The Life You Want Read online

  Unworthiness can be a deeply held belief, and getting past it involves a lot of self-examination. But just identifying the problem can be liberating. Once people with low self-worth begin looking at their real value to others, it becomes easier for them to appreciate themselves. “They also see that you don’t have to be like the people at the other end of the spectrum—people who value themselves so much that they are selfish and literally railroad others to get what they want—to have a healthy sense of self-worth,” says Taylor. “There is a middle ground where you feel as though you are allowed to have what you need and know that you can get it without hurting other people.”

  Barrier 5: Fear of Success (or Failure)

  In some ways, it doesn’t seem to make sense: If you want to lose weight, how could you possibly be afraid of losing weight? Yet many people are afraid of successfully slimming down, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes this fear harks back to barrier 4: feelings of unworthiness. “I call it the Swiss cheese phenomenon,” says Ann Kearney-Cooke. “If your core belief is that you are not worthy of success, everything positive that happens to you falls through the holes of the cheese, while everything negative sticks. You get used to the core belief that you shouldn’t succeed; it’s where you feel safe.”

  People who are afraid of losing weight may fantasize about changing their bodies, but the reality of that change can be unsettling. Weight loss is a very visible way to take control of your well-being. If you’re depressed and get better, very few people are going to notice and comment on your improved health. But, let’s face it, friends, family, and even acquaintances love to commend weight loss. Even if their observations are complimentary—“You look fabulous!”—the attention can be embarrassing and make you feel as though your privacy has been invaded.

  Some people also fear that weight loss will shake up the status quo in ways they may not be able to handle. If, for instance, you use food to cope, knowing that you can no longer turn to a pint of ice cream after, say, a bad day at work can provoke anxiety about how you’re going to deal with stressful or chaotic episodes in your life. Weight loss can change the dynamics of a marriage, too: not only because the other spouse may feel threatened now that his or her partner is more attractive to outsiders but also because it requires a new, healthier way of living that he or she finds unacceptable. Anyone at all apprehensive about upsetting the apple cart in a relationship is a perfect candidate for feeling afraid of change. The fear may be unconscious, yet if it’s there, quietly nibbling at your brain, it’s going to be a barrier to achieving your goals.

  Fear of success is often common in people who have had a history of sexual abuse. For them, the kind of attention I mentioned earlier can be embarrassing and, worse, feel threatening. Ann had a client (see page 61) who had been abused as a child and struggled with her weight as an adult. The woman was eventually able to drop a significant number of pounds, getting down to a size 10. “One day, she went to the mall, and she had a paranoid, uneasy feeling as she was getting out of her car,” recalls Ann. “Then a man opened the mall’s door for her, and she could feel him noticing her body. It made her feel unsafe.” There’s no doubt that a bigger body is easier to hide behind, and many people sabotage their own weight loss efforts for that very reason. For them, fear of successful weight loss is really fear of sexual vulnerability. “When my client was little, she wasn’t safe,” observes Ann, “but as a grown woman, she now had the skills to handle unwanted attention. I had to remind her that she wasn’t vulnerable anymore.”

  The flip side to fear of success is fear of failure. To be honest, there is some logic to this fear. The data indicate that most people do fail at long-term weight loss. And if you’re like most people, maybe you’ve already been through several cycles of successfully shedding pounds only to regain them all (and sometimes even more). But I think it can also be said that you shouldn’t let past failures or the failures of the population at large worry you. For one thing, most people don’t keep off the weight the first time; it can take a few rounds before you learn from your mistakes and figure out what will and won’t work for you personally. For another thing, this book is going to help you take a holistic approach to weight loss. In the past, you may have addressed weight loss from only one angle—just as many of the people who end up as failure statistics do. As I outlined in the introduction, we’re going to help you deal with the emotional-psychological side of weight loss in combination with the practical eating and exercise issues. That kind of integrated approach is going to greatly increase your odds of success.

  Barrier 6: A Poor Body Image

  Body image is best described as the picture that someone has of his or her body and the thoughts and feelings associated with it. How you feel about your body influences every aspect of your life: your self-esteem, your mood, and, by extension, your overall health. In a way that is similar to feelings of unworthiness, a negative body image can make you feel unworthy of achieving the “good life”—complete with healthy relationships, a great job, a loving family, and fun hobbies—and rob you of the motivation to change your lifestyle.

  Many factors determine body image. It can have to do with whether you were teased about your body as a child and whether your parents either praised or criticized your shape and weight. It can also be determined by how your parents talked and felt about their own bodies. Traumatic events such as sexual or physical abuse can also influence body image, as can the culture we live in. Living in a culture obsessed with thinness makes it difficult to navigate life as an overweight person and hard to cope with weight-related stigma and discrimination. Many overweight people internalize these prejudices and negative stereotypes, which can further contribute to a negative body image and low self-esteem.

  Part of the mission of this book is to help you develop a different type of relationship with your body. It’s crucial to not only accept your body but also make taking care of it a priority, no matter what else is happening in your life. “You might worry, ‘If I accept my body, then I will become complacent and just gain more weight,’” says Ann. “However, I have found that the opposite is true: Beating yourself up about your appearance and putting yourself down is the last thing that motivates healthy lifestyle change.” In fact, once you are able to improve your body image, you will choose to actively take care of your body (by, say, increasing your physical activity, and giving up fried foods and overeating at night). What’s more, you’ll insist that those around you treat your body with respect, removing another barrier to long-term weight loss. It’s challenging to lose weight without the understanding and sometimes even the help of family, friends, and coworkers. When you let them know that you are serious about treating your body right, chances are they’ll fall in line too.

  Check out the body image chapter in this book. It’s filled with strategies that’ll help you let go of a negative body image and develop a positive, healthy one instead.

  Barrier 7: Unsupportive Relationships with Adults

  When You Were Young

  I’m not a psychologist, but sometimes when I’m working with clients, trying to probe a little bit about why sticking to a fitness program has been difficult for them, they talk to me as though I am. And I’ve been surprised at how many of those clients end up talking to me about their early lives and the expectations placed on them by their mothers or some other authority figure. It’s not uncommon for people to still harbor hurt feelings and fears well into adulthood, and for those feelings and fears to have a profound impact on their motivation to exercise and ability to control their eating.

  It’s a topic of fascination to me, and I asked Angela Taylor about it. She, too, has many clients who eventually bring the conversation around to Mom or Dad, an older sibling, or a teacher when trying to understand their reasons for not being able to lose weight. As Taylor explains it, a lot of that has to do with how our brains form connections when we’re young.

  “When we’re kids, every experience creates neuroconnect
ions—sort of like grooves—in our brains and impacts the level of safety we feel, if our needs are being met, if we’re stimulated. At the same time, thoughts, emotions, and beliefs are getting tied into these neuroconnections. Now fast-forward to when we’re adults, and if anything happens to us that is related to our experience as a child, it fires up the old neural pathways as though we were that age all over again.”

  Say, for instance, that your mother told you to stop eating so much or you would get fat. Or your older sister once said you were fat and nobody was going to like you. Or you loved dance and thought you were beautiful until your dance teacher poked your belly and said you were never going to make it in dance. With your adult brain, you could probably handle these discouraging but not necessarily devastating verbal jabs. “But to your eight-year-old brain, they’re traumatizing,” says Taylor, “and when something brings you back to those experiences, you operate with your eight-year-old brain, not your adult brain.”

  In theory, we should have all separated from these early experiences, but as Taylor points out, our brains have long memories. Many adults are still rebelling against the parent, sibling, or teacher who was unsupportive, or have feelings of anger or fear that get triggered every time they try to change their eating and exercise habits. Yet these same people often aren’t aware that their current struggles are related to psychological injuries they received in their youth.

  Recognizing that you may be acting with your eight-year-old brain can help you make sense of behavior that your logical adult brain has never quite been able to comprehend. “Many people don’t understand why they feel so out of control with food; they say, ‘It doesn’t make sense,’” says Taylor. “But when they realize that it’s rooted in early experiences with caregivers, it starts to become clearer.”

  Barrier 8: Abuse

  According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, over 770,000 confirmed cases of child abuse and neglect occur each year. That’s an astounding number. Abuse permeates our society, occurring in millions of homes across the country, regardless of class, race, socioeconomic status, religion, or profession. The effects of abuse may not be immediately visible, but they can affect a person for the rest of his or her life. The magnitude of this effect depends on the nature and circumstances of the abuse, the personal temperament of the child, the child’s home environment, and the support received after the abuse has taken place.

  When an adult—whether it be a parent, caretaker, teacher, relative, or religious figure—who is supposed to love and protect children instead betrays and uses them, their young victims may ask themselves, “What’s wrong with me that they did this?” or “How can I ever trust anyone if those closest to me took advantage of me?” Abuse typically can cause self-esteem to plummet and feelings of shame and fear to take root.

  In one long-term study, researchers found that, by age twenty-one, as many as 80 percent of young adults who had been abused met the diagnostic criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder, such as depression, anxiety, or suicidal behavior.

  I’ve already mentioned a few times how abuse is linked to some of the barriers to weight loss (for example, feelings of unworthiness and fear of success), but there are also other ways that abuse can present an obstacle to attaining a healthier body and body image. In Ann’s work, she has observed a link between childhood abuse and eating disorders. “About one-third of the patients I treat for eating disorders have a history of sexual abuse,” she says. “Victims of abuse often feel as though they can’t control their bodies and lives. This may lead to lifelong attempts to regain control of their bodies by controlling their weight—either through restriction, obsessive monitoring, and various weight loss strategies or through overeating and chronic obesity. Victims may engage in extreme dieting, starving, bingeing and purging, crash dieting, and detoxes in an attempt to get rid of fat.”

  But severe restriction never works for long, and many people with abuse in their past end up bingeing: eating large amounts of food, sometimes to the point that they are physically in pain, perpetuating the cycle. They often end up losing and regaining hundreds of pounds during their lifetimes, unable to ease the discomfort of feeling out of control.

  SHEDDING THE WEIGHT TO

  COME OUT OF HIDING

  At age thirty-two, Mary Jo Schneider carried 300 pounds on her five-foot-four frame. She’d been gaining weight since age nineteen, when, pregnant and alone, she fended off an attempted rape. “I think I was subconsciously using the fat as padding to protect myself and feel safe after that incident,” says Mary Jo, now an adult education teacher living in California, and a member of the NWCR. “Plus, I used food to cope with the trauma and with the stress of being a single mother. Food was so soothing.”

  Mary Jo’s scale went up and down for nearly two decades; she hit her lowest weight, 130 pounds, at thirty-five, then packed on 125 pounds by age forty-four. Now sixty years old, she has maintained her weight at 155 pounds for eight years. “There are still days when I use food to cope with emotions,” she reflects. “However, now I recognize this as a barometer that something’s up that needs my attention, and I address it right away.” Her biggest source of support: Overeaters Anonymous peer support groups. “I love OA because it’s a spiritual program; it’s the root of joy and peace in my life.”

  Some victims of abuse cope in other ways; they may be more comfortable carrying extra weight as a means to keep others at a distance. They learned that people are toxic, dangerous, and could take advantage of them at any time. As a result, they layer themselves in extra weight, which mimics a space suit or coat of armor around the body, signaling others to stay away. Although they feel unattractive and often wish they could lose weight, they are frequently unaware of the strong connection between their past childhood trauma and their current destructive behavior patterns.

  The body is where child abuse often occurs, whether the violence is sexual or physical. Sometimes, though, child abuse can also be emotional—for instance, being chronically yelled at by an alcoholic parent or forced to live a life of severe deprivation out of sheer cruelty. “Either way,” says Ann, “children who live through abuse have their souls injured, violated, and compromised.”

  Ann will talk more about the link between abuse and overeating in chapter 2, but if what you’ve read so far resonates with you, even if it happened years and years ago, it’s important to know that this might not be something you can or should handle alone. Because the problem is so widespread, there are therapists all over the country who are well trained to handle the ramifications of abuse. Your number one priority shouldn’t be your weight; it should be to deal with any issues that linger from any mistreatment you’ve suffered, whether it happened when you were a child or as an adult. Once you do that, a healthy weight will likely follow.

  2

  * * *

  OVERCOMING

  EMOTIONAL EATING

  * * *

  By Ann Kearney-Cooke

  IT HAS BEEN MONTHS since your divorce. After a quiet weekend, you find yourself at the cupboard mindlessly noshing on chips. You aren’t really hungry, but you feel empty and lonely. As you fill up on the chips, you’re probably not even aware that you’re actually trying to fill an emotional void in your life.

  Or it’s nine o’clock in the evening, and you’ve been running around all day hoping to get an impossible number of tasks done. You turn on your favorite television show and begin to eat the pizza just delivered to your apartment, even though you finished dinner only about an hour ago. In your life, as in your meals, you’ve put “too much on your plate” or “bitten off more than you can chew.”

  Or perhaps you’ve just hung up the phone after another particularly stressful fight with your mother or spouse—over your relationship, your job, money, or some other hot-button issue. Instead of reflecting on the argument and digging into your feelings, you grab a spoon and dig into a carton of ice cream. You stuff down your emotions as you stuff yourself.
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  Maybe you can identify with one of the scenarios above, or perhaps your experiences are slightly different. The list of reasons why we misuse food is endless, and what triggers overeating can vary greatly from person to person. In this chapter, I’ll be talking specifically about overeating as a result of emotions. It’s important to note that overeating and emotional eating are closely linked, but they’re not exclusively related. Emotional eating (any eating that we do to relieve or soothe emotions, such as boredom, anger, or loneliness) often leads to overeating (eating more food than your body needs), but it’s possible to eat for emotional reasons without overdoing it. For instance, you may feel stressed and reach for a candy bar or a piece of cake and then feel better; so while you did react to the emotion by eating, you didn’t really overeat. Likewise, you can overeat for reasons other than emotions. Our physiological wiring, our environment (things like lighting, music, and even who we’re dining with), and even the portion of a particular food doled out on the plate can all lead us to overeat.

  The simple fact is that we’re all vulnerable to overeating for emotional reasons. Using food as a reward, distraction, comforter, friend, mood booster—basically, any reason other than to satisfy true physical hunger—is something we all learn to do at an early age, and over the years, it becomes ingrained in us. Truthfully, it doesn’t really matter how long you’ve been dealing with emotional eating. Whether you’ve been battling it since childhood (these are often the toughest cases, but still treatable), or it stems from an adolescent trauma, or it’s a more recent problem (you got married or had children and picked up the habit as a coping mechanism for some of life’s new stresses), rest assured that you can change your behavior. You have the ability to stop misusing food—and this book is going to help you tap into that power.