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#1
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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 |
#2
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Anxiety Eating
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 |
#3
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Anxiety Eating
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 |
#4
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Anxiety Eating
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 |
#5
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Anxiety Eating
"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 |
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