Meg
02-26-2005, 07:49 AM
Key To Success #8: Face Life Head-On
Chapter 8 of Thin For Life addresses emotional and stress eating. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt! :lol: I used to laugh about how I was never too stressed to eat. If someone would tell me that they were too upset to eat, I’d scratch my head and say: huh? Too upset to eat? :chin: Never! Nope, for me, when the going got tough, I got eating. Happy, sad, bored, lonely … you get the picture. :dizzy:
Lots of us are stress and emotional eaters and that’s a big part of how we ended up being overweight. But it's important to note that the book emphasizes that emotional/stress eating does NOT mean that we have psychological problems and need therapy to overcome this kind of eating for the wrong reasons. For most of us, it’s a problem that can be solved with some analysis and planning.
The purpose of this chapter is to talk about learning to deal with life without turning to food as a crutch – facing life head-on. Studies of maintainers and regainers show that positive coping skills help with weight control. We’re ALL going to have stressful events in our lives – it’s how we deal with them that determines how successful we’ll be in keeping off the weight:
In the Kaiser Permanente study comparing women who successfully maintained weight loss with those who regained [p 64] researchers found that the maintainers ‘believed themselves capable of handing their problems and used problem-solving skills to cope with their difficulties. In contrast, relapsers did not deal with their problems directly (perhaps because they lacked effective problem-solving skills) and reported that they used food to make themselves feel better when upset.’ (p 236)
95% of maintainers used ‘planful problem-solving’ skills, compared to only 10% of regainers (p 237). Wow – doesn’t that just say it all? OK, so what exactly are these planful problem solving skills? The first step is to label your emotions – put a name to exactly what you’re feeling when you want to overeat. Are you bored, angry, lonely, sad, depressed, anxious etc? You’ve probably heard of waiting for 20 minutes before you give in to a craving, right? One benefit of waiting out a craving is that it gives you a chance to label what you’re feeling and to deal with it.
Another aspect of labeling your emotions is recognizing what triggers them – the warning signs. Do you do certain things that lead up to overeating, such as rummaging through the refrigerator or cabinets? Reading recipes? Stopping by the grocery store on the way home? Label your triggers as well as your emotions. Many people find that journaling or writing down their feelings can help label emotions and make them easier to deal with.
Four of the biggest emotional triggers for overeating are listed as anger, loneliness, boredom, and depression (p 243-4). I’m not sure this counts as an emotional trigger (maybe it’s physical?) but I’d add 'being tired' to that list. For me, exhaustion triggers overeating both because it gives me a quick energy pick-me-up and because I lose all willpower when I’m tired.
So once you’ve labeled your emotional eating, how do you control it? The book sets out a specific six-step process for dealing with the stresses that can trigger overeating (pp 245-9):
1. Define the problem. Look for patterns – when the overeating happens, where, if you’re alone or with others I tend to pig out on junk food at night when I’m watching TV.
2. Come up with alternatives. I can keep snacks out of the house. I can plan healthy snacks. I can go to bed early.
3. Evaluate the alternatives, listing pros and cons for each. How likely is each alternative to work for you?
4. Make a decision and a commitment.
5. Implement the strategy.
6. Evaluate the plan and switch gears if necessary.
The remainder of the chapter deals with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) (pp 249-58). There’s a big difference between BED and occasional emotional eating and we here at Maintainers have touched on this issue in our recent ‘Binging’ thread. What we colloquially call ‘binging’ usually isn’t what a psychologist would define as BED and we need to be aware of the distinction. The book defines BED as being able to answer ‘yes’ to all or most of the following questions AND the behavior has gone on regularly for at least six months:
Consuming ‘unusually large amounts of food' – the example given is a quart of ice cream, 6 brownies and 16 chocolate chip cookies – in a two-hour period.
Feeling out of control while you’re eating
Eating much more quickly than usual.
Eating past the point of being uncomfortable.
Eating alone because of being ashamed.
Feelings of intense guilt, depression, and shame.
BED is frequently linked with major depression, low self-esteem, and other problems that need professional help. The book says that 10% of obese patients have clinically significant depression that needs to be dealt with before weight can be lost (p 257).
But for the rest of us, mindful problem solving skills are the best way to deal with occasional episodes of overeating that are triggered by stress, emotions, or boredom. I know we’ve discussed this in the ‘Binging’ thread, but let’s talk about emotional or stress eating and ways that we’ve short-circuited our food response to emotions.
I’ll start out with a little story about a friend of mine who’s struggled with her weight her whole life (like me). About seven months ago, she started losing weight with healthy eating and exercise and has lost 49 pounds to date. All along, the two of us have talked about what it’s going to take to KEEP the weight off for life because we’ve both lost and gained and lost and gained probably hundreds of pounds. We both recognize that it’s when life takes an unexpected turn and things get stressful that our new good habits tend to go out the window.
Well, it happened to her two weeks ago. Her job blew up, things got very ugly, and her life suddenly became stressful to the max. Her knee-jerk reaction was to go right back to comfort eating, specifically carbs. Huge quantities of carbs. She stopped exercising and slid right back into those old bad habits of seven months ago.
I sat her down a few days ago and told her that I was going to fight her doing this to herself – that I wasn’t going to stand by and let her put the weight back on. I reminded her that in six months, this food wasn’t going to fix the job or make her happy. In fact, she’d be miserable in six months once she realized that she’d undone all her hard work.
It was like I had thrown a bucket of cold water in her face and she said she never realized how easy it is to go back to the old way of coping with emotions with food. She said that it was SO seductive just to fall into comfort eating instead of dealing with the issues themselves. Thankfully, I think the story has a happy ending and she’s on Day 3 of exercising and eating healthy again. But it’s been a big lesson to me to watch all these events unfold and seeing how emotions and stress can throw us completely off track. The lesson to me is that we’re always going to need to be aware of how emotions and stress can affect our eating and always be on guard.
How about the rest of you? How have you dealt with stress/emotional eating? Has any strategy really worked for you? Do you find yourself falling back into old habits when the going gets tough? Do you have any great tips or tricks to share?
Chapter 8 of Thin For Life addresses emotional and stress eating. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt! :lol: I used to laugh about how I was never too stressed to eat. If someone would tell me that they were too upset to eat, I’d scratch my head and say: huh? Too upset to eat? :chin: Never! Nope, for me, when the going got tough, I got eating. Happy, sad, bored, lonely … you get the picture. :dizzy:
Lots of us are stress and emotional eaters and that’s a big part of how we ended up being overweight. But it's important to note that the book emphasizes that emotional/stress eating does NOT mean that we have psychological problems and need therapy to overcome this kind of eating for the wrong reasons. For most of us, it’s a problem that can be solved with some analysis and planning.
The purpose of this chapter is to talk about learning to deal with life without turning to food as a crutch – facing life head-on. Studies of maintainers and regainers show that positive coping skills help with weight control. We’re ALL going to have stressful events in our lives – it’s how we deal with them that determines how successful we’ll be in keeping off the weight:
In the Kaiser Permanente study comparing women who successfully maintained weight loss with those who regained [p 64] researchers found that the maintainers ‘believed themselves capable of handing their problems and used problem-solving skills to cope with their difficulties. In contrast, relapsers did not deal with their problems directly (perhaps because they lacked effective problem-solving skills) and reported that they used food to make themselves feel better when upset.’ (p 236)
95% of maintainers used ‘planful problem-solving’ skills, compared to only 10% of regainers (p 237). Wow – doesn’t that just say it all? OK, so what exactly are these planful problem solving skills? The first step is to label your emotions – put a name to exactly what you’re feeling when you want to overeat. Are you bored, angry, lonely, sad, depressed, anxious etc? You’ve probably heard of waiting for 20 minutes before you give in to a craving, right? One benefit of waiting out a craving is that it gives you a chance to label what you’re feeling and to deal with it.
Another aspect of labeling your emotions is recognizing what triggers them – the warning signs. Do you do certain things that lead up to overeating, such as rummaging through the refrigerator or cabinets? Reading recipes? Stopping by the grocery store on the way home? Label your triggers as well as your emotions. Many people find that journaling or writing down their feelings can help label emotions and make them easier to deal with.
Four of the biggest emotional triggers for overeating are listed as anger, loneliness, boredom, and depression (p 243-4). I’m not sure this counts as an emotional trigger (maybe it’s physical?) but I’d add 'being tired' to that list. For me, exhaustion triggers overeating both because it gives me a quick energy pick-me-up and because I lose all willpower when I’m tired.
So once you’ve labeled your emotional eating, how do you control it? The book sets out a specific six-step process for dealing with the stresses that can trigger overeating (pp 245-9):
1. Define the problem. Look for patterns – when the overeating happens, where, if you’re alone or with others I tend to pig out on junk food at night when I’m watching TV.
2. Come up with alternatives. I can keep snacks out of the house. I can plan healthy snacks. I can go to bed early.
3. Evaluate the alternatives, listing pros and cons for each. How likely is each alternative to work for you?
4. Make a decision and a commitment.
5. Implement the strategy.
6. Evaluate the plan and switch gears if necessary.
The remainder of the chapter deals with Binge Eating Disorder (BED) (pp 249-58). There’s a big difference between BED and occasional emotional eating and we here at Maintainers have touched on this issue in our recent ‘Binging’ thread. What we colloquially call ‘binging’ usually isn’t what a psychologist would define as BED and we need to be aware of the distinction. The book defines BED as being able to answer ‘yes’ to all or most of the following questions AND the behavior has gone on regularly for at least six months:
Consuming ‘unusually large amounts of food' – the example given is a quart of ice cream, 6 brownies and 16 chocolate chip cookies – in a two-hour period.
Feeling out of control while you’re eating
Eating much more quickly than usual.
Eating past the point of being uncomfortable.
Eating alone because of being ashamed.
Feelings of intense guilt, depression, and shame.
BED is frequently linked with major depression, low self-esteem, and other problems that need professional help. The book says that 10% of obese patients have clinically significant depression that needs to be dealt with before weight can be lost (p 257).
But for the rest of us, mindful problem solving skills are the best way to deal with occasional episodes of overeating that are triggered by stress, emotions, or boredom. I know we’ve discussed this in the ‘Binging’ thread, but let’s talk about emotional or stress eating and ways that we’ve short-circuited our food response to emotions.
I’ll start out with a little story about a friend of mine who’s struggled with her weight her whole life (like me). About seven months ago, she started losing weight with healthy eating and exercise and has lost 49 pounds to date. All along, the two of us have talked about what it’s going to take to KEEP the weight off for life because we’ve both lost and gained and lost and gained probably hundreds of pounds. We both recognize that it’s when life takes an unexpected turn and things get stressful that our new good habits tend to go out the window.
Well, it happened to her two weeks ago. Her job blew up, things got very ugly, and her life suddenly became stressful to the max. Her knee-jerk reaction was to go right back to comfort eating, specifically carbs. Huge quantities of carbs. She stopped exercising and slid right back into those old bad habits of seven months ago.
I sat her down a few days ago and told her that I was going to fight her doing this to herself – that I wasn’t going to stand by and let her put the weight back on. I reminded her that in six months, this food wasn’t going to fix the job or make her happy. In fact, she’d be miserable in six months once she realized that she’d undone all her hard work.
It was like I had thrown a bucket of cold water in her face and she said she never realized how easy it is to go back to the old way of coping with emotions with food. She said that it was SO seductive just to fall into comfort eating instead of dealing with the issues themselves. Thankfully, I think the story has a happy ending and she’s on Day 3 of exercising and eating healthy again. But it’s been a big lesson to me to watch all these events unfold and seeing how emotions and stress can throw us completely off track. The lesson to me is that we’re always going to need to be aware of how emotions and stress can affect our eating and always be on guard.
How about the rest of you? How have you dealt with stress/emotional eating? Has any strategy really worked for you? Do you find yourself falling back into old habits when the going gets tough? Do you have any great tips or tricks to share?