Ending the Tug of War with Ourselves—Part Three—10 Steps to Stop Dieting and Lose Weight
In part one, I discussed how food issues can be a complicated, multifaceted symptom of past trauma, life stressors, chronic dieting, and other factors and how being overweight is often the physical manifestation of that pain (also can apply to anorexia, bulimia, and substance abuse). In part two, I discussed four modalities that helped me, as Martha Beck says, “return to a state of peace.” These included intuitive eating techniques, therapy, meditation, and journaling. To continue, here are several other things that have helped over the years.
5—Focus on improving health instead of losing weight. There is just something about focusing on weight loss that seems to backfire and make a person want to rebel. It’s kind of like a teenager wanting to rebel just because a parent is being overprotective and controlling. In a way, you are being the overbearing parent to yourself–treating yourself like an unruly, misbehaving child. First of all, I don’t believe in that kind of parenting. I think children want to be treated with respect and trust and know that we see their innate goodness, their tender hearts. When they make a mistake, the consequences of the mistake are often more than enough to “teach them a lesson” and they need reassurance that we love them, not shaming and belittling. When they misbehave, yes–sometimes we need to implement consequences. But shaming, belittling, and extreme punishments only serve to hurt a child’s self-esteem and put a wedge between parent and child, not create a change in behavior. Our adult selves are not much different. The consequences of our behaviors (overeating, for example) can be enough to motivate change if we observe the mistake with compassion and take the time to deep dive (through meditation, therapy, and journaling) into the reasons we behaved that way. Shaming, belittling, and threatening ourselves with extreme punishments (like dieting) only serves to lower self esteem and motivation and increase feelings of depression and discouragement. None of these are effective ways to inspire yourself to change.
One of the perks of being an adult is autonomy and autonomy is marvelous. Why would you take that away from yourself? For myself, I’ve noticed an innate, visceral reaction in my body and mind when I was gearing up for strict adherence to a certain way of eating (aka dieting). I used to ignore that “gut feeling,” push it away like a whiny child. But now I know. That is my inner wisdom whispering to me that extremes are not for me. Dieting is not for me. Self loathing, negative self talk, and belittling are not for me.
Balance is for me. Kindness is for me. Healthy living is for me. When I focus on these things, I find that it is easier to eat in a healthy, balanced, relaxed way and that weight loss is a natural consequence. It’s a bit of reverse psychology, I suppose. It can be tricky at first because you’ve been taught by the diet culture that you can’t trust yourself. But that is more marketing scheme than actual truth. If you do the work of returning to a state of peace and focus your efforts on improving your health, you will find that you can trust your innate wisdom.
One aspect of focusing on weight that can be counterproductive is obsessing about the number on the scale. If weighing yourself is an instant ticket to despair, put the scale away for a while. For the better part of the last 20 years, I only saw my weight when I was at the doctor’s office and even then I usually closed my eyes! I knew that it was a trigger for me. It actually didn’t matter if it was more or less than what I was hoping. Either way, it elicited stress and I’ve come to observe that the stressing about the number backfired on me, making me want to give up trying and sabotage my efforts. You can tell if you are trending up or down by how your clothes fit. Weight naturally fluctuates based on hormones, water retention, inflammation, all sorts of factors. Allowing that number to decide your mood for the day creates stress that is not good for you or anyone around you.
Instead of researching the latest fad diet, fill your mind with high quality information about healthy eating and fitness. Make feeling amazing and improving your health the focus.
I have heard that stress is worse for our health than any of our other habits. Some people lose weight when they are anxious, but most of us tend to gain weight when we are under stress. When we are stressed, our bodies release a hormone called cortisol. This is normal and needed under certain situations when we are in real danger. It helps mobilize the adrenaline and glucose to get yourself out of danger. But if cortisol is chronically high, it can contribute to anxiety, depression, weight gain, Type II diabetes, and other ailments. So ironically, dieting (which is stressful) and stressing about your weight can contribute to weight gain. At least, that has been my observation of myself–when I stress about my weight, I usually gain weight. I believe this is related to cortisol and that it can contribute to a negative cycle.
Stressing about weight → increased cortisol → weight gain → stress about weight gain
Focusing on health instead of weight can interrupt the cycle and get you on a positive trajectory.
6—Stop counting, start living.
Geneen Roth, the author mentioned in part two, has a set of guidelines for eating. She makes the point that they are not rules. They are more a description of how people who don’t have issues with food eat. You can read the guidelines here. She doesn’t say, “stop counting, start living,” but if I were going to sum up the guidelines and how they have helped me evolve, that’s how I’d put it.
People who don’t obsess about their weight and what they are eating don’t generally count calories, grams, pounds, or the minutes since they last ate. They generally eat when they are hungry and stop when they are satisfied. I say “generally” because we all have circumstances and schedules and health conditions and fluctuations in cravings, moods, quality of sleep, and a multitude of other factors that influence when, what, and how much we eat, which is exactly why it is an exercise in frustration to follow strict plans or rules that dictate when, what, and how much you eat.
The problem with counting is that it severs the connection between your body and your mind. It sends the clear message that your body’s hunger cues can’t be trusted and again, I think the intuitive side of ourselves rebels against this practice. “Intuitive eating” is simply a label for describing that your body knows when it needs food and it has very clear ways of communicating that with you. If you have tuned these cues out, it may take some practice to hear them and trust them. Geneen goes into detail about starting to listen to your body again.
If you count calories, grams, pounds, minutes, you probably think that if you don’t count calories, grams, pounds, minutes then you will eat through all the calories, grams, pounds, minutes. And at first, you might. But with practice and patience, you will get better at it. You also might think that intuitive eating means you can eat whatever you want, whenever you want. But if you really learn to listen to your hunger cues and you focus on health, you will eventually crave foods and portion sizes that are nourishing.
I have found that feeding my mind good information about the benefits and how-to’s of healthy living has helped to curb my appetite for junk. I will address this topic more in another blog post, but for now just know that your body has the wisdom to guide your food choices and that if you learn to listen to your body’s cues even half of the time, you will likely lose weight and improve your health faster than if you count every single calorie, gram, pound, and minute. In general, people who have issues with food should take caution with any sort of extreme measure like counting, daily weighing, fasting, and other strict rules that void access to innate hunger/satiation cues and body wisdom.
When we were on a trip this summer, Stephen and I talked about hunger cues and how to decide when we are hungry and when we are satisfied. Were we perfect about listening to our hunger cues? No. We are both “foodie” types and love to try new foods when we are traveling. But the goal is not perfection. The goal is progress and improvement. Geneen Roth has a hunger/satiation scale that she uses. We came up with a variation that made more sense to us and we have used it now and then to reflect on our hunger cues and satiation levels. We set a scale from zero to ten with zero being absolutely starving to the point of desperation and panic. Ten is stuffed to the point of nausea and total regret. We agreed that both zero and ten are not places we want to visit. In an ideal world, I eat when I am about two or three and stop when I am about six or seven. Am I perfect at this? Absolutely not. Not even close. But over the course of the last 20 years, I have gone from having to consciously think about and strive for this to, for the most part, having it be second nature. In the process, I started focusing more on living, loving, feeling, being. In the process, the colors of life became more vibrant, the feelings of love became more tender, the clarity of my vision improved in terms of what makes me happy and content in a more authentic, genuine way.
Your perspective can change from a very narrow, strained, tunnel vision type of living to a more vibrant, broad, breathtaking, tender, clear perspective. Imagine if you were standing at an expansive viewpoint that overlooked an incredible landscape with winding canyons and steep plateaus and a never ending horizon, but you were looking at it through a straw with one eye, the other eye closed. You would miss out entirely on the breathtaking view. Even if you try to look around, you will only catch partial glimpses of the landscape.
This breathtaking view is your life and the straw is any issue, not just weight, that keeps you from enjoying the beauty that is your life. Does life have to be perfect to be beautiful? Just like your body will never be perfect, neither will your life. If your focus is on what is not perfect, you are staring down the narrow barrel of the straw. If you have issues with food, it may be hard to imagine that you will ever feel differently. I know, darling. I remember. It may not happen overnight, but you can feel differently. A first step is opening your mind to that possibility. For now, you may have to take my word that eating can be more intuitive and that you can feel more at ease in your body. It is possible and it is freeing.
7—Positive language
Our bodies are like a powerful computer. Our brain and body are the hardware and our words and thoughts are the software. With a computer, the software programs tell the computer what you want it to do. Likewise, your words and thoughts tell your brain and body what to do. Most people don’t monitor their words and thoughts and don’t realize that they are reinforcing the very behaviors and habits they want to change.
Monitor your thoughts and words. Don’t sabotage yourself by saying or thinking things like, “I’m so fat,” “I failed again,” “It is so hard to change,” “I hate my body,” “Nothing good happens for me.” “I hate my life.” Instead, think and say (both in your mind and out loud), “I am grateful for my body,” “I want to feel good,” “I understand why I chose to eat that way and will make a healthier choice next time so that I can feel better,” “My body is amazing,” “Good things are happening for me.” Start now and be vigilant. Do not allow negative, self-sabotaging language to enter your thoughts or come out of your mouth.
And for goodness sake, do not let your children hear you say negative things about yourself. “But I’m not talking about them, I’m talking about myself,” you might say. Wrong. Your child’s identity is still very enmeshed with your identity. They are still forming their own identity and they very much internalize the things you say. When your child hears you say, “I look so fat today,” they may internalize those words and think the same thing about themselves, sometimes for the rest of their lives. I have made a point of making positive comments out loud when I knew my kids were in earshot. If I was looking in the mirror, I would say something like, “Dang, I look good today,” or “Wow, my butt looks good in these jeans.” They would usually laugh at me, but I think the point was taken.
8—Gratitude
When you find yourself in a moment of self-loathing, belittling yourself for something you did or threatening yourself with the next diet, bring your attention back to this moment and focus on 3-5 things that you are grateful for. What is going right? What is good? Changing your focus from what you are unhappy about to something you are grateful for disrupts the negative cycle in the now. This is key to returning to yourself and focusing on what is. Dieting keeps us in a “what is wrong with me and how to fix it” mindset in a self-defeating way. Coming back to the present in gratitude helps cultivate contentment and contentment breeds change faster than self loathing. You will never be happy in the now, regardless of your body size, until you can learn to shift your focus from regretting your past or idealizing your future to being at peace with what is. That doesn’t mean you won’t change. You will change faster when you stay with yourself in the here and now in a place of peace and trust.
Keeping a gratitude journal can be a great way to focus on what is good in your life. I mentioned the power of journaling in part two of this post, but specifically focusing on gratitude can be another way to utilize this tool. No matter how bad your day was, you can find good things that happened. This habit really helped me through the difficult years towards the end of my first marriage and my divorce. I love going back and reading the things I wrote when I know I was experiencing incredible pain. Some of them are heartwarming and some are just hilarious. I wrote at least five things every day and it helped me see that no matter what, I had so many things to be grateful for. Gratitude can help break a negative loop and get you started on a positive trajectory–reducing cortisol, anxiety, depression, and stress and improving sleep and physical health.
9—Appreciate the wisdom that comes with age. We can fight against and resent aging, but if we learn from our mistakes and evolve through our journey, getting older can mean gaining wisdom that we would not trade for youth, no matter how hard it is to see the wrinkles and gray hairs in the mirror. My goal for the last twenty years has been to live in my body with ease. At times, this has meant being at peace with my body being a little rounder than I would like. I had four children, for goodness sake. For ten years, I was shape shifting faster than Harry Potter drinking Polyjuice Potion, not because I was dieting but because I was growing humans, birthing said humans, and then keeping said humans alive with only my body! It is nothing short of miraculous and I loved it. I know many women who despise the changes that come with pregnancy and childbirth, but for me it was sacred space and it actually helped me appreciate my body. Also, getting older has helped me let go of unrealistic expectations. I love Megan Trainer’s song, All About That Bass when she belts–
“I see them magazines, workin’ that Photoshop.
We know that shit ain’t real, come on now make it stop!
If you’ve got beauty, beauty, just raise ‘em up.
‘Cause every inch of you is perfect, from the bottom to the top.”
I am striving everyday to maintain a healthy body and I won’t deny that maintaining a healthy weight is part of that for me. However, I don’t strive for unrealistic perfection. Mental and emotional health are as important to me as physical health and age has taught me that those aspects of myself are inextricably intertwined, so I have to attend to all of them to have any of them be in balance. Striving for physical perfection is futile and if you don’t learn that lesson while you are young, age will eventually force the lesson upon you. You can resist or you can gracefully lean into appreciating that you have earned every wrinkle by waking up and living, day after day after (sometimes amazing and sometimes really freaking hard) day.
10—Open Your Mind to the Possibilities
Am I saying that if you accept yourself, you can eat whatever you want and you’ll lose weight? No, that’s not what I’m saying. My evolution has included becoming passionate about all things clean and healthy living and I will write about that in other blog posts. Even Meghan Trainor has been open about needing to make changes in her lifestyle, including trying to eat better and exercise because she developed gestational diabetes during her first pregnancy. What I’m saying is, don’t put the cart before the horse. Trauma, childhood experiences, and chronic dieting, other issues are often the fuel that drives overeating. People who are overweight want to make weight the problem, but often it’s just a symptom, an outward manifestation of internal suffering. Deal with your trauma, make peace with your childhood, deep dive into the issues that are fueling the dysfunctional eating patterns, and get off the diet rollercoaster. Make a promise to yourself that you will not ever threaten yourself again with a diet. Get off the diet rollercoaster for good. If you do the work, make peace your home, the weight loss and changes you want to manifest will come more easily and be more permanent.
If you are in the thick of the struggle, take heart. Certainly, if you think you might have an eating disorder, contact a doctor or therapist for professional help. You are not alone. There is hope. Open your mind to the possibility that the way you feel about food and your body can change dramatically and that these positive changes can trickle down, in a very natural and less tug-of-war kind of way, to changes in your body.
I think there is a very stubborn part of ourselves—our mind, our inner wisdom, our spirit, call it what you want—that refuses to believe the negative things we say or think about ourselves. It knows, deep down, that we are okay and we can be trusted. It knows that we are incredible, magnificent, tender-hearted creatures with unimaginable potential to create, heal, achieve, dream, love. If you are in a negative loop with your weight, it is like being in a tug of war with this other part of yourself. You are pulling the rope—saying how much you hate your body and want to change it. You deal with this “problem child” by punishing it with a diet. But the other end of the rope is being held by that very stubborn, innately wise, very powerful part of yourself that says, “I am an incredible, magnificent, tender-hearted creature with unimaginable potential to create, heal, achieve, dream, love and I can be trusted. I am all these things no matter what my body looks like or what has happened to me.” If you are fighting this side of yourself, stop it. Drop your end of the rope and go over to the side that knows—you are okay. You are an incredible, magnificent, tender-hearted creature with unimaginable potential to create, heal, achieve, dream, love. Get on that side and watch the magic happen.
Butterflies
A monarch caterpillar has to work very hard to transform into a butterfly. It has to inch its way to a safe place, transform into a chrysalis, rearrange the chemical constituents of it’s body into wings, and fight its way out, all while avoiding the myriad perils that it can encounter along the way. Unlike in the wild, there are things I did to increase the likelihood that my caterpillars would make it through the precarious process. The first season, I only had one monarch make it from egg to butterfly. I learned from my mistakes. I read, researched, talked to people who had more experience, observed what worked and what didn’t work. The third season, I had over thirty butterflies and the result was breathtaking—the majestic patterned wings, the delicate black lines, the vivid colors, the lightness of flight on the breeze.
There are steps you can take to return to a state of peace and move through life with more lightness of being, emotionally and physically. If you do the work with integrity, you can break free from the chrysalis of your pain. You can end the tug of war with yourself. You can discard the tunnel vision thinking and take in the whole, breathtaking, magnificent view that is your life.
Stay tuned to the blog for more information on living a healthy, vibrant life. And remember—If there is one thing the last several years have taught me, it’s that life is about second chances. Every day, every moment, every interaction, every breath is an opportunity to begin again.
~Melanie
References
Bassam Khoury, PhD., Creswell, David J. PhD. “Mindfulness meditation: a research-proven way to reduce stress.” American Psychological Association. October 30, 2019.
Cleveland Clinic. “Cortisol.” Reviewed Dec 10 2021.
Dictionary.com Definition of autonomy.
Mayo Clinic Staff. “Chronic stress puts your health at risk.” Mayo Clinic. Aug 1 2023.
“Meditation.” Psychology Today.
Memon, A. “Have our attempts to curb obesity done more harm than good?” National Library of Medicine. Published online Sept 6 2020.
Ohlsson Walker, Sheila. “Meditation is a Medically Proven Antidote to Chroic Stress.”
UCLA Health. “Health benefits of gratitude.” Mar 22 2023. https://www.uclahealth.org/news/health-benefits-gratitude
WebMd Editorial Contributors, Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD. “Mental Health Benefits of Journaling.” Oct 25 2021. WebMD