Anxiety Eating

I find I eat senselessly if i am anxious about an upcoming event
whether it is one I am looking forward to or not.

This week a meeting was scheduled to take place here.
I bought some nuts and dried fruit ahead of time in plastic tubs and
kept grazing. It was more than enough so once I filled a bowl for
guests ahead of time, over two days I demolished the rest.

This behavior is followed by cutting back sharply for a few days and
great remorse plus strict attention to my daily calorie intake. do not


I need to develop a permanent strategy for these occasions.

--
Diva
********
Completing 4 years of maintenance

It could have been worse... you could have had bowls of hersheys kisses...

I have the same problem and I wish I had the answer for you. Let me know if
you find the answer.


"Carol Frilegh" wrote in message
...
I find I eat senselessly if i am anxious about an upcoming event
whether it is one I am looking forward to or not.

This week a meeting was scheduled to take place here.
I bought some nuts and dried fruit ahead of time in plastic tubs and
kept grazing. It was more than enough so once I filled a bowl for
guests ahead of time, over two days I demolished the rest.

This behavior is followed by cutting back sharply for a few days and
great remorse plus strict attention to my daily calorie intake. do not


I need to develop a permanent strategy for these occasions.

--
Diva
********
Completing 4 years of maintenance

This is a typical restriction/desinhibition cycle. To the extreme of that,
this is what some people who constantly switch between boulimia and anorexia
experiment. Or what many boulimic people experiment : severe restriction,
then their control break and they pig out during a large orgy (it's not
uncommon to have a 5000 calories meal then) and then use various
hyper-control technics to cope with the break of control (vomitting, intense
exercise, fasting).

The problem is that the remorse and strict attention is as much part of the
problem as the binge eating. It's like a rubber band, if you pull it, it
will snap back to its original length - the harder you pulled, the faster it
will snap back. When you're in cognitive restriction, which is most of the
time, you just pretend that some category of food doesn't exist (most diet
use a manicheist view there : some food is just not eatable, Evil, tastes
awful...). But of course, reality often snaps back at us, and at some event,
you discover that only that kind of food does exist, but that it tastes
GOOD. So, you eat some, but you are breaking a taboo (your restriction). And
breaking a taboo often causes a deshinibition : this is a one time only
occasion and this won't happen again, so you have to have your fill.
Actually, the restriction has set your mind in starvation mode, and during
starvation, if you can eat, you eat as much as you can take! And after that,
you feel guilty, and you enter another phase of hyper-control, that will
again lead to yet another loss of control, and so on... In both phases, you
are cutting yourself from all your biological means of control : hunger,
satisfation...

Some questions you might ask yourself :
- Why the nuts and dry fruits? Is it something you do not allow yourself in
your regular diet? Do you think nuts and dry fruits are stuff that make you
inflate beyond their real caloric value? Do you think that if you ate a
whole reasonnable meal of nuts (like, 80-100g of them for lunch), terrible
things would happen to you? Do you believe that it's better to eat 1 pound
of fat free yogourt than a couple of nuts? 2 pounds of yogourt? 4 pounds? Is
it something that you used to love, that is tied to some memory of happier
time or something like this?
- You named anxiety. Do you eat like this because of other events? Fear,
anger, sadness? Any strong emotion? Boredom?
You already noticed this is linked to your anxiety. Eating is actually a
*normal* way to cope with some emotions. Food has an emotional value, we all
have some food that make us feel good - for some it's chocolate, for others
it's French fries, maybe it's nuts for you. The problem arise when food is
our *only* way to cope with emotions.
Another problem comes from the state of cognitive restriction. As you said,
you feel great remorse. You probably feel a lot of other negative feelings
in the process : loss of self esteem for not being able to control yourself,
sadness for the goal of losing weight going further away, anger against
whoever had the idea to bring the meeting... So, you hate some food to feel
better, but the mere fact of eating it made you feel even worse, so you eat
some more hoping to feel better, and... This is a downward spiral that
usually ends along with the food supply. And the negative feelings are still
there afterwards.
Maybe if you hadn't thought that nuts and dry fruits are so evil, you would
have only eaten a little of it, felt really better, and that would have cut
your hunger during the next meal, where you would have eaten less. No weight
gain. Actually, since this would have been fullfilling food, both
emotionnally and energetically, maybe you would have eaten much less and
even lost weight.

That's not something any diet can help - actually, they tend to worsen it.
The only solution here is going through a therapy or self-analysis to get at
the real problem. What Jayjay posted is actually a short term solution, but
it does work to some extent. That's what comportemental therapies try to do.
The loss of control is often done on a completely unconscious level. Did you
get the impression that you were somehow not in control while eating these?
Like, not really in your body, or not really conscious? For some people,
this can involve walking up during the night, eating, and forgetting they
did it. For others, it might be being unable to remember what you really
ate, or what was happening in their surroundings. Other comportemental
tricks might involve :
- Do meals, not knacks. A meal lasts 15 minutes at least, is done sitting
done, is something you focus on (no TV, no reading...). If you really want
to eat chocolate or nuts, fine. Just consider it a meal : you sit down, you
focus on eating that food one small bit at a time, you try to analyse its
tastes, how it feels... If going through all this for a piece of chocolate
or nuts feels like too much trouble, then you're not really hungry for it!
- Slow down the meal : chew, put your fork/spoon/whatever down every few
bits. If you feel like pausing during the meal, do so.
- Try to avoid alcohol. Alcohol brings desinhibition, and desinhibition
leads to binge eating when you're in cognitive restriction. Besides, alcohol
unsettles your hunger signals.
- Whatever you eat, if you don't feel hungry anymore, just stop eating. When
you pause, try to feel if you're hungry or not.
- If you really don't feel hungry, don't eat. Fullfillness only comes if you
experienced hunger first. If you never feel hungry, skip breakfast (or even
lunch) once, then you will know what hungry means
- When you're done with your meal and feel you had enough, throw it away. It
might feel gross to you, but being able to let go of the food is part of a
healthy relationship with food. Storing it, either in your body or in the
fridge, can get pathological. If that's food you wouldn't keep anyway, but
are forcing yourself to finish because it's wrong to throw food away, it's
even worse. Do you consider your own body as a garbage can where you can
throw excess food away?
- Write down everything you eat and the quantities. But also write down
where you eat, how you eat, with whom, what you felt... The goal is to spot
where you over-eat and what event is linked to it. And over-eating doesn't
only mean binging on nuts. If you ate 4 0% yogourt to resist that chocolate
craving, that's also over-eating (hint: all these yogourt are equivalent to
around 40g of chocolate, you might as well have had the chocolate to start
with - especially if you finally lose control and eat the chocolate anyway).

But these are mainly tricks, though they can work really well. If you are
really worried about this relationship with food, maybe it's time to start a
psychological therapy, with a *good* psy who is aware of food related
problems (like one who deals with boulimia and stuff like this). I stress
*good*, because many psy will pretend they can't lower themselves to deal
with food related symptoms and refuse to treat them. Yes, that's a long
process, nothing comes easy. But the result might be that someday you might
be able to eat a few nuts with your friends without feeling guilty about it,
and without putting weight on because of it...

"Carol Frilegh" wrote in message
...
I find I eat senselessly if i am anxious about an upcoming event
whether it is one I am looking forward to or not.

This week a meeting was scheduled to take place here.
I bought some nuts and dried fruit ahead of time in plastic tubs and
kept grazing. It was more than enough so once I filled a bowl for
guests ahead of time, over two days I demolished the rest.

This behavior is followed by cutting back sharply for a few days and
great remorse plus strict attention to my daily calorie intake. do not


I need to develop a permanent strategy for these occasions.

--
Diva
********
Completing 4 years of maintenance

In article , Lictor
wrote:

Some questions you might ask yourself :
- Why the nuts and dry fruits?

Thank you for this inceredibly thoughtful and detailed response which i
have archived. It is certain that the rest of the group will also
benefit from your post.
..
The nuts and dried fruits are because I have Celiac Disease and only
use monosaccharide carbs. Normally, in the bad old days I would do
binge eating with candy or bread but am somewhat fortunate that I can
only use baked goods made with nut meal and don't bother doing home
baking or making confections using honey, nuts and nut butter that are
allowed..

I cannot eat chocolate or candy except for the occasional small sugar
free hard candy which I don't even bother with. My diet has a fairly
high fat content from eggs, cheese and healthy vegetable oils but I do
not really "low carb" and include easily digestible carbohydrates.

I follow the Specific Carbohydrate Diet which has excellent results for
several intestinal diseases and is proving to be an effective dietary
intervention helping autistic children to improved behavioral and in
many cases, cognitive recovery.

www.breakingtheviciouscycle.info

I am keeping my 86 pounds lost off for the most part but must apply
constant vigilance, being consistent with exercise and of course also
observing the dietary guidelines for the gastric condition. the
disadvantage is that it keeps these issues constantly a high priority.

But I am halfway through year five of keeping the weight off and still
with that happy 2% of the dieting population that consider they have
succeeded.

And jay jay makes a good point. You cannot eat what is not there. I am
not the type who would tear out to buy the stuff that is problematic
during occasional lapses.

Overall I enjoy my menu as it is very broad mainly lacking in grains,
soy and sugar and some root vegetables. That leaves plenty of fruit,
eggs, aged cheese, animal protein, home incubated full fat yogurt,
honey, nuts, vegetables, herbs and spices, not a bad diet for anyone
and one I have lived happily with since the year 2000.

--
Diva
********
Completing 4 years of maintenance

"Lictor" wrote in message
...
This is a typical restriction/desinhibition cycle. To the extreme of that,
this is what some people who constantly switch between boulimia and
anorexia
experiment. Or what many boulimic people experiment : severe restriction,
then their control break and they pig out during a large orgy (it's not
uncommon to have a 5000 calories meal then) and then use various
hyper-control technics to cope with the break of control (vomitting,
intense
exercise, fasting).

(snipped)

I'm just catching up on posts. This was really good, Lictor, very
thoughtful. Besides, I've been there, done that, didn't want the t-shirt...

Martha