, and so were my feelings.
Eating was grounding, a way to push the pause button. You have to slow down to chew and swallow, and enter a world of doing something for apparently “no reason”.
When I was eating, I wasn’t doing something “good” or getting tasks done from my endless to-do list, or saving the world, or writing a book, or even being good.
I was simply focusing and taking in for myself alone, and processing my troubled thoughts in a way (although, not permanently).
So instead of feeling so upset and ashamed at how rotten and selfish I was, and entering the self-criticism mode about me….
….I connected with others so that I could talk, share, express, and say what I was troubled about. And oh boy was I troubled.
I had deeply stressful thoughts about careers, jobs, bosses, work, money, survival, pain, fear of hurt, family, relationships, mother, father, sisters, competition, being left out, feeling muted.
What brought me the greatest freedom, was beginning to look at each of these experiences of suffering in my past.
Eating peace is born from thinking peace.
The most simple, lazer-sharp way to do it that I’ve found is with The Work of Byron Katie.
Find one troubling experience, and begin today. It can feel frightening, but it’s better than pushing it down with food, I can guarantee it.
P.S. Four day Mental Spring Cleaning Retreat. We’ll be clearly identifying what’s felt so painful in our experience, and with the power of The Work of Byron Katie and our slowing down, we’ll discover answers that were waiting inside us the whole time. For more information visit HERE.
When it comes to compulsive behavior, our thoughts can get very extreme.
If this doesn’t end now (or very very soon) I will kill myself, I will go crazy, I can’t stand it, I can’t take it anymore.
These thoughts are horrifying or infuriating, and very painful.
I’ve thought them all.
From eating everything in sight, driving my car through a city through fast-food restaurants OR starving myself all day long OR pushing hard in exercise OR finding a new diet to follow….
….there was a constant effort to “solve” the problem of what was happening now.
Now was not good! (Look at this eating, look at this body, after all–see my proof?)
Somewhere else would definitely be better. I hate what is.
But can you absolutely know that’s true?
Perhaps life is unfolding at the perfect pace necessary for your own healing. Perhaps there is more to look at and know, and something occurring that is not on YOUR timeline.
Could it be OK that you haven’t healed before this moment now?
Today I share about this strange process of being willing for things to take the time they take, including healing from addictive or compulsive eating. (And it doesn’t mean you can’t stop eating today. You can.)
P.S. Four day Mental Spring Cleaning Retreat. We’ll be clearly identifying what’s felt so painful in our experience, and with the power of The Work of Byron Katie and our slowing down, we’ll discover answers that were waiting inside us the whole time. For more information visit HERE.
One area I’ve noticed over the years of working with those of us with eating woes is one particular type of eater.
An eater with such a deep broken heart about other people’s suffering…
…that they unconsciously move to help those in need almost as a compulsion all in itself. Like they can’t help it.
Often, they are nurses, teachers, healers, holistic practitioners, counselors and therapists, maybe moms.
Now, helping others is a beautiful act. But often, when we’ve got this underlying belief running about needing them desperately to be OK….our efforts to help them are not really helpful.
When we’re worried about other people we feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, literally. It’s all over us.
We seem images of people close to us, and the suffering of humanity, and feel the pain of it all.
The belief “I need to help other people” can be very, very stressful.
People feel guilty about questioning it, like it will mean they will never help others, and they’ll be selfish, isolated, uncaring people.
Can you really know that’s true, that you’ll forget about others, if you question that you need to help them?
“Being soothed and oral intake are closely associated in the human mind…Food becomes a substitute for nourishment. Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. ” ~ Gabor Mate, MD
One of these things is not like the others. What if we didn’t go to war with it, but relaxed beyond the right vs wrong battle?
Jalaluddin Rumi, the famous Sufi Persian philosopher who lived 1207-1273 had a beautiful quote most of us find very familiar:
Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. ~ Rumi
When I was a young woman, my ideas about food, eating, exercising and being in a body which needed to eat were filled with ideas about right-doing and wrong-doing.
I’m not sure there was one single neutral stand in the entire process of living my life within these confounds. Everything was labeled “good” or “bad”.
Driving around hunting for sweet sugary foods obsessively? Wrong. Evil. Bad.
If anyone saw me…shame and embarrassment forever.
Running 5 miles in the morning at dawn, followed by herbal tea and all raw food? Right. Holy. Good.
I could list for you, at the time, the tick marks I’d give each and every food in the world that was “bad” along with all the foods that were good.
Being quite full was also bad, and starving or feeling empty was good.
I never stopped to question any of these rules and regulations. All I tried to do was conform, and follow them.
Until I began to explore more deeply what my condition might mean, what my behavior might be longing for, or saying to me.
I tried an experiment you’ll find very surprising, that changed my entire approach to the Good/Bad wars of food. I “allowed” myself to eat something I previously considered “evil”.
It helped me go beyond the battle, and step into the field that Rumi spoke of so long ago….someplace peaceful, clear and joyful, without debate.
The brilliant Cheri Huber, meditation teacher and author, offers a beautiful idea, summarized in her book “There is Nothing Wrong With You”:
Your self-improvement plans and projects are ego-maintenance projects.
They don’t accept this present moment here now. They argue with it. You’re this or that, and it’s mediocre, unacceptable, lacking.
What’s here now is wrong, bad, ugly, fat, grabby.
I will fix myself, and then later I’ll be right, good, attractive, thin, self-less.
The problem lies in “later”.
The mind that’s oriented to fear LOVES that later, you’ll be OK, but not today, not right now, not yet.
I’m reaching for the dangling carrot, and not getting it.
Constantly on the hunt, planning for a better future.
What a paradox to relax, now. To stop the planning, pestering, controlling, dictating in a rigid way.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with turning over a new leaf, and venturing out on a journey to health and vitality, or peace and joy. We love those things.
But the best way to receive these, to experience them?
Notice them….now.
If you really sit long enough in an uncomfortable moment, difficult feelings, hateful images, screaming inner voices, forcing, willpower, the mind freaking out and mad as a hornet….
….you may be surprised.
You may discover peace of some kind is actually possible here. And this moment is not FULLY filled with fear, dissatisfaction or powerlessness. Sure, the mind and thoughts are all riled up. But not everything, not the feeling of being alive.
In this video today, I’m calling that part that can feel peace now the self, perhaps the peaceful self, the true self…I don’t even know if I can say “true” (as if I would ever know).
This inner “I” however, this life force, doesn’t care about weight loss later on, and it also doesn’t care about compulsion in this moment, or severe cravings, or chaos or lack of knowledge.
It’s OK with not knowing, resting, relaxing, being still.
It’s been here the whole time, and it never abandons you despite your mind and your actions.
We’re living our day, or just finished dinner after getting home from work, you have some unscheduled or uncommitted time….
….and here comes a thought suddenly about food.
Mmm, wouldn’t that be good to eat right now?
I know I’m not hungry, but it’s soooo yummy. Just a little bite.
When I used to have this kind of thought of eating, when not hungry, I’d think a second later “No. Don’t do that. Bad idea. Fight! It’s wrong and you know it!”
I’d take up arms against the idea of eating. This idea shouldn’t be happening, I hate this, I must fight it to the death. I must control this. Uh oh. There’s something wrong with me, obviously. I can’t stop craving. This is terrible. I need more willpower.
The only way to get through this, is to just eat.
And of course, what was my behavior?
I’d eat. I’d binge. I just fall into the wild chaos and let it take over and rule my present moment. Inside my mind I’d be screaming and battling, I’d make promises about starting tomorrow.
I might even feel a little relieved once I took the first bites of compulsive eating, because now I didn’t have to “fight” anymore or hold everything together with extreme control. I’d just eat, eat, eat.
It felt like letting the thing have me. I don’t have to be in charge anymore.
Which never had a good outcome, except exhaustion and self-hatred and the never-ending repetitive cycle of being trapped and in prison emotionally and physically.
My strategy used to be constantly that I needed to find more willpower. I needed to build my fighter energy. I needed to get more control.
But what if we question “I need to control this.”
Let’s see what happens when we question this sometimes very stressful thought…about anything in life.
Is it true I need to control my urges, control my eating, be in the diet mode of rigidity, exerting effort?
Many people answer “yes” and think it’s the only way to getting what you really want (freedom from compulsion).
How do you react when you believe you need to exert effort and control and fight your urges, in order to get to freedom?
The way I felt is I’d feel the war within, I’d feel angry. I’d argue myself right into a screaming binge. I’d feel like I was duking it out with some kind of force that was taking me over like an evil demon. I definitely believed in good vs evil.
But who would you be without the belief you have to gain more control, and this is the only way to happiness and peace?
Wow. Almost strange, right?
If there’s no fighting, doesn’t it mean I’m simply eating from one end of the city to the other without care?
No. That’s the Urge taking over everything and “winning” or conquering, but not it a way you can count on or feel peaceful or loving about.
Looking back on that time I used to regularly binge-eat, it felt like anxiety and believing my thoughts about that uncomfortable moment was the thing that “won” over or dominated the scene.
I was believing my very stressful, uncomfortable thoughts about life and my own inadequacy and the need for escape.
Who would I be without that story about needing to fight?
Turning the thought around: I do NOT have to get more willpower or control when it comes to compulsive eating. How could this be true?
I have all the will necessary (not “missing” willpower), I have the capacity to stop, to say no, to slow down, to wait. I have the capacity to feel peace. I can notice that overeating or eating when I’m not hungry isn’t satisfying truly, anyway. That’s already clear. Nothing is missing here. I can identify other thoughts I have about life, and take them through inquiry.
Turning the thought around again: “I” have all the energy and power ever needed. I don’t have to be in charge and control everything, including emotions and thoughts and other peoples’ behaviors and incidents that occur in life.
“Practice not-doing, and everything will fall into place.” ~ Tao Te Ching #3
Let’s see what happens today if we can live the turnaround to relax, instead of exert more control, or more willpower. If you could relax, you probably wouldn’t follow the order from part of your mind to binge eat. You might find you can live through disturbed feelings. You might find you’re OK.
