Tanya was one of my favourite clients. She told me that she longed to be slim and had frequently lost weight on different diets. However, when she was slimmer she felt incredibly vulnerable and had a powerful urge to overeat which she always gave in to. She always gained all the weight back that she had worked hard to lose. In hypnosis Tanya regressed back to being two years old and watching from the stairs as her father hit her mother. Tanya tried to intervene and stop him but he tossed her aside like a rag doll. She reported other instances in her childhood where her father hit her mother in her presence. Tanya felt so small and vulnerable; she wanted to protect her mother but could do nothing as she was too little. These events led to Tanya feeling vulnerable when she was lighter and more secure yet unhappy when she was heavy.
Talking through this with Tanya gave her the power to move away from acting and reacting like a helpless child. It also stopped her feeling so powerless when she was lighter. I gave her a tape to listen to every day that told her she would be slim and strong and that she had all the adult power she needed to protect herself. She had a voice and rationality and intellect and an awareness of her rights that she didn’t have as a child and therefore the need to be bigger was redundant. She reached her ideal weight within four months and had kept it off for several years before we lost touch.
Solution
If you have ever felt helpless and small because you were bullied or intimidated when little and are now overweight say the same things to yourself:
• I am slender and strong.
• I am reaching my ideal weight and maintaining it while feeling safe and secure.
• I have a strong voice and I am smart. The need to be physically big is over.
Find words that work for you and repeat them every day. If you have had these issues for years it is unrealistic to expect that a week of new affirmations will give you immediate results. They could, but you also may have to repeat your new words hourly, daily and weekly to replace the years of negative conditioning.
David was obese and his story was heartbreaking. In hypnosis he regressed back to being molested frequently by a neighbour. While he was talking as if he was still that small child he kept saying, ‘If only I was big these bad things would not happen to me’. Because he was so small for his age he also got bullied and beaten a lot by older children and repeated the same wish to himself, ‘If I was big people could-n’t hurt me’. I asked him how often he longed to be big when he was a child and he replied, ‘Every hour of every day and for years’. I have seen this so often with my clients, many recall being children who were too small to protect themselves against bullying parents or siblings, or to protect their siblings or a parent from a bully. Children who are abused or molested and feel too tiny to protect themselves want to be big, just like Tanya who could not intervene when her mother was hit because she was too small. In the film
Big
Tom Hanks longs to be big. In truth he longs to be tall and an adult, a grown-up. If you as a child longed to be big or bigger or to have substance don’t be surprised that you have made that happen. The strongest force in every human is that our body has to act in a way that matches our thinking. When you long and wish for something your body finds a way to express that longing physically and it often does it in an unwanted way because we are so unspecific in our longing. It is never too late to undo and reverse this.
Solution
Repeat the following until you believe them:
• I am significant.
• I am important.
• I matter.
• I have a big heart and intellect and a slim, fit body.
• I am an adult and my body is slender and strong.
• Now that I am a grown-up I am free to stop growing and to feel good about being me.
Fiona’s parents had a very bitter divorce and fought in front of her. She was traumatised by their rage and began to comfort eat. She gained an enormous amount of weight very quickly. The weight clearly had a role, function and purpose. It was telling her parents that she was deeply unhappy and that something was wrong. When we cannot open our mouths and tell people what is bothering us our body must take on this job. In Fiona’s case her weight was saying, ‘Look at what you have done to me and look how unhappy you are making me’. One of the keys to having inner peace and emotional wellbeing is to express your hurt as close to it occurring as possible. When I was training to be a therapist we were taught that one of the ways that madness is defined is in the length of time it takes to express a hurt or grievance. Become used to expressing your hurt out loud so that your body does not have to express it in a disguised or abnormal way for you. When you express your feelings you don’t need to swallow them with food. Using food to push feelings down doesn’t work. When you can’t say it out loud because it’s your boss or relative who’s upset you, lock yourself in the bathroom and run the taps so you can say out loud what you’re upset about rather than comfort eating. You
must
express it verbally.
Although Fiona was grown up and had long ago left home she kept the excess weight. Its function and role were still so imbedded in her. Discovering what it was all about freed her.
Solution
If you identify with this client’s case history then use the effective statements below, repeatedly, to achieve freedom from the bad habits you have developed:
• I express myself easily so my body doesn’t have to do it for me.
• I understand my feelings and deal with them.
• I am free to have a fit, healthy body.
• I express it instead of eating it.
• I am at peace with myself.
• I forgive and let go and am physically and emotionally healthy and well.
• I am letting go of the excess weight and its role, function and purpose simultaneously.
• Chewing gum helps angry eaters. We have receptors in our jaws that respond to chewing by releasing relaxing feelings. Gum gives you the same relaxed feeling as comfort food but without the calories.
Nell was slim when she married her rock star husband. He made it very clear to her that she was expected to look perfect all the time. He was very controlling about what she ate and if she appeared to gain any weight at all he was critical and cold with her. She began to feel that he did not love her, only what she looked like, and within a year she gained a lot of weight. It was her way of saying love me as I am.
I had another client, Susie, who was married to an even more famous actor. She began to live a Hollywood life and hated it. She found it hard to look beautiful every day and told me that she felt she was in a competition with all the other wives to look sensational 24/7. She realised she was in a race to stay slim and pretty and not only could she not win this race, she couldn’t even reach the finishing line. It constantly moved beyond her reach as she was surrounded by younger and more beautiful women. She found the pressure so overwhelming that she became a compulsive eater and gained a lot of weight which took her out of the competition completely. Nell and Susie could be classed as emotional eaters but in each case their anger towards their husbands and the situation they were in drove the overeating, and of course the anger is an emotion.
Solution
Use the following statements to enforce the right messages:
• I accept myself as lovable and I am filled and nourished by things other than food.
• I am unique and lovable. I love my body, I treat it with respect.
• I eat in a way that nourishes my body and makes me feel and look great.
• I am unique. I don’t need to compete with or compare myself to anyone.
• I matter as a person.
Particularly with habitual and emotional eating, there is also the issue that for many of us food equates to love. I had a wonderful grandmother who absolutely loved me but showed me that love through food. The minute I walked in her door she would get out the cake tin and offer me all kinds of goodies that she had bought or baked just for me. As a child I was delighted by this, as a twenty-year-old trying to control my weight I refused them and she was very hurt and offended. She took my refusal personally. I soon noticed that the instant I entered her door I wanted to eat cakes. If she wasn’t home I would help myself from the same tin. Even if I had had a full meal beforehand I still wanted them. I had built an association with her house and food that was very strong. I had an issue with food for years partly through being loved with food. It is not an exaggeration to say it ran my life and I am so happy that it no longer does.
Addictive eaters
can be very successfully cured once they have identified the foods that are triggers for them. They can break their addiction by choosing to replace specific foods with something similar but healthy and not chemically addictive. Many of us have addictive traits, it’s hard to eat one chocolate, one peanut or one crisp and many of us find once we start we can’t stop. Instead of berating yourself for having an addictive trait you can absolutely use this to your benefit. It is easy to get addicted to good habits going to the gym: exercising, eating fruit, even drinking water. I have many celebrity clients who have what I call ‘positive addictions’ – they can’t miss yoga or a gym session or they go everywhere with a water bottle as they feel ‘addicted’ to it. I have worked with many ex-addicts who became addicted to extreme sports instead of drink and drugs. You don’t need to behave in an extreme way but you can learn very quickly to replace every negative habit or addiction with a new positive one. The next chapter, Ending Cravings, will show you exactly how to do this.
Emotional, angry
and
destructive eaters
will find a lasting cure as they deal with their feelings and take charge of their thoughts, beliefs and language. Emotional eaters need to feel nourished by things other than food. Destructive eaters must feel safe as well as slender. Angry eaters need to express their emotions instead of swallowing them. Overeating is a learned response that you are unlearning through this programme. The first chapters of this book have already begun the process of lasting change for emotional, destructive and angry eaters and the next chapter will continue this.
Ignorant
and
habitual eaters
are easier to cure because human behaviour often falls into patterns – we are creatures of habit. However we can choose good habits.
Habits are easier to break if you replace them with something new. To break a habit you need to:
1. Be convinced you can do it.
2. Make a decision to start now.
3. Initiate it.
4. Absolutely persist.
5. Allow yourself to feel a sense of accomplishment and achievement.
Your habits, beliefs, actions and thoughts are yours to change. Only you can do it. Physical cravings ruin diets, figures and lives. You can break the vicious circle, it’s really not that hard. I did it and I have never looked back, neither have my clients.
Disclaimer
– Although the methods and techniques in this book can really help how you feel about yourself and your relationship with food, if you have an extreme eating disorder such as anorexia, bulimia or body dysmorphia, please seek additional help from your doctor or a recognised professional body.
Leave Childhood Eating in Your Childhood
Many of my clients report that they begin each day determined to do well on a new eating plan. They stay on target until late afternoon, and then at around 4 o’clock they lose their resolve and begin to crave cakes, biscuits or sweets. In therapy they very often recall coming home from school to a snack of something sweet or stodgy. Many adults have programmed themselves to recreate this scenario by eating the same foods at the same time of day. We have taste receptors in the mouth that link certain tastes to certain sensations. That is why we always crave foods like toast, ice cream, biscuits, cakes, chocolate, desserts, cereal with milk, etc. Few people crave comfort food in the form of salads, vegetables, sushi or steamed fish. We have no memories of these foods being given to us as a treat or comfort so we can’t re-enact anything by eating them. Food is linked to memories, both good and bad, that’s why many adults hate semolina, tapioca or Brussels sprouts because of the memories of being made to eat them at school. These memories are still having an effect years later.
Overeating is a search for security: a need to recreate the secure feeling we got as children when we were held and fed. By eating foods that are similar in sweetness and texture to the foods we ate as babies, we are trying to reactivate the memory of feeling secure and loved: we are looking to find the feeling in food but it’s a search that does not work.
Emotional eaters
often want to eat food linked to nice memories to recreate the memory along with the sensation. Emotions are very linked to food and many people who eat sugary fatty foods are searching for the emotional memory the food had for them. Smell is by far the strongest of our five senses and is absolutely linked to memory, followed by taste, hence the smell of freshly baked bread or cake or chocolate will bring back memories, as will the taste of these foods. Equally the smell of boiled cabbage can remind us of being back in the school dining room and the taste of something we were forced to eat like cod liver oil can bring up horrible memories.
When we continuously reward children with food we set up a pattern in the brain that wires it to believe food makes everything better and is a cure all. We reward children with sweets, snacks and desserts then they learn to associate these foods with feeling better. Food can distract an unhappy child and instantly make things better because children’s lives are so simple therefore an ice cream creates instant gratification. Lucy falls over, you buy her an ice cream, she is distracted and happy again. As an adult if Lucy falls out with her boyfriend she buys a big tub of ice cream believing it will still have the same effect, but it can’t. As adults our lives are not simple and we cannot find instant gratification in food. It can’t make anything better. If you lost your job and your partner and you were describing your feelings of devastation to a friend who replied, ‘Here’s a chocolate bar, that will make you better’, you would find this insensitive and ridiculous. A chocolate bar is not a cure all to an adult. Adults don’t need instant gratification, we need the long-term gratification of liking our bodies and being healthy.