It's Not A Battle: Befriending Your Body & Food Again

Struggling with a diet? How many people do you think maintain their optimal weight once they struggle to get there? Only 5 percent! That means 95 percent backslide. Why is this? Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath®claim there is a "missing x-factor" in our relationship to food and body image that relates to binge eaters, binge and purge eaters, and anorexics alike. This missing x-factor cannot be addressed by exercise, calorie counting, or by following the perfect diet. What is the "x-factor"? It turns out that those of us who starve ourselves, and those of us who binge, have more than just food compulsions in common: Emotional stress is at the root of all of our compulsive behaviors.

Here are three questions you can ask yourself to identify whether you or your loved ones are being impacted by an eating disorder driven by emotional eating:

Do you use eating, or restricting eating, to soothe yourself when you are stressed?
Do you have a loud inner critic? Is the inner radio station you tune into always playing self-judgment hits?
Are you an all-or-nothing kind of guy or gal? Chances are, if you have a loud inner critic this all or nothing attitude applies to you too, and the perfectionism that goes with it. You won't do anything unless you can do it full out. And if you fall off the wagon from a diet with a cookie, you're the person who will decide, "I may as well eat the whole bag now and start my diet again tomorrow."

I know these traits from the inside out because I was an expert in all three — and the binge eating, binging and purging, and anorexia that went with them. As an aspiring teen dancer, I longed to have the lean and long giraffe body of a ballerina. I thought if I starved my Shetland pony self it would transform me into a giraffe. Unfortunately, it turned me into a sickly, weakened porky pig. How is it that I could weigh 30 pounds more than I do now, when I was starving myself with my eating disorder? How is it that now my metabolism mows through five full meals a day to fill my slight 105 pound humming bird frame? It has to do with how we spend or store our calories, not how many we eat.

The stress hormone cortisol causes us to pack on pounds, whether we eat more or not. This is part of our historic survival intelligence. The body, brilliantly designed, cannot tell the difference between the stress of a bad break up, an email that pisses us off, or a famine. The only signal it has that stress is happening is our emotional response to life events- it cannot distinguish whether the stress is psychologically triggered, or physically triggered.

Cortisol causes most of us to gain weight as fat (in particular around our waist and hips) as a safety mechanism for danger; a kind of insurance policy against being without a food source for a while. However, this doesn't work so well when our stress is hatred at how we look in a bikini, or bill paying anxiety with a cupboard full of chips and a freezer full of ice cream waiting for us in the next room. For some of us, cortisol packs on pounds to protect us no matter how hard we try to keep the weight off. And dieting itself can be stressful — counting calories, judging ourselves in the mirror, depriving ourselves of what others get to have at dinner parties or special events, which unto itself can increase our cortisol and cause all of our dieting efforts to backfire.

Stress feels uncomfortable physically and emotionally. What do we want to do when we feel uncomfortable? Some of us want to soothe ourselves. And others of us want to feel in control and on top of the situation. So how do those with eating disorders self soothe or take control? Some self soothe by binging, and others try to feel in control by limiting their food intake and over exercising. Both approaches put more stress on the body, and the mind. This makes us more uncomfortable from the physical imbalances caused, as well as the judgment and inner criticism we inflict upon ourselves for our compulsions. Keep reading ...

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So what do we do with that self-perpetuating stress loop to try to feel better? We reach for the only feel-good our neural habit patterns know to go for: our eating disorders! And the loop perpetuates.

This is the most important piece to get right here, because if you do it will change your life forever.

Having an eating disorder or any other addiction does not indicate that you are an insane freak, or lack willpower. What it says to me is that you love yourself and you want to feel better. Your nervous system has been conditioned to reach for food or to avoid food to get the self-soothing or sense of control you seek. An eating disorder is really an act of self love and self care gone awry.

I say gone awry because stress — both emotional and physical — is a side effect of the strategy a person with an eating disorder is using to feel better, and to get over the very stress that started the cycle to begin with. They are caught in a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. Here is a picture of how the missing x-factor I call the emotional eating loop perpetuates itself:

THE COMPULSION LOOP

The loop begins with a mindset: self-judgment, self-criticism and an all-or-nothing perfectionism that causes stress
Stress leads to the need to feel in control or the need for comfort and to self-soothe. Where we will reach for that?
Reach for it outside — the refrigerator, the cupboard, the gym or another addiction
Reaching outside oneself to self soothe or gain control leads to more self judgment and perfectionism, and perpetuates the stress-self-soothe-with-substance loop

A heroin addict or an alcoholic interrupts this loop by quitting their substance cold turkey. When I was tortured by my own eating disorders, I kid you not that I was actually jealous of my patients who were heroin addicts! They could quit their substance cold turkey but I couldn't do that with food (that tells you how bad off I was!).

However, I don't feel that way anymore. Because what I came to discover is that playing out an addictive pattern through an eating disorder forces you to befriend yourself and food, and in doing so to make a new and more fulfilling relationship to yourself and your life. Too often, when people quit one addiction cold turkey they displace another one onto it. Recovering alcoholics tend to become sugar addicts, for example. The real opportunity any addiction offers (and that eating disorders demand of us because we cannot stop eating and live to tell about it), is to replace numbing our feelings using substances, with listening to our feelings and honoring what they are telling us we really need.

The key to stopping eating disorders lies in making the stress we feel an important advisor with messages for us to listen to, rather than a nuisance irritation we judge and move to numb or suppress or distract with an addiction. This requires going into our hearts rather than the fridge or the gym for the emotional release, centering and self-soothing we seek. Keep reading ...

Researchers from HeartMath have not only identified the missing x-factor in eating disorders and other addictions, but they have also given us a way to fill the void we try to fill with food by teaching us to listen to ourselves and soothe our stress with the self regulation and self reflection capacities of our own hearts.

Heart power is completely different from will power. Unlike will power, which calls us to force ourselves to conform to external dietary and exercise regimens even if they don't feel good (that’s stressful, and not sustainable), heart power puts us in touch with the feel good we can access from inner balance, helping us hear what it is that we really need and act on it. There is even a technology called Inner Balance that helps us see our heart rhythms in real time and know that we are making that shift to a balanced state inside. When we are balanced internally, then we can hear what stress is telling us we really need rather than mechanically reaching for a substance or compulsive behavior to make the feeling of stress go away. Sometimes instead of food, or instead of controlling our food intake, we need water, or a nap, or a bath, or a talk with a friend, or a break from work. Heart power manifests as listening to ourselves, and our bodies, rather than prescribing what they should do and then inevitably rebelling.

How do we access the power of the heart to stop eating disorders for good? HeartMath has a six-week course called The Stopping Emotional Eating Program that teaches us in a step-by-step way to do exactly that. With no other interventions, participants in HeartMath's studies dropped their stress hormone cortisol by 23 percent in just four weeks using the skills they learned, and after six weeks showed:

Significant 5.2 pound average weight reduction
Average waist size reduced by 2.1 inches
Average hip circumference reduced by 1.78 inches
Calmness significantly increased
Anger, resentfulness and stress significantly reduced

The most important thing that came out of this study from my perspective was that because people were befriending their feelings, their bodies and food, they didn't just lose physical weight. They gained a better relationship to themselves, their work, their loved ones, and their lives.

It's Not A Battle: Befriending Your Body & Food Again

Can changing how we digest our emotions liberate us from eating disorders?

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