How often do you say, “I can’t”? This statement runs rampant on my Food and Feelings Message Board and I hear it regularly in my therapy and eating coaching sessions. What if the only thing keeping you from progress is saying, “I can’t”? In “The Four Types of Depression and How to Help Clients Overcome Them—Microtherapy for Shifting Depressed Behavior Patterns and Attitudes,” (Psychotherapy Networker online, 8/4/15) Margaret Wehrenberg takes on the challenge posed by the words “I can’t do that.” When you say it, what you’re really expressing are two thoughts. The first is that to date, you have been unable to do something, say, stop mindless eating when you’re upset or stand up to your bully of a boss. The second thought you’re expressing is that because you haven’t been able to do something, you believe you’ll never be able to do it. Do you often tell yourself and...

How often do you say, “I can’t”? This statement runs rampant on my Food and Feelings Message Board and I hear it regularly in my therapy and eating coaching sessions. What if the only thing keeping you from progress is saying, “I can’t”? In “The Four Types of Depression and How to Help Clients Overcome Them—Microtherapy for Shifting Depressed Behavior Patterns and Attitudes,” (Psychotherapy Networker online, 8/4/15) Margaret Wehrenberg takes on the challenge posed by the words “I can’t do that.” When you say it, what you’re really expressing are two thoughts. The first is that to date, you have been unable to do something, say, stop mindless eating when you’re upset or stand up to your bully of a boss. The second thought you’re expressing is that because you haven’t been able to do something, you believe you’ll never be able to do it. Do you often tell yourself and...

One comment I hear (far too) often is clients and Food and Feelings message board members insisting they can’t possibly “fake it til they make it.” The belief that you can’t act in a certain way unless it’s instinctive and natural right down to your toes is an unhealthy belief in itself. The truth is that we’re all faking it til we make it at times or, said another way, practicing til we get it (whatever “it” is) right. Think about the first time you drove a car after you got your license. Did you feel as if you were ready for the Indie 500 after taking some lessons and receiving your license? I sure didn’t. Did you feel compelled to tell everyone on the road that you really didn’t feel totally competent and were terrified that you might mow someone down, or did you just do your best to maneuver...

I confess, I’m on a crusade to eliminate the word “should”—and its brethren “must, need, ought, have to, am supposed to” and “shouldn’t”—from the English language. Well, actually from every language. To learn the basics of why these words are contraindicated as motivators that will lead to “normal” eating and why, as comedian and educator Loretta LaRoche says, it’s time to stop “shoulding on ourselves,” read my blog, “Shoulds,” at http://eatingdisordersblogs.com/?p=4809. Should is an invented concept that is employed to cause us to feel shame. If people say you “should” do something and you don’t, or that you “shouldn’t” and you do, they mean—intentionally or unintentionally—to shame you into behaving the way they want you to behave. Who made up all these rigid rules about what we’re expected to do: our parents, grandparents, society, religion, government, the first Homo sapiens? Remember that shoulds and shouldn’ts are arbitrary standards agreed upon by...

How often do you turn to mindless eating when you have a conflict—unexpected or ongoing—with someone? Improved conflict resolution skills will help you avoid running to food to distract or comfort yourself, tamp down boiling emotions, or soften aggrieved feelings. These tips for conflict resolution are from “As many solutions as there are conflicts” by Dennis Zink (Sarasota Herald Tribune, Business, 5/25/15, p.14) David Hooker, public service associate of JW Fanning Institute for Leadership Development says that “a conflict exists when two ideas are trying to share space” and goes on to identify five sources of conflict: Data: lack of or misinformationInterest: competition of interestsStructural: desire to control resources or time constraintsValues: differing ideologies or world viewsRelationship: miscommunication or strong emotions He suggests doing the following to resolve conflicts: Data: validate factsMethod: point out common goals and focusing on ends over meansGoals: clarify exactly what the goal is in case there...

If mindless eating is a problem, you might also be mindless in other areas of your life. Being mindful and acting with deliberate intent make each moment fuller and brighter—eating cheesecake, showering, or cleaning out the garage. Practice living with intent and I can practically guarantee that your life and your eating will change for the better. The difference between acting without or with deliberate intent is not simply three letters of the alphabet. It’s as large as the ocean, as vast as the sky. When you act mindlessly, you don’t know where you’re going and are, therefore, taking a risk on where you’ll end up. When you behave purposefully, you set your sights on a specific direction and destination, then assess how you’re doing getting where you want to go. For example, let’s say you’re angry at your spouse or partner for not having done the laundry when he or...

One of the barriers clients and Food and Feelings message board members sometimes have is holding on to past traumas they think have misshapen them—including being eating disordered. Why continue holding onto what doesn’t serve you? I’m not asking rhetorically. This is a question for you to answer so that you can make better choices about food—and everything else in your life. Do you understand why you actively cling to your memories of trauma and abuse, as well as behaviors you used to engage in because of them—binge-eating, excessive drinking, passivity, viewing yourself as a victim, fearing confrontation, shaming yourself, hiding the “real” you? Here’s my view of how to approach the issues of trauma and identity; those of you who’ve been reading my blogs regularly may have heard it before. Your childhood shaped in you certain adaptive responses to the environment you lived in which, in turn, gave you a...

I’ve had some conversations of late with clients about the nature of healing. What do we mean when we say we are or want to be “healed” from our childhoods? Is being “healed,” say, from an eating disorder, the same thing as being recovered from it?According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, “to heal” means 1) to make sound or whole, to restore to health; 2) to cause (an undesirable condition) to be overcome, to patch up (a breach or division); 3) to restore to original purity or integrity. In emotional healing, I’d count out being restored to an original state. That’s not going to happen, nor would that necessarily be beneficial. Yet, we can overcome eating problems or childhood abuse or neglect, that is, change our thoughts and behaviors.So we’re left with the concept of being made sound or whole and restored to health. Those seem like acceptable, realistic, doable goals....

While attending a presentation of educational scholarships for deserving women at a local women’s center where I volunteer, it struck me that each of the several dozen women who had received scholarships had nearly the same thing to say: that though life had been very hard, they had never given up hope that they would make a better one for themselves. Hearing them, I got to thinking about how dysregulated eaters sometimes fall into victimization, helplessness and despair and how ready so many of you are to give up on becoming “normal” eaters. One young woman from Afghanistan left her large family and, on her own, traveled to the US where she was given an “adopted” mother to live with. How many of us can imagine what it would be like to come to a strange country where we didn’t speak the language, leaving our family behind in a war-torn country?...

Here’s a question I often ask clients. As I tell them, it’s really a trick question: Is it better to be independent or dependent? If you’re like many of my clients, I bet you answered with “independent.” The answer is that being independent is not better than being dependent. They are of equal value. We need both qualities to live long and prosper. As Kenny Rogers croons in his hit song, “The Gambler,” “You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.” He’s saying that both strategies are essential to winning. The same is true in the game of life. You need to employ both strategies, knowing when to be autonomous and do things yourself because you’re resourceful and capable. And, equally, you need to know when to solicit and accept help when you’re trying to solve a problem and are unable to do it or do it...

To decrease emotional eating, learn to become more resilient which will decrease your stress and bounce you back from stressful occurrences more quickly. Who wouldn’t want to become more resilient? Now there’s a book that tells you how to do it. Resilience is “a set of skills—as opposed to a disposition or personality type—that make it possible for people not only to get through hard times but to thrive during and after them.” (Time magazine, 6/1/15, “Bounce back” by Mandy Oaklander, p. 38) The article is based on the book entitled Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges by Drs. Steven Southwick and Dennis Charney. They are researchers who believe that people can train themselves to become more resilient no matter what dysfunction or trauma they have experienced in their lives. They arrived at this conclusion through studying changes in the brain after participants underwent mindfulness and resilience training. Yes,...

I’m often amazed at what I hear people say about therapy when they have never engaged in it. I recognize that they learn about it by watching TV and movies and take as truth what people have shared about their experiences seeing a psychotherapist. I understand why they might think as they do, but that doesn’t mean that their view is accurate. Here are three myths I’ve heard in my three decades as a clinician:Myth #1: I must be really messed up if I need therapy.The idea that reaching out for mental health help means there’s something gravely wrong with you misses the point of therapy entirely. It isn’t about how serious your problems are, but about how to get help to resolve them. Does it matter if your tire is flat with a nail stuck in it or whether it came off the rim? Not really. You still need to...

Talking with a client who was worrying about what might happen in the future, I told her, “Well we don’t know what the future will bring, but we can always know what we bring to it.” It’s true. We can’t ever know exactly what the future holds in store—events out of our control, uplifting surprises, life-changing good luck, tragic misfortune, or natural occurrences that turn our lives upside down. Life is a crapshoot: You roll the dice and live with whatever turns up. But, are we really that powerless in terms of the future? We can’t predict or control what will happen from this minute on, but we can be confident about what we’re bringing to the metaphorical party of life, and that’s what I mean when I say that “we always can know what we’re bringing to the future.” For example, on a concrete level, when it comes to a...

I was listening to an interview on NPR a while back and a remark made stuck in my mind. To paraphrase, it went like this: The question isn’t whether you have the right to do something, but whether it’s right for you. Hmm, I thought, this is exactly what troubled eaters need to know about making food choices. Many of you struggle with feeling deprived of or entitled to food. You’ve dieted and restricted food for so long that a tension has built up which has made you want to break out and eat everything in sight or, at least, everything you think you couldn’t or “shouldn’t” eat. Believing you can’t have something—food, love, attention, etc.—may cause you to crave it. And to overfocus on it as if you’re on a crusade. Insisting that you have “the right” to eat something has roots in your upbringing or history with food. First...

I thought I’d written on this topic before because it’s something I talk about all the time with clients, but I couldn’t find a blog about making decisions by the pride-and-shame method. This is a very simple way to make choices. It totally bypasses internal conflicts and focuses only on how the decision will make you feel: proud or ashamed. Sometimes, it’s quite clear cut how we’ll feel after we do something. If you were emotionally healthy, you’d return the wallet someone dropped and feel proud. And if you picked it up to keep it, you might feel enough shame to give it back. As an emotionally healthy person, when you engage in effective hygiene, you feel proud. Alternately, when you don’t brush your teeth or bathe, for example, you feel some shame. Likewise, when you’re emotionally healthy, you stop eating when you’re full or satisfied and feel proud. And, when...

Whether you grew up without a parent or had one (or two) who weren’t great caretaker material, as an adult you need to know how to parent yourself well. If you take good care of yourself—and, to me, at rock bottom that’s what will turn you into a “normal” eater—it matters less what kind of early care-taking you received and more how you’re focused on re-parenting yourself now. I’ve blogged about this before, but the process of taking care of yourself is worth repeating. If parents didn’t model healthy caretaking for you by how they treated themselves or each other or didn’t care for you well enough physically and emotionally, you internalized negligent caretaking. Then you proceeded to go along thinking that you weren’t worth treating better or that poor care-taking was normal. As a child, you likely didn’t know any better and poor self-care habits became entrenched. Perhaps as a...

I’m all about encouraging troubled eaters to take baby steps to grow healthier, but there are some life-altering decisions which can catapult you forward and help you reach your goals more quickly. These are decisions that have high-impact consequences. Make a poor choice and you reinforce behaviors that keep you stuck in dysfunctional patterns. But make one in your long-term best interest and you alter you brain map by reinforcing neural pathways that lead you to emotional and mental health. For example, say you’re dating a self-centered guy (or gal) who makes you feel invisible and is more concerned with his needs than yours. Sure, he’s fun to be with and when he occasionally directs the sunshine of his love on you, you feel all warm and fuzzy. But, truth is—and you know it deep down—that he is really not emotionally mature enough for the kind of intimate, mutual relationship you...

How do you identify someone who has good self-care and high self-esteem? Do you assume that people who dress smartly, are well-groomed, pamper themselves, and always seem as if they know what to do or say must feel great about themselves? Is self-care all about massages and great hair cuts and going to the newest vacation hotspot? How do you identify someone who takes excellent care of themselves? Along with the self-esteem movement came new ideas about how to feel good about yourself. Do positive things for yourself to love yourself, it said. Tell yourself you’re a success and you’ll feel like one. While there’s some truth to these ideas, it’s only partial. Here’s why. I see many disregulated eaters who don’t take care of their emotional needs focusing on externals which make them feel better in the short run, as they miss the whole point of what excellent self-care is...

I’m glad to be evolving as a therapist and educator on the topics of food and weight. The more I learn about how people change, the more value I am to my clients, students, and readers. One thing I’ve tried to stop myself from doing is saying and writing about recovery as “hard” or “work.” I’m not saying it can’t be challenging, because it can be, but it actually makes it more so when we keep reminding ourselves of the difficulty. This subject came up while I was talking with a client who mentioned several times during our session how hard changing her thinking or behavior would be. There are many ways we can think about change: as hard work, interesting, challenging, exhilarating, scary, fun, enlightening, impossible, frustrating, or an adventure. All these adjectives are possibilities—in part because of what we expect. Why tell ourselves that we might be feeling this...

What one quality makes for a topnotch crime-solver? As an avid reader of mysteries, my take is that successful detection is born of curiosity and open mindedness. You don’t solve a crime by deciding right off the bat who had done it because then you’d be fitting evidence into a forgone conclusion. Instead, you are open to everything pertinent you find and build a case from the ground up. This is what scientists do as well, employing the scientific method. They begin with a hunch or hypothesis, then accumulate data until it points in a true-or-false-direction. Open-mindedness and curiosity keep scientists from cherry picking data which would sway their opinion one way or another. They let the truth emerge, even if it proves their initial assumption wrong. Quite honestly, I’ve found that many clients and Food and Feelings message board members are unwilling to stay curious and open-minded enough to disprove...

I tend to avoid using the term self-control, never mind blogging about it. It smacks of rigidity, restriction, and holding yourself on a too-tight leash. But, one day I happened upon a review of the book The Marshmallow Test—Mastering Self-Control by Columbia University psychologist Walter Mischel (“Mastering the art of self control,” Science News, 11/15/14, p. 28) and couldn’t help but wonder what it had to say. It’s important to understand where the book’s title comes from. The Marshmallow Test is famous in psychology. Basically, it’s Mischel’s study of children faced with marshmallow temptation and their consumption based on being told that if they didn’t eat the marshmallows right away, they’d get two later. The upshot was that “Kids who waited for double the goodies grew up to do better in school, get better jobs, maintain better physical health and felt better about themselves than their grab-and-go peers.” Says Mischel, “No...

For years I’ve been urging clients to replace self-condemnation with curiosity and self-compassion. Compassion simply feels better and it relaxes you (as opposed to being harsh with yourself which generates bodily tension), even if it may initially cause discomfort because you’re not used to being nice to yourself. And now it seems that curiosity also serves a vital function in promoting mental health. “Curiosity made you read this, but will you remember it?” (Meeri Kim, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 10/21/14, 20E) tells us that there is “brain activation between a state of curiosity and the anticipation of rewards” and that “being on a ‘curiosity high’ can facilitate learning.” Here’s how: “Things that you’re interested in, you learn better.” This is why therapists encourage you to be curious about your behavior and why lecturing you about change doesn’t work. Being curious about behavior activates your brain in a different way than pressuring yourself to...

A major characteristic of people I treat for eating problems is that they frequently compare themselves to others. Sometimes they do this consciously but, honestly, most of the time I don’t think they have a clue that they’re doing it. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy dose of competition, but there’s everything wrong when you can’t stop noticing who has more of this and less of that and how you don’t stack up. Constant comparison is about feeling insecure and believing that you must have a certain amount of whatever—money, clothes, job status, successes, recognition—in order to feel okay about yourself. And this insecurity leads to envy and jealousy (see my blogs Envy and Jealousy) which are not emotions you want to feel very often never mind live on a steady diet of. Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess, quotes psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 10/30/14,...

When I say “true grit,” I’m not referring to the movie of the same name. I’m talking about a quality that is essential to success which many dysregulated eaters need to cultivate. Although I haven’t read the book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth, I did read about it in an article on parenting and fostering grit which is a central component to achievement (“The vital role of grit” by Jenni Stahlmann and Jody Hagaman, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, p. B4, 9/13/16). Grit is what used to be called “stick–to–itiveness,” the trait of not giving up until the job is done. It’s also been called perseverance, doggedness, determination, persistence, diligence, being driven, and even stubbornness. It’s when people remain focused on a task until it’s completed, whether they’re trying to untie a knot in a shoelace, learn to make a soufflé, or plug their way through night school to...

I have a fair amount of “Duh!” moments in my life, just like the rest of you. I had one while reading a book on helping clients process traumatic death. Reading a chapter on employing mindfulness to accept grief and other emotions that may follow when a loved one dies under traumatic circumstances, it occurred to me that dysregulated eaters have difficulty with mindful eating because they tend not to live mindfully in general. Most of my clients either rush around all day long trying to check off a lengthy list of items on their “must do” list or float from activity to activity with scant paid attention to the moment. One client with three children, all under ten, confessed how often she has to slam on her car brakes because she’s barely aware of driving, between arbitrating disputes among her kids and fretting about picking them up and getting them...

People love to make resolutions—to walk more and eat less, stop yelling at the kids, clean out the garage, find some interesting hobbies, or get a better job. We feel tremendous elation in making these kinds of energizing pronouncements, not just to ourselves, but to our family, relatives, co-workers and, of course, to our Facebook friends. We think that the more often we state our intentions, the more boldly we do it, and the larger the group we do it to, the more successful we’ll be. But, if that were true, you’d probably be off doing something else right now rather than reading this blog. Resolutions don’t work long-term because, as I’ve repeatedly said and human experience proves ad nauseam, we make them only for things we don’t much want to do and for changes we don’t much care to make. We cling to the flimsy belief that the act of...

Values is a word I don’t hear much. Now, we’re all about liking and not liking, dividing the world into “good” and “bad,” and deciding what we should or shouldn’t be doing to live “right” (whatever that means). None of these terms hits the mark for me as well as values, an entirely different kind of animal. When we value something, we believe it’s worthwhile and matters more than lesser things. Our values are the foundation for our happiness and well-being. Valuing is far more than liking. Moreover, we can value something without liking it. For example, I value my health, even though I don’t enjoy having a colonoscopy or a mammogram. Many dysregulated eaters are hung up on being liked rather than being valued or valuing themselves, or needing to find immediate pleasure in activities rather than doing them because they are life-enhancing. Alternately, some people have no clue what...

As I age, I’ve been thinking a great deal about wisdom, a useful concept to reflect on in my business of helping people lead their best lives. What I’ve come to believe is that if I can teach clients and readers how to become wiser in order to make better choices for themselves—with food and all of life—I’ll have made an impact. Rather than hear my voice in their heads guiding them, I’d like them to develop their own internal Wise Woman or Man who knows what’s best for them. The word wise has many meanings: good judgment, discernment, prudence, sagacity,  the ability to discriminate, enlightenment and knowledgeable. It is not per se about happiness, success, achievement, love, power or healing. In my mind, it grows out of learning from your experience and that of others in order to make the best choice you can make in any given moment. It’s about...

Ever wonder why it’s hard for you to reach your life goals? Maybe you don’t try hard enough and give up too easily. Maybe you’re low on frustration tolerance and delaying gratification and high on impatience. Or, maybe the goals you set simply aren’t right for you. Should you pursue goals which are easy to achieve which bring little satisfaction or should you set goals which are difficult and may bring greater pride in their accomplishment? All good questions with no easy answers. My reflections on this subject spring from a conversation I had with a client about how well she does in her job, yet how stressful she finds it. In sales, she works with large crowds of people and yet admits to being more of an introvert than a people person. She said she hates all the noise she encounters on her job and all the excess stimulation which, rather...

One of the worst things you can do when you’re in internal distress is to drop your self-care routine—eating regularly, getting enough sleep, exercising, and doing the daily activities that give life structure and embody extreme self-care. Emotional health includes keeping up with self-care no matter what is going on in life. This is exactly what many dysregulated eaters don’t do when they’re thrown a curve ball, endure a major change, or get walloped by something unexpected or unwanted. When your life is thrown out of whack—by illness (yours or someone else’s), job change or extra work, guests staying with you, or unforeseen travel—it can seem as if the world is spinning out of control. You may feel as if the pressure’s on, you’re routine is thrown off balance, and you can’t seem to find time for yourself. Pretty soon you drop all or most of the activities you’ve been doing to...

Try this simple question: Where does change happen—in the past, present or future? Of course, it can only happen in the present. Here’s a more complicated question: If change happens only in the present, why, then, do we spend so much time thinking about the past or the future which we can’t change in the present? Your reflections on and response to this question may be the key to your becoming a “normal” eater. In order to do things differently that will help you develop new, healthier behaviors, you need to be anchored securely to the present moment. You can’t learn how to practice new eating behaviors when you’re ruminating about the past or agitating yourself about the future. I don’t mean to imply that mental time travel happens only in the food arena; these unconscious shifts out of reality and into memory or anticipation may happen any time. Here’s what I mean....

For many people, the hardest two words to say in any language are “I’m sorry.” Ironically, according to Harriet Lerner, psychologist and author of Why Won’t You Apologize?, these words might also be “the most healing words.” (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, “A healthy conscience depends on apologies” by Jane Brody, 2/17/17, E32,  34). Even for those of you who don’t find it hard to apologize when you’re wrong, here are some tips to help you improve at this crucial and beneficial life skill. Before explaining what’s best to say in an apology, let’s look at why saying “I’m sorry” can be difficult. First, maybe you grew up in a family in which you were blamed for everything that went wrong and neither of your parents ever apologized to you or each other. If you didn’t grow up hearing apologies, you might think they’re weird or not know what to say. Moreover, if you were...

Image by Debbie Digioia I hear the same story over and over from clients: I want or wanted to lose weight to find a date or mate. For some, it’s true that being more fit and trim would widen the potential partner pool, but ironically, more often than not, weight is not the problem. Rather, it’s the people they choose as dates or mates that makes relationships not work. The problem is more a statement about their self-esteem than their size. These clients are so preoccupied with looking attractive, looking thin, and looking for love and approval, that they never stop to ask themselves how they manage to unerringly find partners who treat them poorly, show little ability or desire for emotional intimacy, and who, to a person, end up causing them to feel inadequate and rejected. They pay so much attention to being attractive that they don’t think about making choices that...

Guest Blog by Paige O’Mahoney, MD  My favorite quote from the business literature is, “You become what you think about most of the time."* Focus on what you don’t like or don’t want in your life (fat, dieting, food rules, your least favorite body part (more on this later), your worst habit), and that’s exactly what you are likely to get more of. Have you ever noticed how the more you focus on restricting calories or avoiding certain foods, the more you want to consume? You get what you think about. On the other hand, focus on what you want, and you are more likely to get it. Focus on what your muscles need to feel strong and supple and you may find yourself in a yoga or stretching class and actually enjoying it. Focus on eating foods that feel good to you, and a zucchini frittata with goat cheese may be exactly what...

Image by Debbie Digioia Here’s a true story about a very good day I had at work. First, a client arrived when I didn’t expect her and kept apologizing for getting the session time wrong. I told her to come on in (the benefits of having a home office) because I happened to be free. Then, when we went to schedule our next session, I saw right in my appointment book that she’d arrived at the correct time and I had misremembered when her session was. After her, I had a difference of opinion with a client about owing me money. Knowing how notoriously poor I am in math, she patiently walked me through the amounts she’d paid, with check numbers and all, until I finally saw the light. A very good day, indeed. Why on earth, you might be asking yourself, would I consider making two bloopers in one day a good...

Image by Debbie Digioia So many dysregulated eaters eat because they make mistakes and feel like failures. Are you one of them? Or maybe you fail at something and fall into depression or give up  taking pleasure in life. Or come down hard on yourself whenever you don’t live up to your lofty standards. Here’s a newspaper column about how not to do that—to take mistakes and failures in stride and, moreover, grow from them. This column is about a manager making some major blunders supervising an employee who manipulated him like crazy, admitting to and learning from his mistakes (“Manipulated manager learns to be firm” by Lindsey Novak, Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 12/26/16, p. D17). The manager describes how he got wrapped around the finger of an employee, doing special favors for him and even giving him money, because the guy presented as a sad sack victim who needed help. When this manager happened...

Image by Debbie Digioia While listening to an NPR radio interview with Charles Duhigg, the New York Times reporter who researched the scientific and social history of habits for his book, The Power of Habit, a remark he made struck me as particularly pertinent to why dysregulated eaters have such a deuce of a time not using food as a reward. To change habits, he said that we must be able to reward ourselves with something other than the original behavior—food, drink, gambling, drugs or sex. The key word here is reward. Many dysregulated eaters turn to food as a reward which creates problems on a few fronts. Food is nourishment and often pleasurable, but should not be used as a reward on a regular basis. This is how we get into trouble. If we think about food primarily as sustenance that happens to be tasty, then it won’t be our go to...

Image by Debbie Digioia Here it is, four months into the new year and some of you continue to be preoccupied with becoming a “normal” eater and feeling better about your body. The media focus as the year starts, as always, was on “new year, new you” which is worth nothing unless you understand what exactly needs to be different or “new” about you. Rather than start a diet, check out Rick Hanson’s video, “Using Brain Science to Build Inner Strengths,” which lays out the characteristics which will help you grow and explains how to acquire them. (https://psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/1007/video-rick-hanson-on-using-brain-science-to-build-inner?utm_source=Silverpop&utm_medium=email7utm_ campaign=091016_pn_i_rt_WIR_throttled10am). As you read through the list, I urge you to practice several of these abilities—self-compassion, openness, optimism, self-respect, and patience. If you find yourself being judgmental about lacking certain characteristics, stop reading, comes to a place of self-compassion, and continue reading until you’ve digested the whole list. Here goes: Capabilities: mindfulness, insight, emotional intelligence, resilience,...

Image by Debbie Digioia Nearly all of my eating dysregulated clients are highly shamed-based folks. Shame infects not only their eating and their weight, but their entire lives. Doing well makes them feel ashamed because they fear that they might cause envy in others. Doing poorly generates shame because of their belief that they’ve seriously failed themselves and others. Sometimes I believe that my most important job with clients is to help alleviate their shame and support them in moving forward proudly without it. If you’re ashamed of your eating, size or shape, my hunch is that you were a shame-based person long before you had food problems. You felt inadequate, defective, or unable to meet your lofty standards and believed people’s self-serving negative comments about you. Shame is at the core of your being, and you may not even realize it. You may think that everyone feels mortified when they make mistakes,...

Image by Debbie Digioia We don’t all experience and survive trauma the same way. Though genetics play a part, there are commonalities among adults who come through traumatic childhood or adult experiences and bounce back relatively quickly. Building resilience is one more way to move toward reducing internal distress in order to become a “normal” eater. In “Resilience is about how you recharge, not how you endure” (Harvard Business Review, 6/24/16, https://hbr.org/2016/06/resilience-is-about-how-you-recharge-not-how-you-endure) authors Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan lay out a sadly convincing explanation of how our American lifestyle reduces our ability to be resilient. They describe our “militaristic, ‘tough’ approach to resilience and grit,” saying, “We believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefor the more successful we will be.” This adage may work for the Marines, but not for the general public. The authors tell us that, at least in scientific terms, this approach to building...

 Image by Debbie Digioia Do have persistence to reach your eating and health (and other goals)? Or do you either give up easily? Do you persist for a while, then slack off, and keep up this on-off cycle until you stop trying? If you’ve ever wondered about why persistence is difficulty for you—but gave up seeking to figure it out before you found an answer!—here are some questions to ask yourself about what you learned about persistence as a child:Were one or both of your parents/caretakers persistent or did they cave without a fight or try to reach a goal, stop, resume, then give up their efforts? If you didn’t have role models who persisted in attempting to reach realistic goals, you may have a hard time doing it because you likely picked up the bad habits and patterns of your parents. If they didn’t have stick-to-itiveness, you never saw effective skills...

 Image by Debbie Digioia I was listening to a talk on the dangers of “the silo effect” on U.S. climate change policy and thought about how we compartmentalize our eating problems in a similar way—to our own detriment. According to Wikepedia, “The Silo Effect refers to a lack of information flowing between groups or parts of an organization. On a farm, silos prevent different grains from mixing. In an organization, the Silo Effect limits the interactions between members of different branches of the company, thus leading to reduced productivity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_silo). In a similar way, we have silo ways of thinking about ourselves that inhibit our efficiency. We think of having eating problems, unhealthy beliefs, emotional problems, or skill deficits, but rarely consider how they impact one and other. For what feels like forever, we’ve regarded problems with overeating and mindless eating as being due solely to lack of self-discipline or self-control. We’ve viewed...

What do you value in life? Whatever it is can help you change your thinking and behavior around self-care, including food and fitness. Success psychology (yes, there is such a thing) and motivational inquiry both tell us that an effective approach to improving behavior is to tie it to what you hold dear and think important above all else, because then what you value becomes the generator for the behaviors you engage in. Don’t confuse values with goals. We may or may not meet goals, but we generally keep our values no matter what happens. Losing weight specifically for your son’s wedding is a goal (not one I’d endorse), whereas valuing health so you can stick around as long as possible is a value. For instance, if you value staying physically active, even if you can’t do what you used to do (whether from age or injury), you find ways to keep...

One of the biggest and most costly mistakes people make is expending mega energy trying to solve a problem they’ve totally mislabeled. Of course, most of the time, they don’t realize that they’ve made a major blunder in how they’re viewing the problem. They just keep on trying one solution after another or the same one over and over, but never get anywhere. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: Say, Joanie has been struggling for decades to get her husband Ben to understand how hard she’s been trying to lose weight but can’t seem to stay on a diet. She wants his support and he just keeps telling her that she lacks self-control and that something must be wrong with her if she can’t stick to a diet. He shares his happiness about her losing weight and his disappointment when she puts it back on. She defines the problem as,...

Being unable to manage your thoughts can add substantial difficulty to managing your eating. Said another way, by learning to employ power over mental chaos, you can learn how to make wise choices that guide your food cravings. The interrelationship between the two came to me as I awaited a client who’s a troubled eater and I began thinking about several interactions I’d had with a friend I was doing a project with. I kept emailing her a question that related to the project, and she kept emailing me back without answering it. This happened four times. Each time I tried to be clearer about what I wanted to know, but to no avail. The question wasn’t greatly important to finishing the project, but her lack of response was bugging me no end. I’m usually pretty good with scotching ruminations before they start by immediately filing non-essential issues in my Unimportant...