Managing Overeating - a Mind Body Speedometer

Of all the issues I hear in therapy, no ongoing issue seems to frustrate people more than being overweight. Broken hearts. They mend eventually. Death and dismemberment. A snap. But being overweight? Whew. It's the bane of banes. So now, let me ask you. Has overeating been a problem for you? Have you struggled with your weight? Have you dieted and failed or regained the weight? Is there even a way to manage overeating? These are the questions we're about to explore, in this chapter of Plain Talk about Talk Therapy.

"Fat Jokes and Thin Jokes"
As I combed the Internet for this chapter's opener, I came across this obnoxious little bit of weight directed hatred: "When fat people pass wind, if you're caught in the updraft, you lose days off your life ! It's a scientific fact!"

Did I just make laugh? Get you mad or insult you? Do you fear this chapter is already off track? If so, then consider this. My mother was forty eight when she died. At the time, she was 5'6" and weighed all of seventy pounds. And when I walked into the hospital ICU that day, I could barely find it in me to look at her. She was little more than a skeleton covered with skin. To say I felt afraid is an understatement. And what made it worse was how ashamed I was to show this fear. My own mother and I couldn't even look. How sad is that.

What did my mother die of? She died from not being fat enough. Literally. Can you imagine that? And while most thin people will not die from being thin, if you think being overweight and hearing fat jokes is bad, you should feel what it's like to be underweight and hear skinny jokes. This one I know personally. At the the point my mother's anorexia killed her, I was pretty thin myself. Frighteningly thin, in fact.

As you might imagine, I had frequently been the target of jokes during my childhood. And of course, hearing these things always hurt. Interestingly enough though, as I grew older, hearing thin jokes was not what hurt me the worst. What hurt me the worst was hearing things like, "You're so lucky. You don't know what's it's like to be fat." And they were right. I didn't know. But they didn't know what it was like to be too thin either.

Fast forward to my early fifties. At this point in my life, I did know what it was like to be too fat. And had for years. Since when? Since somewhere in my mid thirties. The strange thing is, while I knew with certainty that I had gone from being underweight to overweight, I could not recall a time wherein my weight felt right. Ever. Until my mid fifties, that is, when I stepped onto a scale and in the same moment, felt afraid I'd die of obesity and afraid I'd die of anorexia. Both at the same time. And no. You're not reading this wrong. I felt too fat. And I felt too thin. Both from seeing the same number.

Sound crazy? Hard to believe? Know this then. I'm not the only person who has felt this way. In fact, many overweight people have told me they cannot recall a time when they did not feel fat. Talk about feeling confused.

In a general sense then, this is what we'll be talking about here. Being too fat. And being too thin. And what it feels like to be either or both. As well as the role overeating plays in all of this. And no, this will not be a rehash of what is known about dieting. Nor a food bashing contest either. Rather, we'll be looking at how a lack of mind body awareness, especially in the gut, is the real culprit in overeating.

What about the idea that we eat to mask our feelings? Don't we often feel painful emotions, before, during, and after overeating? The truth? Not really. In fact, seeing feelings as the cause of overeating is like seeing the sky as the cause of the horizon. The sky and horizon simply exist as two parts of the same view.

Likewise emotions and overeating. In other words, obviously painful emotions and overeating coexist. But not because one causes the other. Rather they coexist because they are two parts of the same picture. A painful picture, to be sure. However neither causes the other. They simply coexist within the same picture.

Don't experts tell us we overeat to stuff our feelings though? And doesn't this idea feel true to a lot of us?

Yes. Experts do tell us this. And it does feel true to a lot of us. Regardless of how true this may feel to us though, it cannot be the truth. Why not? Because symptoms cannot cause injuries. They can only be the result of injuries.

Sadly this kind of thinking; that symptoms cause injuries, is one the main errors modern therapies make. Talk and otherwise. Including therapies for everything from addictions and overeating to relationship difficulties and reality problems.

Here then is yet another common talk therapy misbelief. The idea that if we treat the symptoms, we effect a cure. Sadly, many therapies fail because they base their remedies on this misbelief. And it's not their fault either. In many cases, it's hard to tell the two things apart; the symptoms from the injury. Why? Because the nature of injury is such that it always includes a startling onset. And being startled programs our minds to go blank, rendering the cause itself invisible to us.

The thing is, no talk therapy currently teaches this idea let alone the nature of healing. Which means, if you ask your therapist if we overeat to mask our feelings or if we feel these feelings because we overeat, if she's intuitive, chances are she'll answer correctly; neither answer is true. At the same time, she'll likely have no idea why.

Does knowing why matter? Very much so. You see, if you cannot discern a symptom from a wound, how can you heal your wounds? This is why I spent so much of the early chapters of this book focused on the nature of wounds; that they are the suffering we cannot see rather than the symptoms we can see. Metaphorically and literally, they mirror the "bullet hole," not the bleeding.

With regard to overeating then, it is important to remember that while one symptom may exacerbate another, this does not make this symptom the cause. Moreover, the wounds which cause these symptoms always have one thing in common. They are some sort of an inability to notice something. Literally. A blankness which has been programmed into our minds.

What blankness causes overeating then? Our inability to sense the gradual changes going on in our guts as we eat. This is what we cannot see. Thus our lack of awareness that we are eating is what causes overeating. And yes. We may have wounds in and around eating as well. Most people do in fact. But healing these wounds will not stop overeating. It will only make people more aware they are overeating. And less ashamed.

So fine. Our inability to sense the gradual changes going on in our guts as we eat is the root cause of overeating. Moreover, it would make sense that because this lack of awareness is the true source of overeating, that until we focus our energies on becoming more aware of what is going on in the gut, that there can be no long term solution to our overeating. Okay. Fine. But how do we become more aware of what is going on in our gut? Can we even learn to do this?

In a word, yes. We can learn to do this. And in my practice, I've already begun to teach people how. Moreover, before we end this chapter, I'm going to share with you what I've been teaching my clients. A way to begin this very process.

Know that what I'll show you here is but a beginning, not an end. There is much work left to be done on making this process doable. Even so, and with only a brief exposure to this work, a number of people have reported noticeable changes in their awareness. Body wise as well as mind.

Before I show you this though, I first want to elaborate on the nature of what not feeling what is going on in our guts is like. Beginning with what I've previously mentioned about the work of Dr. Michael Gershon. That we have two brains; a brain in the head and a brain in the gut.

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