Good afternoon. I am at the fun part of the book now I think, not that I've mastered the other steps yet! But I am reading the Satisfaction factor chapter and trying to figure out what I really really love and what I just eat because it's healthy.
Does who-ever started these forums think we should start a new thread- 13?
Hi ladies. I have been MIA for a day or 2 but I am still IE. I also started exercising but I'm slowly introducing it into my routine and not going all out crazy like I have been known to do in the past. I hope you ladies enjoy the weekend
Hello all, hope you all are enjoying the weekend. WOrking as usual, busy, Communions, Confirmations, and Baptisms all this weekend.
I had a slight gain this weekend, we have been eating boiled crawfish for the past 2 nights, and that is boiled with a bit of salt, so I am sure the .75 gain is from all the water retention.
Hello all. Quick hello. Just finished bank statements for all 3 stores, I have a headache!!! Hope you all have a blessed day. We are having so muc wind, feels like a small tropical storm it's blowing so hard!!
We've been blowy here in NC for 2 days now and humid and off and on getting dark and acting like it wants to storm. But doesn't. Lots of allergy and sinus headaches going around too.
I had my first grocery shopping when not dieting experience in a long long time yesterday. I also stayed off the scale today and plan to go for at least a week.
Hello! Just checking in. Nothing happening on the weight-loss here. But I haven't really been trying. But I am still enjoying eating whatever I want. I think someone here said recently that it takes a year or two to really get IE. I think I've been at it a little over a year, gosh, I can't even remember, so I'm still in the "honeymoon" phase I suppose. Just enjoying eating all the goodies I would avoid and then binge on in the past. Now I just eat them without the guilt, tho I must admit, Guilt still pokes her head in from time to time to check up on me. *GRRR* "Go bother somebody else, Guilt!"
I do still find diet mentality hanging around in the following situation: I've been eating whatever I want for a week or whatever, guilt-free, except that I often eat when not truly hungry. So in the back of my mind, I know that I should be only eating when I'm truly hungry if I want to see any kind of steady weight loss, so I find myself thinking "tomorrow I'll only eat when I'm hungry and get back on track." As if I've fallen off the wagon again. But there really wasn't a wagon to fall off of. Make sense? So even tho I'm not dieting, the thinking that I have to get back at it, because I'm not playing by the *rules* is still there. Don't know how to get away from that.
Just a few thoughts from Cheryl Canter, author of Normal Eating.
There are many reasons that people continue eating after they are no longer hungry. Here’s the short list:
You don’t recognize satiation cues. You don’t recognize that you’re no longer hungry until you are past full.
It bothers you to leave food on your plate. The reasons for this can run deep, as you’ll soon see.
The food tastes good and you want to continue experiencing that. But what aren’t you paying attention to?
You are in the grip of compulsion. You don’t want it, it doesn’t taste good, but you can’t stop.
You Don’t Recognize Satiation Cues
When emotional eaters start paying attention to hunger and satiation cues, they’re often startled to realize that they can’t recognize when they’re hungry or – harder yet – when they’ve had enough. It’s not surprising, when you think about it. When you eat for reasons other than hunger, you ignore these cues. After a while, you almost forget where to look for them.
When you first start asking yourself if you’re hungry or if you’re full, it’s frustrating to get the answer back, "I don’t know." But keep asking. Eventually, you will know. It’s only by continually trying to reconnect with your hunger and satiation cues that finally you will. The inner cues are still there – you just need to learn to listen again.
You Feel You Must Clean Your Plate
The crux of the "clean your plate" issue is eating according to internal cues rather than external cues – stopping when your body says to stop, rather than when your plate is empty. To some extent, the urge to eat everything on your plate is related to being disconnected from your hunger and satiation cues. But there’s more to it.
As I’m sure you’ve experienced, sometimes you keep eating when you are well aware that you are no longer hungry, and in fact you’re starting to feel uncomfortable. But as long as there is food on your plate, you feel the urge to continue eating until it’s all gone. What’s that about?
This is actually a self-esteem issue – a particular aspect of self-esteem. It’s about feeling entitled to leave food on your plate – knowing you have the right to eat according to internal signals rather than external mandates, and you’re entitled to throw away food. If you’ve spent years eating according to someone else’s rules – or at least trying – then you don’t know in your heart that you have the right to eat according to your own inner directives.
Somehow, in the mind of an emotional eater, the food on the plate becomes work to complete – something you must accomplish. You can feel this way even if you’ve served yourself, put the food on the plate yourself.
An easy out, if you’re serving yourself, is to simply put less on your plate and go back for more if you’re still hungry. But the more general solution is to know that you are entitled to throw away food. Your body is not a garbage can. If you are no longer hungry, it is better to throw the food in the garbage than down your own throat. You have the right to throw away food. You are entitled to do this! You are more important than the food.
The Food Tastes Good
If you continue to eat past full just because the food tastes good, then you are in the "neck-up" trap. You are ignoring all aspects of your body and physical experience except what’s happening in your mouth.
The experience of eating isn’t just about taste. Your entire body experiences eating. What you eat affects your emotions, your energy level, and creates physical sensations in your belly and bowels. When you’re cut off from your whole body experience – and if you hate your own body, you surely are – then you focus only on what’s happening above the neck. You experience yourself as a floating head. There are taste buds, and then the rest you ignore as best you’re able. That is how you can focus on the pleasure of taste while ignoring the discomfort signals in other parts of your body.
In Stage 2 of Normal Eating I talk about being mindful when you eat. I’m not just talking about mindfulness of your mouth experience. I’m talking about your whole body experience. It’s by reconnecting with your whole body experience that you can align the drive for pleasure with your own best interest.
You Just Can’t Stop
And then there is the situation when you are eating and just can’t stop. Maybe you’re bingeing in the middle of the night, eating whatever happens to be available – a jar of peanut butter or cake frosting, or something even less delectable. But you can’t stop. You’re hating yourself, you feel sick and full and you don’t even like what you’re eating, but you can’t stop.
Emotional eating is not about the food – it’s never about the food. That’s why dieting doesn’t work. Dieting is all about the food – what you are eating. But emotional eating is about something else, and if you don’t address this "something else", you will continue to do it. No type of eating past full makes this key fact more clear than the "just can’t stop" situation, when you’re eating something you don’t like and don’t want, but you can’t stop doing it.
What you need to do when you just can stop is to pause. Pause. Even if it’s for five minutes. Or one minute. For however long you can do it, pause. Pause in your anxiety and discomfort and feel your feelings. Let it all bubble up and live your own truth. Stand in your own real experience and be you, living your life. Don’t be afraid. Cry, scream, whatever you need to do, but feel your own authentic self. You’ll probably start thinking about some aspect of your life that’s really bothering you. That is your trigger – the real problem that you are trying to stuff down with food. It’s almost impossible to surface what’s triggering a binge unless you pause in the midst of the craving.
Pausing in the midst of craving is a crucial part of recovery in Normal Eating. I wrote more about this in a previous blog post, The Importance of the Pause. And of course I address it at length in my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight.
Something to Try
Here are some skills to practice so eventually you can stop eating when you are no longer hungry:
Eat mindfully. By this I don’t just mean pay attention to your mouth experience. Pay attention to your whole body experience. Notice how eating makes you feel throughout your body, and emotionally as well. Keep asking yourself, "Am I still hungry?"
Monitor your thoughts. If you feel like you "should" clean your plate, remind yourself that you are more valuable and important than this food, and you are entitled to throw it out.
Pause in the heat of the moment. When you are in the grip of compulsion and craving, notice it and pause. You may very well continue eating after the pause, but even a pause of one minute or five minutes strengthens your "emotional muscle", preparing you to be able to stop in the future. A baby doesn’t learn to walk by leaping from the crib. First, it crawls. Similarly, you can’t stop emotional eating until you are first able to pause.
So practice pausing, and feel proud of however long you are able to do it. Even if you end up eating afterwards, you have made progress. Those minutes you paused are minutes of genuine recovery.
Carol Thanks for sharing, I think I will print it when I get home.
Blue Hang in there.
I may show Carol's article to my son, I was talking to him about IE the other day and he says he's never full, so I think he is and does not know it or there are deeper issues with him.
Hey ladies I've been busy lately and haven't had that much time to post.
The next step for me IE wise is going shopping for clothes that help me look and feel better. For the past couple of months I have been dressing frumpy wearing workout tights and my husbands shirts. I HATE shopping but my clothes make me depressed because they don't make me feel good about the way I look. So tomorrow I am gonna bite the bullet and buy some jeans, dress pants, and nice shirts that make me look great. I'm really good at not judging my body til I get in front of the mirrors at stores but tomorrow I will work on that and stay positive plus havin clothes that I can fit will make me feel so much more confident even if they are a larger size then what I'm used to.
Well hopefully everyone is having a great day and everyone take care
Oh and Carol those are great articles that you posted, keep them coming
Last edited by 19Deltawifey; 05-04-2010 at 09:32 PM.
Just dropping by to say hello to everyone. I'm not on the computer much these days. Just so busy. We are getting ready to leave next week to go see the new grandson. Since economy is as it is and we don't travel like we used to, we are going to make a little vacation out of it.
I have let my weight hold me back from so many things the past few years and I've decided to change that and get out and do more... kind of come out of myself. It might even help with some weight loss. I think living here with no family around has not been really great for me. I used to get out and do things with people and have stopped that. The ladies in my neighborhood like to get out and do things together. And our neighborhood likes to get together for cookouts and things. Some of that isn't my thing, but maybe I should do it any way. I've ordered some new clothes for the trip and when I get back I'm going to get my house fixed up so I can invite people in. Ladies for coffee, tea or whatever and just visit. Tony and I have met people in our church we would like to socialize with and we head up an on-line prayer ministry in our church and we need to get to know our partners or at least meet them. So we need to make the moves and invite these people into our home.
I really think this will help me get to moving as I become more active and it could help me to lose weight. I know it would get my mind off of it which has got to be good for me in a lot of ways not just weight loss.
I hope everyone is doing well.
Carolr as usually you always have great articles you share. I printed it out so I can read it later. What I skimmed over looks very helpful. I will to check back in before I leave for trip and definitely will check in when I get back.
