3 ways to stop eating problems

Eating disorders and, as a result, excess weight are perhaps one of the most painful and complex problems of modern society.

As a practicing psychologist, I see that my overweight clients would like a quick solution, a kind of “magic pill” to get themselves in perfect shape once and for all.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way, and extra pounds are just the tip of the iceberg. Delicious food is one of the easiest ways to relieve psychological stress.

From the first days of life, we associate food with safety and love, and thanks to these associations, in the future it helps to quickly relax and cheer up.

Of course, gambling, and alcohol, and spontaneous shopping perfectly “cope” with this task, but overeating looks much more harmless from the point of view of public opinion. Indeed: who will condemn us for a couple of crispy buns in the night? It’s not the same as losing the family budget in a casino.

In fact, the mental mechanism of any of the above addictions is the same. For some reason, a person cannot cope with stress, internal tension grows and, in order to somehow alleviate his condition, he chooses the way available to him to quickly enjoy and reduce anxiety.

Hence – “jamming” of the problem, “flooding” it with alcohol, uncontrolled purchases and other types of escape from the territory of one’s own personality.

The saddest thing is that pain doesn’t go away just because we pretend it doesn’t exist. You can eat all the buns in the world and lose (or win) the budget of a small country in a casino, but still remain vulnerable at the same time.

Moreover, if pain is not dealt with in a constructive way, it will only get worse in the long run. That is why people who are deprived of the physical ability to overeat after bariatric surgery (popularly referred to as gastric closure), without serious psychotherapy, “break down” in the first year and fall into other types of addiction.

After two or three years, the weight returns, and the result of the operation is reset to zero. To understand the root cause of overeating, you first need to understand what you are running from. Learn to understand, analyze and live your emotions.

The problem is that eating a chocolate bar is much easier than doing reflection. Therefore, very few manage to get out of this vicious circle without the help of a specialist.

The goal of psychotherapy is to help you become aware of the automatism of repetitive overeating and the repressed emotions that lie behind it. In fact, there are not so many negative emotions that most often “jam”. It can be shame, guilt, loneliness, resentment, envy, jealousy, fear, boredom, or a combination of these.

Let’s see how it works.

1. Allow yourself to experience more than just “good” emotions

It is quite obvious that if a person did not have shame, he could not exist in society, be responsible, moral and honest. And at the same time, shame is one of the most painful emotions for a person, because it is associated with the recognition of one’s imperfection.

One of my clients had an overly controlling father. She was in her forties, and he could still show up without a call and open the door to her apartment with his key. He scolded her for immoral, in his opinion, behavior, for choosing the “wrong” men, for the wrong upbringing of her son, and so on and so forth.

Usually, after talking with her father, a woman woke up with a brutal appetite. She weighed over a hundred pounds when she finally began psychotherapy. She soon realized that she had been “living with her eyes closed” all this time.

She did not allow herself to admit that she felt a feeling of debilitating, unbearable shame – for being so “worthless”, for the fact that her father did not appreciate her, for being so unlucky with a parent.

Each time after her father’s call, she felt a burning hatred for him, but she was frightened of this feeling and ashamed of him. In order not to plunge into a pool of unpleasant emotions, she went to the refrigerator.

Only by realizing the full range of her feelings, giving them an honest name and allowing herself to fully experience them, she was able to control her appetite and bring her weight back to normal.

2. Translate emotions into a constructive channel

Surprisingly, the same emotions can both destroy a person and stimulate him to develop and move forward. For example, consider envy. No one benefits from the fact that a person envies a neighbor and dreams that he would get worse.

At the same time, the success of a neighbor can inspire us to get off the couch and reach even greater heights. If we unravel the tangle of sequences that led to fixation on a certain emotion, then the “thread” will most likely lead us to childhood.

Let’s say the eldest child in the family lacked parental attention, and he felt that the situation was aggravated with the birth of the youngest. Then he begins to feel jealous of the baby, because he is smiled more often, he is better taken care of. And in general they give the baby what was actually meant for him.

By doing petty nastiness to a hateful younger relative, the child receives a scolding from his parents. And although this is negative, it is still the attention that you so want! This is how the chain is formed: “deficiency – envy – getting what you want – replenishing the deficit.” Food can also be a way to console yourself, to make up for the lack of what you so dream about.

In the case of being overweight, envy can become a secondary benefit: a person is used to envy, and if he is overweight, then there are plenty of opportunities to find an object for envy. In this case, the therapeutic task in working with a psychologist will be to recognize the emotions that bring pleasure, and redirect them from a destructive channel to a constructive one.

For example, you can envy a good salary, a big house or knowledge of a foreign language. That is, what, if desired, you can achieve yourself. And in the same way, we can, relying on this feeling and not denying it, achieve a promotion, learn Swahili or … Adjust our relationship with food.

3. Allow yourself to be slim

In my work with overweight clients, I often notice that many of them seem to punish themselves for living too well. Usually, repressed emotions are behind this, and most often – guilt.

For example, a woman has experienced the difficult care of her mother and blames herself for not providing her with decent medical care. Every time she has an opportunity to improve her life, she feels she has no moral right to do so.

Being slim and light is unacceptable when the burden of such guilt is behind you. Therefore, she unconsciously chooses to have health and weight problems.

At the heart of all three of the above examples is the suppression of unpleasant emotions. And the path to a healthy weight always begins with their extraction from the bowels of the unconscious and naming them by their appropriate names.

You can start tracking and becoming aware of your actions right now, without waiting for the start of therapy.