Shrink Yourself
Break Free from Emotional
Eating Forever
ROGER GOULD, M.D.

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 by Roger Gould. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Gould, Roger L., date
Shrink yourself : break free from emotional eating forever /
Roger Gould,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-04485-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-470-27537-5 (paper)
1. Compulsive eating--Popular works. 2. Food habits--Psychological
aspects--Popular works. 3. Weight loss--Psychological aspects--Popular works.
4. Self-help techniques. I. Title.
RC552.C65G68 2007
616.85'26--dc22
2006032487

Printed in the United States of America


To my wife, Bonnie,
who knows how to love, and to be loved

Acknowledgments

This book is derived from the MasteringFood.com program, so I want to thank my staff, who worked with me over several years to
write and think through the complex logic of that program. They are
Michael Vogt, Dan Marshall, and Peter Verukailen.
I want to give special thanks and acknowledgment to Hiyaguha
Rachelle Cohen, who has been my constant editor on this and
related projects for the last three years. She has been an invaluable
second pair of eyes who helped transform the material from the
online MasteringFood program into a book rich and complete with
real-life stories. Her faithful renditions of my case examples and the
principles of this book and her artful suggestions about making
complex concepts concrete and accessible are the products of her
own professional experiences as psychologist and author. This book
could not have happened without her.
I want to thank my editor, Tom Miller, who immediately knew
the importance of what we are hoping to do and made the key
suggestion as to how this book would be best organized.


Introduction

Twenty years ago, I started working with psychotherapy outpatients
who also had eating issues. When these patients told me that they
had trouble controlling their weight because they ate too much, I
would ask, "Why do you eat too much once you've decided not to?"
You can imagine the answers I got as I pursued the question over the
years. The answers ran the gamut of everything that has been
reported in every self-help diet book, in every online diary, in every
confessional written by the morbidly obese, the bulimic, or your
average everyday overeaten "I eat because I'm ravenously hungry."
"I eat because I'm bored, or lonely, or married, or single." "I eat
because I pass a donut shop, or I had too much to drink, or I was at
a party." "I eat because my mother cooked and I didn't want to disappoint
her, or because I want to eat as much as my husband can, or
I don't want to deprive myself, or I'm depressed." For years, my
exploration of this question led nowhere. My patients would talk
about the problem, we would understand some of the illogic behind
the pattern and some of the historical connections with early family
experiences, but all the explorations remained superficial. I kept on
hitting brick walls. My patients went around and around in circles,
telling me things like "I ate because I was angry at Joe, vowed not to
do that again, but felt so guilty about eating that I just said the hell
with the diet, and went on to eat as much as I wanted. I guess I'm
powerless when it comes to food, just too weak to do this right."
Eventually it sank in. "I'm powerless"was the key. I was exploring
the wrong question. It's not "Why do you eat?"It's "Why are you
powerless?"Why, after you made a commitment to yourself to take
charge of your eating, did the urge to eat become so powerful that it,
or that part of you, overruled your conscious intent? There was not
only an urge to eat, there was a conflict occurring between two parts
of your mind fighting over who was going to control that moment
when your hand moved toward the chocolate cake.
Once I had that realization, I was in familiar territory, and my
understanding of the answer to the new question "Why are you
powerless?" quickly grew. I saw the issues of overeating as closely
aligned with those I had observed in my work developing programs
for alcoholism and addiction. The alcoholic and the addict both felt
they were powerless when it came to alcohol and drugs, but it was
very clear that the real powerlessness was about some aspect of their
life. When things went wrong, they turned to these dangerous and
illegal substances, while people who struggled with their weight
had found a legal, readily available tranquilizer to serve the same
purpose.

I also realized that overeating issues had some relevance to the
stages of life we normally go through in maturing. My book about
the stages of life, Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life, was organized around one aspect of powerlessness: the question of
safety. In Shrink Yourself, I focus on the maturation of your conscience,
because it's your overly critical conscience that creates the
illusion of being powerless when you're not really powerless. My
training as a psychoanalyst immersed me in the complexities of this
internal drama between you and your critical conscience, and that
has become the main underlying theme of this book about taking
charge of your weight and your life.
For decades, starting when I was the head of Outpatient and

Community Psychiatry at U.C.L.A, I've been developing computer
assisted psychotherapy programs to make therapy more affordable.
About five years ago I put it all together to create an online stepby-step
program that guides people through all the ways they
unnecessarily conclude that they're helpless or powerless over their
uncontrollable urge to eat. Several thousand people used my online
program MasteringFood, which was the predecessor to the Shrink Yourself Hunger Coach ( www.shrinkyourself.com). I'm writing this book to share what I've learned, and what has already worked for
thousands of people.
All people, when it comes to controlling their weight, are looking
for a simple or even magical solution.You don't need to go far to
see that. Everywhere you look, someone is advertising a new diet, a
new pill, a new exercise plan, or a new surgical solution. I wish I
could offer you a simple way to remedy something you've struggled
with for so long, but I can't. Instead, what I can offer you is something
born out of years of experience. I've come to believe that the
issue of powerlessness is the key to controlling your weight. It's the
missing link. It's the reason your attempts to lose weight have failed
or why your successes have only been temporary. What I'm offering
isn't a simple solution but rather an interesting and proven process
that will have you recover your power not only over food, but over
many aspects of your life.

Why Do You Eat?

Food starts off as being not just a source of life but an expression of
love. At the heart of almost every culture, hospitality is shown by
feeding people. And a celebration or a time of grief wouldn't be
complete without food.
Using food for reasons other than simple sustenance is a normal
part of life. It becomes a problem when food becomes so closely
linked with feelings that the two overlap and become one. The
foundation for this starts in childhood. "When I was good, I got a
cookie"; "When I fell down, I was offered food"; "On summer
nights, we went to the Jake to get ice cream"; "Sitting at the kitchen
table eating bologna sandwiches and chips was the only time I had
with my mother"; "When I misbehaved, dessert was withheld."
Food was transformed from a simple source of nutrition to a reward,
a diversion, a punishment, a love object, a friend. Once that happened,
food became a way to control your emotions--to deal with
your feelings of powerlessness. When you've installed food as a preferred
way to cope, you stop developing new ways to deal with
stress, your weight becomes increasingly difficult to control, and
ultimately you end up reinforcing your feelings of powerlessness.
In simple terms, when something happens to bother you (such
as a person ignoring you), it makes you feel bad, and you suddenly
have the uncontrollable urge to eat. Then, when you eat more than
you know you should, it's always followed by regret, self-hatred, and
extra pounds. For many of you, the moment when something
bothers you overlaps with the moment when you suddenly have the
uncontrollable urge to eat. For instance, my patient Gloria, a married
woman who is thirty-three years old and thirty pounds overweight,
told me about an eating episode that occurred after an argument
with her husband. I asked her why she chose to eat to deal with how
she was feeling. She responded, "What other choice did I have?"In
the next half-hour of the session, we developed six other things that
she could've done instead of eating. For example, she could have
taken responsibility for her part of the argument or done something
to relax, like going for a walk or taking a bath, to buy herself some
time to think things through and clarify her feelings. I was struck
over the years by how many people were similar to Gloria.
Something happened, and they felt that there wasn't any other
choice but to deal with what happened by eating. They gave up
because they felt powerless. By choosing food, they totally relinquished
their ability to solve problems and deal with their lives in a
mature and empowered way, and this naturally reinforced their
experience of powerlessness. The only way to recover that power is
to pause long enough to determine what other options you have
besides eating when something in life troubles you. Even though it

may not be obvious that something happened that bothered you, if
you suddenly find yourself starving when you know you've just
eaten, you can logically suspect that you've been emotionally triggered
in some way.
Extensive research has shown that you're not really starving in
those moments. It's almost always emotional hunger that drives you: a fight with a spouse, an uncomfortable work situation, a lull in
your workday, a needy parent or child, your life, your future, your
past. It's something that sets off a brief episode of powerlessness.
This book is really about finding the space between when something
has affected you and your sudden urge to eat (which is not real
hunger), and then exploring what goes on in your mind when you
have that uncontrollable urge. Up until now, the emotions and
issues that fuel the urge to eat have been operating behind the
scenes, sabotaging all of your good intentions.

Who Will Benefit from Shrink Yourself?

This book will benefit anyone who feels that they have an unhealthy
relationship with food. Some people aren't even overweight and yet
their thoughts are still consumed with what they're going to eat and
food is still the way they manage their emotions and cope with
stress. Focusing on food distracts them from dealing with the other
real issues in their lives. This book is for anyone who has too often
used food to deal with the challenges and struggles of life.
Food, when used to make you feel better, actually impedes your
ability to be informed by your feelings, to complete your emotional
maturation, and to have the fulfilling life that you dream about.
Once we bring the spotlight back to the real issues and take the
focus away from food and weight, you'll begin to see who you really
are, what you really want, and how to get it. Once you do this, you'll
become like the person in love, or the child at play who doesn't want
to come in for dinner, or the artist in the studio so fixated on creation
that he forgets to eat.You will have recovered your power.


How Does the Book Work?

Once I began to explore the question of powerlessness as related to
weight, I realized that powerlessness over the urge to eat was simply
a superficial layer of powerlessness. It actually covered up for five
other ways that people felt powerless in their lives. People feel powerless
when they doubt themselves, when they feel frustrated, when
they feel vulnerable or unsafe, when they feel rebellious or angry,
and when they feel empty. I call these five areas the five layers of
powerlessness, which we'll explore throughout this book. As you
explore each of these layers, you'll delve more deeply into your
psyche and develop a more mature and clear view of who you are
and who you are becoming.
When a person crosses over the line between food as a source of
life and food as a source of comfort, all these layers compound one
another and food becomes a psychological thing instead of a biological
necessity. People can usually identify when in their lives this
happened. Perhaps it was during a difficult transition: a divorce, a
move, or a change of schools. But whenever it happened, they have
perpetuated the pattern and they can't see their way out. This book
will help you peel away the layers and finally be free of this pattern.
In this first part of the book, you'll learn about these five layers
and how they've been specifically affecting your life. Then, in part
two, you'll have sessions that, similar to being in a private session
with me or participating in my twelve-week program, will provide
you with the necessary exercises to have you arrive at the insights
and understanding you need to achieve real change.
Together we'll peel away the layers as you go on the Shrink
Yourself'journey, and I'll work with you through the exercises in this
book to free the real you hiding inside your body.

We'll look at why, after so many efforts to be free of an addiction
to food, you're still at a place where you feel utterly defeated.
Together we'll begin again--this time with a renewed sense of hope
and my expertise and partnership. As you strip away each of the
layers of powerlessness, your dependence on food will diminish
until your powerful self finally emerges.


PART ONE
The Learning Sessions

1

Emotional Eating

I've been on a constant diet for the last two decades. I've
lost a total of 789 pounds. By all accounts, I should be
hanging from a charm bracelet.--Erma Bombeck

Take any moment in time, focus the camera lens on your neighborhood,
and look closely. You'll find dozens of people--maybe even
hundreds or thousands--breaking their diets no matter when you
check. Every one of those well-intentioned dieters woke up in the
morning determined to stick to an eating plan, but by afternoon had
one hand on a piece of chocolate and the other on their forehead,
wondering why, why on earth they had no willpower. In fact, you
might be one of those people.
It's no secret that extra pounds can shorten your life. Studies
show that up to 83 percent of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease
can be prevented by proper diet and exercise. Obesity can
diminish your energy level, interfere with social success, and even
reduce earnings, as a recent study that appeared in the Los Angeles
Times showed. The study measured overall wealth at age thirty-nine
for 2,000 people who had been followed since adolescence. Those
with a normal weight had twice as much accumulated wealth.
So why can't you reach your weight goals, knowing these
things?

As I said in the Introduction, you have installed food as a
psychological coping mechanism in addition to being a source of
nutrition.

My patient Allison recently told me, "My dependence on food
started as a preteen. If I came home sad, my mother told me/Eat, it'll
make you feel better.'I didn't have weight problems very early on in
life but 1 was pushed to eat, eat. As a teenager, food became my
friend.

"One day when I was sixteen, I found out that my boyfriend had
cheated on me with this bitchy girl, Linda. I remember crying on the
couch and my mom making me a huge ice cream sundae and
spoon-feeding it to me. And yes, if you can believe it, I still want ice
cream now whenever I feel blue. When my divorce from Tad became
final last month, I went right out to Cold Stone Creamery. I know I
eat to avoid emotions."
Using food to deal with emotions as Linda did is called emotional
eating. A study I conducted of 17,000 failed dieters showed that
virtually all of them relapsed because of emotional issues, mostly
related to self-esteem or emotional hurt. They were doing really well
on their diets, and then their husband started having an affair, or
they lost their job, or a parent got sick. Perhaps you had a similar
kind of thing trip up your diet efforts in the past.
One thing I've learned is that attacking emotional hunger by
counting calories is almost like trying to run a marathon while lying
on your couch. It just doesn't make any sense. You need to go deep
within to control emotional hunger, because as real as the hunger
feels, it originates in your mind, not in your belly.
Roxy, a forty-five-year-old mother of three, reported that she ate
a whole box of donuts after a frustrating afternoon at the mall with
her sixteen-year-old daughter. She said to me, "I was so mad at her,
what else could I do?" This very intelligent woman couldn't think of
even one other option, in spite of my prompting and questioning.
Her pattern of stuffing down feelings by stuffing in food was so
deeply ingrained in her mind that it short-circuited her common
sense. Roxy had lost her ability to think clearly and constructively
about a charged emotional issue, another indication of emotional
eating. She didn't need a box of donuts to satisfy her physical
hunger, but she thought she did. She thought donuts were the only
way to dial down her anger and frustration and to rid herself of
angry thoughts toward her daughter.
Roxy and Allison have a few things in common.

1.	They overate to suppress feelings.
2.	They chose comfort food (not broccoli) and felt guilty about it.
3.	They short-circuited their best problem-solving abilities.

These three behaviors describe emotional eating in a nutshell.
Let's start with a simple quiz to determine if you are in fact an
emotional eater, someone who uses food to cope with life.

Are You an Emotional Eater?

To find out if you're an emotional eater, answer the following seven
questions.
The last time you ate too much:
1.	Did you notice your hunger coming on fast, or did it grow gradually?
2.	When you got hungry, did you feel an almost desperate need to eat something right away?
3.	When you ate, did you pay attention to what went in your mouth, or did you just stuff it in?
4.	When you got hungry, would any nutritious food have sufficed, or did you need a certain type of food or treat to satisfy
yourself?
5.	Did you feel guilty after you ate?

6.	Did you eat when you were emotionally upset or experiencing feelings of "emptiness"?
7.	Did you stuff in the food very quickly?
Let's see how you did.

1. Emotional hunger comes on suddenly while physical
hunger develops slowly. Physical hunger begins with a
tummy rumble, then it becomes a stronger grumble, and
finally it evolves into hunger pangs, but it's a slow process,
very different from emotional hunger, which has a sudden,
dramatic onset.

2.	Unlike physical hunger, emotional hunger demands food
immediately and it wants immediate satisfaction. Physical
hunger, on the other hand, will wait for food.

3.	A difference between physical and emotional hunger
involves mindfulness. To satisfy physical hunger, you normally
make a deliberate choice about what you consume,
and you maintain awareness of what you eat. You notice how
much you put in your mouth so that you can stop when
you're full. Emotional hunger, in contrast, rarely notices
what's being eaten. If you have emotional hunger, you'll
want more food even after you're stuffed.

4.	Emotional hunger often demands particular foods in order to be fulfilled. If you're physically hungry, even carrots will
look delicious. If you're emotionally hungry, however, only
cake or ice cream or your particular preferred indulgence will
seem appealing.

5.	Emotional hunger often results in guilt or promises to do better next time. Physical hunger has no guilt attached to it,
because you know you ate in order to maintain health and
energy.

6.	Emotional hunger results from some emotional trigger. Physical hunger results from a physiological need.

7. When you are feeding physical hunger, you can eat your food
and savor each bite, but when you eat to fulfill emotional
hunger you stuff the food in. All of a sudden you look down
and the whole pint of ice cream is gone.

The Real Reason You're So Hungry-- Phantom Hunger

When I buy cookies I eat just four and throw the rest away. But
first I spray them with Raid so I won't dig them out of the garbage
later. Be careful, though, because that Raid really doesn't taste that
bad.--janette Barber

Did your answers to the seven questions above reveal that you
might be an emotional eater? Did you discover that you've been
confusing emotional hunger with real, biological hunger? If so, the
first question becomes--why?
You eat when you aren't really hungry because you have two
stomachs--one real, the other phantom. The hunger in your belly
signals you when your system has a biological requirement for food.
If that was the only signal of hunger you received, you'd be thin. It's
the phantom stomach that causes the problems. The phantom
stomach sends out a signal demanding food when unruly emotions
and unsolved personal agendas start pushing themselves into
awareness and you feel compelled to eat, or more accurately to stuff
yourself and shut the feelings up. Phantom hunger has such power
that it drives you to almost any lengths to satisfy it. You'll drive to a
convenience store in the middle of the night for snacks; you'll steal
your child's Halloween candy when she's asleep; you'll sneak and
hide food.
My patient Danielle described an episode of phantom hunger on
a typical weekend: "The minute my husband left the house to play
golf I found myself getting hungry when I knew I wasn't. I tried to
put eating off: I took the dog for a walk, I went in the hot tub ... but
the entire time I only thought of what I could be making, what I
could be eating. I checked the fridge I don't know how many times,
and then the pantry ... then the fridge. Three cookies, some spoonfuls
of ice cream, slices of cheese, a handful of cashews, five more
cookies, the rest of the pack. Then I sat in front of the TV and
wham I'm hungry again. Every time the show stopped and a commercial
came on, I wanted something else to eat."
Danielle didn't know what to do with herself when she was
alone. Sound familiar, or do you have other triggers that drive you to
the cupboard? All emotional eaters have particular issues they want
to avoid facing, and when those issues arise, the phantom belly
growls with insistent urgency and suddenly you find yourself powerless
over the urge to eat.

What Triggers Your Phantom Hunger?

There are two categories of things that trigger phantom hunger. The
first includes situations, places, or events. Perhaps you overeat when
you have to attend staff meetings at your pathetic job, or when you
go to family functions. For some people, it's funerals or restaurants
or sports events. For others, it's a boring day at work.
The second category that triggers phantom hunger includes
people. For you, it's probably a specific person--your boss, parent,
spouse, or child--who triggers you to overeat. They may trigger you
with a glance, a word, or even with their silence, but whatever it is,
when you're around them, you're sure to overeat.
My patient Bonnie eats when she has a deadline at work. Last
month, when she had a grant proposal due, she ate two large bags of
chips in one day and drank four cans of soda; the next day, she had
five candy bars. She gained eleven pounds in one month.
Florence, on the other hand, deals well with work pressure, but
she binges late at night when her husband, Barney, doesn't come
home. "I feel like I have no control," she tells me. "I get so anxious,
and all I can think about is having some cake. It's always something
sweet I want, and starchy, like cake or cookies or a scone. I almost
get the shakes, and then I eat, and then I want something else, just
to fight off the anxiety."
In other words, phantom hunger is the hunger that's created
when a person feels uncomfortable.

How You Originally Got
Hooked on Food

If you do have an emotional eating pattern, you might wonder
where it came from. Did you become an emotional eater because
you have extraordinary problems or some genetic coding gone
awry? Probably not. Emotional eating is the norm at birth for all of
us. When a mother feeds her baby, the baby stops crying because
food soothes. Babies equate the mother's milk with survival, love,
and peace of mind. When babies don't get mother's milk, they may
settle for a substitute--a bottle or a pacifier, for instance. The pacifier
has no warmth, taste, or nutritional value, but it's close enough to
that primal experience to soothe the infant. It's natural for infants to
continuously seek comfort from the mother's soothing presence,
and easy enough, later in life, to make food the substitute pathway
back to that comforting state of mind.
The first, and primal, regulator of your mood was your mother. If
your needs for food and comfort were met, then you will often equate
that comfort on some level with food. And if you were neglected in
some way by your caregivers, food and love will be linked and you'll
find yourself craving food when what you really want is love.
As you grew up you had to learn to regulate your own moods
and handle stressful situations, away from your mother, without the
immediacy of food or her love.You had to develop the mental skill to
handle your interior life as an autonomous being. If you still use
food as an artificial quick switch to stop feeling bad and start feeling
good, you've not yet completed this essential task of human development.
You want to be independent, but perhaps you also fear or
resist it.You'll learn more about this ambivalence later in this book.
Although decades have passed since infancy you still have a
sense-memory left over from this buried part of your past, so that
even now, eating actually changes the state of your mind, at least
temporarily. When you feel anxious, eating "compresses" the anxiety,
almost as if it's dialing down the volume. Overeating actually
works. It soothes you in times of distress, and that's the dilemma.
But as you know, the comfort doesn't last for long, because once the
food is finished, the self-hatred starts.
'You probably adopted food as a method to cope with uncomfortable
feelings at some point in your development, when in an effort
to return to the safety of infancy, you started overeating. Perhaps it
was when your parents separated, or when you changed schools, or
when you came home after school to an empty house, or when you
went off to college, or had your first child.
For Marcia, overeating started after her family moved. "I was
about eleven years old," she says. "I had just moved from the Bronx
in New York to Queens, and I did not have any new friends. I would
tell my parents I needed like four dollars for this special typing
paper--and would go to the little grocery store and buy Twinkies,
Wise potato chips, and as many other snacks as I could afford and
hide them in my backpack. I would binge on cake or cookies my
mother would bake and lie, saying I needed to bring them to school.
I was missing some sort of attention and my old friends, I imagine,
at the time it started. But I just got fat, without getting friends."
Cocaine addicts keep using cocaine because they long for the
feeling of their first high, but it's something they'll never be able to
get, just like Marcia couldn't go home again by eating ice cream and
cake. You can't return to the comfort of infancy no matter how much
food you eat.

Some of my patients say that eating puts them into a bubble
where all their worries seem to disappear, much like the state that
babies experience when they nurse. Others tell me that eating
makes them feel insulated and protected instead of vulnerable and
raw, which is like being held close to your mother's chest. You use
food, whether consciously or unconsciously, to numb the mind so
you don't have to deal with issues you'd rather not confront. I call
the altered state of mind where food transports us a "food trance,"
something I'll expand upon later. It's a very important factor in the
story of compulsive eating.
If you overeat when you feel distress in order to change your state
of mind, then food has become your substitute for that mother-child
bliss. Certainly when you go to the vending machine when you just
can't deal with your workday you aren't thinking about cuddling
with Mom, but that's the unconscious origin of the urge to overeat,
and it's as primal as can be. In psychological terms, food has become
a love object. Separating you from your food is like yanking the child
out of the arms of her mother; destroying your private, secret sanctuary;
and exposing you to the unending turmoil of life. No wonder you
hold onto your emotional eating pattern with such tenacity--the
alternative is too frightening. It makes perfect sense!

Why Is Emotional Eating
So Hard to Stop?

Inside some of us is a thin person struggling to get out, but
they can usually be sedated with a few pieces of chocolate cake.
--Anonymous

Basically, all diet plans and fitness programs advise you to just cut
back or choose what you eat according to some logical plan. These
strategies imply that you can consciously control your eating habits,
choose alfalfa sprouts instead of ice cream, and deal with life's problems
straight on. For emotional eaters, however, this simply isn't
possible; the urge to eat is too strong. Food has become a psychological
tool, a way to avoid feelings that are too intense or anxiety
provoking. If you haven't learned how to cope with your life and
your emotions in a way that doesn't include food, you will not be
able to adhere to any diet plan for very long. While things are going
smoothly in your life you may be able to stick to your diet, but when
life presents a challenge you'll inevitably turn back to your old faithful
fix, food.
Using food to deal with feelings, however, creates a vicious cycle.
Food lets you avoid your problems or what's bothering you for a
while, but when problems are left unattended they grow in intensity.
This makes you stuff yourself and then you're filled with guilt on top
of your original problem, and the cycle spirals out of control because
then you need food to deal with the guilt as well as the original
problem. Sure, food can serve as a fabulous quick fix, it can bring
immediate relief and pleasure, but it doesn't take long to see that
one cookie doesn't do it.You end up needing more and more to fill
up the emptiness from living an unexamined life.
Emotional eaters have struggled with this vicious cycle for years
in some cases or even decades. It's so difficult to change the cycle
because simply recognizing it doesn't help, nor does willpower.
In order to change this deeply entrenched pattern, you have to go
deep below the surface to new places never before explored. You
need to analyze what's happening in your life--you need to address
that which you're trying to avoid by eating, and arrive at a new
response. That is the only way to break the cycle. That's what we're
going to do together.

Powerlessness

After working with thousands of emotional eaters, I've been able to
decode the secret of overeating and break it down to reveal some
basic truths. You think the main thing you're struggling with is feeling
powerless over your uncontrollable urge to eat. However, years
of experience have proved to me that that sense of powerlessness
over food, although deeply agonizing, is really a cover-up, and the
consequence, of a deeper experience of powerlessness.

1.	You feel powerless about how to deal with your self-doubts.

2.	You feel powerless about how to get real satisfaction in life.

3.	You feel powerless to insure your own safety.

4.	You feel powerless to appropriately assert your independence.
5.	You feel powerless to fill yourself up when you feel empty inside.

You eat when you feel powerless in one or more of these five
ways, because the experience of powerlessness is almost instantaneously
transformed into the uncontrollable urge to eat. This fact is
the cornerstone of everything that follows in this book.
We'll teach you how to overcome these five experiences of powerlessness
by focusing on the fact that you are not really powerless,
but instead are needlessly giving away the power you do have over
control of yourself and your life. Once you realize that, your urge to
eat will be controllable, and you'll reclaim your power in your relationship
to food and increase your power in all the areas of your life



Compulsion versus Motivation

In one Native American folk tale, a grandfather explains to his
grandson that he has two wolves inside him. One wolf fills him with
hope and reminds him how wonderful his life is, and the other fills
him with doubt and convinces him that nothing is worth the effort.
The grandson asks, concerned for his grandfather, "Which wolf will
win?" The grandfather replies, "Whichever one I feed."
The two wolves inside you are your positive motivations to lose
weight versus your experience of powerlessness that leads to the
uncontrollable urge to eat, and the overeating camp usually wins.
Every time you overeat because you are feeling powerless, you reinforce
your erroneous belief that you are powerless. You feed the
wrong wolf.
No matter how hard you try to diet, no matter how sincere your
promise to give up certain foods, you can't stop overeating for very
long. When you do, you feel empty or anxious. Feelings of depression
and boredom begin to creep in. As long as you remain unaware
of the experience of powerlessness and how it's instantaneously
transformed into the uncontrollable urge to eat, you can't change it.
Once you begin to look at the fact that overeating has served you
in some way, you may be ready to see that the fact that you haven't
been able to lose the weight you want has nothing to do with your
willpower, and it isn't because you haven't found the right diet or the
magic solution, either. You haven't been able to lose the weight you
want because eating has become an automatic soothing response to
the stresses in your life.
My goal is to help you become mindful, conscious, observant,
and awake in order to find the pause between when you have one of
the five experiences of powerlessness and when you begin to
overeat. It's only in that space that you can begin to change your
emotional eating pattern. Because it happens so quickly, you are not
even aware at this point that you are making a decision. But you are,
so in each chapter and in each session we are going to try to slow
the process down by looking at the gap between the experience of
powerlessness and the uncontrollable urge to eat in great detail.
That will give you the opportunity to make a different decision.

Diets Fail Because of Emotional Eating

Diets don't work--for you or for anyone. Of course, eventually you'll
have to adhere to a sensible eating plan and a regular exercise
routine, but first you must focus on what specifically makes you feel
powerless in your life, especially in relation to food.
You may be hopeful now at the start of this journey, but I suspect
that you're also skeptical about ultimate success. Your gut may be
saying to you, "Can something as deep and as strong as my emotional
eating pattern really be changed?"
The answer is "yes"; thousands of people have already gone
through the ShrinkYourself program online and have been able to
reclaim their power and make dramatic changes in their relationship
with food, reversing patterns that had been there for decades. Some
of the members of ShrinkYourself have said, "I learned things that I
tried to hide from myself and your program found all of them. I
learned I don't need to let food and eating rule and ruin me and
have already lost sixteen pounds," or "The program was a great way
to mirror back behaviors, motivations, and habits that were not serving
me well. It gave me a deeper understanding of how destructive
these were to my health and happiness--my focus is finally on me
and not food"; and finally, "The program showed me how to see
what was really bothering me in my life. Once I started to address
those things and make changes, the fat just became a useless blanket
I was hiding beneath."
But this place of skepticism is where everyone who has attained
lifelong weight loss has to start. Once you get past that, we'll be
ready to look at what has kept you stuck in the same vicious cycle for
so long.
You see, the diet industry assumes that because you're desperate
to lose weight, you'll have enough positive motivation to stick to the
program and succeed. As you've discovered, eating generates immediate
rewards, whereas the rewards you get from dieting won't be
realized for weeks, months, or, for some, years. Future benefits versus
the immediate compulsion to eat: that's the formula for yo-yo
dieting. Positive motivation alone simply can't overcome the desire
for the immediate payoff that propels you to eat the things you
know you shouldn't.
I saw this fact clearly demonstrated when I consulted at the
Pritikin Institute in Santa Monica, California, where clients paid
$10,000 a month to take part in a controlled diet and exercise program.
Although the tuition for the program far exceeded the cost of
attending the most expensive private university in America, I frequently
found participants sneaking out for hamburgers and french
fries at a corner stand. These were all highly motivated people sent
to Pritikin by their doctors because of serious, life-threatening
health problems, but positive motivation clearly wasn't enough to
help them resist phantom hunger.
One recent study showed that 33 percent of overweight women
said they would trade 5 percent of their remaining lifetime for just
ten pounds of permanent fat loss. With that level of desperation, you
would expect these women to succeed in dropping pounds, but they
don't succeed, so again, you see that negative motivation easily
overpowers even the most positive motivation in the weight-loss
arena. The desire to hold onto the comforts of emotional eating can
be a powerful force indeed--far more powerful than the desire to
shed the belly
Don't be discouraged if you recognize how much you now love
and depend on food--if you fear that you won't be able to function
if you stop overeating. It's the place where everyone must start. All
you need is a good therapist to take you on a healing journey.

SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

Emotional Eating

	You've defined yourself as an emotional eater.

	You're beginning to look at the differences between phantom
hunger and physical hunger.

	You're starting to see glimpses of how you began using food as
a source of comfort or a reward.

	You know the secret to overeating is not your lack of
willpower but your experience of powerlessness.

	You have to remember that in the gap between powerlessness
and the uncontrollable urge to eat, you are making a decision
that can be changed.

	You'll have to rid yourself of denial in order to do the learning
work that will free you from your food addiction.

2

Food, the Over-the
Counter Tranquilizer

Christine, a forty-year-old patient of mine, had just moved back to
Los Angeles from Alabama. While she was living in the South she
gained fifty pounds. It wasn't just the down-home cooking, it was
being in an abusive relationship and then living alone in an unsafe
neighborhood. She was already ashamed about her weight when
she moved back home to L.A.--after all she used to be a model--
but she was determined to have a fresh start. This time, she was
going to get what she deserved from her job and from her relationships.
She was going to do everything right from day one. When she
was offered a job the first week back, she didn't negotiate a high
enough salary for herself. She got off the phone feeling defeated, her
chance to have a clean slate ruined, just like when you blow your
diet and you figure why bother for the rest of the day. She didn't
realize that she was feeling all of these things, though; she just hung
up the phone and suddenly felt hungry.
In the last chapter we defined emotional eating as using food to
deal with your experience of powerlessness over the struggles and
stresses of life. We established that something always triggers you to

overeat, perhaps some friction with someone or an emotionally relevant
event in your life. Now let's look deeper. It's not the person or the
event per se that sets you off, but how those things made you feel. At
first you may not even know how you feel. As you work on shrinking
yourself, you'll observe the places you're at or the people you're
around when you tend to overeat. Then you'll pay close attention to
what feelings come up for you around those people or situations.
Marjorie is thirty-eight years old and is married with two children.
She had twenty-five pounds to lose after her first child was
born and now she has forty pounds to lose after her second child.
She said, "I've started to notice that every time I go to my mother-in
law's house, even though I'm not hungry, I go right toward food. I
use the food like a weapon, even though I'm only hurting myself,
not my mother-in-law, who triggered the emotion."
Simply identifying the times when you overeat is a huge first
step. Why is it a huge step? It's a huge step because then things start
to come into focus. You'll be putting a spotlight on something, and
that will allow you to begin to analyze it. Inevitably, you'll have to
confront the bad feelings that, up until now, you've been trying to
get rid of by eating.
Let's face it: there isn't anyone who welcomes bad feelings. We
look to do something with them--wish them away, take a nap, go
for a jog, talk to a friend, distract ourselves with television or a book,
have a drink, smoke a cigarette, have sex, or eat a snack. Ideally you
can get to a point where bad feelings are like bad weather--you
know they'll pass, and just like when you know it's going to rain so
you bring your umbrella, you know what you need to get through
them. If you haven't yet arrived at this place of acceptance where
even bad feelings are a part of you to include rather than to banish,
then food will remain your preferred method of medicating yourself.

Food Protects You from Bad Feelings

Why has food become the thing that you consistently turn to when
feelings triggered by people or events feel unbearable? Food serves
two very effective purposes. First, it helps you avoid feelings. I call
the desire to avoid emotions the "feeling phobia." Also, food gives
you a way to replace bad feelings with the pleasurable experience of
eating. I call the pleasurable experience that food provides the "food
trance." In short, eating protects you from the feelings that you don't
want to feel.
If your feelings open the door to your interior world, then eating
slams the door shut. It keeps you functioning on a surface level, and
although you're feeling powerless to control what and how much
you eat, at least you don't have to focus on the deeper things that
really make you feel powerless (including failed relationships,
unsatisfying careers, and difficult children). Remember Christine
from the beginning of this chapter? Not handling her job opportunity
perfectly gave Christine a flood of bad feelings: disappointment,
fear that her new start was already ruined, and anger at herself. By
eating, she got to avoid confronting all those feelings.
Many people report to me that as they're approaching their goal
weight they often sabotage themselves and all of their efforts. They
wonder why that is. It doesn't seem to make any sense. In fact, you
may be able to relate to that experience. The answer, time and again,
proves to be simple: if you didn't have your weight to think about you
might have to think about what's really bothering you, and that's
very frightening. It's frightening because I know that you feel powerless
to change the things that really bother you. You've made what I
call the "unexamined powerlessness conclusion." It's a conclusion
that you're powerless over your feelings and the circumstances in
your life that the feelings point toward, so you might as well eat.


Food Reinforces Your Feelings
of Powerlessness

We talked about how eating takes you to an earlier place in your
development, predominantly because as infants and children, food
was often associated with comfort and love. However, childhood is
also associated with powerlessness. As a child, you were in fact
powerless. You could be mistreated, you couldn't control your
impulses, you were subject to abandonment, you were dependent
on others to protect and nurture you. Although food provides you
with some of the comfort of infancy by taking you back to that state
of mind, when you use food this way, you're reverting back to a
childish way of dealing with the world. And that reminds you of the
powerless feeling of being a child. You're an adult now and you have
choices: you can be the powerful agent of your own life by facing
your feelings and hearing what they have to say to you, or you can
continue eating to cope with emotions, knowing that it actually
keeps you stuck in childhood, a place where you were in fact powerless.
Facing your feelings makes you an adult, the only place where
you have the possibility to finally be powerful.
For emotional eaters like yourself, you can't see the forest for the
trees. In the moment when feelings have been triggered and an
unexamined powerlessness conclusion has been made, eating feels
like a life-or-death decision. When you distract yourself with food,
it's not an apple or a simple cookie. It tends to be large quantities of
food, typically unhealthy foods, and the foods are eaten in a voracious,
aggressive way--more like stuffing than eating. By the time
the eating frenzy has ended, the bad feelings have vanished, but
they aren't really gone. They're just buried under food, almost like
lost files on a hard drive--they exist somewhere but are temporarily
irretrievable.You're addicted to the escape that the food provides you
more than to the food itself.

The Feeling Phobia

"Comfort me with apples: for I am sick with love."--Song of
Solomon 2:5

Alice, a thirty-year-old online member who reports feeling addicted
to food, is successful at her job. She hasn't found a satisfying
relationship yet, and when she comes home after work she often
feels lonely. She said, "It gets too quiet if I'm not chewing."
Why, exactly, do you eat to cope with uncomfortable feelings?
Why do you eat in order to avoid dealing with the sensations
aroused by strong emotions? Are you like a patient of mine who
said, "I stuff my mouth with food when I'm angry because I'm afraid
I might bite someone"?
What is it about emotion that triggers overeating? Why wouldn't
you want to just face your anger, experience it, get over it, instead of
choking down your feelings? What's so terrible about emotion anyway?
That's the root question. Once you understand why you interrupt
your negative feelings rather than let them flow to their natural
outcome, you can make a rational decision about whether it makes
more sense to deal with those feelings or to eat. Right now, it's automatic;
you don't really have a choice to make.
No one likes feeling angry, lonely, bored, or sad. But most emotional
eaters have more than a simple dislike of these feelings, they
have an allergic reaction to them. In fact, I believe that most emotional
eaters have what I call a "feeling phobia." This phobia makes
you avoid negative emotions at any cost because you're overly
frightened of what your feelings mean and where they might lead
you. For example, I've heard patients say that if they didn't eat they
would cry for days. But most people who have had a good cry know
that once you stop clenching your throat and quivering your lip and
let the tears come, you feel much lighter.You've probably been holding
your feelings in for so long that you don't believe you can deal
with them. This is normal.
Feelings are the doorway you need to pass through. You have to
stop eating mindlessly and automatically when unpleasant feelings
arise so that you can draw on your interior wisdom.
We're meaning-hungry creatures. We make everything mean
something. When we come home at the end of our busy days we
look at our e-mail in box or our answering machine, and if there are
no messages we make that mean something. If there are many messages
we make that mean something, too. Sometimes we attribute
off-base meaning to things in our lives. Most often we misinterpret
our feelings in a way that confirms that we're not as worthy as we'd
like to be, that makes us believe we're more powerless than we
actually are. These misinterpretations turn up the volume on simple
emotions.
You typically interpret the actions of others and events in your
life and even the feelings you're having in a particular way, a way
that leaves you feeling bad. Have you ever noticed that when you're
watching someone else's child and that child misbehaves, you can
address their behavior calmly? However, when your own child
exhibits the same behavior you find yourself beet red and screaming.
Have you ever wondered why that is? It's because when your child
misbehaves you make his behavior mean something about the
future of your child (if he keeps behaving like this he's destined to be
a serial killer) or you make it mean something about you (I would
never have been allowed to get away with crap like this). It's the
interpretation that makes the feeling so intense.

Catastrophe Predictions

Feelings are like weather. They're all necessary. Living in Southern
California, I have seen how a slight drizzle can almost shut the city
down. People are not accustomed to dealing with rain, and so they
panic when it happens. The rain is not really the problem. It's what
they say about the rain that scares them (it will be dangerous to
drive, there will be more traffic; my kids will have to play inside
now). And so it is the same with your feelings. The feelings themselves
are not problematic; it's normal and healthy to have all kinds
of different feelings. Where we get stuck and panicked is when we
interpret what those feelings mean. There's a specific way in which
you misinterpret your feelings and experiences that I call "catastrophe
predictions." You misinterpret things in a way that paints a very
vivid portrait of how terrible things are going to turn out.
Catastrophe predictions are doomsday thoughts that are, in fact, not
true. They reflect the worst that your brain imagines is possible.
Instead of experiencing sadness, you see yourself being depressed
forever. Instead of feeling loneliness, you see yourself as a seventyyear-old
spinster with sixteen cats. Instead of dealing with simple
anger, you're afraid you'll hurt someone.
Norma is a thirty-six-year-old mother of three. Every day at 4:30
p.m., she starts to count the hours until her husband will get home.
She gets so overwhelmed and it feels as if she'll never get any relief
from the laundry, the kids fighting, and her mother, who, recently
widowed, is dating on a regular basis and wants Norma to be her
confidante about her new sexual endeavors. The day feels endless,
Norma feels totally alone, and it's during those hours that she finds
herself bingeing on all of the kids'snacks. By the time her husband
gets home, she's disgusted with herself.
When Norma starts to have the catastrophe prediction that
she'll never get any relief, instead of just acknowledging how tired
she is by 4:30 and doing something to make that time of day easier,
she feels powerless and the uncontrollable urge to eat shows up.
As you shrink yourself by doing the exercises in part two,
Session 2, you'll have to identify the catastrophe predictions you've
been attaching to your feelings, and that will help you see why
they've grown so out of proportion and subsequently why you're so
afraid of them.
When you are afraid to stay with and explore your feelings, you
have already come to the conclusion that you are defeated in some
way. Your feelings are leading to a deeper experience of powerlessness,
and that's where you don't want to go. As you know, the emotional
eating pattern gets triggered like a knee-jerk reaction.
Something happens, you make a misinterpretation--perhaps a
catastrophe prediction--and you arrive at a powerlessness conclusion,
all in the blink of an eye. When you come to the place where
you're feeling powerless for just a moment, you believe on some
level that eating is the only option that you really have to make
yourself feel better, and that otherwise that moment will become an
eternity.
I listed the several types of powerlessness conclusions that you
might have experienced in the last chapter, and will go into them in
greater detail in the remaining chapters, but for now let's look at
them a bit more closely so that you can get some clarity on what's
really going on for you when you make the decision to overeat
despite your commitment to control your weight.

Conclusion # 5: Your Emptiness Layer You almost never have plans at
night. When you're alone you feel empty inside and can't experience
fulfillment. You come to the conclusion that food is the only thing
that can fill you up. Being alone can be really overwhelming, but in part
two, I'll start you on a pathway to being able to fulfill yourself.






Powerlessness Conclusions

Conclusion # 1: Your Self-Doubt Layer Someone asks you to do
something at work that you don't know how to do. You come to the
powerless conclusion that you're stupid. To feel this way is so devastating,
but you don't have to go to the vending machine and eat to
avoid feeling stupid. In part two, I'll show you how to talk back to your
inner critic and erase the idea that the real you is stupid.

Conclusion # 2: Your Reward/Frustration Layer You go on your eighteenth
date from Match.com. No one feels right despite all the hope you have going into each date. You come to the conclusion that
you're defeated and there's nothing you can do about it. The search
for a good mate can be disappointing, but you don't have to deal
with it by stopping at a fast food restaurant on your way home. In
part two, I'll show you how to work on your relationships.

Conclusion # 3; Your Safety Layer You were molested as a child. You
come to the conclusion that you're unsafe and can't protect yourself.
The trauma and pain you're feeling are real, but extra layers of fat
can't change what happened to you and won't protect you from anything. In part two, I'll show you how to create real safety by dealing with
real issues.

Conclusion # 4: Your Rebellion Layer You're angry at your kids for
never listening. You come to the conclusion that eating is better than
expressing how you really feel. You're afraid that if you express how
angry you are at them you'll scream uncontrollably or maybe even
hit them. Anger can in fact be a frightening emotion to deal with. In
part two, I'll show you the difference between childish defiance and
mature assertion.

The Food Trance

Now you've seen how your feelings get so inflated that you can't
think of facing them. You can understand why up until now you've
wanted an escape from whatever you were experiencing---to avoid
your own tendency to amp up your emotions until you feel utterly
devastated, and on the brink of disaster. You've been retreating into
the food trance, which feels like a safe place, a bubble, a zone where
you feel nurtured, loved, free from responsibility. The food trance is
a place to find rest from bad feelings--it's the place where the bad
feelings are actually transformed momentarily into the pleasure of
eating. The food trance is an escape. It sure beats the alternative hell
of suffering through your own overblown emotions--or so it seems
to you at the time.
Many of my patients over the years have described what they
gain from retreating into the food trance. Maybe you'll recognize
yourself in some of their comments:

Rebecca is a thirty-eight-year-old stay-at-home mom. She weighs
175 pounds and is 5'1". "Food is faithful, it's always there, always
works. My husband says I make love to Kit Kat bars and he's right. I
eat them methodically. It's really kind of gross but I do it each time,
and every time it puts me in a trance. The short-term benefit is that
for a few moments it is just me and the chocolate. My mind concentrates
on the method of eating it, the taste, the texture, the sensation
that doesn't allow for other thoughts or interruptions. I'm totally out
of it and then when it's over it's always the same letdown--guilt and
remorse."

Ellen is a single thirty-two-year-old teacher. She weighs 142 pounds
and is 5'6". "Being in the food trance is very powerful. I love sweets!
I have always been a slow eater, so everything I eat, I fully enjoy.
When I am in a trance I savor every bite and enjoy every different
flavor explosion that is happening in my mouth. All the textures
dancing in my mouth provide a perfect escape for the moment.
When I am concentrating on what I am eating, I don't have to deal
with my emotions, but once I am done eating I am ashamed."


Lena is a sixty-three-year-old retired advertising executive. She is
5'5" and weighs 280 pounds. "The'food trance'for me is where no
one or nothing can bother you or invade you. It provides a'numbness'
to everything going on around you. I can escape, if even for a
few moments. Everything is great until I come back and then the
guilt sets in."

Addy is a twenty-four-year-old college student. She is 5'4" and
weighs 115 pounds. "When I'm in the food trance, I stuff as much
food as I can into my mouth. All of my energy goes into getting as
much food as possible and eating it as fast as I can."

Reading through these comments, you probably observed that
no matter how much weight the speakers have to lose, or even if
they don't have weight to lose, food has become an escape. They
enjoyed the food trance while they were in it, but as you saw, it was
always followed by guilt and regret and, of course, extra pounds.
If food really does make you happy and contented, even if only
temporarily what a powerful narcotic it becomes. To resist it, you
need to get the entire picture, to see the end of the pattern, in the
way a junkie needs to see that the fast high leads to a future of overdosing,
infection, poverty, crime, and so on. In the case of food compulsion,
you need to see not only the weight you'll gain by eating
too much--because that clearly hasn't been enough to stop you in
the past--but also to understand how covering up emotions with
food sets you back psychically, spiritually, and effectually.
Your feelings aren't there to make you miserable. Rather, emotions
provide you with information about your interior life. Wrapped
inside your feelings are messages you need to hear. Because of the
catastrophe predictions you attach to emotions, you fear staying
with your feelings long enough to hear yourself.
Even a seemingly innocuous feeling like boredom has something
important to tell you. Your boredom might be signaling you to
do what really interests you instead of what you believe you should do, or telling you that you miss someone or something. Boredom
tells you that you hunger for a greater degree of life satisfaction than
you now have, and if you listen to that boredom, it can pinch you
into action so that you'll get off the recliner and start going after
your dream.
You can't ignore your emotional signals--whether major or
seemingly trivial--or your life will remain stuck. And if you remain
stuck, you invite depression and anxiety to flourish. Of course,
depression and anxiety provoke you to eat more to suppress those
unwanted feelings, and the vicious cycle continues until all you
know is that as soon as you feel bad, you have to eat something fast.
Eventually this mechanism becomes so efficient and automatic that
you aren't even aware that you feel bad. All you feel is an unrelenting
pressure to eat.
Food grants you a little time-out from your life, but the time-out
ends and the problems are still there. Wanting a time-out when feelings
become too intense is actually normal and healthy. It's using
food too often to get that time-out that becomes problematic.
Later in this book, when you go through the sessions, we'll
explore other, nonfood ways for you to get the time-out you need to
calm down, think clearly about your situation, and choose a powerful
action.

SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

The Feeling Phobia and Food Trance

You've begun to identify your feeling phobia.
You've started to think about what you make your feelings
mean, your misinterpretations, your catastrophe predictions,
and your powerlessness conclusions.
	You've identified the benefits of being in the food trance: the
escape it gives you and the pleasure it provides.
	You've examined what it costs you to retreat into the food
trance instead of facing your feelings, especially the fact that it
keeps you from solving the problems that need to be solved.

	You've begun to think about the possibility that there are
other ways you can get a time-out when feelings become too
intense.

	You have to remember that you need to master the feeling
phobia and food trance in order to understand the deeper
issues that make you feel powerless.

3

The Costs of
Powerlessness



Whatever is formed for long duration arrives
slowly to its maturity.--Samuel Johnson

Power versus Powerlessness

There are at least two different kinds of power for us to consider: the
power over others and the power over yourself. The first is your
power to influence or control events and circumstances outside
yourself. This power depends in large part on your role in life, and
the power invested in that role by the institution you work in. If
you're the president of the United States or Exxon or Goldman
Sachs, you have a lot of power to make changes within your own
institution and upon the larger world. But even in those exalted
power roles, the occupant can be powerless to make many of the
changes they would like to see happen. The point is that in every
role you have some power to influence the world, and some very
real limits to getting everything you want done the way you want it
and when you want it. That's life, and the same principles apply to
the role of mother, father, boss, employee, laborer, or night watchman.
That's the external world we live in and have to adapt to.
We can increase our powerfulness in the world in two ways. We
can get ourselves promoted to a more powerful role, or we can
become more skilled and competent in our role and thereby, by
becoming more effective, become more influential.
The second kind of powerfulness is power over yourself, which
means not just the obvious, to control and discipline yourself, but to
let yourself be the author, the agent, the one in control of your own
life. That's the powerfulness we'll be focusing on in this book as I
show you how to maximize your power over yourself in order to end
emotional eating and, as a side benefit, get a lot more out of your
life. I can do this because I know how you're giving away your power
over yourself unnecessarily, and covering over that fact by eating
excessive amounts of food.
At those times when you give away your power over yourself,
you experience one or more of the five different layers of powerlessness
that we'll discuss in each of the five subsequent chapters.
You have a strong critical voice inside you that tells you in
dozens of different ways that you don't have the complete set of
rights to be in control of your own life, and when you believe that
voice, you lose your courage. That's when you have the experience of
powerlessness, and if you're an emotional eater, that's when the
uncontrollable urge to eat occurs. That strong critical voice is really
your conscience, which hasn't yet evolved enough to become the
reliable useful guide to your self-authored life because you're still
being measured by impossible perfectionist standards.
Bella is twenty-seven years old. She's 5'4" and weighs 140
pounds. She's the manager of a restaurant. She has her own apartment.
She graduated in the top of her class at university. By most
people's standards she's really successful, and yet every time she has
to make a decision, anything from whether she should take a cab or
the subway, to what kind of coffee table to buy, to whom she should
date, she has to consult her friends. She doesn't believe she can
make her own decisions. She doesn't feel like the author of her life
in some areas even though she clearly has been in other areas.
When she's faced with something that feels like a big decision and
she can't get someone on the phone to coach her through it, she
feels powerless and ends up eating. It's this sense of powerlessness
in her ability to take charge of her own life that has had her take off
and put back on twenty pounds time and time again. In order to
make light of this painful pattern, she jokes with her friends that
she's the human accordion.
Every time Bella listens to her critical conscience's impossible
standards of perfection and fails to make a decision on her own, she
confirms her innate fear that she is powerless.

Where Did the Voice That Makes
You Powerless Come From?

In the beginning of your life you were truly powerless. When you
were born, you had no sense of yourself as an individual. You didn't
recognize yourself as separate from your parents--they were looming
presences whom you could see, hear, touch, and make respond
to you, but you experienced them as part of yourself. Also, because
your parents produced you, according to the law, they virtually
owned you. You were totally dependent on them for sustenance,
protection, survival, and audience. When you discovered your own
toes, your nose, your fingers, you experienced surprise and delight,
but still had no concept of yourself as an individual being--you
remained, essentially, an appendage of your parents.
All of your attention as a baby was directed toward your parents--watching
them, learning from them, getting them to
respond to your needs. You didn't judge their wisdom at that
time--they represented God, the source of all knowledge and sustenance.
Since your parents constituted your whole world, you figured
out a way to "keep them with you" even when they left the
room. You imagined them as if they lived inside you. You started
mimicking them to keep them close. When you observe young
children, you'll often hear them repeat to themselves what Mom or
Dad said, in the parent's voice: "Great job." "I said no." "Don't
drink in the living room."
And so, by the time you reached the ripe old age of two, you had
internalized your parents. You knew what they thought about you,
whether you were good or bad, and they spoke their opinions to you
even when they weren't around, from your internalized image of
them. You no longer needed your physical ears to hear Mom say,
"Don't drink in the living room" when you made a mess; you told
yourself "You're a bad boy," perhaps in Mom's voice, because Mom
had become alive inside you.
You needed this internal critic in early life to keep you out of
trouble. Mom told you not to touch the hot flame, and you internalized
that instruction so that you didn't need her to stand over you
every time you saw fire. Mom told you not to spit at people or stick
your tongue out at them, that it's disrespectful to do that, and you
internalized her scolding so that you didn't make enemies when you
started kindergarten. If you hadn't obeyed your mother's warnings
about the world in an absolute way, you couldn't have played outside
later, you couldn't have walked to school when you got old
enough, you couldn't have been trusted on your own. And so Mom
and Dad's internalized rules helped you to navigate and survive in
the new, sometimes dangerous and confusing universe you found
yourself exploring.
All of the rules of life that you learned started out as rigid
absolutes: all or nothing, black or white. These rules originated from
outside you, but you internalized them and obeyed them even when
others weren't watching. They became your values, your rules, your
way of looking at life, and your conscience.
As long as you obeyed all the rules, you were rewarded with the
illusion of absolute safety . . . somehow or other, powerful parents
would protect you from all of the hazards of life. If you disobeyed,
you would be abandoned, and would have to deal with all of the
overwhelming dangers in your life all by yourself, without knowledge
or borrowed resources. That was your emotional choice when
you were two. Obey, and be magically protected. Disobey, and
become powerless to survive. You can see the primitive origins of
powerlessness in that scenario.
So that strong critical voice that is still telling you what you're
allowed to do as an adult originally had absolute power over you
early in your life because you didn't have the capacity to fend for
yourself at age three. But as you grow up and become more competent
to lead your life your way, you can fend for yourself, and flourish.
It's your conscience that still lags behind, and has to be updated
to match your age and competency. But that's not easy to do.

Helping Your Conscience Grow

Under normal, healthy circumstances, you wouldn't have continued
honoring those same rigid rules forever. They would have become
modified by experience, contextualized. Most rules that made sense
for you as a two-year-old no longer apply when you turn twelve. By
then you have the competency and the right to walk across the
street by yourself, for instance, even when there's no stoplight. You
have real, albeit limited, power to take charge of certain parts of your
life, like walking to school.
By the time you reach age twenty or thirty, the rules have been
changing daily as new experiences require you to adapt to a world
you couldn't imagine a decade before.You can swear freely when the
time calls for it; you can choose to ignore Aunt Isabel because she
constantly criticizes you; you can elect to leave your clothes piled on
the chair until tomorrow. As an adult, you have the option to make
your own rules after questioning and modifying and learning the
hard way by making mistakes and being awkward.
And so, you would expect that you'd simply disregard the old
rules and implement new, adult ones, except that every single
time you modify some internalized rule, every time you change a
rule to make it your own or drop a rule that doesn't make sense to
you, you face an anxiety challenge. For instance, think about what
you experienced in owning your adult sexuality. As a child, you

couldn't touch anyone sexually, maybe even yourself, without evoking
a rebuke. As a teen, you got bombarded with straight talk, warnings,
and prohibitions about sex. By the time you became old
enough to engage in adult sexual activity, you needed to rewrite the
script and give yourself permission to go ahead in spite of the internalized
voice telling you that sex leads to some version of hell. For
many people, making that leap means overcoming considerable
anxiety.
When you convert an old rule into your own value, you take
authority away from your internalized owner and transfer it to yourself,
the new owner. This is how you become your own person--by
undergoing this step-by-step process in which you become the
owner of your own rules. In so doing, you diminish the original
authority that actually represents a version of your internalized
parents. So anytime you create your own rules and challenge the
rigid strictures that you've been living by, in a sense you're standing
up to your parents and daring to be on your own. This means that
you give your internalized parents a pink slip, and that can cause
palpitations for even the most healthy among us. You're sacrificing
the illusion of safety in order to be free to live your own life.
The job of the critical conscience is to keep you as safe as a rule
abiding child. The critical conscience wants to remain intact as an
extension of your parents' mind-set, values, and historical view of
life--a replica of what they contend you need to be in order to be
loved and to not be abandoned. Meanwhile, your job is to assert
your individuality and freedom by deciding what is right or wrong,
good or bad, useful or not useful, based on your evolving view of life
during your journey through the life cycle. You can see that you and
your critical conscience have competing agendas.
There's a natural tension between your need to evolve and your
own critical conscience's need to keep you from striking out on your
own. Your critical conscience tries to scare you into not taking risks
or venturing out on your own. Yet you have a defiant need for freedom
that fuels you into rebellion. It's as if you have two powerful
creatures dueling it out in your body, in your mind.
In the last chapter we talked about how people make their 
feelings, circumstances, and interactions with people mean something.
They don't generally interpret things in their favor, though; in fact,
they often interpret things in a way that confirms their worst fears,
which is why we call it a misinterpretation. The way that you'll begin
to mature the critical conscience is by understanding that there are
two things that happen when you feel something, or when something
happens in your life. There is your internal reality, the ways in which
you measure what you're feeling or what has happened against
everything else that has ever happened in your life, who you think
you are, and who you'd like to be. Then there is the external reality,
which is what is actually happening. To really look at what's actually
happening, you need to weigh all sides of a feeling or situation. Take
Bella, who we mentioned earlier in this chapter. When she's faced
with a decision that feels difficult to make and she can't get a friend
on the phone to consult with, she can immediately turn toward food
because she feels too powerless to make any kind of decision on her
own, or she can weigh all sides of what's actually happening. She
can understand that her friends are busy. She can write a pro-and
con list and try to make a decision on her own. If possible, she can
delay making her decision. I call this process of looking at all sides of
something before immediately assuming you're powerless a "reinterpretation."
It's not falsely interpreting something simply to put
things in your favor; it's interpreting something from a real-life point
of view, assuming that our initial interpretation of anything is generally
based more on our internal reality, and so much of that is rooted
in the past.
To interrupt the immediate need to eat, you'll learn to slow
down long enough to look at what's going on in your inner reality
and what's going on in the external reality, and then reinterpret
things in such a way that you'll be able to own your power and
become the author and agent of your life.
Once Bella was able to start making reinterpretations, she no
longer felt that she needed someone every time there was a decision
to be made. Sure, she still likes weighing all sides of things with her
friends, but she has learned to trust her own ability to make choices
and decisions for herself.
Freedom to Be Yourself

If all goes well, your critical conscience loses. You evolve and grow,
the end point being that you have no more harsh, unrealistic, perfectionistic,
absolute rules to live by or criteria to meet--just a good set
of values and guidelines and rules of thumb to help you decide what
to do and how to behave. You develop a friendly, mature conscience
based not on fear and outdated notions, but instead on your experience
in the world. Your conscience nudges you a bit when you slip,
reminds you to give to the poor, to help someone even when it isn't
convenient, and to avoid certain temptations because they're too
risky or potentially hurtful to those you love. The ideal end point is
100 percent self-ownership so that you can deal with reality straight
on, with an open creative mind, not hampered by outdated, rigid
ways of looking at the world. In other words, your naturally evolving
self puts your critical conscience out of business and replaces it with
you, who, in an ideal world, handles challenges in a straightforward,
adult manner, without resorting to food addiction. But, alas ...
If you've been using food to shut down rather than transcend
your critical conscience (because you don't want to hear its perfectionistic
self-accusations about your worth, your adultness, your
style, your friends, your anger, your lovableness, your values, or
your impulses or its pessimistic projections about your dreams, your
ambition, and your ability to handle life), you've stopped or seriously
slowed down the natural and necessary separation from your critical
conscience. You may have quieted the strong critical voice when it
acts up too vigorously by eating, but you remain stuck with its criticisms
and demands as soon as the food gets digested.
In the next chapter, I'll help you see how you can move the dial
forward in your quest for independence by addressing the self
doubts that your critical conscience relies on to control you. Think of
it this way: there are three stages in the development of your conscience.
You've mastered the first--you no longer obey every single
rule your parents taught you, so your conscience is not the absolute
master of you as it was when you were three. You are in the long
second stage, where you and your nagging critical conscience are in
contention for control.You are heading for the third stage, where the
nagging and false accusations are a thing of the past, and your conscience
represents your values and integrity. So from now on, every
time we refer to your conscience, we are talking to you about this
second stage.

SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

Unnecessary Powerlessness

You've begun to see that it's you who makes you feel powerless.
The part of you that measures yourself by impossible standards,
making you temporarily powerless, is an overly harsh
conscience.
You've started to realize that if you eat to avoid self-accusations
rather than confront them, you never get a chance to reform
and remodel your conscience.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. --Eleanor Roosevelt

My patient Carmen was out shopping with her single friend Lucy
after Carmen's son was born. They were both excited because the
famous European clothes store H&M had just opened in New York.
Lucy picked out her size 4 clothes, and Carmen picked out her
barely fitting size 14s. As they were trying things on in the dressing
room side by side, Lucy glanced sideways at her friend and said,
"Carmen, perhaps you'd have better luck at a store for umm, bigger
women, like Lane Bryant or The Avenue." Carmen felt angry at Lucy,
but actually it wasn't Lucy's offense per se that made her feel terrible.
If Carmen weren't already feeling so uncomfortable with her
postbaby body, if her weight hadn't been such an issue since she was
a child, if she hadn't had a history of comparing herself to Lucy since
they were cheerleaders together in high school, then Lucy's comment
might not have hurt so much, and she might not have needed
to immediately grab an ice cream cone the minute she left the store.
Let's say someone breaks a date with you. You probably start a
self-critical judgment that your mind finds too painful to deal with
(He/she broke that date with me, what does he/she think is wrong
with me?), so you run to food for refuge, then criticize yourself for
overeating and end up focusing on what you've just consumed
rather than the message in the hurt feelings. That's why it's common
to hear people complain about how angry they are at themselves for
having gone on a binge. It's easier to live with a self you've deemed
temporarily lacking in self-control than with a permanently stupid
or ugly self that nobody wants to spend time with. In psychoanalytic
language, this is called a displacement--a little trick of the mind to
reduce the interior pain level connected to self-doubt.
A little displacement is all right temporarily, but when it comes
to food addiction there is no such thing as a little displacement. It
doesn't work because you actually bury the self-doubt under food
and make it almost unavailable to your conscious mind. You're
unable to grapple with the self-accusation that you're a defective
human being (ugly, or stupid, or unlovable, as you might be if someone
broke a date with you). Unless you confront these overly harsh
self-assessments (that part of your conscience that's still operating
at a critical level), you actually believe them, and soon you stand
accused and convicted without the benefit of an open trial. Who
wouldn't want to suppress such a verdict with food and then more
food? Who wouldn't rather think that they're just a person with no
willpower than a person that is completely unworthy of love? It's
normal to choose the former. But it's wrong.


You Measure Yourself from the
Inside Out

As human beings, we like to measure things. Anyone who has a child
knows that a broken cookie is just not the same thing as a whole
cookie. It doesn't give the same sense of satisfaction--it actually
doesn't taste the same. Ask children to pick a piece of dessert off a
plate or a toy out of a bag and they'll ask for the biggest one. As we
get older, we continue to measure not just the size of things, but
also the quality, the appearance, the monetary value of everything,
including ourselves. And as we judge, so we are judged.
You've been measured and judged ever since you were a child.
Were you a good enough student for your parents or teachers? Were
you pretty enough or handsome enough, kind enough, loving
enough, a good enough athlete? Naturally, you came up short in
some categories--we all do. The unfortunate thing is that inevitably
you learned to judge yourself as others judged you. If you're like
most people, you can hardly get through a day without making
some negative assessment of yourself. You see a younger or more
attractive or smarter person and you compare yourself, and at least
momentarily you think you aren't good enough. You don't measure
up. And when you measure, you probably don't measure fairly--you
compare one of your weak areas against one of someone else's
strongest areas.
Your opinions of yourself as a child were so dependent on what
your parents, teachers, and friends thought of you, but as you get
older, you have to develop a solid sense of who you are separate
from the opinions of others. Of course, that doesn't mean you'll be
immune from what others say or do, but it'll make you less susceptible
to feeling awful and having a feeding frenzy when someone
says they don't like what you're wearing.
If you're an emotional eater, every time you determine you aren't
good enough, you become hungry. Feeling inadequate is as powerful
a hunger stimulant (phantom hunger) as low blood sugar or a
day without eating (biological hunger). Of course, there are other
emotional factors that can stimulate your desire for food that we've
yet to explore, but insecurity outranks other issues by a long shot,
and it has a tricky way of masquerading as other things.
For instance, you may think you crave almond croissants because
your husband tears you down verbally and you want a sweet
comfort, but actually, you eat the croissants because you believe the
ridiculous things he says about you. It's your own lack of self-esteem
that triggers the eating. It's not what he says. If your sense of self
were more valuable than his opinion of you, you'd ignore him, and
the croissants as well.
Or suppose you find yourself bored and wanting something to
eat instead of trying something new or interesting. You may lack
confidence to even explore a new idea. Or if you eat out of anger, say
because your neighbor's dog won't stop barking, you eat because
you fear the outcome of a confrontation, something that could
reflect badly on you. It throws you into a state of self-doubt. If your
anger arises when your wife asks you to stop driving so fast, the real,
underlying trigger might be that you feel uncertain about something
else, so even a simple criticism becomes too much of an assault on a
sore and sensitive ego.
As you further delve into all of this you may discover that the
single biggest problem standing between you and a thin body has to
do with your harsh view of yourself. This may seem to be a strange
focus for a book about weight, but the measurement of your interior
self has a lot more to do with the measurement of your waist than
you might realize. The emotions that your mind transforms into
phantom hunger all connect to your interior life, with self-doubt
as the central organizer. If food has become your major mood
regulating mechanism, you'll find yourself overeating every time
your mood slips, every time you feel you don't measure up, every
time you think you or your life aren't good enough.

Self-Doubts Triggered by Others

Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality. --Les Brown

I have a patient who traveled in Thailand for a year, only having brief
interactions with other travelers. Her weight was never an issue
while she was away and she came back weighing her ideal weight,
almost effortlessly. When she returned she said, "It's amazing.
Nothing bothered me while I was there and so I didn't struggle with
food at all. My mother wasn't calling me telling me all the things
that are wrong with my life. I wasn't in a love relationship. There was
no one to criticize my job performance. I was so focused on meeting
new people, meditating, and seeing things that I only ate when I
was actually hungry."
This is not a suggestion that you should leave your family and
friends and live in isolation if you want to lose weight. Anyone can
be a Buddha on a mountaintop with no one or nothing around to
trigger them. It's the person who can be a Buddha at their motherin-law's
kitchen table who is more likely to reach enlightenment.
Nothing activates self-doubt like getting criticized or rejected by
other people, and so that's where we'll start. Even confident people
slip onto shaky ground when they feel rejected, and if you're an
emotional eater, you'll quickly want a food fix after you get your feelings
hurt. After Mom points out that you haven't been on a date in
twenty-seven months, you may go home and eat three brownies.
You might feel angry at your mother and blame her for making you
feel terrible, but experience has shown me that it isn't an insult or
offense per se that triggers emotional hunger. You could survive any
insult slung in your direction if only you didn't allow it to trigger
your self-loathing. Who makes you feel miserable--your attackers?
You can't really blame those who chastise or shun you for your
brokenness; you can really only blame yourself. You're the one who
makes yourself feel worthless. Let me explain.
When you experience rejection or criticism, first you suffer pain
from the hurtful incident, and that triggers the old tape loop inside
your head that tells you that you really are a loser, and that's why
people treat you so poorly. You jump right onto the rejection bandwagon
and believe the worst about yourself, rather than the best,
and you can't bear feeling that way. Even if you don't buy the critical
message you receive--if you don't agree with Mom that you
should be married because "at age thirty you ain't no great catch
anymore"--you allow her negative message to trigger other negative
beliefs you have about yourself. Maybe Mom's criticism makes
you worry that nobody will ever love you or that you'll never truly
love anyone (catastrophe predictions), or that there's something
wrong with you for not wanting to be married, or that something's
wrong with you for getting so angry at your mom, or even for having
such a terrible mom in the first place. When it comes to finding
ways to reject ourselves, we're a remarkably creative species.

Hurting Yourself because
Someone Else Hurt You

You need to separate the experience of being hurt from the experience
of hurting yourself in response to being hurt, so you can see the
difference. It's the judgment you make about yourself that hurts so
much, and that is what drives you to eat. It's painful self-doubt that
grumbles in your phantom stomach. Disappointments and rejections
are real-world phenomena that can be handled in many
different ways. But self-doubt is something else. It's harder to nail
down; it's deeply entrenched and very painful. It's the thing we're so
afraid of. It triggers our feelings of powerlessness because if we're
really as awful as we think and we have no power to change, then
life is simply too overwhelming to bear. We need an escape, any one
we can find, and food is generally the most accessible option.
Each of us has particular vulnerabilities that trigger our worst
thoughts about ourselves. You might fall apart when your husband
forgets to kiss you good night, taking it as confirmation that you're
completely undesirable. Your friend might go nuts when her boss
refuses her promotion request, interpreting that to mean that she
has no talent. The trick is to know what makes you "crazy insecure."
If you know what triggers you, you can intervene before you react by
overeating.
Let's say you get home from work after a difficult day and your
spouse criticizes you or acts cold and distant. At the office, you
handled one annoying phone call after another, then your boss asked
you to redo the project plan that you had worked on all month, and
on your way home, you got stuck in traffic for forty-seven minutes
with a broken radio.You want a little comfort and support, but instead
your spouse has the television on and barely looks up when you walk
in the door. No kiss, no "Welcome home," no hot meal waiting.Your
spouse's behavior leaves you hurt, disappointed, and at least a little
bit angry. So you go to the kitchen, eat a piece of cheese, last night's
chicken, four cookies, the kids' leftover pizza, and six bites of ice
cream. For a few minutes you forget about your day, your boss, the
traffic, your lazy husband, and your annoying kids, but then there's
this nagging voice inside that reminds you that you just blew your
diet and that by opting for the eating solution, you have also avoided
finding some better solution to your disappointment. Now you can
deal with all of your bad feelings by putting the television on and
zoning out, or you can go to bed, or you can eat more. All of those
solutions numb your feelings for the moment, but none of them solve
anything; your bad mood is likely to get carried into the next day.
What would happen if, instead of eating, you could freeze-frame
your feelings and put them under the microscope at the moment the
tension occurs? Like the woman above who came home from a
stressful day of work, most likely you'd see that you initially feared
that your partner had some valid reason for ignoring you--you
feared that your partner was cold because there was something
unlovable (self-doubt label) about you and so you deserved the rejection.
If you were able to slow down instead of immediately using
food to ease the blow, you might be able to make a reinterpretation.
You might see that perhaps your husband had a hard day at work,
too. Perhaps he could sense your angry mood and was afraid that
anything he said would be wrong. From that thoughtful place, where
you don't immediately get disappointed or make an assumption that
what's happening is about you, you might be able to ask your husband
for a hug or call a friend to talk about your day, something that
would actually help you feel better rather than just distracting you. It's
human to doubt yourself; we all have places where our confidence
wavers, although during normal day-to-day life we usually keep our
self-doubts under control, at least to a degree, so that we can
function. But rejection or criticism or disappointment startle the self
doubts awake, and they really hurt when they're activated. As soon
as you experience hurt feelings and accompanying self-doubt, you
grab food to appease yourself. In fact, your pain may so quickly get
transformed into hunger that you don't even recognize the pain that initially triggered the hunger. We will work toward slowing down and
reinterpreting what has happened so that you don't hurt yourself in
the same way that you've just been hurt by someone.

Unprovoked Self-Doubts

I have an inferiority complex, but it isn't a very good one.--Anonymous

Sometimes, even when there's no one around to provoke you, you
might still feel horrible about yourself. In fact, for some of you, you
may feel more horrible when you're alone. Self-doubt needs no
other person, no slight or rejection, in order to make an appearance.
Judy, the forty-three-year-old mother of three, says that after all
her kids go to sleep she feels so unfulfilled, and then she feels guilty
and that makes her feel like a bad mother. She finds herself sitting
on the couch when the house is quiet eating M&Ms and watching
reality television.
You can have a self-doubt dream in the middle of the night and
wake up craving food.You can sit alone in the park and obsess about
what's wrong with you, convicting yourself for being a bad parent or
spouse or friend. You can become paralyzed by critical words you
hear inside your own head--words spoken to you decades ago by
critics long dead. It's as if an inner detractor resides inside you,
taking up where the critical parent or teacher left off. You hear the
verdict leveled against you, but not the deliberations, and so you
give yourself no chance to put forth a defense. Self-doubts can be so
overwhelming that nothing seems to help: even if others contradict
your doubt, you can't take it in.

Camille, a thirty-one-year-old social worker, has spent her whole
life helping people. In high school everyone called her to talk about
their problems; she supported her college boyfriend through medical
school and was then surprised when he left her for a co-worker
at the hospital; she even made a career out of putting her needs
aside by becoming a social worker. Camille believes that unless she's
helping people, they won't want to be around her. Being the helper
is Camille's armor. It covers up for the fact that she doesn't think
she's worthy of having anyone do anything for her.
In order to deal with the pain of feeling inadequate and unworthy,
many of us develop a type of defense that I call "the armor."
Your armor is a role or persona you adopt in order to shield yourself
from the pain of self-doubt. However, armor represents a false front,
and often it's a dysfunctional front. It also prevents us from really
feeling fulfilled in relationships because even if someone loves our
armor, we secretly know that they wouldn't love the person who is
hiding underneath. For instance, you might adopt a victim role in
order to shield yourself from your self-doubts, unconsciously
feeling that if people realize how pathetic and needy you are, they'll
lay off you. Obviously, you can't challenge anyone from your victim
position--you can't grow or change--and so in the end, your armor
gives you one more thing to feel bad about, one more thing to instigate
an eating binge. Likewise, if you adopt a workaholic armor with
the unconscious motivation of being too exhausted to face your self
doubts because every waking moment is spent compensating for
and proving them wrong, then you'll end up spiritually bereft and
emotionally hungry.
Some of the common types of armor that people wear are the
following: martyr, nurturer, perfectionist, loner, clown. Wearing the
armor can become so habitual that you mistake the alias for your
true self. It's useful to identify the type of armor you wear, so that
you can begin stepping out of it to address the self-doubt head-on.
Until you allow your true self to emerge, you won't feel loved and
you won't believe in the love that people are offering.

Meet Harriet, Your Self-Critic

Let's call the self-critical voice inside you "Harriet" or "Harry." You can
rename this inner censor anything you want, but for the sake of
simplicity, let's just call her Harriet for now. Of course, you don't really
have a person named Harriet living inside your bones, but you do have
an inner critical voice that might as well be another person, because
like a person, this inner critic has a certain consistency in its attitudes
and judgments and it functions as an entity within you, influencing
your actions and beliefs about yourself. Take a moment now to imagine
that the self-critical voice in your head has a personality and even
the name Harriet. Try to listen to the self-deprecating messages that
Harriet is giving to you even at this very moment. She rarely rests.
Even though you're an intelligent, self-contained, functioning
adult, Harriet has a lot of power. Sometimes her chatter stays in the
background of your consciousness, like static, but other times it's
blaring like a sports announcer, really berating you. You need to get
her under control in order to control your emotional eating pattern.
As a psychiatrist, when a patient is coming in every week talking
about their self-doubts, directly or indirectly, I make it a point to
maintain the perspective that they're a person who despite their
doubts also has successes in their life: they have a job, a spouse, a
family, hobbies, interests, passions. So I'm going to ask you to treat
your inner critic Harriet by being sure to have a dialogue with her
that's surrounded by this same reality perspective. No matter what
she says, you must always go back to your reality. It's your anchor in
the world of today that will keep you sane and strong. Like a good
therapist, you have to remember all your good qualities and victories.
From that perspective, you'll be in a much better place to hear
what Harriet has to say and think about what it means, rather than
run for the hills every time she opens her mouth.

My working assumption is that you know Harriet quite well but
have never figured out how to handle her, other than trying to avoid
doing anything to stimulate one of her verdicts. You've become
accustomed to living with her inside you, and when she's become
too intense or aggressive, you've tried to shut her up by eating or
drinking your way into oblivion. You've used food to try to stuff
Harriet down and maybe even alcohol to poison her. These substances
allow you to go into a sort of trance where you can't hear
Harriet's voice anymore.
You've been suffocating and poisoning Harriet because she
seems dangerous to you--because until now, you've granted her the
status of a goddess. Whatever she's said, you've believed without
question. If Harriet has whispered that you're inept or a loser or not
likeable, you've accepted those judgments. You go ahead and eat
another piece of cake because Harriet has convinced you that whatever
diet you're on is never going to make a real difference. She's
convinced you that you'll never lose the weight and that even if you
do lose the weight, people still won't love you the way you want
them to. You haven't been able to talk back to Harriet any more than
you could talk to an enraged parent making the same pronouncements
about you--you wouldn't dare. You've assimilated Harriet's
harsh and unfair criticisms as basic truths about yourself, the proof
of your badness and your defectiveness. But now you've given
Harriet an ordinary mortal name and taken her down a notch, so
you can begin exploring whether or not she's telling the truth.
In fact, Harriet is your conscience, or in psychological terms, what
we call the "superego." This is not your whole conscience, but that
sector that still operates on an immature level. She's a part of you, not
a concrete thing exterior to you or a mysterious, powerful "other"
inside you. You're telling yourself something highly critical about
yourself, and you believe it without question. You assume your conscience
is infallible, elevated, and even godlike, but while your mature
conscience helps you to behave with decency in the world, the critical
conscience, Harriet, always goes overboard in assigning guilt.

How to Weaken the Power of
Your Self-Doubts

There are two ways to weaken the power of your self-doubts. One is
an interior conversation with yourself and Harriet, your inner critic,
whenever you're in the midst of accusing yourself of something.
We'll be giving you the scripts to dialogue with Harriet in Session 4
(chapter 13) of part two. This is one way that you'll be reinterpreting
things and feelings in order to have a more accurate inner reality.
The other way to weaken your self-doubts is to stop automatically
and mindlessly strengthening your self-doubts by jumping to
conclusions that you don't examine as you interpret the world outside
or yourself. When something happens--for instance, you're
disappointed with yourself for doing a bad job at work and you jump
to the conclusion that there's something wrong with you and then
eat to avoid dealing with that conclusion--you reinforce your self
doubt. You're making an incorrect interpretation of the event just
because you're disappointed in yourself, and because you've eaten
to smother the feeling, you've robbed yourself of the opportunity to
make a reinterpretation. You've compounded that self-doubt. The
fact that you did a bad job at work doesn't mean that there's something
wrong with you. It doesn't mean that you're lazy or stupid or
incompetent--it simply means that you didn't do a good job at
work. If you look at the exterior reality and weigh all the sides of
what happened, you may realize that perhaps it means that you
didn't put in enough effort to match the difficulty of the task, or you
didn't have enough time to do it right, or you weren't really motivated
to do it in the first place. Once you can see the real picture and
make a reinterpretation, instead of just your knee-jerk immediate
interpretation that leads you to the experience of powerlessness and
then the uncontrollable urge to eat, you have some choices.You can
apologize. You can commit to doing a better job the next time. You
can realize that you're simply not motivated at your job and would
rather be doing something else. When you do that, you regain your
power. And regaining your power allows you to be your own agent
in the world. How skilled you get at looking at the external world of
today, rather than your interior world of your past where Harriet
rules, will determine how much agency you actually have over your
own life and ultimately over your weight.
In other words, imagine you're holding all your self-doubts and
they're piled twelve layers high. Every time you dialogue with
Harriet, you take a layer off with your right hand. Of course, I want
you to take all the layers of your self-doubt away. But every time you
immediately accept your misinterpretation of something, you're
putting a layer back on with your left hand. The pile doesn't change
and you're left with your self-doubts. By dialoguing with Harriet
you'll take your existing self-doubts away, and every time you reinterpret
something to reflect the real-life external reality of today,
you'll be preventing a new layer from being put on.
Since your self-doubts are the first layer of the powerlessness
experience that causes the uncontrollable urge to overeat, figuring
out how to master your old self-doubts, not fear Harriet, and prevent
new self-doubt from being added to your collection by embracing
the external reality is the first key to success.
In part two, you'll actively attack Harriet by learning how to
defend yourself against her accusations, but for now, it will help you
to keep these three principles that we've discussed in mind:

1.	Your self-doubts represent only a part of yourself, not the whole picture. Your self-doubts take your everyday mistakes and failures
and inflate them so that they're unbearable. If you stay
grounded in your real life, the self-doubt experience will be only
a momentary experience without any effect, just a reflex that
goes nowhere. My patient Roz is a published magazine writer.
She got a critical note from her editor. Normally this would send
her running to the fridge, her self-doubts from childhood about
not being creative enough fully awakened. But after working
with me, she was able to stop and realize that she's a good writer
and that one criticism doesn't erase all her accomplishments.
She went back to her desk, took her editor's comments to heart,
and rewrote her piece. Her editor was pleased with it, and she
didn't have to confront the guilt from overeating.

2.	The second principle is that the self-doubt powerlessness experience lasts only as long as you continue to reinforce it by misinterpreting
the daily events in your life. Every time you create a
false link between the event (e.g., a rejection or disappointment
and the conclusion there must be something wrong with you to
explain why this is happening), you feed the self-doubt powerlessness
conclusion. Every time you spend time thinking about
and analyzing the situation to understand the real-life complex
cause, you stay in the real world. The initial misinterpretation
must be replaced with the correction reinterpretation. Roz
misinterpreted her editor's comment to mean she wasn't good
enough; when she reinterpreted, she remembered that her
editor generally loves her work and is actually on her side.
3. You actually have to listen to your harsh critic and learn a new way of talking back to it. In part two, I'll provide you with scripts
you can practice, but for now, let's look at the six most common
accusations that Harriet will make against you, so you can begin
thinking about how you will have to respond to each.

Six Accusations You'll Learn How to Counter


1.	If you're not perfect, you're deeply flawed.

2.	You're trying to cover up and deny your real faults.

3.	You're a phony.
4.	You're a pretend adult and don't deserve the full rights of adulthood.

5.	You know the good stuff about you isn't real.

6.	Everybody knows what you're hiding.

SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

Powerlessness and Self-Criticism

You've seen that you have self-doubts. Some are triggered by
others, some are unprovoked.

You've begun to see that perhaps you're wearing armor to
protect yourself from self-doubts.

You've met your inner critic, Harriet, and understand that
she's been keeping your self-doubts in place.
You made a false conclusion when you decided that "you're
powerless to do anything about your self-doubts." That false
conclusion has made you hide or run away into food.

You learned the six accusations Harriet makes against you.

You understand that up until now you've accepted those
accusations as truth, but now you know that you'll need to
dialogue with those accusations to see if they're just old tapes
replaying or if they actually pertain to who you are today.

You understand that you have two methods of mastering your
self-doubts:

1- You can diminish what is there now by talking back to
your nagging critical conscience.

2. You can stop adding to your load of doubt by catching
yourself when you misinterpret a situation to mean there
is something wrong with you.

5

Your Frustration/Reward
Layer


We human beings come into the world hardwired to seek passion
and pleasure and fulfillment. From the moment of birth, we look for
pleasure. We delight in the breast or bottle; we need touch to survive;
we like soft blankets and toys; we love when people pay attention to
us, entertain us, and make us laugh. Even as babies, we become
passionate about things--about a parent or sibling; about a character
on television like Elmo or Barney; about a particular blanket, pacifier,
or toy. And as babies, we first experience the frustration of not always
getting what we want when we want it. This frustration creates a
certain degree of pain. Babies cry in response to pain, and usually get
the frustration allayed fairly quickly--the bottle or breast arrives, the
blanket or toy is found. As we get older, though, we're on our own in
resolving frustration. Our needs increase, as do our desires, and it
takes increasingly more work, diligence, and audacity to find the
passion and pleasure and fulfillment we long for.
Until now, when you've felt frustrated with some part of your
life, you've eaten to satisfy yourself because deep down you haven't
thought you had the power to do anything to reverse the frustration,

to get your real needs met, and to have the life you want. Perhaps
this frustration has led you to chronic feelings of disappointment
and anger, and over time those feelings have turned into depression.
I want to help you see that you don't need to stay in this conundrum.
You've come to the wrong conclusion. Although you'll always
have frustrations in life, there's always something you can do to
either diminish them, reverse them, or peacefully coexist with them.
Eating to give yourself an illusory reward is always the worst possible
way to deal with your frustrations, for as we have pointed out so
many times already, your problems don't get better, new problems
accumulate, more self-doubts get added to the pile and that makes
you want to eat more, and then the whole added load of hating
yourself for being fat comes into play.
Up until now, you've learned that you're afraid of where your
feelings might take you, what they might lead you to realize about
yourself and your life. You've seen how in the past you resorted to
eating in order to avoid the discomfort of whatever you were feeling
for a brief period. You ate to end a bad feeling such as sadness or fear.
That bad feeling covered for a deep anxiety that you didn't want to
face, usually some notion that you're a defective person, that your
mythically exaggerated doubts about yourself represented the secret
truth about you. If you follow that line of thinking, you can see that it
extends to the idea that you are so defective that you'll never achieve
satisfaction. And so when you have frustrated needs that don't get
met, you eat instead of dealing with them, which ensures that they
don't get met, plus you feel even more terrible about yourself.
You can see how this cycle plays out in the case of Susie, a
patient of mine who struggled to lose weight for years. Anytime it
was suggested that she eat less, she felt panicked. She couldn't
imagine what else she might do that could provide her with the
pleasure that food provided. And she was passionate about her food,
too. The thought of what she would eat at the end of her workday
actually kept her motivated throughout the day. The meal that
awaited her was almost as enticing as the idea of meeting a lover.
The fact of the matter was that her needs had not been met for a
long time in her marriage. She had no outlets that gave her a feeling
of accomplishment. Despite many compliments about the clothes
she designed and made for her children, she had not been brave
enough to take them to local stores. In our work together, she began
to look at ways to overcome her self-doubt so that she could ask for
what she needed from her husband and begin getting her handmade
clothes out into the world. Once she took these steps and
started deriving a sense of real satisfaction from her life, food moved
from first to third on her list of sources of pleasure.
Like Susie, you also need to look at your self-doubts, put them
aside, and see what your true needs and passions are. In part two,
we'll work on what I will discuss here, which is your:

	unfulfilling relationships
	unfulfilled needs
	unlived potential
	stresses

Using Food to Deal with Unfulfilling
Relationships

Romance like donut. Everybody hungry for donut. Everybody hungry
for romance. But when romance over, you not feel so good,
maybe vomit. Same with donut.--Unknown


Let me tell you about Cara, who couldn't find the love she so desperately
wanted--a variation on the theme of having a relationship
with its built-in frustrations.
At age forty-nine, Cara's love life looked bleak. She hadn't had a
date in two years, and no prospects loomed on the horizon. She
longed for an intimate partner, someone who could help out with the
financial burden and house chores, someone she could snuggle with
and talk to late at night. A while back she joined Match.com, but all the guys disappointed her except for one, Jack, with whom she did
finally start a relationship. Jack had some good qualities--generosity;
he was good to Theresa, Cara's sixteen-year-old; and he had nursed
Cara back to health after her shoulder surgery. He was kind and all
that, Cara thought, but he was in debt and far too needy. She had to
end it because Jack got demanding about spending more time
together, not understanding that Cara's job required that she work
sixty, sometimes seventy or eighty hours a week.
No guys seemed to get that fact. Lately, Cara's work schedule
had made it difficult for her to cook good meals at home or to exercise.
She started eating out a lot, and the pounds found their way to
her waistline. Her friends urged her to rejoin a dating service, but
she pointed out that it hadn't worked before and so she saw no reason
to bother now. She had her daughter to take care of, and her
demanding work schedule, and so she'd just have to trust fate. Plus
she wanted to hold off until she lost some weight before dating
again. No guy would want to go out with someone forty pounds
overweight, she told her friends over drinks. When her sister suggested
that she should get some counseling, Cara exploded. She
didn't need counseling, she told her sister--she needed some relief
from all the pressure. After she hung up, she fixed herself a chocolate
milkshake with whipped cream and stuck You've Got Mail in the
DVD player. Halfway through the movie, she felt munchy, so she
grabbed the bag of Mint Milanos and ate the entire thing.
When first in love, we feel full, our appetites fall away, and we
want nothing other than the beloved. And yet, as the Irish folk
song, "The Water Is Wide," reminds us, there's another part to the
story: "But love grows old, and waxes cold, And fades away, like
morning dew," go the words, and therein lies the problem. When
love grows cold, we grow hungry, and it hardly takes a major frost in
the relationship to activate emotional hunger. Once the radiance of
new love fades, frustrations begin, and then emotional hunger has
a field day.
Our deepest fears, frustrations, and disappointments come
from our interactions with people, and especially from those people
we love most. In chapter 4, we explored how to deal with the
emotional hunger that gets triggered when other people hurt us,
but relationships engender problems other than hurt feelings that
lead us to overeat. Perhaps your partner simply doesn't communicate,
and that frustrates you, or you don't get what you need from
your partner on an ongoing basis. Perhaps your partner has behaviors
that frighten or dismay or irritate you, or perhaps you're the one
who botches things because you fear intimacy. Perhaps everything
seems fine on the surface, but you find yourself wanting something
more--maybe more romance, or more freedom, or more excitement.
What can you do about the hunger related to these issues?
First you need to figure out if, in fact, relationship issues do
underlie some of your eating behavior, because such frustrations can
be subtle, and because you might have developed elaborate
defenses to suppress such issues in order to maintain the status quo.
Recognizing frustrations in relationships takes courage. We crave
love and intimacy with all our being, and so we hate to admit it
when things aren't completely fulfilling. We don't want to lose the
love we do have, unless the lack of fulfillment has become so blatant
that we have no choice. And so we hold onto imperfect partnerships,
figuring that's the best we're going to do, meanwhile doing
nothing much to make things better.
As the above story about Cara illustrates, many people reach for
food when they think love is totally out of reach. Some unconsciously
hope to fill the void inside themselves by eating delicious
treats. Others actually make a conscious decision to eat rather than
to relate. You've probably seen those bumper stickers that say,
"Forget love. I want to fall in chocolate." People who think that way
have decided that it's easier to get a hit of bliss from a cookie than to
deal with the emotional demands of love. Food doesn't talk back, it
never says no, it doesn't criticize you. I understand the temporary fix
that food provides, and have seen my patients turn to it countless
times, but food will never satisfy that basic human need to be part of
an intimate, harmonious, and fulfilling relationship. Although food
can give you a momentary feeling of fullness, it can't fill the void that
wants to be filled with love and intimacy.
How Harriet, Your Inner Critic,
Interferes in Your Relationships

Food has replaced sex in my life. Now I can't even get into my
own pants!--Anonymous

You've Got Mail, The Notebook, Sleepless in Seattle, Must Love Dogs. What stands between you and such enduring cinematic love?
You probably know by now that Harriet the nag creates problems
that keep you from enjoying lasting intimacy. As long as self
doubt tickles you, even if only in the innermost recesses of your
awareness, all your relationships will be difficult. Self-doubt makes
you overly sensitive to perceived slights because deep inside you feel
damaged or unworthy. Self-doubt makes you withdraw too quickly,
hide too much, become jealous and envious, give up too easily, and
rationalize your actions. When insecure, you avoid reaching out, and
you spend too much relationship energy protecting your self-image.
You wear at least one suit of armor, a challenge to any partner. You
want or need too much attention and acclaim, and you become
angry and hurt when you don't get it. In short, you become exactly
the type of partner you would never want to be with, and so it
should come as no surprise when you end up alone or when your
partner points out some of these faults.
I find that many of my patients run into trouble because they
aren't ready to part with Harriet. They're still functioning from their
critical, childlike conscience. They can't love themselves, much less
another. They say that they know love takes work, but they don't
really get what that means--that the bulk of the work needs to be
inner-directed. At some level, they want a fairy tale, a perfect prince
or princess to come along and make everything gorgeous, although
they act the part of the wicked witch, driving suitors away or making
the relationship more difficult. Until you wrangle with Harriet
and feel truly worthy of love, until you believe in your own ability
to be loving, and reliable, and a gem of a partner, until you know
deep down inside that you're the kind of person you'd like to spend
eternity with, relationship problems will hound you and you'll
overeat to compensate.
Also, when you don't believe in your inherent worth, you'll fear
exposure, which makes intimacy impossible. Getting close to
another person means letting him or her see all of you, including
your imperfections. If you don't love yourself, you'll fear that your
partner will find out the so-called truth about you--that under the
surface, you're really bad, that Harriet speaks the whole truth and
nothing but the truth. You also fear that your partner will confirm
Harriet's accusations--a prospect so terrifying that you consciously
or unconsciously sabotage your own relationships.
I had a patient who decided she was going to use skydiving to
overcome her fears. She thought that if she jumped enough times,
she would no longer be afraid. After doing it many times, she realized
she was supposed to be afraid of jumping out of a plane at
15,000 feet.
Relationships are no different. Any time you make yourself
vulnerable, you can expect to be frightened. But any time you let fear
overwhelm you or make you run away, you reinforce your negative
self-image, convincing yourself that you're weak, fearful, and someone
who can't succeed in love. The challenge is to face the fears and
the self-doubt head-on.
Sometimes it's the armor you have put on to run away from
Harriet that becomes the obstacle. Let me tell you about Brad.
Brad had a way with women. In fact, he had his way with so
many women in the past five years that he had lost count. Last
March, he had the hots for Marissa, but her husband, Stewart, got
between them. Then he fell for Sandy, but her two children botched
that relationship. He could deal with neither the kid factor nor with
clingy women, which was what had ruined his infatuation with
Alison. Why, he wondered, couldn't God just send him a beautiful,
sexy, smart, compatible, independent, kid-free woman he could
enjoy life with? He didn't want to get married or anything, but he
was beginning to feel weird about his lack of long-term success with
women. All of his friends were either married or living with someone,
and he had an uneasy feeling about being the only guy he
knew who had never been with a woman for longer than 14
months, although he did love living the bachelor dream.
Recently, his friends George and Lynette had set him up with
Delia, who seemed to be perfect in every way. She was attractive and
funny and smart, and she shared his interests. But after a few
months, she started asking him what he was thinking about all the
time, trying to figure him out. Sometimes it almost seemed as if she
could read his mind--it kind of spooked him how she knew so
much about his feelings. He told her to back off, and she got sulky
and then they fought. He didn't like a meddlesome woman--he just
wanted to have fun, he said. Then she started in on what she called
"his relationship issues."
"You're forty-one," she said to him, "and you can't sustain a
relationship because you're scared out of your mind." That really got
to him. He broke up with her that very night, and then she told him
to grow up and said he didn't deserve her. She said she didn't want
to be with someone dysfunctional.
That was a month ago and he hasn't asked anyone out since
then. He tried not to think about Delia, but for some reason,
their last fight kept bugging him. In fact, it bugged him so much
that he didn't want to date at all, for fear of getting into a similar
situation.
Brad's armor was his womanizing. It covered up his fear of
intimacy, which arose from his extreme sensitivity. He feared the
vulnerability of being known and watched. If he was known and
watched he might be found out to be the fraud he was sure he
was. As long as he stayed encased in his armor, without any
dialogue with Harriet that might change his self-perceptions, he
was bound to experience a series of endless disappointments,
his emotional hunger would remain enormous, and he would
overeat to reward himself for what he couldn't fix. If Brad doesn't
confront his serial womanizing with therapy or real introspection,
all of his doubts will keep being confirmed, and ultimately he will
become a caricature.
The Common Denominator
in All Your Relationships

Wake up to your own strength. Wake up to the role you play in
your own destiny. Wake up to the power you have to choose what
you think, do, and say.--Keith Ellis, Bootstraps

In any relationship that you want to improve, you have to start with
the premise that you can only change yourself, and in so doing
change the dynamic of the relationship. Only then is there a chance
that your partner may change in exactly the way you want in
response. Most people don't understand this, even though they have
heard it a thousand times. Instead we ask, beg, demand that our
partner change to please us. Simply put, it won't work.
My patient Pam, a midlevel manager in an advertising firm in
Manhattan, has been married for three years and has begged her
husband to not take it personally if she is in a rage when she gets
home from work. She expected him to understand how stressful her
work is and accept any way she treated him. That is an unrealistic
kind of unconditional love to expect. When Pam realized that it was
unfair of her to expect this from her husband and started controlling
her anger in a mature way, her relationship changed dramatically.
She ended up getting many more of her needs met and was actually
able to enjoy her time in the evenings after she came home from
work. They even started taking walks every night after dinner, which
has helped her relax even more and she's lost weight effortlessly.
Harriet stands in the way of you making changes. If Harriet were
not in the picture, you could change your own behavior in your
frustrating relationship and reap the rewards. You would

	try to open an honest dialogue
	expect less from your partner
	accept that you have different opinions on certain topics
	learn to not take things so seriously
	call your partner more often
	not be so stubborn or hard-headed
	not try to control everything
	let your partner have more space

	acknowledge that he or she is temporarily under a lot of stress

Instead of doing these things, we have such unrealistic expectations
in love. Why do we want to be swept off our feet without
putting forth any effort? We took the fairy tales that we heard when
we were young to heart. We grew up expecting blissful, perfect, soul
matey love, and now, when our partners act like mere, imperfect
mortals, we think the sky is falling. We feel angry, slighted, and, deep
inside, inadequate--because we think we must be ugly frogs down
to our bones or else we would have fairy-tale partners who treat us
like royalty.
One way you can improve relationships and diminish emotional
hunger is to get real about your relationships, including about your
expectations of others. First you have to accept your own faults and
realize that they don't add up to the entire you, and then you have to
accept that your partner has faults that most likely comprise only
part of the picture of who he or she is.
Going back to Pam, whom I mentioned above, it was her own
change of attitude that got her relationship to improve so dramatically.
A relationship with a difficult partner can change completely if
you make minor adjustments in your attitude and behavior. There
are two ways to do this:
One, if frustrated with a relationship, there are things you can
do, and they all involve some change in you, your attitude, your
behavior, your sensitivity, or your intimacy skills. You need to work
on these instead of eating. You don't have to solve them all at once,
though. Making small changes can actually offer a lot of relief, and
you may not feel the need to immediately turn to food for that relief.
Second, you have to stop Harriet if she tries to prevent you from
making these changes. You have to do combat with her or you won't
be able to change, and your original conclusion that your frustrations
can't be resolved will become correct. If that occurs, you'll be
stuck and then you'll only continue eating to reward yourself for
your frustrations.

Talk Back to Harriet

As you discover ways to improve your relationships, here are some
of the things that Harriet may say about the things you are thinking
of trying. I'd like to share them with you so that when Harriet starts
suggesting them, you'll already be prepared with responses.
First, when you think that having a dialogue with a loved one is
going to help, Harriet will warn you to be careful. She'll tell you
that you might hear something about yourself that you can't quite
handle. What will you tell her?
When you attempt to give your loved ones space, she'll tell you
that if you don't have a hold over them they'll find someone else, or
that by giving them space they'll find others more interesting and
will eventually abandon you.
When you entertain the idea that perhaps you've been expecting
too much from your loved ones, she'll tell you that by expecting less
from people, you'll allow yourself to become a doormat. You'll be
used because they know you're not worth anything more.
When you try to accept that people in your life are going to have
different opinions, she'll tell you that if you have opposing opinions
you'll be cast aside.Your opinions don't count after all.
When you try to lighten up and not take things so seriously,
Harriet will tell you that if you don't take your feelings seriously,
people will not pay attention to them. She'll encourage you to stay
in an angry place where you feel lonely and disconnected.
When you try to stop being so stubborn and hard-headed,
Harriet will tell you that you are compromising and that by giving in
you are accepting that you're flawed and imperfect. Obviously,
imperfect is bad by her standards.
When you give up trying to control everything and everyone (your
spouse, your children, your co-workers), Harriet will tell you that if
you relinquish control, things will go wrong and you'll look bad.
When you try to be sympathetic toward someone in your life
who is under stress, Harriet will start to pout, saying, "What about
me, where is my unconditional love and support?" When you're
starting to feel bad about not receiving that kind of support, she'll
convince you that you don't have it because you don't deserve it.
Harriet works hard to convince you that nothing is going to help
in your relationships. She keeps you locked in a rigid pattern that
never has things change or get better. To break free of her negative
influence, spend some time planning counterarguments for any of
her attacks. Ultimately, having good relationships is the highlight of
life, the source of deepest fullness and fulfillment.

"Hormones," says Claire, a forty-two-year-old patient, when I ask
her"why she feels depressed.
"Is there anything else," I ask, "anything specific bothering
you?"
Claire thinks for a moment. "I feel like something is wrong, but
I'm not sure what it is."
My patient Richard comes in angry, cranky. "What's wrong?" I
ask him.
"Nothing," he says. "I'm just in a rotten mood."
"What's causing the mood?"
"I don't know," says Richard. "That's why I'm paying you, to
figure it out."
On a daily basis, patients like Richard and Claire tell me that
they feel irritable and grouchy, but even when pressed, they really
don't know what's making them miserable. They describe a free
floating feeling of discomfort that eats at them and makes them
want to eat, but have no complaints grand enough to account for
their misery. And so we do the work of exploring, digging for
answers, and reflecting. Finally, we discover unfulfilled needs and
desires buried deep beneath the surface. Those desires and needs,
when not addressed, cause depression, anger, frustration, and, of
course, hunger--a desire to fill the gap with food.
One of our online members wrote, "I wanted food to be so much
more than nourishment. Food became the soother, the lover, the
caregiver, gave me something to do when I was bored and didn't
want to examine the direction of my life. Of course food isn't any of
these things/it is just food.'I stuffed myself to fill all the gaps in my
life rather than dealing with the gaps themselves. It wasn't until I
realized that food wasn't any of those things that I was making it, it
was just food, that I lost quite a bit of weight."
llrtl iu^/

Most of us hunger for something that we lack. Maybe you want
more security, or more appreciation, or more leisure in your life--but
there's a good chance that you don't fully acknowledge or even
know what you want. My experience working with patients over
three decades has shown me that if you don't know what you want
and if you fail to consciously own your desires, you'll find emotional
hunger attacking you with ferocious strength.
In this frustration/reward cycle, we're following the consequences
of the powerlessness conclusion that you cannot do anything about
your frustration except to reward yourself with food. Well, when you
feel frustrated but don't know why, it's true that you can't do anything
about it. Perhaps you're even afraid to look for an answer because you
fear that looking will lead you to an unbearable destination, to a
place where you find out what you need but believe you'll never get
it. No matter how scary that is, the cure is to dig and find out which
of your needs are being frustrated, put those needs into words, and
then figure out what to do about them.
You will have to determine which of your needs are infantile and
unrealistic and which ones you should pursue getting met. The
process of excavating and facing them is all you need to begin to
stop the phantom hunger created by frustrated needs.
Remember, all of your legitimate needs cry out to be satisfied.
When you frustrate a real need, you'll experience emotional hunger.
You can create the temporary illusion that everything is all right for
a while by eating, but food alone won't fulfill any need but physical
hunger.

Your Needs Need to Mature, Too

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to
go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and
remain in it. This is a kind of death.--Anah Niti

One reason that you may lose touch with your needs or become
frustrated that they'll never be satisfied is that you haven't changed
your needs to adapt to the way your life has changed. For example,

Ml 11 I .1 N H'UHSELF

as a child, you were quite dependent on the approval of your
parents. You constantly waited to hear your parents say "great job"
after everything you did--everything from going down a slide, to
coloring a picture, to making poopie in the potty--and you needed
that validation.
As you got older, you undoubtedly received less validation.
Adults simply can't expect to receive as much validation as kids get.
Validation must become internal. You need to cheer for yourself.
Your boss won't tell you "great job" every time you write a memo,
your spouse won't exclaim with praise every time you smile--you
have to enjoy yourself for your own accomplishments. Still, it's normal
to need some external validation. If you gave your spouse an
amazing fortieth birthday party and you got no acknowledgment,
your need for thanks is an adult need that must find a way to be satisfied.
Being able to look at your needs in a realistic and fair way is
essential to your happiness and to the success of your relationships.
It's quite natural for your needs and dreams to shift to reflect
your new life circumstances, and also typical to ignore this fact and
keep acting as if the old needs apply. Every time you enter a transitional
stage in your life, it's time to reassess and recalibrate your
path--to assess what your needs have become and to look at which
needs no longer apply.
What you might really need now is an opportunity to exercise
your strength and independence. You may need a stage to play on
now rather than a hiding place. And so it's important to assess
whether your needs and desires are outdated--if they're tied to
childhood fears rather than rooted in present reality.
Lois, a thirty-eight-year-old online member, doesn't struggle
with her weight, but she does struggle with her relationship to food.
She thinks about food constantly and binges occasionally, and then
feels horrible guilt and shame for days. Even though she manages a
business from her home and is the star tennis player at her club, she
turns into a little girl around her husband. She expects him to handle
the bills, take care of the cars, and even pitch in with her work whenever
she feels overwhelmed. It's almost as if she forgets how competent
she actually is when she's around him. Whenever he's not
around and she has to do things for herself, she ends up bingeing.
YOUR t KU STRATION/REWARO LAYER	/.J

If you identify with this, you'll need to stop looking for a protector
and start looking for a stage. The change in your personal needs
at any point in time is related to your place on the life stage spectrum.
At each stage in the life journey, certain needs typically
become relevant, although they weren't before. In your late teens,
you are busy experimenting with adulthood and need both independence
and family support in your half-child, half-adult status. In
your twenties, the task is to become independent by becoming more
competent at work and in love and friendships, and what you need
is opportunity, experience, and hands-off acceptance of your
method of learning about life. In your early thirties you need commitment
and an opportunity to go deeper into your life and into
yourself, often involving children and family life. In midlife, you
might experience the need for professional success and fulfillment-- many people do at this point in their life journey--whereas later
life typically brings an increased longing for downtime and inner
reflection.
One patient said, "Once my son left home, I didn't know how to
fill my time. I felt lost, bored, and didn't know what I needed to
make myself happy, and most times I just ended up eating to fill the
time." Constantly reassessing your needs is part of what it takes to
keep evolving and growing as an adult.
The key is to get in touch with your real needs at each point in
your journey, and to recognize the legitimacy of your current needs
so you can move forward. Although you might discover that you
can't fulfill all your desires at this moment given the circumstances
of your life, you at least can begin to construct a plan that works for
you in your current situation.

Knowing What You Want So
You Can Go for It

You might be saying I would go after what I need and want if only I
knew what I needed or wanted. The real trouble begins when you no
longer know what you want--when you lose touch with your

in	SHRINK YOURSELF

dreams because they seem so impractical. This is a very common
problem. We get too busy to take time for ourselves--we become
caught up in life. We go through the motions of existence, spinning
wildly on the hamster wheel of obligations and daily tasks, forgetting
what we started out hoping for, burying ourselves in routine
and work.
One of my patients recently said, "I take care of my three children
with the grace of Mary Poppins. I make sure they explore all
their interests. Why, then, can't I do that for myself?"
We may forget that we had any dreams at all. Then our old friend
Harriet the naysayer reinforces our amnesia by making us feel that
we aren't deserving and therefore should just accept life as it is.
Meanwhile, the dreams we once had nag at us, or new needs bubble
up, and though we ignore them, we feel frustrated, which breeds
depression and anger.
Dig beneath the surface of depression or anger and you'll almost
always find some frustrated desire or unmet need. Once you
uncover the desire, you can deal with it. Face the desire, and you
might see that it isn't all that important after all; then you can let it
go. On the other hand, you might see that the desire is legitimate,
something worth striving for. But if you don't even know what it is
you really want, you'll continue to feel empty inside, devoid of
fulfillment, and since you haven't a clue what the problem is and
therefore don't know how to address it, you'll want to fill up the void
with food.
My patient George stopped being angry and depressed the day
he decided to go to law school. He no longer felt trapped being the
accountant his father insisted he become.

Undoubtedly you've seen kids have a tantrum about not getting
something that they wanted. Perhaps you thought, or even said to
them, "Better start learning early that you're not always going to get
what you want in life." Obviously, at this point in your life, it's no
longer acceptable to throw yourself on the floor, scream, kick, and
hold your breath when things don't work out according to your
plan. You might feel like having a tantrum, especially when you try

i, a i r. i\
YOU H 1' KU S 1 RATI ON/RE \\ AKW

to fulfill infantile demands that are unrealistic, but it works much
better to cultivate realistic, mature needs that you pursue appropriately,
using realistic problem-solving techniques and making distinctions
about how the world works. It is your responsibility to get
your needs met appropriately within the context of your relationships,
family, and work.
When you decide to fulfill a need, you have to balance your
responsibilities, values, and loves, so any decision is by necessity a
complex trade-off that only you can make. But when you engage in
that complex trade-off you're operating in the real world of today,
outside the domain of Harriet. That's your freedom space.
Linda decided to go back to school, though she also had a
responsibility to be home for her kids by three o'clock. She knew
that taking on the added pressure of getting her degree would make
everything harder--managing the kids would be more difficult
because of school, managing her schoolwork would be more difficult
because of the kids, and overall she was afraid that managing
her weight would once again fall to the bottom of her priority list.
However, Linda was amazed at how creating a schedule and keeping
to it made her more successful in all three of those areas.

How Harriet Keeps You from
Fulfilling Your Needs

Sometimes your needs remain unfulfilled not because of outside circumstances,
but because self-doubt makes you put on the brakes
when it comes to trying to get your needs met. Because of Harriet,
you feel that you don't have the capacity to get what you want, or
that you don't deserve it, so you only make halfhearted or intermittent
efforts to get it. Being blocked can make you resort to magical
thinking, hoping that others will give you what you want or need
without you having to ask for it. Perhaps you feel that it's too much
of an imposition to ask for things--even things that you would be
happy to give to others--as if you deserve less than others do. But

<o	SHRINK YOURSELF

waiting too long to be nurtured or respected or acknowledged or
loved will make you hungry, both physically and emotionally. It
will make you resentful, less likeable, moody, and fragile. And that
will reinforce all your self-doubts.
The fact of the matter is that the people in your life rarely will
satisfy your needs the way you hope they will, and too much hoping
and wishing can leave you overly sensitive to disappointments. At
the heart of your emotional hunger is a sense of hopelessness and a
whole list of unfulfilled needs that you just can't seem to get met.
This makes you eat more, in part because it makes you feel powerful
and even hopeful, temporarily, to address a need you can fulfill--the
need for delicious food.
Here's the conundrum. When you don't tell people what you
want, you don't have a chance of getting it. And so you set up the
people in your life to fail. They don't know what you want, and so
they can't give it to you. And since you don't get what you want, you
feel worthless and unloved; your host of unmet needs festers or
grows; and you eat to comfort yourself, feel awful about pigging out,
and then feel too unworthy to ask for what you need. So the cycle
perpetuates and leaves you feeling like a loser.
Lilly is the mother at school who never says no. Lilly is a patient
of mine who has been trying to lose thirty pounds for the last two
years. Her four children go to a prominent Beverly Hills school and
the teachers, the other mothers, and even the principal all know that
Lilly will say yes to any committee, any play date, and almost every
volunteer opportunity. At home, it's not much different. Her husband
expects her to negotiate their social calendar and manage
everything with regard to the children. Lilly says she's so busy she
doesn't have time to think about what she needs, let alone eat properly
or exercise. Getting your needs met takes real work. You may
need to assert yourself, negotiate, make trade-offs, clarify communications,
and maintain boundaries. You have to be willing to take a
risk and put yourself on the line. If you experience sharp warnings
from Harriet, doing this work might feel too anxiety-provoking: it
might seem easier to simply ignore your needs--to repress them
completely, or tell yourself you'll deal with them later. Again, the
YOUR FRUSTRATION/REWARD LAYER	/W

conundrum becomes that other people perceive you as someone
who doesn't assert herself or himself and they run all over you, and
you feel even more undeserving. But if you can believe that you'll
survive even if your needs don't get met after you express them, if
you're willing to take a chance, you have at least some possibility of
fulfillment, plus you gain the self-respect of knowing that you stood
up for yourself.

Facing Your Unfulfilled Potential

Avoidance sabotages our ability to have meaningful and truly intimate
relationships. It undermines our clarity and creativity. It robs
us of our capacity to be fully present in the moment. We think we
are tuning out to avoid pain, but in the end, avoidance delivers us
into the very pain, confusion, and unhappiness from which we are fleeing.--Barbara De Angelis

Another reason we don't fulfill our needs is because we fear failure
if we attempt anything new. But no baby walks perfectly the first
time, just as adults don't master equivalent challenges right away.
And yet, stumbling, looking stupid, and failing frighten most of us so
much that stagnation might seem preferable by comparison, and so
we make the unfortunate choice to lay low.
Once you start avoiding challenges and abandoning your
dreams, the road to the fridge is short. When you avoid challenges,
you eat to stuff down frustration that comes from sitting on your
own power. You eat to assuage guilt and sadness that your life isn't
as full as it could be. You eat to avoid facing nervousness that comes
from wanting to stay under the radar while also wanting to rise
above it. You eat because you're torn between the self that you've
always been and the self that you have an inkling you could become
if only you'd take a risk.
What's so awful about the possibility of failing that you fear it
with your whole being? Why rot and stagnate rather than take up a
80

SHRINK Y O U R S E L F

YOUR ERUSTRATION/REWARO LAYER
81





risky challenge? In order to stop the hunger-producing frustration
and low self-esteem that come from avoiding challenges, you need
to understand precisely what it is that you fear and what price you
pay because of that fear.
Think about any mistakes you've made or humiliations you've
experienced. How did you feel when you failed or made a mistake in
public? In private? Don't forget the small mistakes or embarrassments,
such as asking a "stupid question," or coming in last in a
race.
My patient Catherine illustrates the price we pay when we fear
challenges. Catherine had wanted to be a singer since she was a
child. She still has cassette recordings of herself singing Madonna's
"Live to Tell." She always felt free when she was singing. She was
often asked to sing solos in the shows in her high school, but one
day the boy she had a crush on made fun of her singing. She felt so
humiliated that she stopped singing, except in her car when she was
sure no one was watching.
When I asked Catherine about how she wasn't living out her
dreams, she realized that she had abandoned something that gave
her deep joy. Her dream was to make a living from her singing. The
thing she immediately did was to start singing in front of people
again. Catherine offered to sing at a friend's wedding. Her friends
were surprised because they didn't even know that that beautiful
voice was hiding beneath all of her weight.
The six-month goal I set with her was to make a demo tape.
Catherine did this and used it to get a job as the music teacher at her
local preschool. She no longer hoped to be Madonna, but by the
time a year had rolled around she was working in a job where she
was paid to sing. The children at the school loved her, and she finally
felt fulfilled. Now Catherine no longer sits on the couch eating
cartons of ice cream while watching American Idol; she's too busy
learning songs to sing for her classes.
Perhaps, like Catherine, you've also given up old dreams. What
was the end result of your mistake or failure? For instance, if you
once had a terrible singing performance, did you stop singing? Or
did you take lessons and improve? What does the way you handled
your failure tell you? Have you avoided putting yourself forward in
order to avoid the possibility of looking stupid again in public?
What's the worst that might happen if you did look stupid? What is
it that you fear? What opportunities have you missed by holding
yourself back? How do you feel immediately after holding yourself
back? What are the long-term effects?
If you actually spend a few moments thinking about these questions
and possibly writing down your thoughts, you'll discover a
very bad cold feeling in the pit of your stomach. Note it well. It's not
pleasant, but it is bearable. It's your shame/fear condensed into a small compact space somewhere inside what seems like your gut,
where it's easily converted into phantom hunger.
Please understand that the absence of a guiding dream creates
an empty place inside you hungering to be filled up. You think a
dessert or a plate of ravioli can give you a few moments of bliss, but
no treat can substitute for a lifelong dream. When the food is gone,
no matter how full your belly is, you're still empty.

Reclaim Your Dreams

Keep on going and chances are that you will stumble on something,
perhaps when you least expect it. I never heard of anyone
stumbling on something sitting down.--Charles F. Kettering

Maybe you've determined that your dreams aren't meant for this
lifetime, or that you can't fulfill them right now. You can't become
a prima ballerina if you're sixty-five years old and arthritic, you
can't make Timothy marry you if he already has a wife whom he
loves, you can't go back to school full-time if you have no extra
money and a dependent child. Perhaps, however, you can start taking
the tiniest steps toward getting what you want. If you can't be a
dancer, you can take ballet lessons. Maybe you'll find that tap dancing
works better for you given your physical limitations, so you
adjust your needs to meet the reality of your life. If you stick with

dancing, who knows? Eventually you might form a troupe for senior
dancers.
On the other hand, maybe you need to recognize that it's time to
drop that particular desire to dance, to accept the frustration of
dropping the dream and realize that frustration is a natural part of
life. You need to assess what makes more sense for you--taking tiny
steps to approach your dream, even if fulfilling that dream is a huge
stretch at this point, or moving on to a new dream. If you choose the
latter course, whether by choice or because you have no choice,
you'll want strategies to help you navigate the frustration that comes
with not getting what you want.
Here's the pep talk part of this session: True, failing might make
you look stupid. If you aren't an expert, if you make mistakes, if you
find out that you just don't have the necessary capacity, people may
snicker and gossip--but you won't die from that. On the other hand,
if you don't engage yourself in a dynamic process of trying new
things, of chasing the challenges in your life, your spirit will, in fact,
die, and you'll eat like a voracious lion besides.
As you undoubtedly know, the people who succeed most in life
are those who endure failure well. If Edison hadn't failed ten thousand
times, he never would have invented the battery. In fact, Edison
turned fear of failure on its head by insisting that the more failures
he had, the more likely he would be to eventually succeed. Jack
London received six hundred rejections before he sold his first story,
Henry Ford went bankrupt five times before he met with success,
and Julia Child tried to sell her first cookbook for eight years before
she found a publisher. It's no secret that cultivating resilience in the
face of failure is a prerequisite for success.
What does this mean for you? You might not want to become
another Babe Ruth or Henry Ford, but in the context of your own
life, you have ample opportunity in which to cultivate an attitude of
courage. The small events of everyday life present ample opportunity
for developing resilience, for taking chances, for testing yourself, and
for allowing yourself to grow in spite of the risks.
If you don't open up your latent potentials because self-doubt
makes you fear failure and disappointment, then deep inside you'll
feel like a coward, while the latent talent keeps calling out to you.
You'll know that you haven't fulfilled your destiny or responded
to new stages in your life cycle, and this perpetuates your self
doubt.
You have to at least try to fulfill your potential as much as you
can in order to stop feeding your self-doubts. You have to take up at
least some of the challenges in front of you, even though you might
not ever realize your full dream. Or you have to make a conscious
decision not to pursue your dreams because of other compelling
considerations. But left in the murky no-man's-land of the unconscious,
your failure to take chances and go for your dream remains a
festering source of self-doubt.
Remember: if you don't find things to be passionate about in
life, that creative energy that dwells within you will be forced into
unproductive things like eating, arguing with your spouse, watching
television constantly, and so on. Your life actually depends on
you finding things that make your heart sing. Everyone has lists of
things that they once dreamed about, everything from being president
of the United States to flying to the moon to being a rock star.
Some of those dreams may no longer be realistic, but let's revisit
those dreams for the sole purpose of using them to create new
dreams.
In part two, we'll look at your dreams and determine which ones
are realistic to pursue and create new dreams. The story below about
my patient Jess should illustrate how not following your dreams and
taking risks affects your weight.
Jess Miller sat at her desk, staring out the window at the street
below, watching a yellow cab cut off a Lexus. The Lexus honked,
then pulled in front of the cab. "Great show," Jess said aloud.
In front of her, the annual report lay in a pile, waiting for her
review, but she intended to put off reading it as long as possible.
Everything about her job bored her lately.
"I need a new challenge," she muttered. Just as she reached for
a cookie, her e-mail in box beeped. She had planned to ignore it,
but then she saw that the message came from Dexter Norman, the
CEO.
The message turned out to be a memo announcing that Jess's
boss, Tom Winer, had resigned from his position as chief operating
officer. Jess reread the memo three times. She wondered if Tom
actually had been fired, Jess had liked her boss, but she knew
Tom was incompetent. She also knew that she was next in line for
the job.
The open position announcement came the next day- Jess got so
nervous reading it that she made a trip to the kitchen for donuts and
coffee before printing it out. She should apply, she knew, but she
didn't have the MBA that the announcement called for, and so she
wasn't qualified 100 percent. Plus, taking that job would put her in
the firing line. She wasn't sure she was up to taking the heat. Did she
really want to work that hard? Would she be up to the challenge?
For ten days, Jess equivocated, her donut quotient rising to four
a day by the end of the application period. She just couldn't seem to
get her materials together.
Two weeks later, another announcement arrived: Dina Leverton
would be the next chief operating officer. She had applied right
under Jess's nose and had gotten the job. Dina! Dina, who also had
no MBA, who hadn't gone to Princeton, as Jess had, who wasn't half
as smart as she was! How could Dina get the job that she should
have gotten?
Jess boycotted the staff meetings that Dina ran for the next
month, taking herself out to Starbucks during meeting time. When
she found out that Dina had enrolled in an online MBA program,
using her educational benefits, she examined the benefits packet to
see if it was legitimate for her to use company money for online
training. She briefly considered enrolling in the same program, but
figured she shouldn't bother now.
For the next month, Jess continued to eat donuts daily. She put
on 13 pounds by February and alienated the entire management
team with her bad attitude. She told herself she should quit before
she got fired, but just couldn't muster the energy to start the process
of looking for another job.
Envy: The Great Informer

Jealousy is all the fun you think they had.--Erica Jong

As Jess Miller's story illustrates, envy provides a special way to
avoid facing challenges. You can use envy to trick yourself into
ignoring opportunities. Jess put her energy into resenting Dina
instead of exploring her own inability to move her career forward.
She actually hid behind envy, using it as a smokescreen to obscure
her own dysfunctional behavior, her lack of willingness to take
chances. She felt jealous of Dina simply because she had what she
wanted, what she feared going after--not because she begrudged
her success.
We naturally try to stifle jealousy because we've been taught
that it's shameful, bad, ugly. And yet envy can be a great aid in the
self-discovery process. If you don't know what you want, if you
can't figure out what challenges you've been avoiding, envy has a
message for you. Envy lets you know what you really hunger for-- and it isn't food. In fact, envy delivers a message that you need to
listen to carefully: envy tells you what you want, in no uncertain
terms.
If you envy someone living a life that you wish you had, you
need to pay attention to the buried message. That type of envy is
loaded with the information you need about your deepest desires
and frustrated hopes, just as Jess Miller's envy contained a clue
about what she truly wanted--a go-getter attitude, courage to put
herself forward, a more stimulating job.
Envy sends you a signal from within telling you that you want
something more in life than what you have. If you try to suppress
this signal by eating, you don't address your deeper needs or give
yourself an opportunity to find satisfaction. And if you act out
against the person you feel jealous of, your relationship ends up in
the toilet, so you suffer even more in the end. Better by far to welcome
the messages that jealousy brings and do something about
them, making the requisite adjustments in how you live.
If You Can't Manage Your Stress,
You Can't Manage Your Weight

The cause of stress is reality.--Lily Tomlin

There are certain things that you need to do to manage your life as
an adult. You need to pay your bills and do your taxes. You need to
get the oil changed on your car. You need to renew your driver's
license and passport. You need to keep toilet paper in the house and
take out the trash. They require some skill, but, more than that, they
require discipline. When these things are not attended to, chaos
reigns and you might feel scattered and incompetent. You feel like a
fraud and end up hoping that someone will rescue you.
If you can't manage your day-to-day life, it makes it a whole lot
harder to entertain the idea of going after dreams and goals. We
have already established that addressing your self-doubts, cultivating
satisfying relationships, and pursuing your dreams are critical
components to ending your dependence on food as a reward. So
let's look at ways that you can manage your life better so that you
can feel confident and start doing some of the things that you'd
really like to be doing. See if you see yourself in the anecdote below:
You're late for your meditation class. In your hurry to get there
on time, you forget your wallet. Five miles down the highway, you
realize that you're driving without a license, so you flip a U-turn and
speed home. The phone rings.
"Ms. Jones," the nasal voice at the other end says, "you have a
doctor's appointment today at two o'clock." You can't believe that
you scheduled a doctor's appointment for the same time as meditation!
Late for both appointments now, you frantically rip through
the house searching for the wallet, which you can't find because you
haven't cleaned in three weeks and everything is in a jumble. On the
way to the bedroom, you grab a few cookies and shove them in your
mouth without thinking. By the time you find the wallet in the
pocket of yesterday's jeans, you're too late for either appointment, so
you console yourself with more cookies and a mug of hot cocoa.
YOUR FRUSTRATION/REWARD LAYER

Does this sound familiar to you? Does stress make you desperate for
a food fix?
Although you've probably recognized the connection between
stress and the five-cookie syndrome before now, you might not have
thought about what role food plays specifically in diminishing your
stress. For one thing, food distracts you from the source of your anxiety,
at least for a moment or two. That makes you feel better right
away, but whatever has been making you anxious remains intact as
long as you eat to forget about it, only to arise again as soon as the
cookie crumbles in your digestive tract. Also, if you eat enough food,
you go sluggish and dull, which might take the edge off the uncomfortable
physical symptoms that anxiety causes, but again, the cause
of the anxiety is still there.
Few things excite automatic eating the way that stress does. One
minute you experience stress, and the next minute you've got a fistful
of chips headed toward your lips, without stopping to think in
between. Having too much stress increases the odds that you'll eat
unhealthy food. Under stress, you tend to opt for food that won't
take any more of your already frayed resources to prepare. You don't
have the time to think about calories or health or even, necessarily,
to cook something. Instead, you go to some fast food place or to the
vending machine, or grab fistfuls of junk food off of your shelves.
My patient Laura illustrates the way stress can drive overeating.
Laura is the single mother of Zachary, a five-year-old boy. She
always wanted to be a mother, but didn't realize it would be this
hard. Her husband left when her son was two months old and she
has been on her own since. It would be one thing if her son were
compliant; maybe then she would feel as if she finally had an ally in
the world, but her son fights her on everything. By the time she
manages to get Zach bathed and into bed at night, there are still so
many things that need to be done. There are piles of dishes in the
sink. There are stacks of unpaid bills.There is trash and recycling that
need to be taken out. There is laundry. There are the cupcakes she
has to make for Zach's class the next day. That doesn't even include
all the things that she's been wanting to do for herself, the unread
bestseller on her night stand, the single parents'event at the church,
the online degree she's been looking at. She bakes the cupcakes
because she wouldn't want to disappoint the teacher, eats four of
them, and then just sits on the couch staring at the ceiling. She can't
imagine how to begin to tackle everything that needs to get done.
Most of us, like Laura, use stress-reduction strategies that just
don't work. Or they work for diminishing one type of stress, but not
others. For instance, if you're stressed because you aren't making
enough money, going salsa dancing won't necessarily help. On the
other hand, if your stress comes from feeling ugly, the dancing might
be just the thing. The trick is to isolate your current greatest stressors
and find techniques that help you to get a handle on those things. You
can begin by assessing the current techniques you use for handling
stress, to see how they work for you. We'll work on this in part two.

Food May Be Your Friend, but It Won't
Clean Your Closets for You

Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted
task.--William James

There are two main types of stress: the stress that comes from acts of
God or from circumstances that you have no control over, and the
stress that comes from your own disorganization or from your personality
issues. First let's talk about the stress that you create.
Like Laura in the story above, you might get so anxious about
certain messes in your life that you just don't want to deal with
them, which means that they get even worse. Much of the stress that
grinds you down on a daily basis probably originates in your desire
to steer clear of these unpleasant things. For instance, you want to
avoid cleaning your fridge because it's such a disgusting mess that it
makes you anxious to face it. Instead of tackling the science projects
festering on the shelves, you go out to Wendy's for a burger and
fries. The next day when you go to the fridge, the mess seems worse
than it did before, and so your stress level goes up because cleaning
it seems even more daunting than it did yesterday. And so it goes, to
the point where you're going out all the time and the science projects
grow legs and start walking. In the act of trying to avoid a little
stressor, you've created a big one.
Creating order in your disheveled areas may help you to avoid
the stress that leads you to get overwhelmed and eat. This means
getting the tasks of daily life taken care of: paying the bills, doing the
laundry, getting everything in order for your child's school.You need
to clean your desk, do the taxes, get your doctor's appointments
taken care of, go to the dentist, make the difficult call to Aunt Sally.
The avoidance that causes stress comes from an unconscious
desire to circumvent adult responsibilities. To diminish this type of
stress, you need to complete the developmental steps that will position
you to face adult hassles head-on, instead of continuing to duck
them like a child. For instance, if you experience stress because you
can't say no to anyone and so have an overloaded schedule full of
obligations, you need to take the developmental step of learning to
say no. If you're stressed because your house is a wreck and you
can't find anything, you need to learn how to create order in your
environment. If you have outstanding calls to make, bills to pay, or
reports overdue, you need to learn to complete administrative tasks
on time, no matter how much you hate doing this. Unless you
develop the competencies needed to negotiate everyday life, your
self-esteem will suffer, and by now you know what that means for
your diet.
It's one thing to avoid cleaning the fridge because you don't
want to touch the slimy tomato mold, but quite another when you
simply have no time for taking care of basic chores. When you work
seventy hours a week and have classes at night, when you have
eleven kids who belong to teams and clubs and need constant chaperoning,
you've got a problem. Is the pressure that comes from being
overloaded in the acts of God category, or is it self-imposed? And
what can you do about it?
It's no secret that we've become a society of stress junkies. Many
of us make choices that contribute to our ridiculous schedules-- opting for high-paying jobs that demand our life blood, acquiring so
much stuff that we have to work nonstop to pay for it and to repair
it when it breaks down, frenetically running from activity to activity,
not wanting to miss anything. Stress has become more the norm
than the exception, and so you might even think it's desirable to be
so scheduled-out that you have no time to take care of mundane
tasks. But as you've seen, stress leads to ugly consequences, and so
it pays to examine the choices you've made to see where you might
create some space in your life.
Of course, you might have special sources of pressure that you
can't control. Students in law school have to study around the clock,
accountants during tax season have little time to breathe, unexpected
financial crises might drive you to take a night job. But it's
just as likely that you can free up enough time to get the laundry
done, if you're willing to make some changes in your life. The bottom
line is that if you say yes to making time for life maintenance,
you need to say no to something else, and you have to be willing to
do that.
Dara is a thirty-year-old online member who weighs 238 pounds.
She never takes time to balance her checkbook, is always getting
overdrawn, and infuriated her husband because as a result they now
have a poor credit rating. She would rather ignore the checkbook
than realize how little is there and get disappointed. She creates a lot
of unnecessary stress for herself by not managing her time, and then
when she's under stress, she always ends up bingeing.

Unexpected Sources of Stress

Stress is not what happens to us. It's our response TO
what happens. And response is something we can choose. --Maureen Killoran

Some stress you just can't do anything about: things break, unexpected
visitors appear, layoffs occur, illnesses arise, traffic happens.
Maybe you have to work longer, harder, and with more interruptions
than ever before--most of us do. Unless you've reached enlighten-
YOUR FRUSTRATION/REWARD LAYER	ai

ment or have supernatural powers, there's not much you can do to
stop the assault of certain stressful events and circumstances.
So first you try to eliminate the stressor, if that's possible. If not,
you try to handle stress in productive ways rather than trying to
munch it down with fattening food. Instead of feeling victimized by
your stress, recognize stress as an inevitable by-product of life on
this planet, and understand that you have special equipment built
into you for handling stress.
Some stress-busting techniques you probably know--taking
yoga, going out for a run, practicing deep breathing, getting a massage.
Other responses to stress might take a bit more creativity on
your part. For instance, if you have excessive pressure at work, you
might try taking a five-minute breathing break every hour. If you
have an ill relative living with you, you might look into forming a
support group. If you must drive in horrific traffic, bring books on
tape with you.
To handle the stress in your life, it will help to analyze closely just
what stressors impinge on you now, and brainstorm coping techniques
before you find that food is your only answer.

Stress
When patients come into my office and their lives are clearly in
chaos--they can't find their keys, they forget their checkbook, their
check bounces not because they don't have enough money but
because they forgot to deposit their paycheck--we look closely at ways for them to get organized. It is essential because until that happens,
we cannot look at the deeper issues. If you live in chaos, Harriet
is always there telling you, "Forget about solving your deeper issues;
you can't even remember to bring the library books back on time."
If you feel victimized by the pressures on you, you'll probably fall
into wild disorder. You remain stuck when you say things to yourself
such as, "This pressure isn't fair, it shouldn't have to be this way, it's
too much for me to handle." That's a way of you saying that you
don't like reality and that you don't want to deal with it. And if you
don't deal with it, you can't improve it.
SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

You're the One Who's in Charge of Your Life

	You've learned that frustration with your life leads you to food
as a reward.

	You've also learned that your frustration is based on a false
sense of powerlessness, and that you have to recover your
agency over your own life to master food.

	You'll have to make whatever changes are necessary to
improve your relationships.

	You'll have to be the one who makes sure your legitimate
needs get met, and your immature needs are given up.

	You'll have to take responsibility for your unfulfilled potential.

	You'll have to take charge of your stress, and improve the skills
that make that possible.

	You must remember that you have two methods to recover
your power over your own life:


1.	You can proactively deal with your life challenges and make your life work in the areas we've covered.

2.	You can avoid defeatism, adding to your false powerlessness,
by not using obstacles and difficulties as justification
to become a victim of your life, rather than the one in
charge.

6

Your Safety Layer

I'm guessing that food still feels enticing, in spite of all the knowledge
about shrinking yourself that you have so far--you just can't
help yourself. Why? Because you're human--a complicated entity,
full of contradictions. You say you want to lose weight and you have
all the evidence to prove it--the diet books, the exercise videos, the
low-fat foods in the fridge. Unfortunately, you also have a part of yourself
that wants to stay overweight. This is different from what we've
been discussing so far. Up until now we've been approaching this
problem from the part of you that wants to lose weight but is having
a hard time giving up the advantages of food as an over-the-counter
tranquilizer. Now we want to look at a deeper layer, the part of you
that actually wants to be fat. It's the part that is responsible for your
regaining the weight after you've lost it, or the part of you that just
digs in your heels and says, I just want to eat as much as I want, the
hell with this diet stuff. We're introducing you to your rebellious self.
It speaks to the side of yourself that sabotages your efforts to
diet, the part of you that wants you to stay fat--that actually uses
your weight to prevent you from having the life you want. Most of
this book has been dedicated to the rational side of yourself (the
sensible self)--the you that's fully committed to losing weight, that
wants to have a healthy and attractive body, better relationships, and
life fulfillment. But this other part of you, which I call the rebellious
self, not only resists your efforts to diet: it's terrified of losing weight.
It's almost as if you have two beings inside at odds with each other.
There is the part of you that desperately wants to lose the weight,
and there is a part of you that sabotages all of your efforts.
Your rebellious self has two main modes of operation: either it
cowers in the corner like a frightened toddler, sucking ice cream in
spite of knowing better, or it acts out like a bratty kid demanding ice
cream. In the first case it wants you to stay overweight in order to provide
you a place to hide (under your fat), using weight as an excuse for
not growing up or for avoiding romance and adult responsibility. In
the second instance it wants you to stay overweight to assert independence
from expectations or to get back at controlling people.
Everything you've learned in previous chapters has prepared you
for doing this deeper exploration into the rebellious self. Now that
you've learned that there are many adult alternatives for dealing with
your moods and legitimate desires, you have everything you need to
live better without using food as a short circuit or tranquilizer.
Unfortunately, you also have the rebellious self to contend with. By
bringing the reasons you honor the rebellious self into your full
consciousness, you can think through whether or not you want to
continue hiding behind your weight. Somewhere along the line you
made a decision to use fat to avoid dealing with psychological and
developmental issues. It might have happened when you were ten, or
fifteen, or twenty, or even decades later. Now you have to make a new
decision: do you still want to keep this protective layer of insulation,
in spite of the cost to your health and happiness? Is it worth it?

What Does Fat Protect You From?

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that
they are wonderful things for other people to go on#.--/ra/, Kerr
When my patient Joanne told me that being fat keeps men away, all
of whom seem dangerous to her because of her background, I said
to her, simply, "Aren't there better ways?"
Somewhere in the inner recesses of your psyche, you believe
that you cannot provide safety for yourself out there in the big open
world of your adult life, so you must find a place to hide, and you've
discovered that being fat is a good place to hide.
Do you remember getting scared in childhood and hiding
behind your parents? Or have you seen your own kids, or even your
dogs, hide behind you when frightened? It's a natural human (and
perhaps canine) impulse to seek shelter when threatened. For kids
and dogs, the problem has an easy solution: cling to Mom's skirt or
disappear behind Dad without disgrace. Once you grow up, though,
the options narrow.
You might still feel the impulse to cling to someone when you
feel threatened or uncomfortable, just like you did in childhood, but
running behind Mom or Dad for protection at this point in your
life just won't work. What options do you have? Either you need to
face scary situations and people head-on, or you can develop a
co-dependent relationship to disappear.into, or you can hide inside
yourself--literally.
Obviously, facing frightening things would be the healthier
choice, but it's not necessarily the easiest choice. It might, in fact, be
impossible if you are "sure" you are powerless to protect yourself
when things get rough. We humans tend to opt for the path of least
resistance. And so, in searching for the easy way, you might have
discovered somewhere along the line that you could use your own
fat as a metaphoric place to hide out--a kind of substitute for
Mom's skirt.
Using food to keep you safe can start innocently as a delaying
tactic: "I'll do it [look for a new job, pursue a relationship, go to the
gym] when I lose ten pounds," and then you delay losing the ten
pounds. You might have gone on to make your weight a way of
retreating into your fat persona when danger threatened, using
weight as an excuse for avoiding a host of challenges. And if excess
weight has become your protective blanket, then getting thin means
losing your security. If you're sure you're "powerless" to protect
yourself, then it makes sense that you'd have a considerable investment
in keeping the weight on.
You might be offended by the suggestion that you actually harbor
the desire to be fat, especially given your ardent weight-loss
efforts over the years. It may strike you as absurd to consider the
possibility that there's a force inside yourself opposing the very
rational goal of weight control that you've endorsed with your
actions, your sweat, and your pocketbook. And naturally, your conscious
mind would never drive you to choose fat over personal satisfaction.
But how else do you explain your weight-control failures?
The rebellious self operates deep inside the caverns of your mind. It
might have germinated in childhood and taken root so quietly that
you don't have any memory of actually deciding that being fat had
its advantages. And you probably didn't actually make a conscious
decision, although a few of my patients who were abused in childhood
do remember exactly when they did make a deliberate decision
to be fat in order to be unattractive.

I'm not making this up. I've seen repeatedly with thousands of
patients and online clients how the rebellious self lures dieters back
to fat over and over again with intimations of safety and rest. These
patients all had a full commitment to weight loss--at least as far as
they knew. But in the work of therapy, it became increasingly
apparent to them, and to me, that something worked against that
commitment--a force inside the psyche. And that force, it turned
out, was a mistaken idea that being fat would somehow insulate the
person from danger, hurt, and despair.
June, at twenty-three, couldn't stand her sister's envy any longer,
so she hid in fat, ending the envy, but instead she was drowning in
her own resentment about the sacrifice she had to make. Peter hid
for the opposite reason. He was so successful at work that the pressure
to be even better got to him. It was then that he discovered that
when you are fat people no longer expect that much from you.
As long as some part of you still believes that being fat will make
you be safe, you will always return to fat. It's human nature to return
to safety whenever possible.
Your Logical Mind Knows Better

Your conscious, rational mind probably finds the idea of using food
for protection an absurd notion. Most likely you consider fat a
curse--not a warm, fuzzy blanket to snuggle inside, and so if you do,
in fact, hide behind fat in order to protect yourself, chances are good
that you haven't been aware of it. Chances are good that you feel
uncomfortable with this material. But please don't take offense.
Read on, and at least consider the possibility that you're a bit more
attached to your fat than you care to admit.
Why might that unconscious of yours assume that being fat
could make you safe? What shelter could extra weight possibly
afford? As mentioned at the start of this chapter, being fat gives
you an excuse to avoid uncomfortable sexual situations and sex in
general. Also, you can use your weight to lower expectations, so that
nobody expects too much from you. Fat gives you a reason not to go
out, not to succeed, to have no love life--it provides a built-in excuse
for virtually all endeavors. Plus, being fat keeps unwanted attention
away. It prevents you from being in the same game as everyone else.
It gives you a ready reason for not even trying in life. And if you
don't even try, you're spared the pain of shattered dreams.
Let's explore more fully some of the ways that fat protects you.
Back in middle school, Lydia hated gym. She distinctly remembers
one class during which she got selected to play on Alice Toma's
softball team. Alice was the class jock, the girl everyone looked up to.
Everyone wanted to be on Alice's team.
Up at bat, Lydia struck out.Then, in the field, she missed a fly ball.
"Idiot," one of her teammates yelled. "What a reject!" another
chimed in. After school, two girls jumped her and hit her until she
cried.
Gym became less of a problem after Lydia got fat. She never
made it up to bat. Instead, she waited games out on the bench--the
alternate who never got to play.
Like Lydia, you've probably had experiences when all eyes were
on you and you blew it big-time. Remember the humiliation you
felt? What could be worse? Few things cause excruciating psychic
pain the way that humiliation and shame do. Even neglect doesn't
hurt as much, at least not at the moment of occurrence. If in your
past you suffered through a series of humiliations after putting yourself
forward, you might have made an unconscious decision that
you'd be better off laying low. So many of my patients and online
members have told me how shy they were as children that I have
come to believe that when the fat hiding place starts in childhood, it
almost always gets triggered by shyness and shame.
' As you know, in our culture, fat people get sidelined from the
fast track. A recent National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance
study found that overweight men pay a salary penalty of $1,000 per
year per pound they're overweight, while 16 percent of employers
admitted they wouldn't hire obese women under any conditions; an
additional 44 percent would hire them only under certain circumstances.
If prime-time television reflects popular sentiment, it's no
surprise that a study at Michigan State University found that heavy
TV characters are less likely to date, unlikely to have sex, and very
likely to be the butt of bad jokes. Plus, they are rarely portrayed in
leadership roles and often appear to have no friends of either sex.
We don't expect to see obese characters in the boardroom, the
bedroom, or up on the big screen. And so when we meet someone
significantly overweight, right away our expectations go down.
We're less likely to expect heavy people to pull their weight, and we
certainly don't expect them to excel. And so you can use fat in order
to exempt yourself from career pressures, from relationship pressures,
from the adult challenges of daily life. If you don't want to
enter the fray, if you don't want to risk trying and failing, if you don't
want to process the changes foisted upon you, you can circumvent
these issues by keeping yourself fat.
The usefulness of fat as an avoidance mechanism covers a lot of
territory. For instance, Fred, an online member, uses his weight to
avoid facing the challenges of getting older. Fred says, "Being overweight
gives me an excuse for looking flabby and sloppy. I need to
face the fact that I'm aging, like it or not. I'm changing." Fred realizes
that fat can't stop the aging process, although it can distract his
attention away from it. Likewise, fat can't really save you from dealing
with life, although it can give you a place to hide out while life
gets even more complicated because of your negligence.
My patient Mary said, "I was a size 8 when i found out my husband
was cheating on me. As many do, I blamed myself. I started
eating to ease the pain, but also if I was fat that would be the reason
he wanted someone else, not because I wasn't a good person. I
ended up pregnant and we stayed together, but the damage was
done. He had several other affairs and I continued eating after my
daughter was born. I just gave up."
For Mary, eating was not just medication for her betrayal pain.
She ate to be fat because fat protected her, just like a blanket of
insulation, from the greater pain of thinking there was something

wrong with her.
We've discussed the fact that others don't demand as much of
you when you're fat, but there's also the reality that you might not
demand as much of yourself--and that's the most pernicious effect
of the rebellious self. When you're overweight, you can convince
yourself that it's not worth trying to succeed because your fat condition
won't allow you to compete. If challenges arise, you can excuse
yourself completely or tell yourself, "I'll get to it when I'm thinner,"
or "First I have to lose some weight." That's a surefire way to stay fat.
When you announce you're going to face a challenge you're afraid to
tackle only if you lose weight, you're highly motivated not to lose the
weight.
Again, it makes no logical sense to allow your weight to make
you suffer just so that you can avoid the suffering that you might
experience if you were to tackle life's challenges. And yet, somewhere
in the hidden caverns of your consciousness, you've convinced
yourself that the pain of being fat pales next to the pain of
discovering your limitations. Plus, there's another fear that might
drive you to the illogical decision to stay fat: not the fear of your own
limitations, but the fear of life's limitations. It's one thing to fear that
you'll let yourself down even if you do your best, and quite another
to fear that life just can't give you what you want, that anything you
achieve will ultimately bore and dissatisfy you. If you have a basic
mistrust of life, staying fat affords you a way to keep from experiencing
life's pleasures.
If you're staying fat so you won't be disappointed by your wishes
and hopes not coming true, or at the prospect of not having the life
you want, or because of the meaninglessness of existence, then
you're depressed, and you're staying fat because of your depression.
Depression saps all your energy, makes you tired, and makes dealing
with the real world too much trouble, and not worth the effort.
You're not just hiding, you're out of the game, you're in full retreat.
By reading this, you might realize that perhaps you're not simply
frustrated or disappointed, but you may actually be clinically
depressed. If this is the case, you should seek professional help. In
any case, though, the cure for depression involves taking charge of
your life.

Sex and Fat

Perhaps you've had the experience of being pursued by someone
whose advances you dreaded. Remember enduring that skin-crawly
feeling of having someone breathing too close to you, crowding you, making you want to squirm away? Whether you were touched inappropriately
as a child and developed an aversion to physical intimacy
that still endures or had unpleasant encounters of the sexual type
later on, including in the bedroom with your own spouse, you now
find yourself in a quandary. On the one hand, you know that a primary
marker of adulthood is engagement in sexual activity, and it
isn't acceptable to tell your suitors or spouse that you're not in the
mood for years on end. On the other hand, you find that you just
can't stomach the intimacy. What options do you have other than
working through the aversion and dealing with the consequences?
You can opt for the priesthood or nunnery, or come up with a
headache, or become so fat that you need no excuse because nobody
wants to get close to you anymore.
In my practice, I see many people who hide behind their weight
in order to avoid sex. My online client Lexy, for example, uses food to
protect herself from early memories of trauma. "When Rex abused
me," she writes, "I wasn't old enough to stop it or process the feelings,
or figure anything out. I let the choice of becoming overweight
happen. Because he was fat and ugly and I didn't want to touch him
or be touched intimately by him, I think my ten-year-old mind
assumed that if I became fat and ugly, he wouldn't want to touch
me, either. It didn't work that way; it only generated painful contempt
from others, but I didn't know how to find a different choice
... I need to learn to be comfortable with the woman I am, graciously
accept compliments and male appreciation, and know that
as an adult, I'm capable of setting boundaries with others about how
they may treat me, and enforce those boundaries. This would give
me so much freedom from fear! Staying overweight allows me to
continue hiding behind that ten-year-old's choice."
Lexy has a head start in resolving her problem because she recognizes
where it comes from. She knows why she stays fat, at least
in part, and so she can begin to dismantle the myth that fat will
protect her. In her case, though, her difficulty originates from early,
profound trauma, and so it will take some intense work to resolve.
More frequently, I see patients who use weight to protect themselves
from issues popping up in their current relationships. My
client Andrea, for instance, says her weight protects her from dealing
with fear in her marriage and from acting on impulses that make her
want to have an affair. She writes: "I have been using my weight primarily
in my relationship with my husband. Continuing to overeat
instead of taking action or risking rejection protects me. I thought
that Ben was rejecting me for my weight, so staying that way gave
me the illusion that [weight] was the only problem and that I wasn't
the problem. I realize now that ... if I want to stay in my relationship,
I will have to change. I have to take charge of getting my needs
met and not depending on him or blaming his rejection on my
weight. [Plus] I have been afraid of being in an affair . . . because of
Ben's lack of attention ... so I have stayed fat to avoid this temptation.
I'm rebellious against Ben, who blames his lack of attention to
me on my weight. He's very'materialistic, meaning how I look is an
issue with him."

One of my patients was spied on by a sexual predator. She said,
"I remember the day a stranger said something to me about my outfit.
I started to eat to get fat, so no one would look at me like that
again." To people like this patient, Lexy, and Andrea, extra layers of
fat feel like protection from an unsafe environment or world.
Not every person who uses fat to avoid being looked at or
approached by sexually aggressive people has had a real event to
hang their discomfort on, but that doesn't make any difference. The
discomfort can come from within and be just as strong, and often
hardly conscious.

How Fat Becomes a Hiding Place

My weight is, I believe, one of the primary spiritual issues in my life
... It is why I run from opportunities to lead and make excuses
about my performance. . . . It's why I dread dressing up in a suit
and being the adult I should be at my age and station. It's why I
shy away from friendships, and project rejection on others. It's why
I am painfully selfish. It's why I'm often grouchy, mean and overly
sensitive for no reason. It's why I'm jealous of others. It's a source
of resentment at God.--Michael Spencer, The Internet Monk

You could interpret Mr. Spencer's quotation above in two ways. First,
you can think he is saying, "Because I am fat, I hide." On the other
hand, he might be saying, "I stay fat or become fat in order to hide."
The question is, which strategy resembles your own behavior?
You may be part of the first group. You became heavy for all the
emotional eating reasons we have pursued in the preceding two sessions
of ShrinkYourself, and because you're heavy, and embarrassed
about it, you're hiding from the world until you lose the weight. But
even if this is how it happened to you, once fat has become useful as
a way of avoiding and hiding, the "I will do it after I lose weight"
becomes a hiding place, just an excuse.
In essence, using fat to keep you feeling safe is learned and can
be unlearned. You learned to use food to smother your self-doubts,
to reward yourself when you felt defeated, and you also learned how
to use food to keep you feeling safe.There's no gene that determines

that.
You may have learned that being fat makes you feel safe when
your father and mother divorced when you were eight, or when you
were afraid of sex when you were fifteen, or when you went away to
college and would rather order in pizza than face the cafeteria, or six
months after you got married and things weren't going as well as
you would've liked, or after your first baby was born and you felt
isolated and overwhelmed, or after your children left the house, or
during a separation from your spouse, or when menopause made
you feel old, or when your parents died.
Once we stumble on the fat-as-protection solution, we find that
it serves many purposes. One of the ways that many people use fat
as a source of protection is to deal with their family dynamics.
Probably the best way to explain this is to remind you of the importance
of roles in families. Think back on your own extended family.
One sister or brother was the athlete; another the brain; the third
the dramatic one. Then there was the one destined for success; the
beauty; the hunk; the black sheep; the angry one; the rejected and
unloved one; the favored; the alcoholic; the bad-tempered one; the
oversexed one; the bad student; the shy one; the stubborn one; the
ugly one; the caretaker. You and everyone you know fit some role
stereotype like these while growing up. These assigned roles are our
family legacy and control much of what we do and how we think
about ourselves until the time we emerge from them. Most of us do
emerge completely over time, but some don't. When fat is used as a
hiding place, the emergence can't occur.
Family-assigned roles distort who you are and limit who you're
capable of being. And they are all accidents of life, the consequence
of converging forces beyond the control of anybody. If you had been
born the oldest instead of the youngest, you might have been the
black sheep instead of the favorite. If your mother liked herself
better, or married differently, or later, or to a different husband, you
might not be as angry as you are or as much of a people-pleaser as
you had to be.

If you were a seriously overweight girl, it might have gone something
like this: when in the grips of any of these roles, you might
have discovered fat as a way of coping. You couldn't compete with
the beautiful sister, so you had to be the rejected one. Being fat gave
that role the support it needed, justified the envy you already felt
toward your sister, and at the same time paid back your parents for
their unfair treatment and misunderstanding of you by forcing them
to agonize with you about your unpopularity at school. Once this
dynamic was established it fed on itself, and your psychological conflicts
at home became embedded and enshrined in your fat identity.

Real versus Imagined Safety

The real danger of stepping out of a family role and reclaiming yourself
is the danger of being punished, ostracized, and envied by others.
You fear being talked about, labeled, excommunicated from the
clan. When you lose weight and become intent on remaking your
life, you expose yourself to these ancient anxieties, and the rebellious
self tells you that you can feel safe again only if you will get fat again.
You can see how the buffering that fat provides might hook you
into staying overweight, although, of course, fat doesn't really protect
you.You know it doesn't make logical sense to try to hide behind
fat, given the fact that excess weight is seen as unattractive, and that
it's harmful to your health. At one time in history, being fat meant
you were prosperous, and even as late as the turn of the last century
there were clubs designed to fatten up young ladies so they would
appeal to prosperous mates. But that story has changed, and you
know it has. Your logical mind knows it makes no sense to stay fat,
and knows the cost you pay for staying fat.
And so on the one hand you have the illusion that fat will keep
you safe, and on the other, the reality that fat actually makes you
very unsafe, physically, economically, socially, and emotionally. It's
time to recognize that fat only makes you feel safe but doesn't bring
you real safety, so you can decide that you are paying too high a
price for an illusion. The first step is to make the distinction between
real safety and the illusion of safety.
The main distinction to keep in mind is that the illusion of safety
is really the illusion of absolute safety. That is, while in the grips of
the illusion of safety, you think nothing can go wrong. It's a very
seductive idea. It's the deepest wish of an anxious child or adult. The
idea of absolute safety represents the opposite of all of our fears
about what might happen to us, physically and emotionally.The illusion
of absolute safety is what makes the food trance so comforting
when we go into the escape bubble. Perfect safety is the goal of the
heroin addict as well as the alcoholic who drinks him- or herself into
a stupor of oblivion. We will do anything for absolute safety--for the
possibility of living a life where nothing or no one can harm us.
Real safety, on the other hand, is always relative safety, since in
the real world there is no absolute safety. Tomorrow your routine
bloodwork taken during your annual physical can be the beginning
of a fight to survive.Your friend or relative may die of a heart attack.
A good business can go sour. A secure job can be lost. Your child can
have an accident. A great relationship can turn into a nightmare.You
can increase your real safety in the world by facing reality, looking
for real dangers, anticipating problems, and looking for solutions.
You can keep your relationships strong, and invest yourself in good
people who are trustworthy and decent and well put together. You
can avoid impulsive big decisions like falling in love and marrying
before you really know the real person, or marrying the wrong person
to spite your parents. There are hundreds of things you can do
and skills you can further develop to provide yourself with as much
safety as possible in what is at times an unpredictable world. But to
be your own adult provider of real safety, you have to face reality,
whatever it is, and work with it. When you hide in fat to give yourself
the illusion of safety by avoiding challenge, you are not facing up
to reality, and are missing the opportunity to take charge of your
own safety and make it as real as possible.
Fat doesn't bring you any real safety. In fact, it makes you less
safe because you aren't creating your own real safety by dealing
effectively with the challenges and opportunities of your life. If you
apply only a half-mindful effort to your career or marriage because
you want to avoid certain pieces of psychological work or difficult
decisions, if you hide behind fat in these arenas in order to "duck
out," your marriage and your work will be less likely to continue
successfully in a way that's satisfying.
You believe that fat provides safety based on the illusion that you
can buy time before you have to face the imaginary firing squad.
Avoidance, fat, and the illusion of safety work together, reinforcing
one another, and that is why fat is such a good hiding place.
Using fat this way is also a way of fooling yourself. You are not
admitting to yourself that you have made certain decisions about the
way you are now conducting your life. For instance, if you are using fat
to avoid being sexually involved, then you have made a decision to not
be sexually involved. Why not just accept that as fact, and either stick
to your decision (it is your right and your body), or reevaluate your
decision and work on your fears? Either decision would be more
clearly adult, and would make you a more powerful person. But using
fat to avoid sexuality makes the whole decision process muddy.
If you don't want sexual attention, just say no, or dress conservatively,
or stay away from bars and discos, or send out signals to your
boss that you're unavailable.
If you're shy, either work on it or accept it. Plenty of shy people
do that without having to be heavy to call attention to themselves,
which is the opposite of what most shy people consciously want.
If you don't want to have affairs or be promiscuous, either decide
to remain monogamous and stick to your decision, or figure out why
you're looking outside your relationship, or why it feels impossible
to remain committed.
If it's intimacy, success, failure, or competition you fear, deal with
it or live with it; there's no need to add fat to the equation. These are
separate life course decisions that you have to make, or have already
made, that end up getting more complicated when you add fat to
the mix. They need to be separated out and dealt with for what they
are, not covered over and buried by food and fat cells.
It's better to own up to the decision and not be fat. Then you
have only that one problem to resolve. Fat doesn't protect. It only
covers over a decision already made, and prevents an honest review
of that decision. It keeps you stuck. And being stuck means you are
at least temporarily powerless.
One of the online members of Shrink Yourself said, "Once I realized
that I was in a thirty-eight-year marriage that was going
nowhere and made the decision to leave, the fat just became a useless
blanket I was hiding beneath." This almost-300-pound woman
had used fat as a place to hide out from the fact that her marriage
was a disaster since the first day, but she didn't want to admit it to
herself. If she had not hidden that awareness under fat, she might
have made a decision a lot earlier and started over with someone
new when she was twenty-five and thin rather than facing the much
tougher challenge of finding a mate at sixty-three, with a lot of loose
skin to hide. The illusion of safety provided by fat cost her dearly
because she forfeited the opportunity to provide herself real safety
by making a better decision about staying married to a man with a
severe and intractable alcohol problem.
Hiding behind fat is a real contradiction. People who are seriously
overweight or morbidly obese hate the fact that they're discounted and
misunderstood, or looked down on as weak-willed or lazy or gluttonous.
They hate the fact that they're romantically "invisible" or thought
of as "not in the game" or not considered to be potential leaders or
desirable co-workers. But everything they hate about this stigma is
what they're using as protection. They eat themselves into the stigma,
then use the consequences of the stigma as their protective covering.
They use the fact that they are not in the romantic game or expected to
be too successful as an excuse to avoid those challenges.
And of course the stigma only adds to self-doubts both directly
and indirectly. Directly, because no human can totally ignore or discount
what others think of him or her. We are social animals who are
programmed to attend to and care about what others think of us.
Indirectly, being stigmatized puts us at war with, and alienates us
from, those who misunderstand us. That means that we carry a load
of chronic anger that feeds our doubts about our essential goodness.

So all of our logic and good sense tells us that fat doesn't make
us safe in any real way and that all we get in return for the extra
pounds that will shorten our lives is an illusion that lets us avoid
continuing the essential work of human development. Not a very
good bargain, if you ask me.

SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTE

Create Your Own Sense of Safety

	You'll have to face your anxiety instead of eating to give yourself
the illusion of being safe or independent.

	You'll have to do the grown-up work in the real world that
could actually get you real safety and real independence.

	You'll have to stop reinforcing your self-doubts by avoiding
something important, the grown-up work.

	You'll have to realize that your self-doubts make you more
dependent, anxious, and sensitive to failing and embarrassment,
and make you look for a hiding place.

	You'll have to see how you eat more to feel safe, but it doesn't make you safe, it just helps you avoid things and keeps you
from recognizing the life decisions you've made that should
be reviewed.

	You'll see that there are better ways to deal with the challenges
you're hiding from other than using fat as a cover-up
and excuse.

	You know that you have two methods to dismantle the false
conclusion that you're incapable of providing your own safety
in life:


1.	You can use these insights to stop hiding so you can discover for yourself that you're not powerless.

2.	You can stop misinterpreting the dangers in your daily life in order to stop reinforcing your conclusion about powerlessness.

7

Your Rebellion Layer

The man in one New Yorker cartoon says, "I became a vegetarian for
health reasons, then for moral ones, now it's just to annoy people."
If you've ever announced new dietary preferences to your family,
you might have experienced something similar. Perhaps your
so-called loved ones acted annoyed or even threatened when the
subject of your new diet came up, as if by changing your diet, you
were abandoning the family. One of our online members says,
"Even when I tell my mom that I'm watching my weight, she still
prepares all of my favorite fattening foods. It's almost like she
doesn't want me to lose weight."
Kids discover early that if they don't eat according to parental
guidelines, their parents become agitated. If you didn't eat your
broccoli, Mom got anxious. If you ate too much broccoli, Mom worried.
If you threw broccoli into the orange juice, Mom got furious.
Your child mind observed all of this and recognized that Mom's
moods altered depending on how you handled food.Translated, that
meant that if you wanted to control Mom, you could alter what or
how you ate. By overeating or by eating junk food, you could act
out without throwing a temper tantrum, without posing a direct
challenge, without putting yourself in the line of fire. Although you
were controlled by your parents, you learned how to counterpunch,
which at least gave you some feeling of powerfulness.
Kids naturally look for some avenue by which they can assert
their power, because they have so few options. As a kid, you had no
freedom, no real voice in what happened to you. Learning to say
"no" in the terrible two's is a developmental milestone of individuality
and autonomy. By playing with your food, by overeating, by
gorging or sneaking sweets, and in some cases by not eating, you
discovered that you could assert your autonomy in a semiacceptable
way. Simply by eating, or by refusing to eat, or by constantly nagging
for food, you could exasperate Mom and get her attention! Or you
could trump her authority by sneaking food behind her back.
If you now have children of your own, you will be quite familiar
with this pattern.You tell your children not to do something and you
know they understand what you're saying, yet a second later they do
the exact thing you just prohibited. "No more candy, Joey," you say.
Joey waits until you turn your back and then grabs a fistful of
Gummi Bears. You simply can't understand why he would want to
get into trouble over and over again. Doesn't he know that he would
have so much more fun if he just complied?
That part of you that wanted to spite your parents, that wanted
to prove that you could do it your own way, hasn't gone away completely.
Sure, you have to keep it in check to some degree or you
wouldn't be able to maintain any relationships or hold down a job,
but a part of you still wants to do it your way at all costs, because the
pattern, once established, becomes entrenched. Though it might be
relegated to your unconscious mind, it still plays the old tape, which
goes something like this: "They can stop me from doing everything
else, but I retain the power to eat as much as I want, and to eat what
I want. I'll sneak or binge and purge or do anything necessary to
keep this basic building block of autonomy."
So you still have this rebellious pattern, except the object of your
rebellion has long since disappeared.Your parents no longer control
what you wear, what you say, or what you eat. Now you're acting out
against your own critical conscience, in other words, Harriet.

If you're still rebelling against your own conscience with food,
it's a sure sign that in this sector of your mind, you haven't evolved
past your primitive struggle against your parents'control. You're still
stuck with this indirect and now ineffective and self-destructive way
to assert yourself because you still believe that you're not allowed to
express appropriate aggression or confrontation when it is called for
in your adult life, and this is especially true if the one you need to
confront is your parent or a spouse or a boss. You're still being held
back by your primitive assessment that your anger is bad anger, and
can't ever be a good and useful source of power. You still view yourself
as a dangerous time bomb about to explode and injure, rather
than a person coping with life. These assessments make you feel
powerless, and hungry to act out your aggression in the only place
you dare, onto yourself. One patient said, "I put food in my mouth to
keep me from spitting out angry words."
You act out against yourself.You express your defiance by eating.
No one is going to tell you what to do. Obviously, this approach to
asserting yourself lacks logic. But it is a normal behavior and I see so
many people do it. Instead of autonomy you display self-destructive
behavior. It may give you a false feeling of being in control to eat as
you please, just as it gives toddlers a feeling of control when they
throw food or refuse to eat broccoli or scream for candy. Defiant
food control is the mechanism of choice for the terrible two's, but
hardly a rational choice for adults.
Before we move on, scour your memory to see if you can recall
any times in your childhood when you used food to assert your
autonomy. Did you ever sneak food? Did you refuse to eat or refuse
to stop eating? Did you know you were being disobedient in doing
so? Try to recall the emotions you experienced. Was there any sense
of doing what you wanted in spite of what "they" wanted?
Instead of using fat as an immature way to express hidden
aggression, you must learn the skills of expressing appropriate and
useful aggression as well as admitting when your anger is unjustified
and needs to be curbed, or apologies need to be made.
Several of my patients have told me that they eat "at" people,
meaning that when in a restaurant with friends who are watching
how much they eat, they purposely eat much more than they want
as a metaphoric way of saying what they don't want to say in words.

Six Ways You Use Food to Rebel

As you know, the angry rebellious self gets activated for a variety of
reasons and acts that anger out through food and eating. Some people
didn't get the independence or nurturance they needed early on,
and now they assert their will, or test the love coming to them, by
eating in opposition to the demands of others. Some people eat
because they want attention they didn't get, and they know wanton
eating can do the trick. In some cases, the defiant self just stonewalls
the expectations and demands it finds offensive.
In almost all cases the aggression itself is masked and disguised.
Here are some of the most common theme songs of the rebellious
self:

1.	Love me first, then I will lose weight.
2.	They made me this way so I can't change.
3.	I'll get back at them.
4.	I'm not this body.

5.	Food is the only pleasurable thing I have, so I'm not giving it up.

6.	If I can't be perfect, I'd rather be fat.

Let's look at each of these agendas in depth and see if any of
them apply to you.

1. Love Me First, Then I Will Lose Weight

My patient Darlene grew up in a one-parent home. Her mother had
to work two jobs to keep the family afloat, and Darlene often stayed
with relatives. Her mom came home from work late, then cleaned
the house, took care of the bills and the laundry, and tended to her
own sick mother. Darlene felt abandoned and comforted herself with
junk food. By age six, she had already started putting on weight.
Now she's twenty-four years old, and Darlene has a boyfriend
who recently suggested to her that she lose weight so that they can
be more active together. Darlene reacted by eating herself sick at the
Marriott buffet the next morning. Darlene's rebellious self didn't
want to be judged because of her weight. Instead, it demanded
unconditional love no matter how she looked or what problems her
weight caused--the sort of love she had missed as a child. The motto
of her rebellious self was, "Love me first; then I will lose weight."
Darlene neither recognized her boyfriend's genuine concern for
her, nor acknowledge the legitimacy of his desire to enjoy activities
with her. She was so caught in the old tape loop of feeling neglected
and unloved that she couldn't see the current reality. Her boyfriend
became the spitting image of her critical conscience, which was the
spitting image of her depriving mother. Her rebellious self still
fumed that she didn't get the love and protection that she needed as
a child, and that made it difficult for her to accept the love that came
to her later in life.
Like Darlene, if you experienced early deprivation, you're probably
wary of any love that comes your way. Even when Prince (or
Princess) Charming shows up, instead of rejoicing, you spend your
time worrying that he's actually a frog. Instead of accepting love and
giving love back, you test and retest Prince Charming, perhaps by
getting fat.
"If he really loves me, he'll see that under this fat I'm really a
princess," says your rebellious self. "First he has to love me--he has
to kiss me as the frog, and then I'll lose weight and show my true

self. "
The rebellious self holds that if Prince Charming--or the relevant
friend or colleague--really loved you in the right way they
would accept you as you are. Then you would lose the weight.You've
set up a test, an assessment of the other person's love for you. And
in so doing, you try to convince yourself and everyone else that the
way you look is fine and that they should accept you, flaws and all. It's a no-win game for you because if you lose weight for him and he
SHRINK YOURSELF

enjoys your new body, then you think that he only really loves you
when you are thin, so you punish him for admiring you by gaining
the weight back.
Obviously, this way of thinking has little merit, because if you
stay fat, Prince Charming might get exasperated and actually turn
into a frog himself. He might get fat or just leave you because you
look bad and you don't trust him. Meanwhile, you're killing yourself
using your own body as a battleground for old hurts that don't apply
in your current situation. Who gets hurt the most? Not the person
who initially withheld love from you, and not the person trying to
love you now (because he or she can go on to find other love). You
get hurt because when you use your body in this way, the battle
takes a toll on your health, your happiness, your chances for love
and intimacy, your self-esteem, and your energy.
Think about this: if you expect your dear ones to love and accept
you as you are, you must do the same for yourself. How do you feel
when you look in a mirror? Do you believe your body is fine as it is?
Are fat folds really beautiful? Isn't the natural shape more inherently
attractive? You can't convince yourself to ignore the fat, so you spend
your life energies trying to convince the people in your life that they
should. It's a no-win, dead-end, wasteful game. Think about the
logic.

The real you, the person who wants the love, lives inside the fat,
underneath it. Isn't that the part of yourself that you want to share
with those who love you?
Read this letter from an online member:

My question revolves around how to get over deep-seated
feelings of being inferior physically. This started at around
age 8. A few incidents of being teased at school have stuck
with me. Kids would tease me by chanting, "Do Re Mi Fat So
La Ti Do." I was passed over at parties when we played spin
the bottle, and shopping in the chubby section took its toll.
By the time I reached my teens, I was afraid to compete with
other girls and I felt unattractive to boys.
This has continued all of my life. I married very young to
the first and only person I've ever had sexual experience
with. Although his relationship with me has improved my
self-esteem, I still see my own lack of self-esteem as the
biggest weight issue. Can you provide any advice?

This member is sixty-two, still at that party where they're passing
over her during spin the bottle. She doesn't see the man in front of
her hoping the bottle lands on him. What she tells me in other parts
of the program is that she has been punishing her husband with her
fat for other things, using her body as a battleground in her current
life, prolonging and reinforcing the childhood wounds. She doesn't
let him look at her or touch her, even though he says he's attracted
to her just the way she is. She's right that self-esteem is her biggest
weight issue, but what she has to realize is not just that something
happened in growing up to create her inferior feeling, but that she is
perpetuating it unnecessarily, and that she can reverse it (not the
memories) by finding a much better dialogue with her husband than
through letting her fat talk, and stop looking at him as just like all
the other boys from the past.
She needs to have a real love affair with herself rather than continue
seeking the unconditional love that no one ever gets for very
long. It's holding out for unconditional love that keeps the angry
furnace burning bright, and that makes your anger dangerous.

2. They Made Me This Way, So I Can't Change
If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of
your trouble, you wouldn't sit for a month.--Anonymous

So often I hear people say they were made fat by the way they were
brought up. My client explains, "We were a family of four but my
mother cooked for twenty. Spaghetti, ravioli, greasy garlic bread, the
fattiest foods. I always had to finish everything on my plate and then
there were seconds and thirds, and always desserts. No wonder I'm
fat." Another tells me, "We're a fat family. What can I do? Everyone
overeats in my house."
Those who don't blame childhood mealtime for their weight
problems sometimes say they became fat because they received so
much criticism of their appearance as children that they couldn't
handle it. They got fat because they had to escape the constant
surveillance of how they looked, or because they received so much
criticism after putting on weight that they became paralyzed into
inaction.
Of course, the meal habits of your family did affect your weight
as you matured. If you grew up a fat kid, or if early on you learned
poor dietary habits, it might be more difficult to lose weight as an
adult. There may be much historical truth to support the claim that
your early experience contributed to making you an overweight
adult: it might even be the main factor. But as the saying goes, the
past is dust. If you put all the blame on the people who raised you,
you remain stuck in the past, as powerless as you were back then.
Perhaps you don't blame your family of origin, but you point to
your current spouse or partner or roommates. Someone in your
household cooks too much or brings junk food home, or tempts you
to go out to eat too often, and you end up paying the price. Blaming
your friends and loved ones now is just a variation on the "blame
the family" game. Instead of placing blame, why not consider what
role you play in making food choices at home?
In order to move forward, you have to shed the victim role, even
if it fits you as comfortably as an old pair of sweatpants. Instead of
wallowing in blame and regret, why not focus on what you have
working for you now?
I had a patient who begged for piano lessons every day since she
was three. Her parents told her that they wouldn't get her a piano
because she would probably get bored and give it up. As an adult,
she has spent a lot of time angry that she doesn't know how to play
the piano. When she feels angry, she puts on piano concertos and
eats chocolate. It's true that she may never be as good as if she had
started lessons at three, but blaming her parents doesn't make her a
piano player--it just keeps her angry.
Compare her story to that of Emmanuel, a young man from
Ghana featured in the documentary Emmanuel's Wish. He was born

with only one leg, into a poor family, in a country where disabled
people like him were shunned. In fact, his father was so ashamed of
his son that he deserted the family after Emmanuel's birth. Then his
mother died when he was thirteen, and Emmanuel had to drop out
of school to support his family by shining shoes for two dollars a day.
Instead of sinking into blame, despair, and anger, Emmanuel
maintained a dream that he would ride a bicycle across his country
to prove that disabled people could rise above their deformities to
do amazing things. He managed to contact a funding agency in the
United States, get a bike, complete his ride of six hundred miles
using his one leg, and then worked to better conditions for all disabled
people in his nation. At this point, Emmanuel has become a
national hero, has met with the secretary-general of the United
Nations, has won many athletic awards, and has helped thousands
of people in his country move from begging to productive careers.
The not-so-hidden anger embedded in this type of rebellion
goes something like this: "You did this to me. You should've been a
better parent and anticipated how the way you treated me would
affect me and my weight. If you had been this perfect protective parent
I deserve, I wouldn't be this way. I'm not going to do all the work
of fixing what you did to me by taking control of my weight and letting
you get all the credit."
As Emmanuel's story shows, with attitude adjustment, success
can bloom from the most unpromising background. If you know
that you blame others for your weight problems, you might ask
yourself if you're more committed to placing that blame or to having
the life you want.

3. I'll Get Back at Them
A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green. --Sir Francis Bacon

Some people who didn't get the love they wanted during childhood
are still having a temper tantrum about it well into adulthood.Their
rebellious self feels satisfied with nothing short of revenge.
One of my clients, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Nancy,
recently told me, "I stay overweight as a way to let my mother know
that she failed me when I was a child by not teaching me good eating
habits and boosting my self-esteem. I ended up overweight just
like she did. So, by being overweight, I guess [I'm] subconsciously
shoving it in her face by not losing the weight. I'm proving to her
that I'm fat and damaged and that she should have been there for
me as I was growing up."
If Nancy's story resonates with you, you have seething anger at
one of your parents. This parent became your enemy way back in the
ancient history of your life. He or she was supposed to love and protect
you, to encourage and understand you. Instead, something else
happened, and you haven't forgotten it.You have a giant score to settle.
Even if that parent now feels guilty and makes sincere attempts
to apologize, your anger doesn't abate. Even if that parent has
already died, the fury still festers inside you. You feel wronged, that
you were damaged in some permanent way, and you're stuck with
this need to get even.
My patient Diane lost her mother five years ago, but she still
shakes with rage when she thinks about her. Diane made a decision
years ago to spite her fastidious mother by gaining weight. She feels
that her mother deprived her in every important way, preferring her
sister, withholding affection, insisting on academic perfection, caring
more about what the neighbors thought than about Diane's needs,
striking Diane on occasion. Diane circumvented her mother's control
by getting fat, and she remains fat in defiance.
It might be important for Diane to disavow her mother's treatment
of her, but there's a big difference between standing against
mistreatment and shutting the door to relationship if the other person
can't act with civility, versus staying in a rage because of that
mistreatment. Diane certainly can't hurt her dead mom by staying
fat herself. The rage that she harbors keeps peace, success, and satisfaction
always at bay for her.
Unlike Diane, not everyone who stays overweight to get revenge
has issues with their family. Sometimes people want to get back at
someone in their life now--a child, a rejecting lover, a spouse. I
have a patient who wants her husband to stop smoking because
she has asthma. He quits for a while and then starts again. Each time
he takes up smoking, she puts on forty pounds to punish him. What
message does this send to her husband about how much she really values her own health?
You'll never win the battle by using your body for revenge. You
might not want to let the perpetrator get away with hurting you, but
it doesn't help to hurt yourself. Better to stop perpetuating past
pains that should be long over. Better also to communicate with
anyone in your life now who angers you, so that you might actually
transform the relationship and find satisfaction in it. Or if you discover
that there's no hope of reconciliation, better to move on with
your dignity, and body, intact.
Remember what you learned in World History class: revenge
tends to be self-sustaining. Once a nation or a tribe establishes a
grievance, they'll blindly fight for restitution generation after generation.
Likewise, if you have grievances that started decades ago, you
may still be fighting inwardly, holding onto horror stories that
you've never revisited for accuracy or meaning, feeling yourself to be
the victim of a huge injustice or hypocrisy, interpreting your own
experience with the same mind-set you applied at age four. It's time
to stop using your bulging belly as a billboard. Nobody is interested
in the secrets you are trying to expose.

4. I'm Not This Body

Survivors commonly speak of how they endured trauma by
pretending that their mind and spirit had gone to a safer place,
leaving the body behind to endure the abuse.--Skittles Place

When Sara was ten, her father asked to come in and watch her
shower. Sara felt she was old enough to shower alone and the idea
of it made her feel uncomfortable. Her father insisted and finally,
feeling guilty, she gave in. As he stood there, she psychically left her
body, splitting herself off from the person in the shower so that she
didn't have to own the shame she experienced. Later, when her
father developed the habit of kissing her good night on the lips in
a lingering way, she perfected the art of taking flight. Her body
remained in bed, but the rest of her went to a safe garden that she
created in her imagination.
Likewise, Barbara's mother flew into rages during which she
assaulted Barbara, hitting and kicking her. Her mother's dark moods
came on without warning, and when they did, anything that Barbara
said or did could result in a physical attack from Mom. Barbara, too,
dissociated from her body during the attacks. She can strike me on the
outside, but not on the inside, Barbara told herself. Meanwhile, she left
her body behind to fend for itself.
The habit of dissociating from the body became so entrenched for
these two women that they barely noticed when they gained weight.
They didn't "live" inside their bodies enough to care. Sara hasn't
returned to her body fully since that day in the shower, and now she's 80
pounds overweight. Barbara weighs 45 pounds more than she should.
Like Sara, many children had devastating attacks on their body
through harsh punishment or sexual predators. To escape the pain,
the shame, and even the confusing feelings of arousal, they dissociated
just as Sara and Barbara did. This type of dissociation really happens.
If you've suffered abuse, perhaps it's happened to you. Ask
yourself if you fully live inside your skin. Do you often have feelings of
floating, of being "spacy?" Does your body feel like a foreign entity
sometimes, separate from the real you? Do you ignore your body's
signals and needs? If so, you also have learned to dissociate.
Continuing to pretend you have no body or no responsibility for
your body is an illusion that keeps you from being a unified being, a
person capable of finally keeping yourself safe from harm. You can
pretend you have no body to yourself, but your mind and body
know differently. Everything that happens in your body is known by
your mind. It's not another person who binges at 2:00 a.m. You may
need to get some special help in overcoming trauma in order to
merge back into your physical being. Getting that help from a
trained mental health professional who specializes in trauma can
help you to overcome depression, apathy, and a host of other seemingly
unrelated issues.

n
5.	Food Is the Only Pleasurable Thing I Have, So Ft
Not Giving It Up

While you might think the declaration that food offers your only
comfort smacks of pathetic, pitiable sadness, it actually broadcasts defiance. You tell the world that you can't find any other option, that
you don't enjoy the gifts others offer, that life stinks, and so you'll
take care of your own needs, no thanks to anyone else. In other
words, the position reeks of anger, of an exaggerated snit. It's just
another example of rationalizing the decision to eat in order to rebel.
It's just not true that you have no choices and no life to live and
no real path to legitimate pleasure in life. Your life is full of possibility.
It is not so difficult, no matter what you are facing, to honestly
believe that you have more reasons for living than the promise of
one more full stomach.

6.	If I Can't Be Perfect, I'd Rather Be Fat

This agenda suggests that the only position worth having in life is
being the winner. And if you can't be the winner, then why bother
playing the game? It is a childlike way of thinking. It renders any
small improvements in your weight, your shape, your mobility, and
your breathing unimportant.

Two Mistakes That Keep You Rebelling

Mistake # 1. Rebellion Is Not the Same as Independence

Better a hundred enemies outside the car than one inside.

--Arabian proverb

By now, perhaps you've begun to see how the rebellious self drives
you to use food as a substitute for autonomy. With luck, you also can
see how irrational it is to use food in this way. Your twelve-donut-a
day habit will never lead you to the one person who will love you the
way you wanted to be loved when you were seven, because now
you're twenty or thirty or fifty--and fat. It won't punish the people
who hurt you in your past and it won't make you free from them,
either--you're already free and independent and grown up. You no
longer need to eat recklessly to prove to anyone that they can't control
you. They can't!
When you put that food into your mouth, you probably don't
. think, Ha ha, Mom. I'll do it MY way. I'll eat what I want... so there! No. You just see the food and it smells great and you want it. But
under the surface of your consciousness, the rebellious mechanism
plays out, driving you to eat foolishly in spite of your higher reason,
in spite of your health, in spite of your diet. You eat how you want,
and nobody can stop you.
The first mistake you make that keeps the rebellious self in place
is confusing this feeling of defiance and rebellion with true independence
and autonomy. I think you have seen that difference illustrated
quite well here, but it'll be up to you to keep that distinction
in mind, and be sure to label your behavior correctly. Don't fool
yourself. Once you've done that, then you can do something about
the second mistake that keeps the rebellious self active.

Mistake # 2. Old Anger Is Not the
Same as Current Anger

Once you recognize that you're not really asserting your independence
by overeating, then you can ask yourself, What mistake am I
making when I get so angry, and what can I do about it?
The problem is that old anger gets set off by fresh events in your
contemporary life. The mistake you make is not being able to tell the
difference, and because you can't tell the difference, the old situation
and the current situation feel the same, and your defiant response
seems like your only choice, just as it was when you were a child. If
you can separate the two by stopping misinterpreting current events
to mean the same as old events, then you can learn how to respond
to the current situation and find the mature response that will make
you truly independent.
Old anger was created and stored in our brains when as children
we were disrespected, or not acknowledged or unappreciated, or
misunderstood, belittled, controlled, or taken for granted. At the
time this happened to you, you had only two major responses. You
either displayed a furious temper or you seethed inside, too frightened
to show what you really felt. In either case, if the anger was not
resolved, you're still holding anger in some part of your brain, and
you're extremely sensitive to any contemporary event that looks like
or smells like or is in anyway similar to your particular sore spots
(being belittled, unappreciated, taken for granted).You're primed to
overreact, and primed to misinterpret.
My patient Janice was consumed with anger because of the special
attention her older sister received from her mother. By age seven
she had learned her lesson well. Any expression of anger about that
subject brought only more coldness and scorn from her mother, and
another victory for her sister. That's when she started to become fat,
and an army of pediatric fat doctors couldn't do a thing about it. She
remembers going down to buy boxes of candy in the same office
building right after her weekly weigh-in as an adolescent.
As we traced her eating patterns as an adult, the most powerful
trigger to her defiant eating occurred when she saw another woman,
a slimmer and easier-to-be-with woman than she, get noticed and
get the attention and care from the managers in her office. It was an
easy and obvious "a-ha."
Eventually she learned to make the distinction between the normal
office politics and what went on in her early family life. When
she did that, and also acknowledged that she was being a little too
angry and aggressive around the office and not so easy to like, she
began to change her behavior, and her angry eating stopped.
Misinterpreting a present situation to mean the same as a past
unresolved situation is everyone's weak spot, but just because something
is normal behavior doesn't excuse us from the responsibility
of being alert to this weakness, and trying to catch ourselves before
we damage ourselves by overeating or damage someone else by
projecting on them a degree of anger that they don't deserve. In
Janice's office incident, she actually liked the woman who got all the
attention and didn't want to go off on her, so eating aggressively to
punish herself was the only way she found to deal with that anger.
Janice's solution to her anger eating represents one end of the
spectrum. When she separated past sore spots from current reality,
she understood that she had nothing to be angry about in the present.
Nobody did anything unfair to her. She simply confused past and
present, and the only action required by her was to look at her general
attitude at work and make some changes for the better. That was her
route to true independence, making defiant eating unnecessary.
But more often the confusion of past and present is really based
on more subtle differences of degree. You are being insulted or misunderstood
or disrespected by someone, and you are overly sensitive
to it because of old anger. It's during those times that you have to rely
on the principle that we have repeated many times in this book. Look
to the reality of the situation, and start by assuming that all realities
are complex and open to multiple interpretations. You have to be a
"reality detective" and analyze each clue, and only after that decide
on a response. You have to accept that your first blush of anger is a
reflex based largely on a misinterpretation that the old anger situation
and the current anger situation are the same. That needs to be
followed by a thinking pause so you can see the difference.
There are many appropriate gradations of anger to be expressed
in the real world that are dependent first on an accurate analysis of
what is going on. Anger can be converted into energy for repair or
progress (I was misunderstood, but I will show them) rather than
expressed in a temper tantrum. Misunderstandings can be cleared
up, compromises made, admissions of responsibility made. You
might find that the insult that made you angry was unintentional or
that you misunderstood, at which point your anger dissolves after
the first exploratory conversation about what that was all about. You
might decide that the insult was really born out of envy and competition,
and in that way was really a compliment rather than a putdown.
You might discover that your own entitlement and unrealistic
expectations set up the disappointment, and there's no one to be
angry at. These are just a few examples of what might be found out
if the anger is analyzed and explored through several rounds of
YOUR REBELLION LAYER

thinking through. Each "diagnosis" leads to a different action "cure."
True independence comes from acting appropriately, wisely and
maturely according to your own values of what is right and wrong.
The more you keep your anger response keyed to the specifics of a
particular reality situation, the more powerful you will be as a person.
That will eliminate your defiant eating patterns.
You'll have to shrink yourself to fully recognize your real power,
and that is where the exercises in part two will help you.You can also
get some real help from the next chapter on emptiness, because at
the bottom of emptiness is part of the answer as to why you haven't
yet finished your autonomy maturation.

SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

Develop a Mature Way to Deal with Anger

	You've learned that you're afraid of your own anger, so you eat
to control it.
» You've learned that when you eat to deal with anger, you're
attacking yourself rather than anyone else.
» You've recognized that eating to defy or punish someone
only gives you a false feeling of power, and that's not real
independence.
» You've learned the six different ways that you mask or excuse
using food and fat as an aggressive weapon.
	You're beginning to see that you can recover your power by
becoming more skilled at expressing anger appropriately in
the context of very specific situations.

	You'll have to remember that you have two methods to void
your powerless conclusion about anger and eating:

1.	Remember that rebellion and defiance are not the same as healthy independence and autonomy.
2.	Stop adding to your anger by confusing old anger with current situations.

8

Your Emptiness Layer

Our greatest pretenses are built up not to hide the evil and
the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to
hide is something that's not there.--Eric Hoffer

Ann, a forty-six-year-old married patient of mine who weighs 210
pounds, said, "I couldn't even begin to number the times I have
eaten to the point of being painfully full, but felt completely hollow
inside."

Feeling empty is both a psychological and a biological description.
The biological reference is straightforward: my stomach cavity
is empty, my stomach is growling, I'm starved, and I must eat something
to fill up. We all recognize that. The psychological description
starts out the same: I feel empty. But where that emptiness is actually
located is unclear. Empty of what, and where is it? We get some
clue from those who are in mourning. They universally describe an
emptiness in the immediate aftermath of the death of a loved one
like I did when my parents and brother died. Sometimes they say,
"The world feels empty," but just as often they say, "I feel empty
inside, like something inside me has died," which it has, that is, their
interior mind space and the existence of the person who has died is
being reordered. Their relationship to the deceased, as represented
in the images inside their mind, is being reorganized. The fullness
that that person provided while alive is being emptied out.
There are many other times than mourning in everyone's life when
we feel empty. People feel empty when relationships aren't working,
or when their life is going in the wrong direction, or when they're too
alone or unfulfilled, or even in a crowded room with loved ones.
Emptiness is the final layer of powerlessness we need to explore
to relieve you of your phantom hunger. On the one hand, it's the
easiest one to understand in relation to emotional eating. You feel
emotionally empty, you conclude you're powerless, you eat, and for
a few moments you feel full. There's a real feeling of fullness, but
unfortunately it's not the fullness you're deeply longing for. There
isn't a simpler explanation of emotional eating. But as is quite clear
by now, we aren't focusing on the obvious, we're looking for the
pause, the space between when you have the feeling of emptiness
and then conclude that you're powerless to do anything about it,
and how that experience of powerlessness is almost instantly transformed
into the uncontrollable urge to eat.
On the other hand, the emptiness experience is intimately
related to our most primal fear, the fear of abandonment, and that's
very old and very complicated. Emptiness itself represents an
absence, the absence of the nurturers who aren't there to pour love
into that space. When we feel empty, we feel short on love. We've
made this point in the Introduction and many times along the way:
eating and filling up on food is a way to get love inside you. So now
the thinking is ever more obvious. When I feel empty I'm in a state
of love deprivation and powerless to do anything about it, so I get
love from food. Food is my substitute love object, and when I eat I
am reunited with that love object, and hope to be filled up with love.
Of course, this cure is a myth, even though at times it feels so real, as
we described in the food trance. But like all myths, they don't work
in daylight. As you can see from Sally's statement below, food will
never provide the love that she is really longing for.

The Futile Search for
Unconditional Love

An online member, Sally, who's sixty-eight, and two hundred
pounds overweight, said, "The emptiness always seems to me to be
about not being loved for who I am. Unconditional love. Something
I didn't experience as a child; nothing I did was ever good enough
.for my parents. If I could unlearn the guilt, and begin to learn to love
myself unconditionally maybe I'd be able to stop the food addiction.
As a child I snuck food into my room to cope with the physical and
emotional abuse; it was my source of comfort."
The brain records experiences and wishes in images, not in
words. The imagery of this myth, of being reunited with the perfect
unconditional love object who gives, understands, accepts, encourages,
guides, and adores us, is the same bedrock image that drives
all of us to have and keep and work on our intimate relationships.
We're always working toward, but never reaching, that goal of having
a perfect source of love in adult life. Unconditional love is a rare
and short-lived experience usually found only briefly and intermittently,
in the parent-child relationship. When relationships fail to
provide us with that feeling of unconditional love we so desperately
crave, as they always will, then we go looking for it somewhere else.
For some it's in alcohol, for others it's in sex, and for you, if you're
reading this book, it's probably in food.
We insist on getting from somewhere or someone the unconditional
love we're certainly entitled to have. The problem is that the
sense of entitlement and reality clash. We're left in a stubborn and
self-defeating position of insisting, waiting, and always being disappointed.
In this area of our life, we live in denial.

Emptiness Is Part of All the Other
Layers of Powerlessness

I asked several hundred people struggling with weight control to tell
me what it meant to them when they felt empty and compelled to
overeat. They all started with the awareness that emptiness triggered
their uncontrollable urge to eat but also that food didn't satisfy their
emptiness for very long. Just as my patient Ann said above, the hollowness
was still there no matter how much she put in her stomach.
Filling up but still on empty was the universal experience.
"I eat when my husband goes away on business trips." Or, "I feel
an aching emptiness inside that only food seems to fill, but only
briefly," or, "I eat and eat and still feel like you could hear echoes
inside me," and finally, "I chew so I don't have to hear the quiet."
When emptiness points to another layer of powerlessness,
you're well on your way to being able to understand and master it.

How You Can Fill All That Emptiness

Emptiness is a normal human emotion, uncomfortable yet normal.
Finding passions, diversions, and things to focus your efforts on can
quell the normal occasional emptiness that we human beings are
bound to feel. There are many real ways to fill that emptiness besides
eating.You'H see how the experience of emptiness fits into one of the
other four layers of powerlessness that we've already covered in ShrinkYourself

Emptiness and the Self-Doubt
Layer of Powerlessness

Theresa has struggled with her weight her whole life. She's a fiftythree-year-old
college student who went back to get her degree after
her children left home. She's had fifty-pound shifts in weight her
whole life. When discussing emptiness with her I asked, "Is something
missing?" She said, "Yes, there is. Love. Self-love. Acceptance.
Self-acceptance. Tolerance. Self-tolerance. Forgiveness. Self-forgiveness.
Respect. Self-respect. Like my mother was with me, I'm critical
and demanding of myself, so I never feel good enough or worthy."
You can see that her emptiness comes from the self-doubt layer. To
address it, she'll have to do the self-doubt exercises in part two.
Emptiness and the Frustration/Reward
Layer of Powerlessness

The following two people describe how the emptiness relates to the
reward/frustration layer of powerlessness. They have some area in
their life where they feel defeated, they've stopped pursuing their
dreams, they haven't lived their potential, and without the real
rewards that fulfillment gives, they can only give themselves the
. reward of eating.
George is a forty-six-year-old man who's preparing to have lap
band surgery. He weighs 380 pounds. He said, "I think the emptiness
is the 'what ifs'in life. What if I had gone to college, joined the
army learned to swim. I've spent my whole life being afraid to live. I
spent a lot of time wondering why and wanting to change things but being too afraid to try. I guess the food trance is the moment I can
forget the 'what ifs' and be in that moment only. The food trance is
my temporary fix."
Peg is a thirty-six-year-old mother of four. She weighs 210
pounds. "I think for me, the emptiness is feeling unfulfilled in life.
I've always tested very high. I have an IQ in the genius range but I
don't finish things. I guess maybe I'm looking for some kind of satisfaction.
I sure have finished my share of pretzel bags, though."
These people will have to do the work in part two to determine
what would really fulfill them in life.

Emptiness and the Safety Layer of Powerlessness

Aisha, an online member who's forty-five years old and weighs 175
pounds, said, "I never feel like I'm enough. I was raised by an
extremely abusive mother. I barely remember the physical abuse, but
the verbal/emotional abuse is still with me. I have a degree, I've
raised two wonderful children, been married to the same man for
over thirty years, held a top management job for eighteen years, and
still I always feel like I'm hiding from my mother. I feel empty all the
time, like I'm'waiting'for life to start."
She'll have to work toward realizing that fat can't protect her
from what happened to her years ago. She needs to create a real
sense of safety inside herself so that she can make her life begin now.

Emptiness and the Rebellion
Layer of Powerlessness

My patient Amelia, who is fifty-one and has been on diet after diet in
her life, said, "As a small child, my parents decided to move from the
city to the suburbs. I left my friends, my school, my home, and most
importantly my grandparents, whom I would visit every day. The place
that they moved me to was far away and our nearest neighbor was a
quarter of a mile away a very stark contrast to where I had been living.
Due to the change in environment (snow, proximity, etc.), we were
housebound for days at a time. My parents weren't getting along. My
mother kind of checked out--sleeping all day, not really caring what
her two small children were doing (I was six and my sister was four).
So my sister and I ate and ate and ate. Whatever we wanted, however
much we wanted. My dad was a police officer at the time and worked
a very weird schedule. He would take care of us when he was home
and in the absence of my beloved grandparents, this was all the
supervision we received. Eating at that time was twofold: we ate out of
boredom, we ate out of loneliness, we ate out of the sheer fact no one
was watching, we ate to prove we could, we ate to fill the empty space
of not having our friends or our grandparents around us anymore.
This is when food started to become an issue."
As a child, Amelia used food to assert her independence and to
fill the emptiness she felt. She has been trying to fill that emptiness
with food ever since. Working on the rebellion layer of her experience
of powerlessness helped fill in her emptiness.

The Mystery Layer of Emptiness

Underneath all of these other meanings of emptiness is the mystery
layer of emptiness. What about that emptiness that's not about your
life today, but your life so long ago that you couldn't possibly
remember it? Is there anything you can do about that? Some of the
descriptions of emptiness I received expose this layer.
Steve, a fifty-eight-year old man who is forty pounds overweight
and is an online member, said, "I often feel empty. I've been able to
recognize this feeling for many years in myself, even as a very young
child. It often seems very physical.. . something that I need to fix. I
do feel like something is missing. From the outside, it would look
like I've got what I need. I'm married to a beautiful woman, I have a
beautiful son, a decent job ... but it's never enough. I'm miserable. I
hate my job, I feel unloved, I feel alone. I feel very alone. I can feel
alone in a crowded room. I can feel alone in my own living room
surrounded by family. I wish I knew what the big thing was that has
been missing but at this point in my journey I really don't know what that is."
For Steve, there was nothing for him to face or take charge of;
there was just this unending, inexplicable emptiness constantly
inside him. He was waiting for something that never happened.
The powerlessness that occurs when you interpret who you are
as being someone who's empty, who's missing some important
ingredient in your makeup as a person, means that you believe you
have a hole in your psyche. That's an ancient image of infantile
panic. It doesn't represent the reality of who you are.

Unfulfilled Expectancy

As you mature, you have to accept the fact that expectations often
lead to disappointments and to gratification that is often delayed.
That hurts, but it's tolerable. As infants and children, we expected
our needs to be fulfilled and we expected them to be fulfilled
quickly, or else we began to form catastrophe predictions. When
infants have the image or feeling of not getting needs met, either the
emptiness of their stomach or the emptiness of being alone, it
makes them wail violently because their survival depends on it. But
in a sense it's an early version of panic based on a catastrophe prediction.
For the infant, it feels as if they'll never be fed or nurtured
again, and this induces panic.
Delores, one of my online members, gives us a clue as to what
this is like when she writes the following: "I really feel that a large
part of my compulsive overeating stems back to when I was an
infant. When I was a baby, I had a lot of allergies and when I was fed,
I would immediately vomit my food up. It took a long time to get the
right formula. My mother decided that it was not wise to feed a child
who had just gotten sick to their stomach, so she didn't give me
more food for another four hours. Then the same cycle would be
repeated. Finally, my mother went back to work and a caretaker took
over and told my mother she couldn't fill me up, that I was starving.
I often think that I have a deep-seated psychological urge to continue
eating even when I'm not hungry because I don't know when
I'm going to get food again. I know that this isn't rational. I'm an
adult and control my food sources. But it's almost like I have to have
the food available or I feel like I'm going crazy, and then of course
when it's available, I eat it. How can I overcome this emotional
need? I can't go back and change being that infant or the circumstances
surrounding my early years, but there has to be a way to
overcome the insatiable psychological need for food."

What Delores is experiencing is not irrational, it's biological. Her
latent sense memory (located in her brain cells) of panic, based on a
catastrophe prediction of absence (abandonment), is being activated.
The way you remedy the problem is the same no matter when
it started.You'll need to prove to yourself, one food choice at a time,
that you won't go crazy the way your expectancy pattern predicts.
Going crazy is a catastrophe prediction. The image in her mind is
that if she doesn't have food immediately at hand, that absence will
drive her crazy.That image is entirely at odds with reality. Assuming
that she's a well-functioning adult with the ability to go to the
grocery store and pay for food, then food is no more than a few minutes
away. Her image is a memory of unfulfilled expectancy. In her
mind, she believes that if she doesn't get the food immediately, she
may never get it. That's the empty hole in her psyche. It's a bodily
memory summarized in that image. The story about her first years
was obviously told to her and helps her explain what she's now
remembering and feeling, but even without that history, we could
read in her current behavior that she has a level of expectancy and
fear of abandonment that hasn't evolved over the years, and is the
root cause of her unrelenting hunger.

Expectancy Extends beyond Food

Not everybody has an allergic eating experience in infancy, but
everyone does have a feeding experience of some kind, and an
ongoing relationship with the same parents who continue to feed
you different kinds of love than food throughout your life.
Depending on how that relationship forms and is transformed over
the years, you'll be imprinted with some kind of expectancy of love
and nurturance that will organize your whole style of relating to
others, especially intimates and family members. What I'm about to
describe is an almost universal experience in the patients I see for
weight problems, but may not be your exact experience.
When you experience emptiness in everyday life, it becomes a
threat to whoever now represents the love your parents did or didn't
give, because you're on the hunt for unconditional love, and are
bound to be frustrated. More specifically, the threat that exists inside
you when you're "empty" is based on the catastrophe prediction
that nobody is going to be there for you in your time of need. You'll
be powerless in a way that only a totally helpless infant can be powerless,
and that's an unbearable feeling. When the experience of
emptiness strikes, you're flooded with feelings that nobody really
cares, that you're not even in their thoughts. You can't count on anyone
to soothe or nurture you, and you can't do it for yourself. You're
alone, floating in some alien, empty, cold space, without a tether to
the familiar or the reliable. That's the hollow, empty experience.
What keeps this emptiness alive is not what happened in your
infancy, though; it's what keeps on happening because of the
conclusion that you've come to. That conclusion is that you cannot
trust anybody to really be there for you, so you can't let anybody
really fill you up with the warmth of a human relationship.You keep
yourself empty in the following way.
When your abandonment fear is activated, you have such a fear
of rejection and disappointment that you pull back when a deep
trust and fondness is growing with someone. You start to get filled
with something, get afraid, and so empty yourself of what's being
given to you. You're so afraid of abandonment that even when
someone is offering real love and nurturance, you perceive it as
something that can't be trusted. Whatever is being given is seen as
temporary, tantalizingly dangerous, certainly not going to last, and
more than likely a manipulation of some sort.You freeze, shut down,
empty out: that's how you protect yourself.
Because the route to real filling up by accepting the love that's
there for you is closed down by your fears and mistrust, you turn to
food. You have fulfilled your prophecy that no one will be there for
you by not letting them be there for you, so you're powerless to get
the love you want, and you must eat.
When you feel this way, food becomes the cure. If you fill up, you
banish the threat of abandonment that the emptiness represents
because in those moments of fullness you're reconnected. You've
prevented the predicted abandonment. When food reconnects you
in this way, it represents the unconditional love of a perfect mother.
It's more reliable than any human mother (or husband or wife or
lover) could possibly be. It's always there. It'll never abandon you,
whereas human mothers and spouses do terrible things like die, or
have lives of their own, or turn their attention to others, or are self
obsessed, or are emotionally illiterate, or are barely holding on
themselves, or have to work, or don't protect you.

The Way Out of Emptiness

Whenever you overeat in response to the kind of emptiness experience
I have just described, you are tacitly agreeing that you aren't an
adult, but are still a helpless infant in fear of abandonment. It's not
the truth, but it's a version of the truth that you keep alive this way.
As you learned in the very beginning of this book, it's a universal
experience that on some unconscious level, childhood fears of
abandonment get reduced to one almost palpable image of an
empty cavity that can be filled only by something outside, as if we're
still infants with open mouths waiting for milk, screeching like the
baby birds being fed in nature films. That primal, early memory of
being hungry--of being voracious and unattended to, desperately
needing milk in order to survive and feel comforted and loved, in
order to avoid discomfort--gets implanted in our psyches, and we
recall it as a potential disaster state. We fear that maybe no one will
be there to fill that void, and then it'll go on endlessly, while we
helplessly wait in anguish.
The familiar empty feeling that any emotional eater can tell you
about is only an inch away from abandonment terror. As long as you
believe that such terror is too horrible to experience, the food trance
will have a seductive power over you.
The cure for this is based on a cliche. Remember, that was then,
this is now.
. You'll have to prove to yourself, by the experience of^catching
yourself, that your expectancy pattern is not the right way to
deal with your relationships in life.
. You'll have to stop adding to your emptiness by mistrusting
what is being given to you by those who love you.
. You'll have to remember that you have two methods to void
your powerless conclusion about emptiness:
1 Remember that emptiness can never be filled with food.
9 Stop adding to your feelings of emptiness by confusing
~ your childhood fear of abandonment with the current
situation.


SHRINK YOURSELF SESSION NOTES

Finding Real Fulfillment

You'll have to reinterpret the experience of emptiness to see
exactly what it means to you and how you can take charge of
your life to deal with it.

You'll have to catch yourself in the mystery layer of emptiness.
You'll have to recognize, not avoid, your abandonment fear,
and see it for what it is, an outdated image and memory of
what you feared as a child.

You'll have to become intimately acquainted with your
expectancy pattern and the catastrophe prediction you make
about being deprived or disappointed.



PART TWO
The Practice Sessions


Recovering; Your Power

The way to recover the meaning of life and the
worthwhileness of life is to recover the power
of experience. This can be done.--Abraham Maslow

When you started reading this book, you thought you were here to
simply look at your feelings of powerlessness over your uncontrollable
urge to eat. What you've been discovering is that that top layer
is just a cover-up for the five other layers of powerlessness. The five
types of power that you'll need to recover are:

1.	Power over your self-doubts.
2.	Power over how you deal with frustration and get rewarded in life.
3.	Power to create your own sense of safety.
4.	Power to deal with anger without rebelling.
5.	Power to fill your own feelings of emptiness.

Countless patients have proved to me that once you can recover
your power in those other areas, recovering your power over the
uncontrollable urge to eat becomes almost effortless. This is what
I've been talking to you about for the whole book so far. How to
remedy the problem probably feels like the farthest thing from a
magical solution to weight loss that you could ever imagine. But
there's more at stake here than your weight, as important as your
weight is. It's been my observation and experience that using weight
to manage the emotions and circumstances in your life does far
more damage than merely giving you a body you're dissatisfied
with; it keeps your whole life functioning in a less than optimal way.
Managing your weight and managing your life are so intricately
interwoven that there can't be a simple solution. It's never simple to
manage your life. I would not be pointing these things out to you
unless I knew unequivocally that you can in fact recover your power
over food and your whole life if you're willing to do the work.

Simplifying Shrink Yourself

Let's review everything you've learned so far in the most simple terms
I can think of. This will set the stage for sessions that follow, where
you start to acquire the observational experiences that lead to change.
If you're an emotional eater, then up until now this is how you've
dealt with life: Something happened (an event or interaction); you
felt powerless in one of the five ways we've talked about; and, in an
effort to alleviate the pain of that powerlessness, you overate and
then regretted it.
In part two, in order to recover your power, I show you how to
change that pattern into something that looks more like this: something
happens (an event or interaction); you feel powerless in one
of the five ways (which you'll now be able to observe, recognize,
and identify); you'll feel the panic of that powerlessness come on
but you'll be able to pause and analyze what you're feeling.
You'll compare your inner reality (your self-doubts, your fears, your
past experiences) to what is actually happening (your external reality),
and you'll respond to what is happening in your current reality
and find that you no longer have the uncontrollable urge to eat.
All the things you'll learn to do in part two teach you how to
convert the experience of powerlessness to powerfulness. Each time
you can effectively deal with your experience of powerlessness
without short-circuiting feelings with food, you'll become a more
mature and ultimately a more efficient person. You'll have to prove
this to yourself--one experience at a time, one food choice at a
time--until who you are and how you deal with life are different. It
won't happen all at once. Remember that you've reinforced your
powerlessness for years every time you chose to eat instead of tackling
what was really bothering you. It will take time to unravel, but it
can be done. In fact, every person who has achieved lifelong weight
loss and given up their obsession with food has learned to do it.
You'll have to stop adding to your existing feelings of powerlessness
by misinterpreting the events in your life. The events that you'll
have to watch out for are the following:

	Anytime you measure yourself or feel that you're being
measured.
	Anytime you don't know how to handle frustration and you
think that food is the only reward you can get.

	Anytime you don't feel safe.
	Anytime you feel angry but don't know how to deal with the
anger.

	Anytime you feel empty.

Once you can stop immediately misinterpreting these kinds of
experiences in a way that leaves you feeling powerless, you'll start to
discover other options besides eating. You don't have to do this on
your own. I'm going to show you how.

The Shrink Your.se/fMethod

At this point in the book, I expect and hope, that you have the
following dilemma. "On the one hand, I now understand how
emotional eating works, and along the way I've had some good
insights about myself and my experiences of powerlessness, and
have some idea about what I can do about it. On the other hand, it
seems overwhelmingly complex and I don't have much confidence
that I can actually change my behavior in a way that can be sustained."
If that's your dilemma, let me assure you that you're just
where you should be. No one can simply transform all that you've
read into new behavior.
That's what the next part of the book is designed to do, to help
you change, by a slow and steady integration of new learning based
on new experiences. What I want to help you achieve is a naturalistic,
not a forced self-conscious, change. The goal is to find yourself
changed without quite knowing why it happened. One online
member said: "By week five of the program, I was amazed at how
much insight I had gained, and how easy it was to make good food
choices."
I want to keep your conscious mind active to give your unconscious
mind what it needs to do the work of integration. By now you
know a lot about emotional eating: you know what it is, how it
starts, and what keeps it going. But what you don't know yet is how
to stop it. In this next part of the book, the practice sessions, I'll help
you apply what you learned in part one to overcome emotional eating
once and for all. By the end, you'll know exactly what to do when
you feel powerless over food or powerless in your life.
Having the right information doesn't necessarily lead to smart
food choices, although it's always a good start. For real change to
happen, especially change involving your eating habits, you need to
arrive at a series of personal insights about your life and about how
you process your experiences and emotions. The insights I'm referring
to are the ones that make behavior change natural. Alcoholics
sometimes refer to them as "moments of clarity." The insights you
should strive for are the ones that help you realize you're not
powerless over food--insights that help you realize there are better,
easier, and healthier ways to deal with your problems than seeking
the escape that food has provided up until now.
When I work directly with patients, I help the insights that lead
to behavior change arrive more quickly then if my patients were
on their own. However, I must accept that I can't force the insights
on them. I may know exactly what a particular patient must realize
before they can feel better, but I can't force them to see it my way, or
to see it when I see it.
The insights must come from inside the patient when they're
ready. It's the same with you. In the sessions that follow, I'll give you
exercises designed to help gather important insights, but you have
to do the exercises and make the observations. You can learn only by
having new experiences that I hope to create for you in each exercise.
Just reading through the text might help a little, but it's up to you to do the work. You must make it your own.
As we continue together, pretend you're a patient or a member of
my Shrink Yourself online course. Each chapter that follows will be
like a session with me. You'll do a series of exercises and read stories
that'll help you to understand why the exercise is important. As you
go along, each session will build on the sessions that come before.
This "progressive disclosure" parallels what happens in therapy.
During traditional therapy, the patient and I can examine deeper
issues in each new session only because we know more than we did
in the previous session. One memory or thought or observation triggers
another, and the web of thoughts and feelings that compose
the conscious mind comes alive in a new way. I've tried to make this
happen for you in the sessions that follow by sequencing the exercises
so that each simple piece of awareness is linked to other
insights until you see things from a perspective that you didn't have
before. You'll actually go through a series of transformations having
the exact experiences in the right sequence that you need to transform
the way you manage your weight and your life.
Let's start with an anecdote now, to put you in the mood for the
work ahead. One of my patients, Helene, told me that she faces a
desperate, losing battle every time she sits down to eat--chocolate
cake versus carrots, calories versus willpower. She calculated that if
she lived to be seventy-nine years old--the average life expectancy
for an American woman--she would have to make the right dietary
choices approximately 80,000 times! In other words, she faced
80,000 future struggles--a horrifying prospect, and yet a prospect
that most overweight people face. Helene had already tried several
major diets without success. She had no idea how to comfort
herself without resorting to food. I'm assuming that like Helene, you
want to avoid 80,000 future struggles. So come into my office and
have a seat.
The sessions that follow will help you to find that mature, powerful
part of yourself, and to do something about your long-term
struggle so you can win the weight war.
By the time you finish the last session, you'll have a plan in place
for making wise eating choices no matter what emotions you're
facing or what types of crises you're enduring or how good or how
bad your luck is tomorrow. You may still, on occasion, want to avoid
confrontation, or chase away a bad mood with food, but most of the
time you'll know better, and have good alternative options.
You'll find that having a blank notebook will help you to do the
work in the sessions that follow. So find a notebook and let's get
started! If you prefer, check out the online step-by-step companion
program to this book at shrinkyourself.com and do the program while reading the book.


SESSION 1

Getting Started

People say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does
bathing--that's why we recommend it daily.--Zig Ziglar


In this session:

	You'll define yourself as an emotional eater.
	You'll look at the differences between phantom hunger and
physical hunger.
	You'll have to remember that in the gap between powerlessness
and the uncontrollable urge to eat, you're making a decision
that can be changed. You'll start to observe that gap, so
you do indeed have a choice.
	You'll have to rid yourself of denial in order to do the learning
work that will free you from your food addiction by looking at
your misguided motivations to lose weight and at your failure
strategies.

Now you have to decide whether you really are ready to do the work
necessary to master your emotional eating patterns, or you are just
here to "think about" it some more. It's easy to deceive yourself about this issue. If you're here to get it done, I can help you do that.  If you're here to think about it, the best I can do is help you think
about thinking about it, and maybe you'll decide to be serious about
doing something, or maybe you just aren't ready.
By now you know that weight is an emotional issue. Believe
me--resistance is common when it comes to weight loss, and
chances are good that you harbor some yourself. Some people get so
agitated when discussing weight issues that they can't focus on
logic. They feel that nobody understands how hard they've tried to
diet or what it feels like to be unable to lose weight--that they've
been subjected to bad advice for years and years. If you fit this 
category, you certainly might find yourself resistant to the ideas that
you've learned about in this book. And so, before we continue with
the exercises, we need to sidestep a bit to address your mind-set and
to look at any ways you might have of deceiving yourself into thinking
you've been doing work that you actually haven't started. If
you're 100 percent sure that you don't suffer from one bit of ambivalence
or self-deception or resistance regarding weight loss or life
change, you can skip this session. Otherwise, please read on.
There's a principle of psychotherapy that I want to apply here. My
patients always start out ambivalent. They want relief from their problems
and know that they'll have to make some changes, but they fear
making those changes because altering old patterns is difficult.
We therapists know this, so we expect ambivalence, meaning
that although we know you'll want to change, we also recognize
that you'll resist making those changes. In therapy, we work with the
ambivalence. It's expected, it's real, and it makes sense that it would
manifest as you read this book.

Your Resistance Decoded

It came as a surprise to me when during my first public lectures on
emotional eating, some audience members became hostile. Most
nodded and were eager to find out what they could do about their
relationship to food, but a few people thought I was accusing them
of something. (Of course, I should've been smarter about this and
remembered the very same principle of resistance that I'm outlining
here, but I wasn't.)
One woman in the audience explained that she'd been a heavy
child, and ever since grade school, she'd been accused of choosing to
be fat, of being weak-willed, stubborn, and lacking in willpower. No
one understood her agonizing conflict, and she was tired of being
preached to and pushed to change. She'd misunderstood my message,
taking it as yet another accusation, until I assured her that I
agreed with her assessment that lack of willpower wasn't the culprit.
Others in the audience took great objection to the psychological
approach, feeling that I had implied they were somehow defective,
and they didn't want any such labels cast at them. It quickly became
clear to me that I'd entered a minefield filled with anger, despair, and
hurt. These people felt victimized by a myth perpetuated by the diet
industry--a myth asserting that people stay fat because they don't
have enough self-discipline.
"We have as much willpower as our skinny neighbors," one
audience member told me, and I agreed. There are many overweight
people who are highly disciplined exercisers and demonstrate as
much discipline as anybody else at work and at home. It's not a trait
we're talking about, it's an area of unresolved conflict. I recognized
the understandable outrage she felt. And yet I noticed something
else, something that concerned me because I saw how it could
sabotage any sincere dieting effort. I saw denial--the same type of
denial that sabotages people trying to kick any harmful addiction.
Those agitated audience members had experienced so much
misunderstanding, so much pain and denigration around their
weight issues, that they no longer could face reality. They'd slammed
the door on themselves and didn't want to consider that their
weight problem had anything to do with their life, preferring any
other cause than that. They didn't want any more probing or self
exploration into the sore spots of their psyche; it was off-base, and
all the evidence to the contrary had to be denied.
If you feel like one of those angry audience members, please
understand--the Shrink Yourself method does not allege that you
have a sickness or a disease. Instead, Shrink Yourself says that you
have an agonizing conflict within yourself because, for one reason or
another, food has become implanted in your mind as a mood control
mechanism and you haven't yet proven to yourself that you can regulate
your life without the use of this mechanism. That's the prime
reason you've been afraid to do the exploration of yourself that you
need to succeed. You've already prejudged yourself and determined
' that you won't survive emotionally intact if you don't use food as a
tranquilizer anymore. You happen to be wrong, but you won't be able
to believe what I'm telling you until you've finished the book and
discover that for yourself. I'm here to coach you in your battle with
yourself, to help you explore that painful conflict within, to help you
find a healthy way to resolve your internal discomfort. I understand
how scary it can be to investigate what lies below the surface, but it's
better to be a little scared of the journey than to close the door. I
promise that we'll proceed through the exercises slowly and carefully,
step by step. I simply ask for your willingness to give it a try.

Let's start with the biggest stumbling block most dieters trip over-- the idea that willpower alone should win the weight war. Of course
you have willpower--you wouldn't have ever attempted a diet if you
didn't and you can't possibly function in life without it, but
willpower alone isn't enough. Why not? Because the adversaries you
face overpower willpower.
You know you have willpower, but maybe you think you don't
have enough. That's a familiar self-accusation. "I'm lacking some
vague but important ingredient. I just don't have enough, so why try
again?" Aha ... another form of denial, in this case the denial of self
efficacy. "I'm missing something, so I can't really be responsible for
my failure. It's outside of my control." It all comes down to feeling
helpless--powerless.
Sometimes overweight patients will tell me that they feel as if
they're being controlled by some inner persona that overpowers
them and always wins--a demonic other. This quote from a morbidly
obese patient of mine illustrates this well. "There is a voice that says,
'Ellen, let's go to the Cheesecake Factory and let's have some of that
cake, the one with the caramel on the top or maybe some cookies.
Yes, chocolate chip cookies--the ones from the mall. That's right, we
want cookies.'It's almost as if I have renters living in my body. I have
at times, at the voice's insistence, gotten up in my pajamas, thrown
on a top, and ran to a twenty-four-hour grocery and bought as much
as eighty dollars'worth of treats."
I've no doubt that this experience is real. I've heard it described
by hundreds of patients in my office, and thousands of people
who've taken the Shrink Yourself program mention this adversary
frequently. People addicted to food because of emotional eating feel
powerless, want to and need to lose weight, but just can't do it or do
it for very long because there's some other person inside them who
takes over and sabotages their best intentions.
There's no demon inside, even though it feels like that. The reason
I know this is a self-delusion is that so many people start this
way and, through the process we're going to use, deconstruct the
"demon," and it disappears. But if you believe in your demon and
your powerlessness, you'll never have a chance to test whether what
I'm saying here will be true for you, because you'll only be willing to
put in a halfhearted effort, and that won't work.
So remember the next time you experience that "irresistible
urge": you're just observing one or more of your powerful motivations
to overeat, which is overriding your good judgment. And if you
can't catch it in time to unmask it before you indulge, at least try to
identify what it was after the fact. Creating a pause that's long
enough for you to think before a binge is a huge first step. In that
pause, you might be able to let your feelings tell you what they're
really longing for and not eat at all, or at the very least you might be
able to make a better food choice.

Reconfirming That You're an Emotional Eater

In part one, we defined emotional eating, and you saw to some
degree how it functions in your life. However, it's very easy to
backpedal and begin denying that you personally are struggling
with emotional eating. Fortunately, there's a very easy way to
decide whether you really are an emotional eater--we'll look at your
symptoms.

EXERCISE

Emotional Eating

All diagnoses start with observing symptoms. If you have a runny
nose, itchy eyes, and can't stop sneezing, you conclude that you
have a cold because you have the symptoms of one. We'll do the
same for emotional eating.
Below is a list of questions, plus a few more, that we asked you at
the beginning of the book. These questions cover the most common
symptoms of emotional eating. If you answer yes to many of the
questions, you have the symptoms of emotional eating, and you can
therefore conclude that you are one.

1.	Do you ever notice your hunger coming on fast?

2.	When you get hungry, do you ever feel an almost desperate need to eat something right away?

3.	When you eat or snack, do you often eat mindlessly, not paying attention to the taste of the food or how much you
are eating?

4.	When you get hungry, do you sometimes feel you need a certain type of food or treat to satisfy yourself?

5.	Do you ever feel guilty after you eat?

6.	Do you experience an urge to eat when you are emotionally upset?

7.	Do you eat to get rid of a feeling of emptiness?

8.	Do you stuff food in quickly, almost as if you were trying to stuff yourself?

9.	Have you tried to lose weight before, only to find your efforts derailed by your urge to eat?
10. Do you ever feel powerless over your desire to eat unhealthy
foods, or powerless to control your portions of healthy
foods?

If you answered yes to three or more of the questions above,
you're experiencing the symptoms of emotional eating, which
means you're an emotional eater. As we move forward, keep in mind
that these symptoms are not the real problem; rather, they're the
indications of the real problem. It's time to make a decision: Are you
an emotional eater? If yes, admit it! If no, give this book to someone
who is.

EXERCISE

Ten Healthy Eating Habits You Should Adopt

You might still be thinking, I have the symptoms but that doesn't mean
I have to do anything about emotional eating. I can still control my weight
by some other approach.
If you didn't think you needed to do something about your emotional
eating, you wouldn't even be reading this book. So this argument
is at least partially wrong from the get-go. But it's wrong for
another reason as well.
Because you're an emotional eater, you can't be a rational eater,
and therefore you won't be able to control your weight. No other
method will work. Below is a list of the ten healthy eating habits
anyone who manages their weight must follow. Next to each of the
ten eating habits there is an "I" statement. If you can say the statement
out loud and feel as if you're telling the truth, then you know
that habit is not a problem for you. If you feel like you're lying when
you make the statement, write that one in your notebook so you can
remember to work on it later.

Habit # 1: Listen to Your Body
I stop eating when I'm full and only eat when I am hungry.

Habit # 2: Manage Your Hunger
I feed myself properly through the day so I don't lose control.

Habit # 3: Bounce Back
If I've made a poor food choice, I don't use that as an excuse to
eat everything in sight.

Habit # 4: Keep Your Weight in Mind
I keep my weight in mind when I make food choices.

Habit # 5: Avoid Junk Food
I mostly avoid junk food.

Habit # 6: Exercise Enough
I exercise enough to stay healthy.

Habit # 7: Control Your Portions
I know how to properly control the amount of food I eat.

Habit # 8: Prevent Binges
I know when I'm about to binge and can stop myself.

Habit # 9: Savor Your Food
I eat good food in a slow way so that I enjoy it.

Habit # 10: Choose a Balanced Diet
I make sure I eat a healthy, balanced diet that keeps me feeling
good both physically and mentally.

If you're like most of my patients struggling with weight loss,
you could only honestly say that you practice two or three of these
habits. The reason that you don't practice the other simple habits is
because of emotional eating.
Think about how much you want to lose weight, or how much
you want to stop food from being the centerpiece of your life. Do
you think that desire should be enough to control your portions, or
avoid junk food, or practice any of those simple habits? It should be,
but it's not. It's not enough because you're struggling with emotional
eating. Trying to fully practice these habits is like trying to go
to work with a temperature of 101. You might really want to make it
so you don't have to use a sick day; you may even get through the
door, but you won't last long.
And what happens if you can't practice these habits? Simple:
you gain weight, can't lose weight, or struggle to maintain your
weight. It's as simple as that. Emotional eating leads to the inability
to practice these habits, which leads to weight gain, which leads to you wanting to lose weight, which leads to you reading this book.
So when the part of you that wants to keep eating says you can
happily live with the symptoms of emotional eating, or that those
symptoms are no big deal, you can obviously contradict it.

EXERCISE

The Red Flag List


Watching these ten habits can help you identify when you're struggling
with emotional eating. Take your notebook out, about halfway
down the page make a heading that says "Good Habits," and list
any of the ten habits you're struggling with. At the top of the page,
make a heading that says "Symptoms" and write down the relevant
symptoms you identified above.
We'll refer to this from now on as the red flag list. Whenever you
experience these symptoms or have trouble practicing these habits,
you'll know that emotions are dominating your eating behavior.
That's the starting point. Instead of just automatically and blindly
continuing to eat, stop for a moment to catch yourself in an emotional
eating episode. Investigate what you're thinking and feeling
when the cravings seem overpowering. The red flag list provides you
with the opportunity to prove to yourself that you're an emotional
eater through direct and immediate experience, not just because you
answered a few questions in a book. This red flag exercise will get
you into the experience that we will probe layer by layer. All you
have to do now is get a hazy but solid view of what it is; then we will
dissect the experience, and you'll really learn what is going on during
those moments when the uncontrollable urge arises.

As you know, with passionate motivation you can accomplish
practically anything. Determination has led people to climb Mount
Everest, swim the English Channel, conquer the hearts of their
enemies. You probably started your diets with a burning motivation,
but lost it because your motivation rested on a hope to achieve
something that weight loss alone can't accomplish. Let me explain.
My patient Laurie told me about the difficulty she experienced
when she dieted and lost a hundred pounds several years before she
came to see me. She told me that she kept herself going by thinking
about how, once she reached her goal, she would sign up for a dating
service. She intended to go out with many attractive guys and
hoped to settle on one who made at least $150,000 a year.
While losing weight certainly made Laurie more attractive to
men, finding love falls into a completely different category. Weight
loss offers no guarantees in the love department, and if you hope to
attain a goal that can't be achieved merely by losing weight, your
diet can't succeed. So Laurie's willpower worked only until reality
intervened and she did not find her dream lover. A year after losing
all the weight, Laurie regained it, plus more. Unless you want to lose
weight for your own health and well-being, plain and simple, your
diet will probably fizzle faster than a balloon on a hot stove.
You can't make any deals with life. You can draw up the contract,
but life won't sign it, so don't fool yourself. Being honest with yourself
is the only way to kick the emotional eating habit.
Laurie's story demonstrates how people trip themselves up in
spite of burning motivation. You can't succeed if you diet to please
other people or for some transient goal, like to fit into a size 6 in time
for your sister's wedding. You can't make a deal with life that if you
lose weight your dreams and wishes will come true. Losing weight
won't make you a rock star, won't make you rich, won't make the
prom king kick himself for neglecting to ask you out twenty years
ago. Motivations such as these inevitably lead you back to eating,
because they depend on variables you can't control. And when you
can't control the variables, your willpower crumbles.
A new shape and a new level of conscious confidence can add to your success in life, but the magical wish to be excused from the
hard work of dealing with reality is a setup for a harsh disappointment,
a familiar justification to soothe yourself with food. In other
words, the will to succeed that kept you going dissipates because

the success you wanted couldn't be achieved through dieting alone.
Your goals absolutely must be intrinsic and achievable, and only
goals completely within your control fit into this category. Only
these types of goals keep your commitment alive.

Let's take a closer look at how you can sabotage your diet by unwittingly
setting unrealistic goals. Suppose, for example, you eat to
assuage the pain you feel because your husband, Chester, ignores
you.You enjoy a slice or two of tiramisu and forget about Chester for
a while. The yummy treat transports you to a place of sensual satisfaction,
and it kind of spaces you out so that Chester's rejection of
you doesn't loom as large.
Later, though, you get depressed because you really do want to
lose weight to look good for Chester, so that maybe he'll chase you
around the house again, and you resolve to diet. That night, Chester
insults you and you want to spite him. You don't want to do what he
wants you to do, so you lose your motivation to diet and remember
that you still have a slice of tiramisu in the fridge. And so the cycle
continues. You have real motivation to diet, but the motivation
depends on Chester, and you can't maintain your determination
when Chester fails to act according to plan.
The truth is that your decision to lose weight can't ever involve
another human being, because humans often act outside the plans
we have for them. Your diet can't be motivated by a desire to satisfy
a parent or partner or friend or child who just might find something
else to criticize even after you drop those pounds.
Again, most of us launch into diets with unrealistic expectations
that inevitably undermine our efforts to lose weight, because when
we don't see the life-changing results we hoped for, we get discouraged
and return to bingeing. Dieting leads to weight loss and
improved health and vigor--period, the end. From any rational
point of view, getting thin and healthy should be reason enough to
forgo the french fries, but as you've already discovered, irrational
forces tend to win the food wars. The work you'll do in this book
will help you to finally make rational decisions about whether or
not you really want to eat your way to oblivion, versus facing those

emotional forces that remain unresolved and that lead you to eat
beyond your own control.
Even after you do all this, the part of you that wants to hold onto
emotional eating has one more trick. It's the most insidious trick of
them all, and if I were a betting man, I would bet at least part of my
savings that you're somehow falling victim to it, too. Almost everyone
I have ever met falls into this trap.
The last trick that the denial part of you uses to keep you
attached to emotional eating involves unrealistic expectations. It's
natural to dream about what you can achieve. In fact, it's healthy.
However, this troublesome part of you uses this healthy activity
against you. Here's what happens.
The troublesome part of you that we're talking about asks you
what you want to get by losing weight. It encourages you to dream
big, too big. It gets you to expect great changes from losing weight
(as if losing weight weren't good enough in itself). Then, when those
unrealistic dreams don't come true, it says that all the work you did
was for nothing--that you are better off eating whatever you want,
since you're not getting these expectations met. Basically, this part of
you sets you up for failure. Why? So it doesn't have to give up emotional
eating and doesn't have to address real problems directly.
Let's take a look at how this works for you.
Each item in the list below has built-in expectations that can
backfire in the way I just described. Select the ones that apply to you.
Be as honest as you can about your dreams and expectations. If you
lie, you're not fooling anyone but yourself.

EXERCISE

Motivation

'I want to lose weight so I can

have better self-esteem
make my career go more smoothly
relieve some of my moodiness, depression,
or anxiety
make some hard decisions about the course of my life
make my life feel as if it's going somewhere
have more day-to-day fun
better handle the ups and downs of life
feel less burdened by responsibilities
feel more independent
be less critical of myself
stop envying the life that others have
be more free of doubts and fears
start being more sexually active
feel more deserving of the good things I have in life
shed some of my shyness or discomfort around people
be happier and more content

How many dreams did you select? Most people select over half
the list, sometimes more if I don't explain beforehand why they're
selecting them. When weight loss doesn't bring these things, which
it can't, you get disappointed, and have a very good excuse to go
back to emotional eating.
Am I saying you shouldn't strive to fulfill these dreams?
Absolutely not. I'm saying that weight loss alone can never bring
these sorts of results. You need to take other steps as well. Just
because you lose thirty or even fifty pounds does not mean you'll
automatically drop those self-doubts you've been struggling with
your whole life. Just because you're skinny doesn't mean you'll have
more fun. And let me assure you, there are plenty of thin sex-starved
people in the world as well. Weight loss is not a magic wand. It won't
make these sorts of things happen. It might help, but that's all.
Make a declaration to yourself that you'll lose weight only for
the direct and immediate benefit of being more healthy. You can be
happy if it also helps you reach some other goal. Declare to yourself
that you're not going to make a deal with life where you'll lose
weight only if you get the payoff you're after.
Because most dieters have at least some unrealistic and conflicted : reasons for losing weight, they tend to fall prey to what I call "the
failure strategies." Before you can learn new eating strategies that
will lead you to weight loss for a lifetime, you need to understand
why the approaches you've tried so far haven't worked. Once you
see how you sabotage yourself with misguided motivation and
misdirected strategies, you'll find it easier to let go of the doomed
methods you've relied on until now.
If you want to avoid wasting any more of your time and energy
on strategies bound to backfire, then you have to give up relying on
methods like these. First, let's take a close look at the six most common
failure strategies. See if you recognize yourself as you read ;
about these methods. In fairness, observe that failure strategy #1
may have more to do with the diet industry than with any hidden
agenda on your part.	¦

Avoid Failure Strategy #1:
Deprive and Gorge and Do It Again

The most common failure strategy relies on deprivation and discipline
and nicely avoids dealing with the issues that drive eating
dysfunction. Of course, everything you know about weight loss to
this point in your life endorses the discipline/deprivation approach,
so it might seem odd to you to disparage it now, to reject it as a
doomed method. Ironically, the diet industry endorses this strategy
with great gusto, but as you know by now, 99 percent of all diets
ultimately fail. Please notice that I'm not telling you to eat with
abandon or to give up exercise--not at all. I'm simply letting you
know that these approaches won't work on their own.
You've seen the results of the grit-your-teeth-and-give-up
pastry approach. Perhaps neighbor John runs five miles a day and
still has a potbelly. Sister Lara goes to Weight Watchers, drops
twenty pounds, and then gains it all back when her boyfriend jilts
her. Uncle Ron follows the Zone Diet, although recently you noticed
Heath Bar wrappers in his briefcase. And you gave up the afternoon
only to blow it all out after work on Fridays (and Thursdays new book and die, plan leads to the ^^_
gorge approacn, ana so mis is me ,.--,. ~_g'
know, when you diet, you deprive yourself of what you really want,
applying willpower and discipline to keep yourself away from the
fridge. It's a painful and difficult thing to do, and unfortunately, the
method doesn't work for long because you really don't want to
deprive yourself. Eventually, your emotional eating patterns kick in,
and then the diet ends.
My patient Mary, a thirty-seven-year-old married mother of two,
subscribes to this deprive-and-gorge approach. I asked her what it
would be like if she finally succeeded in controlling her weight.
She said, "I would be on top of the world. Last year I lost about
sixty-five pounds and I was a totally different person. I could wear
really cool clothes instead of the dreaded plus-size fashions. I
didn't hate what I saw in the mirror--it was a stranger looking back
at me, but one I admired. I was able to get off my blood pressure
medication--but somehow I knew it was only temporary because of
my lifelong battle with fat. It started with a donut--one donut--and
then I started to eat three or four at a sitting. Especially when my
boss got cranky, donuts were my salvation. Now once again, I hate
to buy clothes, I'm back on medication, my knees ache, and I'm feeling
tired and hopeless again."
Mary had strong motivation to change, but she depended on
food as a source of comfort, and so whenever she encountered
problems she overindulged in eating. When the air cleared, she
regimented her food intake like a drill sergeant. Like Mary, you need
to use a method more satisfying than deprivation, a method that
dismantles your dependence on food in times of trouble rather than
a method that leaves you even more hungry for satisfaction than you
already are.

Make a Declaration. Be Honest: Where Are You Now?
1. I believe diets alone will no longer work for me, and I'm
totally open to exploring my emotional eating patterns.

2. I'm not convinced about diets not working and I am reluctant
to learn more about my emotional eating patterns.

Avoid Failure Strategy #2: Gorge and Run

Jason was thin when he was younger because he ran 4 miles each
morning, rain or shine, to justify his enormous appetite. Food was
the only thing that calmed his anxiety, but he compensated for
overeating by exercising, and he did manage to stay trim. If he had a
fight with his wife, he would stuff himself at dinner and then go out
and jog another few miles. They didn't talk things through because
he literally would run away, which only led to more arguments and
more running.
Jason's plan worked until he fell off his bicycle and suffered a
knee injury. The injury didn't heal properly, and Jason had to give up
running. He did not, however, give up bingeing because his anxiety
had increased now that he couldn't run away. He was stuck.
By the time Jason came to me for help two failed marriages later,
he was fifty-five and grossly overweight. He no longer exercised at
all, and he lived alone--with a plate of cookies near his bedside.
Like Jason, many people adopt exercise as a weight-control
strategy. Instead of learning new eating habits, they exercise like
crazy, stuffing themselves full and then compensating by hitting the
gym. This "binge-and-jog" strategy fails over the course of a lifetime
for most people.
First, in order to compensate for eating excess, you have to exercise
so much that you increase the risk of injury, which poses special
problems. Any time you need to stop exercising in order to heal,
your weight balloons up quickly. I've seen patients in my practice
who put on substantial weight after injuries and then couldn't lose
it, though they had been trim athletes at one time--albeit athletes
with a food addiction. Also, if you continue to eat unhealthy foods in
excess, you weaken your immune system no matter how much you
exercise, and so the risk of illness increases, illness makes exercise
difficult, and anytime the routine slackens, the weight returns.
To lose weight for life, you need to conquer food addiction, not
merely run around it.

Make a Declaration. Be Honest: Where Are You Now?
1.	I believe that using exercise on a routine basis to compensate for overeating will no longer work for me.
2.	I still want to be able to overeat and use exercise to compensate
for it.

Avoid Failure Strategy #3: Gorge and Purge
Early in her marriage, Jan tried bulimia to stay thin. She would eat
two dinners and the better part of a cake every evening. Friends
marveled at her ability to stay thin. What they didn't see was what
she did when she went into the bathroom. When Jan finished stuffing
herself, she would find a private place and force herself to throw
up. As soon as she was finished, she promised herself never to do it
again, but the next time she found herself bingeing, she had to
purge to make up for it. She hated herself for doing this. During dinner
at a friend's home, she was planning her exit strategy, hoping to
find a safe toilet where the sound wouldn't be heard. Her husband
saw her red eyes when she came back to the table, and although he
said nothing, his expression conveyed silent disgust. Fortunately, Jan
came to see me before she did permanent damage to her body. After
intensive work around her emotional eating issues, Jan finally beat

her addiction.
Bulimia is a very dangerous strategy. People die from the electrolyte
imbalance that happens with chronic purging, or they get
serious dental problems, they have various forms of malnutrition
and vitamin deficiency, and a secret life of agonizing shame. They
appear to be thin, "together" people on the outside, but they feel
like frauds on the inside.

Make a Declaration. Be Honest: Where Are You Now?
1.	I believe that using purging to compensate for overeating will no longer work for me.
2.	I still want to be able to overeat and purge to compensate for it.


Avoid Failure Strategy #4:
Look Good for the Camera

Angie is a chiropractor and competitive bodybuilder who works out
five days a week. Despite all her knowledge about the importance of
a healthy lifestyle and her motivation to be an example to her
clients, Angie has a weight problem. By day, in public, she eats perfectly
balanced low-calorie meals. But at one in the morning, Angie
wakes up and starts bingeing.
Angie's emotional eating habit affects her moods, her health,
even her career. When she has her bingeing under control, she's
trim, happy, and successful. But when her midnight binges get
the better of her, she becomes fat, miserable, embarrassed, and
uncomfortable with her patients. She tries to stop her binges by
reminding herself of her obligation to serve as a role model for
her patients--by attempting to shame herself into abstinence--and
while this approach works for her during the day, it has no power
at night.
Obviously, Angie has strong motivation to get her weight under
control, and she periodically succeeds in doing so, but then the cycle
starts all over again. Angie has been locked in this struggle for two
decades. The shame of failure doesn't work. Her unconscious won't
cooperate. It wakes her up with the imperative to make up for all the
deprivation and stress of the day, which includes the pressure of
performing for and fooling her audience.
I've seen many variations of this strategy, including losing
weight for a specific event such as an upcoming wedding or
family reunion, or making a public declaration that you've started a
diet, or buying clothes that fit only if you lose weight, or paying to
join a support group that encourages success but rejects you if
you fail.
There are many other ways to set yourself up to "have to" succeed,
all of which lead to failure because the basic emotional eating
problem is not addressed. Try as you may, you can't fool your own
unconscious mind.
Make a Declaration. Be Honest: Where Are You Now?
1. I am ready to give up the belief that I can only do something
if I do it to get applause from others. 1 am ready to take
charge for myself.
2. I can't see controlling my weight just for myself.

Avoid Failure Strategy #5: Trick Your Metabolism
In our "get it done yesterday" culture, many seek a magic pill to dissolve
cellulite, reverse weight gain, and make getting thin a breeze.
All the pharmaceutical companies are looking for the big blockbuster
solution that will control the hunger gland. The last "miracle
pill" released on the market, Phen-Phen, ended up killing people,
but the drug companies haven't given up, because the American
public would much rather take pills that kill hunger than address the
emotional source of the compulsion to overeat.
Phen-Phen wasn't the first weight-loss medication to endanger
health. Dexedrine, an amphetamine, was commonly used for weight
loss but has largely been discredited. Many people who started taking
Dexedrine to lose weight ended up addicted, less hungry and
less dependent on food, but more dependent on the drug.
Unfortunately, as the bumper stickers say, "Speed Kills." Speed
(amphetamine) increases your resting metabolic rate so that you
burn more calories without having to exercise, stimulates a more
rapid heart rate, and makes you sweat more. You stay up later and
you have more energy to move around, but you can't use the
method for long without physical damage. The speed category
includes Ephedra, which is a major ingredient of many herbal
appetite suppressants.
The same problems exist with thyroid supplements. If your thyroid
is intact, taking more to speed yourself up will work for a while,
but at a cost to your natural balance. And as long as you continue to
eat too much, the method won't work and your health will suffer.
Make a Declaration. Be Honest: Where Are You Now?

1.	I am ready to give up the belief that there will be a magical solution to my weight problem.

2.	I still believe there is a simple solution, like a pill, that I have yet to find.


Avoid Failure Strategy #6: Play the Blame Game

Do you curse parental genes for giving you a slow metabolism? If
so, you've fallen prey to the last of the failure methods--blaming the
extra pounds on your metabolism. You might say that the blame game
is more of a "failure attitude" than a failure strategy, but here the
watchword is "failure." As long as you believe that genetics predispose
you to being fat, you can tell yourself that your hunger is written
"in the stars" and indulge your emotional eating habit whenever life
gets difficult, doing nothing to change the underlying pattern.
I have seen so many patients who have made this claim, supporting
it by telling me how diligent they have been about exercising
and how careful they have been about their food intake. When I do
a detailed inquiry about their exercise and eating habits, it turns out
that they have simply been fooling themselves. One patient, Joe, was
a real classic. He didn't bother to count the three beers at night or
the daily trip to the ice cream store. Somehow those calories didn't
count. My other patients also failed to count little things that added
up, and almost all didn't exercise nearly enough to compensate for
what they ate.
As long as you blame the extra pounds on a slow metabolism,
you've fallen prey to another ruse--unless you've been diagnosed .
with hypothyroidism or take certain prescribed medications. Some
medications do cause weight gain, either by changing your metabolic
rate, making you retain fluids, or affecting how your body converts
calories to energy versus storing calories as fat. That's a different
story. But if you don't have hypothyroidism or prescription drugs to
blame, then your metabolic rate is in the normal range and you need
to gain control over your eating habits in order to lose weight.
If you can't quite accept the idea that you can't blame metabolism,
look at the latest research showing that high-strung people stay thin not because of metabolism, but simply because they fidget
more and move around more than you do and therefore burn more
calories. The study showed that sedentary people sat 163 more
minutes a day than fidgety people, who took 7,000 more steps and
expended 350 more calories per day--a nonrigorous form of exercise,
perhaps, but one that does contribute to weight loss. And so,
again, metabolism can't be blamed.
The average person consumes 60 million calories during his or
her lifetime. In order to stay at a steady weight you have to expend
60 million calories. That's the basic balance. If you make the slightest
mistake in this balancing act, you immediately become overweight.
For example, if you're an average man who needs 2,700
calories a day to remain at a steady weight but you take in 2,800 and
expend only 2,700, you will gain 12 pounds every year.
An apple is about 100 calories. That's just an apple a day difference.
In other words, it's very easy to be overweight.

Make a Declaration. Be Honest: Where Are You Now?
1.	I am willing to accept that I have to deal with the psychological
aspects of eating.
2.	I'm still thinking and hoping that the reason I am overweight is outside me.

Look at your answers and reflect on what they mean. If you selected
the first decision for all six failure strategies, you're open-minded
and ready to learn about yourself. If you selected the second decision
on all of the failure strategies, you're totally resistant to learning
about yourself and may want to think about your resistance more
before going any further. Perhaps you can come back to this in a
month or two. If you have a mixture of both Is and 2s, you may still
be resistant to change. The more Is you have, the more likely you
will succeed.


Embrace Reality

Now you've seen that the six failure strategies don't work because
they all attempt to stimulate weight loss while keeping the emotional
eating option intact. You've also seen that denial doesn't work
because emotional eating does, in fact, make you fat. When you follow
one of the failure strategies, you make a hopeless bargain with
yourself: "I will deprive myself for a while as long as I can go back to
bingeing sometime. I will discipline myself to run as long as I can eat
as much as I want when I am anxious. I will risk my health and
harbor a shameful secret of purging as long as I can stuff myself at
dinner. I will suffer public shame in order to overeat again. I will
mess up my insides with speed and attack my hunger rather than
attack the sources of emotional eating."
These strategies circumvent the reality of emotional eating. They
keep the emotional eating habit alive in a rainy-day bank account
in case you need it to cope with the next life stress. Unfortunately,
you can't win as long as you hold the eating remedy in reserve for
difficult times, because reality guarantees that you'll backslide under
stress, throw off that delicate "calories in-calories out" balance, and
put the pounds right back on.
If you want to control your weight for a lifetime, you need to
attack and dismantle your emotional eating habit. There is no way
around this. First you need to cultivate realistic motivations so that
your diet doesn't fall apart. Then you need to follow a realistic strategy
that gets to the roots of your addiction, as the Shrink Yourself sessions will help you to do. Once you have your addiction under
control, you'll be able to practice the habits of people who stay
thin for life. You'll eat rationally, which means you won't deprive
yourself. You won't be hungry. You'll enjoy food. You'll have your
weight under control because you will be eating to fill your
biological stomach, not your phantom stomach. That's the goal I
want to help you reach.

I

EXERCISE

Observe

For the next week, instead of focusing on your diet, just focus on
finding a pause right before you're about to overeat. Ask yourself
what you're feeling. Did something bother you? Where are you
when it happens? What time of day is it, and who are you with at the
time? The more information you can gather about what happens for
you right before you overeat, the better you'll be able to do the exercises
that are to come.

So You're Really Ready to Lose Weight

For anyone who has ever been in a bad relationship--and that's most
of us--you know how hard it is to end the cycle. Your relationship
with food is no different. You think you'll be too alone and empty
without it and that you won't be able to function, but you're wrong.
You've accumulated a lot of good reasons why you don't want to
give up your eating pattern. The smart thing to do is to no longer
deny that you're hesitant or afraid to give up this pattern. Once you
do that, you might be able to begin resolving the issue and shrinking
yourself. Try it, and see if it works for you.
But to do that, you have to think things through, and therein lies
the conflict that we'll start to address in this practical part of the
book.You've probably used food to avoid thinking things through so
many times that you no longer have the confidence that you can face
your feelings and end up better off.
When you don't go deeply into your feelings, you can only think
about the issues on a superficial and unproductive level and that
keeps you stuck, which is the all-too-familiar cause of phantom
hunger. When you no longer use food to stop your feelings, you'll
not only stop being a slave to food, but you will begin to have mastery
over many areas of your life. If you agree that you're ready to ShrinkYourself let's dig in.


SESSION 2

Conquering the
Feeling Phobia

In the first session I helped you with a series of exercises so that
you could begin to catch yourself in the grips of an emotional eating
episode and become familiar enough with it to start observing
yourself with some perspective. Now we want to refine those observations
by identifying the exact feelings that trigger your emotional
eating behavior.
As you learned in part one, emotional eating occurs when you
can't face your feelings. Instead, you stuff the feelings down with
food. As you already know, you have to hone the skills to accept your
feelings, read and interpret what your feelings mean, understand
where they lead, and master the art of controlling and regulating the
intensity of what you feel without being overwhelmed. When you
can do that, you've opened the door to the deeper exploration that
we'll go through together.






In the next two sessions:

	You'll identify your feeling phobia.
	You'll start to develop the skills to understand what you make
your feelings mean, how you misinterpret things, how you
form catastrophe predictions, and what your powerlessness
conclusions are.

	You'll identify the benefits of being in the food trance, the
escape it gives you, and the pleasure it provides.
	You'll examine what it costs you to retreat into the food trance
instead of facing your feelings, especially the fact that it keeps
you from solving the problems that need to be solved.
	You'll identify the other ways you can get a time-out when
feelings become too intense.

	You'll learn to master the feeling phobia and food trance, and
then you'll be ready to understand the deeper issues that
make you feel powerless.
Four Kinds of Feeling Triggers

There are four different kinds of events that trigger the feelings that
make people overeat. Use the lists below to identify the set of feelings
that trigger your phantom hunger and uncontrollable urges to
eat. You'll be asked first to identify your feelings, and then asked how
your feelings relate to your overeating patterns.

EXERCISE

Feeling Trigger #1. Feelings
Triggered by Events

Emotionally difficult events trigger uncomfortable feelings. These
feelings can be clearly linked to something that happens, whereas
other feelings come from relationship friction or are just there.
Below, you'll find a list of potentially volatile events that might
activate your feeling phobia. Review the list, checking off any events
that have triggered your emotional hunger in the past few months.


List the event and then describe the uncomfortable feelings you
had: the ones that made you feel compelled to interrupt the feeling
by overeating. We'll call anything that triggers an emotional eating
episode a "sore spot."

There's stress or dissatisfaction at work.

I am not focused on something or there's a lull in my day.
I feel challenged or pressured.

The stresses of my life seem totally overwhelming.
There's a lull at work.
I have a free moment at home.
I'm dealing with bills or financial problems.
I have to work too long without stopping.
I'm watching television.
I am driving.
I am in a meeting.
I am with my family.
I am in a room full of people.
I am working.
It's cloudy or raining.
I'm under pressure.
I have to take care of someone.
I am alone for too long.

I am forced to be in a room that I find uncomfortable.

I have to do something new.

I'm ready to go to bed.

Demands are made by my children or family.
I have a sick parent.
I have an unsympathetic spouse.
I have financial burdens (mortgages or taxes).

Example: "When I'm dealing with my sick parent, it makes me
feel exhausted. After getting back from the hospital, I can't stop
myself from bingeing."

EXERCISE

Feeling Trigger #2: Feelings
Triggered by a Person

Uncomfortable feelings come most frequently from friction in relationships.
Use the list below to identify what has happened to you
recently to trigger an overeating episode by completing the statement
below. With whom did you have this friction, and what did you
feel? Go through the list and check off the three most relevant sore

spots.
"I get set off and want to overeat when someone	."
betrays me

smothers me
deprives me of material things
takes their anger out on me
neglects me

competes with me
ridicules me
treats me like a child
threatens me
rebels against me
lies to me

criticizes me
misunderstands me
judges me
manipulates me
accuses me
ignores me
embarrasses me
discourages me
compares me to others
withdraws love from me
invades my privacy
doesn't trust me	pressures me
underestimates me	takes me for granted

opposes me	clings to me

expects me to be perfect	scolds me
wants me to feel guilty	excludes me
overprotects me
doesn't respect me
blames me
overindulges me
scapegoats me
disappoints me

talks down to me
intimidates me
is unfaithful to me
overpowers me
insults me
insists on their way

Take the three sore spots you chose and write down how each i makes you feel initially and what it provokes in you that makes you
want to eat.
Example: "When I feel rejected by my boyfriend, it makes me
feel angry as well as jealous of my sister, who is happily married, 
That combination of jealousy and anger makes me eat."	?

Feeling Trigger #3: Feelings Triggered
by Unprovoked Feelings

Another set of feelings might arise in the aftermath of events and
friction in relationships, rather than at the time of the occurrence.
You might become aware of these feelings during an interlude from
your daily activities. These feelings are the result of your brain trying
to understand what is happening in your life and making assessments
of where you are and what is real or not real.
Look at the list below. This is a list of feelings rather than events or
people that trigger feelings. You might need to ponder some to determine
just what set off these feelings--that's the point of this exercise.
Review this list to pinpoint some of the feelings that are likely to
trigger your strong desire to eat something quickly. Try to tie the emotion
to the time and circumstance during which this feeling occurs.
Example: "Sometimes late at night when no one is around, I
feel lonely and have to eat something."
jealous
lonely
bored
ashamed

depressed
frustrated

anxious
humiliated
needy
angry
uncomfortable
empty
overwhelmed
guilty
scared
afraid
confused
EXERCISE

Feeling Trigger #4: Feelings
Triggered by Self-Doubts

As you know from part one, each of us has particular vulnerabilities
that trigger our worst thoughts about ourselves. This fourth set of
feelings is a special category, and we'll be working with it throughout
the entire program of Shrink Yourself. You'll recognize it as the
first layer of powerlessness: the self-doubt layer. Here all you need
to do is identify which of the self-doubt labels listed below you tend
to give yourself when you are your own worst, most unforgiving,
and harshest critic. This is everyone's weak spot, and is one of the
main factors that keeps the feeling phobia alive.
Use this list to identify the three most relevant self-doubt triggers
that drive your urge to eat.
"I find I need to eat when I believe I'm	."
powerless
unlovable
hopeless
self-destructive
untrustworthy
inferior
mean and cruel
unworthy
disobedient
defective or damaged in
some way
not a whole person

childish
totally lacking warmth or
tenderness

lacking courage or strength

lacking talent or abiltiy
lacking what it takes to deal
with people
unable to live up to reasonable
expectations
unable to make or keep a
commitment

dependent

stupid
helpless
self-centered
too meek
not feminine enough
bad
not masculine enough
alone
not self-sufficient
boring
weak
other

Example: "I find I need to eat when I believe I'm unlovable. In
those moments I go to the kitchen and eat whatever I can find."

Now you've identified feelings that trigger your emotional eating in
each of these four categories. These are the four different ways that an
emotional eating episode begins. Don't worry about the overlaps that
inevitably happen in real life. We chose these four categories so it'll be
easier to analyze why you have to run away from these feelings.

Identify Your Catastrophe Predictions

As we pointed out in part one, it's the catastrophe predictions that
we make when we feel something (angry hurt, rejected) that make
the feelings seem impossible to bear, which of course creates the
feeling phobia. The catastrophe predictions the feelings evoke leave
us overwhelmed. We say things to ourselves like: "When I am criticized
I feel like I will'explode/'evaporate/'disintegrate/ or not be
able to handle the emotion in some other way." "When I feel
betrayed I feel like I'll never be able to trust anyone again."
These catastrophe predictions are not necessarily accurate, but
you need to prove that to yourself by using the following lists to connect
the feelings you have identified to the catastrophe predictions
you're making. It's your turn to see how you're turning your feelings
into catastrophe predictions. We'll do this for all four types of feelings
discussed above.

EXERCISE

Catastrophe Prediction #1: Catastrophe
Predictions for Feelings Triggered by Events

The reason people are afraid to stick with these feelings has mostly
to do with being overwhelmed or flooded. No matter which events
or feelings you wrote down, see if one of the following fears is lurking
in the back of your mind.

It's just too much for me to handle; I'll fall apart.
This is just the beginning of a deluge of problems that will
swamp me.
This is a sign that my life is going to fall apart.
I am being tested and I am going to fail.
If this keeps up, I will just give up and curl up into a ball.
I give up; it's just too much stress.
I have to run away as fast as I can.

Take the example that you wrote for this category and tack on
one of the lines above.
Example: "When I'm dealing with my sick parent, it makes me
feel exhausted. On the drive home from the hospital I start to think
that it's just too much for me to handle and that I'll fall apart. When I get
home, I can't stop myself from bingeing."

EXERCISE

Catastrophe Prediction #2: Catastrophe Predictions
for Feelings Triggered by Relationships

This is the same exercise as above. We'll be repeating it for each of
the types of feelings and the catastrophe predictions that you create for
each. The catastrophe predictions that accompany the feelings triggered
by relationship friction have to do with the outcome of that relationship.
Here is a list of predictions. Ask yourself which one of these
catastrophe predictions you wanted to or needed to banish with food.
"Because of what happened and the way I felt, I was afraid that
unless I interrupted or got rid of my feelings	"

I would lash out in anger.
I would burst out in tears.
I would say or do something I would regret.
I would melt into a puddle.
I would feel guilty forever.
I would never trust again.
I would lose the relationship.
I would quit or be fired.

I would hurt or damage the person beyond repair.
I would never forgive myself.

Example: "When I feel rejected by my boyfriend, it makes me ; feel angry as well as jealous of my sister, who is happily married. I'm afraid I'll lash out in anger at my sister. That combination of
jealousy and anger is what makes me eat. I eat so angry words don't
come out."

EXERCISE

Catastrophe Prediction #3: Catastrophe Predictions
Triggered by Unprovoked Feelings

Now we want to look at the catastrophe predictions that create a
panic mode in those feelings that may not be directly or immediately
linked to a specific event or a specific relationship. These are brought  about by your unprovoked feelings.
These are the feelings that come up unsolicited and often
unwanted, when there are some quiet or alone moments in the car,
or at home, or in between tasks at work. They may be hard to grasp
at first but grow in intensity and can easily be converted into phantom
hunger before you're fully aware of what you're feeling. You have
already made a list of these feelings. It's now time for you to explore
the catastrophe predictions that frighten you so much you're afraid to
feel fully. Some of these unprovoked emotions could be anger or
sadness or loneliness, which are all normal feelings, but become
problematic when they lead to the catastrophe predictions below and
then become too intense to handle. Here is an example. Use your
personal experience and choose your own ending.
I'm not as good as I want to be and there's nothing I can do
about it.
It'll last forever unless I can figure out a way to get rid of it
quickly.
It'll lead to despair or the inability to do anything if I don't stop
it quickly.
I'll "explode," "evaporate," "disintegrate," or not be able to handle
the emotion in some other way.
My life is ruined. I have screwed up.
I'll never be able to trust anyone again.
I'll never be able to do anything right or ever be successful.
My mind will just stop working and my thinking will never be
clear.
There's an endless ocean of tears inside me that will start
flowing and never stop.
I'll never be able to make a decision again.


Example: Sometimes late at night when no one is around, I feel
lonely. I believe there is an endless ocean of tears inside me that will
start flowing and never stop. When I have that thought, I have to eat
something.

EXERCISE

Catastrophe Prediction #4: Catastrophe
Predictions Triggered by Self-Doubts

Let's become acquainted with your catastrophe predictions related
to your self-doubt labels. Look at the label, and the next time you're
feeling one of these ways about yourself and tempted to eat rather
than debate yourself about the issue, see if you are thinking one of these false statements about yourself. If you believe the catastrophe
predictions, you have to conclude that you're hopeless and powerless
to change. If you question them, you can change all of that.
This is the real me I have been hiding.
If this is what I am, then there is no hope.
This means I am a damaged person and no one will want me.
This makes me unloveable.

This is the reason I have to hide from the world.
There is no fixing this.

A person like this doesn't deserve anything.
Example: I find I need to eat when I believe I'm unloveable. In
that moment I believe that if that's what I am, then there's no hope. In
those moments I go to the kitchen and eat whatever I can find.

Your Catastrophe Predictions

Now you have to convince yourself that these catastrophe predictions
won't really happen. These false predictions are the tipping
point between fear, and comfortable understanding, of your feelings.
If you don't examine these thoughts embedded in your feelings
(the catastrophe predictions), you'll continue to run away from your
feelings because you still believe that something terrible is about to
happen. If you examine these catastrophe predictions, you'll learn |
that nothing terrible is going to happen, which means you'll be able '}
to handle adverse events much better in the future without having "
to interrupt your feelings with food.
Here's what happens: Something occurs. You start to feel
intensely about it, and then go into a panic mode, thinking something
terrible is going to happen (like you're going to fall apart or
run away). These are images in your mind. These are predictions that
make you so afraid that you want to stuff something in your mouth >

immediately because the act of doing so interrupts the horrible feeling
Every time you interrupt the feeling because you're afraid of the
catastrophe prediction that accompanies it, you reinforce your fear.
This is the vicious cycle that prevents you from learning a better way
of dealing with your intense feelings.
You have to demonstrate to yourself that you can quiet your own
mind, that you can rise above the moment to get a perspective on
yourself and see that you have other options besides eating. You
have within yourself a mature response to handling the stressors in
life with wisdom. If you can prove to yourself that intense feelings
aren't going to destroy you, then you won't panic every time you
begin to feel something.

EXERCISE

Reinterpreting Your Catastrophe
Predictions: A Reality Check

If you master the catastrophe predictions in all four types of feelings,
you'll get rid of your feeling phobia. Then you'll be free to feel your
feelings, sort them out, and analyze them. That opens the door to
your interior life, which will lead to a better understanding of yourself
and of the world you live in. Your feelings can resume their part
of your own natural flow of information, and you'll make better and
wiser decisions in how you conduct your life, and better responses
to specific people and specific situations. But even more immediately,
it will allow you to analyze and reverse the powerlessness that
drives you to food.
It's food that keeps these catastrophe predictions reinforced and
intact because you use food to banish your fears.You need to observe
and learn for yourself that these false predictions, if you stay with
and understand them, are actually useless and vacant ideas that you
can easily discard.
Let's take the examples we've worked with so far in this chapter,
and see how being aware of the catastrophe prediction will make it
easier to avoid food. Note that the catastrophe predictions are in italic.

Powerless Choice #1

When I'm dealing with my sick parent it makes me feel exhausted. ¦ On the drive home from the hospital I start to think that it's just too'
much for me to handle and that I'll fall apart. When I get home, I can't;
stop myself from bingeing.

Powerful Reinterpretation I stop and analyze my catastrophe prediction.
I realize that it is a lot for me to handle right now, but it's not
going to be this way forever. When I'm able to do that, the urge to
eat decreases.

Powerless Choice #2

When I feel rejected by my boyfriend, it makes me feel angry as well
as jealous of my sister, who is happily married. I'm afraid I'll lash out
in anger at my sister. That combination of jealousy and anger is what
makes me eat. I eat so angry words don't come out of my mouth.

Powerful Reinterpretation When I stop and look at my catastrophe
prediction, I realize that my relationship with my boyfriend has
nothing to do with my sister. Once I realize that I'm still angry but
don't have to be afraid of lashing out at my sister because of my own
problems, I don't need food. I can think of other things to do with
my angry feelings.

Powerless Choice #3

Sometimes late at night when no one is around, I feel lonely. / believe
there is an endless ocean of tears inside me that will start flowing and
never stop. When I have that thought I have to eat something.

Powerful Reinterpretation I stop and look at my catastrophe prediction
and realize that anytime I've cried in the past, I usually feel better
once the tears stop. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to have a good
cry and realize that being home alone is in fact hard.

powerless Choice #4

I find I need to eat when I believe I'm unloveable. In that moment I
believe that if that's what I am, then there's no hope. In those moments
I go to the kitchen and eat whatever I can find.

powerful Reinterpretation If I stop and look at my catastrophe prediction,
I can see that I'm feeling unloveable, but I'm not really
unloveable. It's not who I've always been and it's not who I'm going
to always be. Maybe there's something else I can do right now to
remind myself that I'm not really unloveable.

By the examples above perhaps you can see how looking at your
catastrophe predictions in a fair and analytical way can weaken your
urgent need to overeat.


SESSION 3

Waking Up from
the Food Trance

Food provides you a way to feel better, at least temporarily. People
report that they eat when they're sad, angry, bored, or lonely; it
doesn't really matter what the feeling is, because having intense 
feelings is uncomfortable. When you're in a place where you're
afraid of or uncomfortable with your feelings, you stuff food in to
banish and control them. There is a spiritual and emotional emptiness
that you've been trying to fill with food. Using food this way
becomes problematic when it becomes the only source of comfort,
the only way to cope with stress or feelings, the only reward you
have to give yourself, the only place where you're loved. Food can
never replace real love or fulfillment. We all do this occasionally, but
if you're reading this book food has probably become your primary
mechanism for dealing with feelings and emptiness. You've learned
that food is the thing that can help you escape reality and temporarily
enter a zone where for a few moments you actually have the illusion
of well-being. That's the essence of the food trance I described
in chapter 2: "While I'm eating nothing can harm me, I feel safe, like
I'm in a bubble." What food actually provides is this: when you eat
to banish an uncomfortable feeling, you're interrupting the feeling.
And when you enter the food trance, you're replacing the feeling
with the temporary bliss that the food trance provides. The food
trance is the other side of the feeling phobia coin. Interrupting your
feelings with food is the feeling phobia; the bliss that food provides
to replace the pain of bad feelings is the food trance.

Starting Point: How to Work with Your Sore Spots

In the last chapter, you looked at events, people, feelings, and self
doubts that triggered you to overeat. We're calling these your sore
spots. I'd like you to take two or three of them and work with them
in the exercises below. Write them down in your notebook.

EXERCISE

The Escape That the Food Trance Provides

Example: "When I'm at work (event sore spot), I feel bored (feeling).
I believe I'll never get a job that satisfies me (catastrophe prediction).
I want to eat something quickly (feeling phobia), so I go to
the vending machine and get a bag of chips. While I'm eating, a
rational calmness comes over me (food trance)."
"While I'm eating to escape the intensity of my negative feelings,
I feel	.	"

a rational calmness
like I'm in a drug fog
like I'm in a place to feel good
like I have time with a friend who is always there for me
like I have a reminder of a time with my mother
like I'm in a safe bubble where no harm can touch me
like I'm in a place where there are no demands or expectations
like I'm in a place where I'm loved the way my parents never
loved me
like I'm in a place where I'm trying to be perfect
like I have a complete change of focus away from the real world'
like I'm in a place where no one can reach me

EXERCISE

Words That Describe the Rewards
of Being in the Food Trance
rewarded
in control
confident
safe
secure
numb
satisfied

"When I'm in the food trance, I feel

capable
complete
comfortable
nurtured

happy

free

content
relaxed
calm
powerful
independent
pleasured

completely focused on the tastes

When you make your observations, try to capture the unique
experience of being in a food trance as we described it in chapter 2.
The list above is just words on paper. The real phenomenon is a state
of mind, a bubble of well-being, a time-out--a disconnect from reality.
Try to capture that and put it into your own words if you can.
Include selections from the list above to get you started. Being able
to switch to a new state of mind is a very powerful motive to continue
your emotional eating pattern, so get to know your seductress
as well as you can.

EXERCISE

Understanding the Vicious Cycle

There are short- and long-term ways that the food trance hurts you.
The short-term ways are perhaps more obvious: overeating in order
to go into the food trance makes you gain weight and feel guilty, and
means you can never control your weight.
I've asked you to observe yourself in several ways so far: observe
the feelings that trigger your compulsion to overeat, the catastrophe
predictions that keep your feeling phobia intact, and the reward you
give yourself temporarily in the form of a food trance. We can now
add the way you punish yourself after a binge.
Here's what that looks like when it is all put together in one picture:
"When I'm feeling betrayed (trigger), I feel like I'll never have
anyone who loves me in my life (catastrophe prediction). I sit down
with a pint of ice cream (feeling phobia) and for the few moments that
it takes to eat it, I am in a bubble (food trance). I don't feel unworthiness.
I just concentrate on the creamy sweetness of the food. But when
it's done, I no longer just feel betrayed, but now I hate myself for being
so weak (cost of the food trance). How could anyone be true to someone
as weak as me (eating actually confirms original trigger)?"
Now put your own statement together so you can understand
how the combination of your feelings and catastrophe predictions
incite you to eat because you want to replace those uncomfortable
feelings with the good feelings of the food trance. Use the example
above to add what happens to you after the food trance. Do you feel
disgust, guilt, self-hatred, or disappointment? This should illustrate
how destructive the vicious cycle of overeating is to your emotional
well-being. The short-term cost of the food trance is that you feel
guilty, but the long-term cost is that it stops you from being able to
grow as a person.

See What You're Trying to Escape

Remember that the feeling phobia and the food trance are two parts
of the same strategy: to run away from, rather than learn from,
what's going on inside you. Here are some of the things you are trying
to escape from:

1. Events and Stressors: Real-Life Issues
The food trance is just another way to delay dealing with the
frictions of life that are creating all the feelings you're trying
to run away from.

2.	Real-Life Relationship Tension The food trance is just another way to delay dealing with the
real issues in your relationships that are creating all the feelings
you're trying to run away from.
3.	Intensity of Feelings
Being in the food trance gives you a replacement feeling for
the panic feeling of your catastrophic predictions. The food
trance is a way to dial down the intensity of a feeling.
4.	Self-Doubts	1
The food trance is a way to deal with self-doubts because the 1
idea of facing your self-doubts is so overwhelming and you 
don't yet know how to deal with them.

Alternatives to Escaping
into the Food Trance

Although the food trance exerts a powerful pull that's hard to resist
when emotions assail you, you're hardly helpless. You don't have to
keep repeating the overeating pattern that has you entrapped. From
now on, your work will be to figure out alternatives to the emotional
eating pattern. You'll see that:

1. You can address the offending situation directly. If a problem
arises at work, for instance, you can talk to your boss instead of
eating, you can quit, you can ask for a transfer, you can resolve to
try harder--you have options other than hitting the vending
machine. Or if your spouse disappoints you, you can talk it over,
you can get counseling, you can move out, you can recognize
your own contribution to the difficulty. One thing's for sure:
overeating won't rescue you from any problem on this earth.
2. You can examine what you need to do in the real world to get
your needs met in a substantial way. You've been using food to
achieve the happy feeling states you identified a few pages
back--eating to make yourself feel contented, safe, or whatever.
You can achieve those same emotional states without food if you
do the work to figure out how.
3 You can battle with your inner critic to prevent self-lacerating
verdicts about yourself from holding sway over your life.
4. You can engage in concrete activities other than eating to
relieve emotional intensity--activities far more healthful than
overindulgence.

The first three options above require more work. We'll deal with
those in later sessions. Right now we're going to start with the
fourth option by identifying strategies that will help you continue
your journey without resorting to binges. These represent the
choices that everyone else uses to deal with the stressors of life if
food has not become their source of comfort. The choices below will
give you a time-out so that the intensity of the feeling can lessen a
bit and you can think more clearly.
Begin by keeping in mind the three sore spots you selected, then
identify a series of specific techniques you can use to relieve emotional
pressure before you find your face in a bag of chips.

Choose Your Interventions

Please choose three techniques from each category so you'll have an
arsenal of strategies at your command to use whenever intense and
frightening emotions wash over you. Then you can choose to intervene
before succumbing to your cravings, and you'll never again be
able to say to yourself, "What else could I do?" These are the choices
that you'll use when you feel sore spots that trigger you to eat.

EXERCISE

How to Dial Down the Intensity of Your Feelings

The goal is to create a mental space so that you have the time to sort
out, think, make reinterpretations, and get a new perspective. Then
you can disprove your catastrophe predictions, and that will open
the door to your interior life. The following things are not difficult to
do. In fact, many people who don't struggle with their weight do
these things effortlessly. It's just that, for you, you've come to believe
that food is the most effective way to dial down the intensity of your
feelings.

Relaxation

Select three relaxation strategies from the list.
"To deal with intense feelings without food, I can relax. More
specifically, I can	."

practice deep breathing
practice meditation
take a long hot bath
get a massage
use tension-releasing techniques
use biofeedback techniques
use aromatherapy
take a sauna or a steambath
practice visualization techniques
listen to relaxation tapes
listen to soothing music
spend time in nature
spend time reading
spend time with pets
just hang out and do nothing
go for a walk
watch television or a movie
take a nap
other	(specify)

Have More Fun

Select three fun strategies from the list.
"To deal with my intense feelings without food, I can have more
fun. More specifically, I can	."

go to a museum or art gallery
attend a concert, the symphony, or the opera
browse in a bookstore or library
go to the theater
listen to music
attend or watch a sporting event

go to the movies
play a game or cards, or do a puzzle

go shopping
participate in spiritual activities
attend a lecture or seminar
call a good friend
surf the Internet
go on a walk

plan my next vacation

other	(specify)

Be More Active

Select three action strategies from the list.
"To deal with my intense feelings without food, I can be more
active. More specifically, I can	."

go running or jogging
take a bike ride
practice yoga
do Pilates
go to the gym
lift weights
work in my garden
go for a walk
play golf
play tennis
. participate in other sports
go backpacking, hiking, or camping
practice martial arts
go hunting or fishing
clean the house
other	(specify)

Keep Your Perspective

Select three perspective strategies from the list.
"To deal with my intense feelings without food, I can learn to
keep my perspective. More specifically, I can	."

remember a time when I was feeling good
remember what I have to be thankful for
make a plan
remember that I won't always feel this way
remind myself of the people who love or care about me
keep in mind that my life is not as out of control as I think it is

remind myself that my life is not as meaningless as it might 
feel
let go and remind myself I don't have to control everything
remind myself that what I fear won't necessarily happen
try to help people who are less fortunate than myself
other	(specify)

Please record all the strategies you identified in your notebook,
and then create a visually appealing list of these strategies to hang
on your refrigerator or above your desk. Each time you're faced with
an emotional trigger, you will choose one of the corresponding
alternatives and then observe what happens to your hunger. It's
okay if you don't avoid eating every time at first.
As you can see, you have a wide array of options other than eating
to make yourself feel better. Of course you already knew these
strategies, but having them organized in writing may open your eyes
to the fact that you can do things other than run to the nearest
supermarket when trouble gets you down. The fact that you turn to
food before using one of these other strategies indicates that either
you don't know how to do something else besides eat, you don't
believe that something else will work, or you're afraid to try.
Bringing these alternatives to your conscious attention should help
you to remember them in the heat of emotional episodes.
Although your impulse still might be to grab a chocolate bar
because it's convenient, quick, and immediately gratifying compared
to most of the strategies on the list, now you'll know that you
can make another choice, and I hope that's what you'll do. After
all, the chocolate is gone in a flash and then you're running on
empty again.
Remember, you now have two powerful ways to deal with negative
feelings other than to binge. First, when catastrophic images
arise, you can remember that they are just fears, they are not real,
and act accordingly instead of panicking and preparing for the
worst. And you can apply strategies from the list you just compiled
of mood-controlling actions.
Each time you choose to eat when you're faced with feelings you
fear, you'll reinforce your feeling phobia and catastrophe predictions.
Each time you use a nonfood way to deal with problems and
feelings, you cut the link to using food as a tranquilizer, you get
stronger and more powerful, and that's our goal. When you have
chosen alternatives to food enough times, your confidence will
grow, and food will no longer be the obvious or only choice for how
to deal with life.
Deal with Your Feelings without Food

Let's take the examples from the feeling phobia session and see how
we can apply the things we learned about the food trance to them:

Powerless Choice #1

When I'm dealing with my sick parent, it makes me feel exhausted.
" On the drive home from the hospital I start to think that it's just too
much for me to handle and that I'll fall apart. When I get home, I can't
stop myself from bingeing. For a few moments while I'm raiding the
refrigerator I forget about the doctor's bills and all the things I need
to do. I feel safe and calm, but when the food's gone I not only feel
exhausted, I feel disgusted with myself.

Powerful Reinterpretation When I get home, I draw a bath for myself
and call a friend. My friend reminds me that it's not always going to
be this way. The bath relaxes me, and I get a good night's sleep.
When I wake up I feel better equipped to go back to the hospital.

Powerless Choice #2

When I feel rejected by my boyfriend, it makes me feel angry as well
as jealous of my sister, who is happily married. I'm afraid I'll lash out
in anger at my sister. That combination of jealousy and anger is what
makes me eat. I eat so angry words don't come out. I stuff as much
food in as possible, and while I'm stuffing I just focus on getting as
much food in as fast as I can. While I'm doing this everything else
fades away. But when I've eaten everything I can get my hands on
and there isn't anything more, I hate myself and think that it's no
wonder I don't have a husband like my sister.

Powerful Reinterpretation When I stop and keep my perspective,
I'm able to see that my sister wants me to have a marriage that's as
happy as hers. When I remember that she's on my side, I'm not too
angry to call her, and she helps me sort out how to talk to my
boyfriend.

powerless Choice #3

Sometimes late at night when no one is around, I feel lonely. I believe
there is an endless ocean of tears inside me that will start flowing and
never stop. When I have that thought I have to eat something. It
doesn't matter what time of night it is, I'll go out to 7-Eleven and
buy tons of treats and eat them all. Then I feel so disappointed with
myself.

Powerful Reinterpretation When I feel this way I go to Blockbuster
and get the sappiest movie I can find. I come home and watch it and
let myself cry, and by the time the movie is over, so are the tears, and
I actually feel better.

Powerless Choice #4

I find I need to eat when I believe I'm unloveable. In that moment I
believe that if that's what I am, then there's no hope. In those moments
I go to the kitchen and eat whatever I can find. Then, when I stop
eating, I feel so angry at myself and I can understand why no one
could ever love someone with so little self-control.

Powerful Reinterpretation I stop and put my sneakers on. I go for a
jog, and while I'm running I remember that I only feel unloveable
but there are a lot of great things about me, one of them being that
even with my extra weight, I can run a solid two miles.

Now that you've exposed and explored your feeling phobia and
you've admitted how pleasurable being in the food trance can be,
you've reached the goal of these last two sessions and you're ready to
look within. With those new eyes, you'll be able to explore the five
levels of powerlessness that have been fueling your phantom hunger.


SESSION 4

Challenging Your
Self-Doubts

In this session:

You'll see that you have self-doubts. Some are triggered by
others, some are unprovoked.

You'll identify the armor you wear to protect yourself from
self-doubts.

You'll make a reinterpretation that you're in fact powerful in
order to deal with your self-doubts.

You'll learn to dialogue with the six accusations that Harriet
makes against you.

You'll understand that you have two methods of mastering
your self-doubts:

1.	You can diminish what's there now by talking back to your nagging critical conscience.

2.	You can stop adding to your load of doubt by catching yourself when you misinterpret a situation to mean there's
something wrong with you.
Talk Back to Your Inner Critic

Your self-doubts derive from a history that should be put to rest as
you grow up and change. But when you block that from happening
by overeating, Harriet pushes play, and the old tape keeps running
and is reinforced, harping about the same old shortcomings you suffered
from at age five or ten or fifteen, except that the voice is no
longer a critical parent or teacher, the voice is your own and lives
inside you. I'm not saying that you've become perfect, by any means,
but I'm willing to bet that most of the deep-seated negative attitudes
you have about yourself are exaggerated. We know that these
self-doubts are the first interior destination of powerlessness that
you fear, and as long as you're afraid to face them, you'll continue to
be addicted to escaping into your feeling phobia and food trance.
Therefore, it's critically important that you look at, rather than away
from, your self-doubts.
You need to make a good assessment of yourself, discover the
truth, and figure out what to do, other than eat pizza, when the self
doubt music plays. In this session we'll start this critical work (work
that all successful, fulfilled human beings must do) and we'll confront
your inner critic.

Listen to and analyze what your critical self is saying. You can;
talk back only if you listen first.

Learn new ways to effectively talk back to the six accusations
Harriet makes.

If you're not perfect, you're deeply flawed.
You're trying to cover up and deny your real faults.
You're a phony.

You're a pretend adult and don't deserve the full rights of
adulthood.

You know the good stuff about you isn't real.
Everybody knows what you're hiding.

Learn how to stop reinforcing the powerlessness conclusion
that something is wrong with you.

When you tell someone that their hair looks great, they usually
don't say "Thank you," they usually say "Really? But it's dirty" or
"No, it doesn't." People desperately want to be validated, seen,
known, appreciated, and acknowledged, yet they're so eager to
convince you of what's wrong with them. Harriet has whole lists of
criticisms that she waits to deploy in your direction the minute life
doesn't go your way. So I'd like to give you the opportunity to tell us
what's really wrong with you. You might be saying, "Wait, this book
is supposed to help me with my self-esteem, not convince me of all
the horrible things I already believe about myself." Well, I once
heard a comedienne say, "You know how when you tell someone
you don't like them, you kind of start to like them a little bit." If you
can be up front and almost have a sense of humor about what you
don't like about yourself, you'll come out of hiding and those self
doubts will get less frightening.

EXERCISE

What's Wrong with You?

Here is the same list of self-doubts you looked at in Session 2. These
are the things that Harriet calls you. Select the ones you identify with.

i

"I think JI'm


defenseless
unloveable
hopeless
untrustworthy
inferior
mean
cruel
unworthy
disobedient
defective
damaged
incomplete

stupid
self-centered
unfeminine
unmasculine

not self-sufficient

childish
coldhearted
cowardly
talentless
incapable
unreliable
too dependent
helpless
too meek
bad
totally alone
boring
weak
pathetic

Now, let's make them specific. That's where you'll really see how
cruel you let Harriet be to you. Write a narrative around your self
doubt label. Here's a couple of examples.

James, thirty-nine, is a musician. He's had dreams of being a rock
star for twenty years. In addition to his regular gigs, which don't
make him much money, he has started to play music for children in
a preschool. He still depends on his mother to give him $1,000 a
month to meet his expenses. Harriet tells him, "You're pathetic."
Whenever he goes to family functions, he doesn't connect with his
brothers or brothers-in-law, who are all younger but able to support
themselves, so he barely participates in any conversations. Instead,
he plays with the kids in the yard and ends up hiding out at the
dessert table. Stuffing himself with sweets makes him feel even
more pathetic.


Dora, a fifty-six-year-old woman whose children are grown and live
scattered throughout the country, has no job and no real interests of
her own. Harriet convinces her that she's all alone and boring. She
wouldn't dare put expectations on her children, but she doesn't
know how to go out and meet new people on her own. Most days
she sits at home with her disabled husband, retreats into books, and 
has an all-day grazing session. Harriet's right: she's virtually all 
alone and she is boring.

Defend Yourself against
Harriet s Accusations

The question "What's wrong with you?" deals with the first two
accusations Harriet makes against you.

Accusation #1: If you're not perfect, you're deeply flawed.
Accusation #2: You're trying to cover up and deny your real
faults.

If you've identified a self-doubt you want to work on today and
have marshaled all the evidence you can to prove to the invisible jury
that you're guilty as charged, then you're ready to take over the
defense's side. Here you'll practice ways to talk back to Harriet, the
prosecutor.

Let's see what James and Dora could've said back to Harriet
when she called them names.

Defense to Accusation #1: If you're
not perfect, you're deeply flawed

When Harriet tells you you're not perfect and therefore you're
deeply flawed, you don't have to accept it, you can talk back to her.
You could say one of the following things:

	It's okay to have limitations.

	I can't expect to know everything.


	I can't control every situation.
	I can't expect to perfectly control myself.
	Not everyone can love me the way I want to be loved.

	I can't expect to perform perfectly.
	No one is perfect.
	Just because I can't do something right doesn't mean I can't do
anything right.
	Just because I made mistakes in the past doesn't mean I won't
do things better in the future. It's okay to have limitations.

We all have flaws. No matter how much it might seem so from
the outside, no one is perfect.
James, for example, could have a conversation with Harriet. Let's
see what that might look like.

Harriet: You're pathetic taking money from your mother at
thirty-nine. When are you going to grow up?

James: You're right. I wish I didn't need to take money from her.
But i'm a late bloomer and just because I can't do something
right (support myself fully) doesn't mean I can't do anything
right. I'm creating new work opportunities for myself every day.

Harriet: Who are you kidding? When are you going to grow up?

James: This year, i'm taking half the money I took from her last
year. Maybe, at this rate, by next year I'll barely need any money
from her at all.

Harriet: You'll still have to be ashamed of all the years you did
take money from her.

James: You know what, Harriet, I'm just going to accept that my
path looks different than my brothers'and my brothers-in-law's.
i'm not going to feel bad about it anymore. I'm going to keep
working hard and let my mother know how much I appreciate
the support she's been giving me. I really believe I won't need it
for much longer.


James finds that when he simply accepts his situation and is 
grateful to his mother, he no longer needs to be sheepish at family 
functions. He can actually participate with the adults and engage in 
conversation. He discovers that when he's doing that, he forgets all 
about the dessert table.
Take your self-doubt from the list on page 199. If it falls into a
category where Harriet is convincing you that because you're not
perfect, you're deeply flawed, then have a dialogue with her like
James did above.

Defense to Accusation #2: You're trying
to cover up and deny your real faults

It is rewarding to find someone you like, but it is essential to like
yourself. It is quickening to recognize that someone is a good and
decent human being, but it is indispensable to view yourself as
acceptable. It is a delight to discover people who are worthy of
respect and admiration and love, but it is vital to believe yourself
deserving of these things.--Jo Coudert

Remember the catastrophe predictions that perpetuated the feeling
phobia? Those messages made you fear your own emotions as if
they were huge, destructive forces that could destroy you and other
people, instead of recognizing them as important communications
that deserved to be heeded. You might have a similar fear of your
own faults. You might be scared to death about admitting any faults,
worrying that they indicate some awful, huge, shameful truth about
you. This attitude is just plain wrong, harsh, and even silly, and it
paralyzes you needlessly.
Every human on earth has faults. The task of growing up means
that you need to accept this and understand that you are, in fact,
an imperfect human being figuring it out as you go along--just
like everyone else. That's the life cycle perspective versus the childhood
perspective. The life cycle perspective assumes that you're an
adult navigating through a complex and sometimes dangerous
world, a person who has to be alert and adaptive, and who must
continue to learn in order to flourish. The childhood perspective
clings to the vestiges of an illusion that you can measure your
behavior by a simple formula, a formula learned in childhood and
endowed with the authority of parents who know best. This formula
can't be questioned because dropping it means losing the
security provided by believing in the illusion of one right authority who has the virtue of being familiar and known, no matter how
harsh that authority is.
To recover from childhood, you need to stop automatically
believing Harriet, accepting when Harriet accuses you that the
accusation is either all right or all wrong. You need to develop
discrimination and free your ability to think creatively for yourself, to
think about truth and degrees, rather than pronouncements and
absolutes. These abilities come as the result of a lot of wrestling with
Harriet. You need to have ongoing, multilevel dialogues with her in
order to see your problems in perspective and to empower yourself
to do something other than accepting a first-round verdict without
sifting through the evidence and granting yourself proper appeals. If
every therapist accepted all the horrible things that their patients
were saying about themselves as truth, they would never make any
progress.You must be your own therapist and figure out what part of
the story Harriet is leaving out. What could Dora have told Harriet
when Harriet accused her of being all alone and boring?

Harriet: Dora, you're all alone and boring. Your kids have all
moved away. They don't want to be around you.

Dora: Just because they don't live around me doesn't mean
they don't love me. I did a good job raising them, and now
they're confident enough to be on their own.

Harriet: But you're boring. You don't do anything all day except
read mystery novels and play Sudoku.

Dora: You're right. I have been sitting around just passing time.
It doesn't mean I'm boring, though. I've just forgotten who I am
now that i'm not so busy taking care of the kids. I was actually a
really great mother, I did a lot of creative things with the kids,
and I bet I could apply those things to my own life now By the
way, Harriet, thanks for pointing out that I haven't been using!
my talents as well as I could be. By the way, can you play 
Sudoku? It's really quite challenging.

Once Dora has admitted that the fault Harriet pointed out 
actually has some truth to it, Harriet is left speechless. When you have]
your dialogue with Harriet, you are representing the real world of 
today while she is representing the world of yesterday. Just as I don't
allow myself to be convinced by all of my patients' self-doubts, you
can't be convinced by Harriet's.

EXERCISE ARMOR

Preparation for Defense to Accusation #3

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone
else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
--Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, 1905

As we alluded before, your self-doubts may make you so uncomfortable
that you need to retreat into a sort of "armor" to avoid feeling
bad about yourself. By retreating into some sort of role, you
distance yourself from the pain of feeling like a failure. Review the
list of typical "armor roles" below. Which of these roles do you adopt
when your self-doubt is activated? Write the ones that most closely
align with your own defense system in your notebook and reflect on
how adopting these roles has affected your growth and happiness in
your relationships and throughout your life.
dreamer
busy person
loner
workaholic
perfectionist
people-pleaser

bully
expert
leader
procrastinator
victim

seducer/seductress

clown self-indulger

martyr
indifferent person
noncompetitor
logician
controller

liar
freewheeler

complainer
someone who needs nobody
competitor
party animal
apologizer
dropout
mother
Realize that you've adopted these roles to compensate for or to
master a lack of confidence. Pick out one or two of your armor roles.
You may use many, but for now pick the ones that you know cause
you problems with others or that limit you in some definite way.
Now try to identify what self-doubt you're covering up by the use of
these exaggerated roles (the armor roles are usually natural
strengths being overused to create a protective shell around yourself).
Wearing the armor can become so habitual that you mistake
the alias for your true self. However you've handled Harriet, your
inner critic up until now, it's likely that you've addressed your lack of
confidence indirectly, which isn't the best way to rid yourself of it.
And so it's useful to identify the type of armor you wear so that you
can begin stepping out of it to address your self-doubt head-on.
Maybe by now you can see that you haven't been presenting a false
front, but overusing a true strength.
Amy has always enjoyed being alone. Her parents said she
used to spend hours in her room caught up in an imaginative world
of play. While Amy's capacity to spend time alone in a productive
way is something that she likes about herself, lately she's been using
it as a cover-up. She is an artist who paints for many hours in her
studio. While she's painting she tends to snack on Gummi Bears and
soda. She's gained thirty pounds in the past year. She tells everyone
she's just so busy preparing for her gallery opening that she can't
socialize anymore. But in reality, she doesn't want anyone to see
how much weight she's gained. She's hiding behind her loner
armor.
Defense to Accusation #3: You're a phony
Harriet will try to accuse you of being a phony because you've been
wearing your armor. She doesn't have compassion for the fact that
the only reason you've been wearing it is because you felt inadequate
in some way. What will you tell her when she says you're a
phony? Let's see what Amy told her:

Harriet: Amy, you're a phony. You're not really an artist who |
needs to be alone. You're hiding out because you're afraid to take
risks to meet people, and you know they're going to think you're
fat now that you've gained weight.

Amy: No, Harriet, I actually do like being alone, but you're
right that I've been alone more than I want to be lately.
Harriet: You don't even know who you are underneath that
armor.

Amy: I do know who I am. i'm an artist, and I like my work,
and i'm trying my best. Tm just afraid no one will love the me
that's underneath this armor.

Harriet: Well, you're too chicken to even put yourself out there
to see if they might.

Amy: You're right. Up until now I have been, but I've taken lots
of risks with my art and I've been well received. Maybe I can take
some risks with people, too.

When you admit that you've just been wearing your armor
because you're scared, Harriet probably won't provide you with the
compassion you want or need. But you can provide it for yourself by
understanding that underneath that heavy armor is a pretty remarkable
person.

Defense to Accusation #4: You're a pretend adult,
and don't deserve the full rights of adulthood

Harriet tries to convince you that you're still a child because only
when you believe that you're a child does she have any power over

you. You'll have to watch for self-defeating behavior patterns that you fall into at the moment when the self-doubt first arises, behaviors
that actually keep you acting like a child. Do any of the patterns
below describe your behavior when you experience self-doubt?
You're responding to Harriet whenever you find yourself
behaving in any of the following ways.

	becoming very intimidated and caving in or holding your
opinion back
	acting as if other people must be right and you must be wrong
	feeling afraid to express your feelings
	feeling guilty, as if you've done something wrong
	forgetting your basic rights and not feeling entitled to
anything

	being afraid to show your potential, true competency, or talent

These are all the self-defeating behaviors that are based on the
premise that you're not a fully enfranchised adult person with a
voice who deserves whatever luck or hard work or opportunity can
offer. Every time you act this way you reenforce Harriet's power
because you're agreeing with her that you're an undeserving person.
Your actions in the real world are mistakenly based on your acceptance
of Harriet's view of the world--a misinterpretation.
Your dialogue with Harriet on this issue is not with words or
self-talk. It's with action. You have to do the opposite of the behaviors
on the list above. For example, if you're afraid to express your
feelings, you need to find a way to express them. You're an adult
now, and this is your right. Every time you take an action that contradicts
something on the list above, you'll be weakening Harriet
and strengthening yourself.

Defense to Accusation #5: You know
the good stuff about you isn't real

Stop all this self-flagellation and let's get on with it. We've got a
world to change.--Neale Donald Walsch, CWG Bulletin


Now you need to prepare for Harriet's most devious assault of all. She doesn't bother to accuse you of anything, she just makes you/
feel undeserving, as if there is some good reason you shouldn't have!
everything you can have in life. Self-doubt can make you forget that
you have any redeeming qualities at all. You might have just received 
an Oscar or an Emmy, but if self-doubt attacks, you'll find a way to 
feel lousy anyway. You could, for instance, convince yourself that iff
the panel of judges knew the truth about you, they would have 
chosen someone else, or you could tell yourself that the award applies to
your former self, not to the you of today. As you already know, self
doubt can make you feel that you have nothing at all to offer to anyone
or to the world around you.
One way to interrupt a self-doubt hurricane is to simply keep a
positive frame of mind and remember times when you were proud
of yourself or just happy to be you. It's a simple and obvious technique,
but it truly can help to recall your good qualities if you keep
them before you. But Harriet has a counterattack planned, so you'll
have to be on guard. She knows how to disconnect her world and
your world so that everything good about you doesn't count in her
world. You may be fantastic in every way, but she won't let you be
happy. My patient Lauren said, "When things happen at my school
where I'm a teacher or with my friends, I immediately think the
worst no matter what is actually going on. My co-teacher might say
something nice, my students might hug me and tell me how great
they think I am, I am always shown how well-liked I am, and yet I
am so far into my own thoughts and paranoia that I make myself
feel completely worthless. No amount of validation on anybody's
part makes a dent in how I feel about myself."
Let's see what Lauren could've told Harriet every time Harriet
tried to discount her accomplishments.

Harriet: You know the good stuff about you isn't real. You aren't
really a good teacher.

Lauren: You're right, I have doubts about my teaching, but I'm
convinced by the responses that i'm getting, the feedback from
my co-teacher, and the hugs from my students that my doubts
aren't necessarily true.

Harriet: They're just trying to make you feel good.

Lauren: No, there are too many people telling me the same
thing, and I know when someone's just trying to make me feel
good, and that's not what's happening. They really mean it, and
I've done a lot of good work at my school that i'm proud of. I am
a good teacher, but i'm not the best teacher. i'm getting better, so
don't try to discount the progress I've made.

Defense to Accusation #6: Everybody
knows what you're hiding

Harriet's best trick of all is disguise. Harriet can migrate. Instead of
being a recognizable voice within you, she speaks through your
husband or wife, a teacher, someone you thought was your friend,
the grocery checkout lady when she seems distant, or anybody that
you are afraid to approach and that you expect will be your critic.
She actually has you hear what other people are saying as criticism
even when it may not be.
Every Hanukah for years Jane and Mark would go to visit Mark's
mother. And every year, Mark's mother would ask Jamie, "What did
you do with your hair?" Jane would shrug off the question but
would feel bad and insecure about her hair for the rest of the
evening. Last year, Jane vowed that she would not let this happen
again. When she walked into the house, sure enough, Jane's motherin-law
said, "What did you do with your hair?" Jane took a deep
breath, paused, and asked "Why do you ask?" Her mother-in-law
responded, "Because it looks so lovely." All along Jane had been
assuming that her mother-in-law was asking about her hair because
there was something wrong with it. Last year was indeed different.
Jane didn't feel bad about herself all night, and the family had a nice
dinner. This year Jane is actually looking forward to seeing her
mother-in-law for the holiday.
When you see Harriet in others, you take one or two approaches.
You give them all of Harriet's power and either avoid them or
appease them--anything so you won't be attacked. The other
approach is to fight back: They are dead wrong. You're absolutely

right. It's a win/lose battle, and you are not going to lose. But of
course you lose automatically when you confuse the real issues and
frictions in daily life that have to be resolved with this fight to the
death to defend your honor and battle with the person who only represents
Harriet at the moment. It's a surefire way to lose friends, ruin
intimacy, and become an isolated, misunderstood person, all of
which make Harriet's other assaults on you stronger.
Let's see how Jane was able to dialogue with Harriet and have a
breakthrough with her mother-in-law.

Harriet: Everyone knows what you're hiding, especially your
mother-in-law.

Jane: I see you out there, Harriet, and I'm not going to talk to
you when you're in that disguise.

Harriet: Your mother-in-law thinks you're awful and you're not
good enough for her son.

Jane: She's never said that.

Harriet: But she thinks it.You know it, I know it, Mark knows it,
everyone knows it.

Jane: I'm not listening to you anymore. I'm just going to ask her
myself.

As you know, Jane did ask her mother-in-law why she always
asked about her hair, and she discovered that it was actually because
she liked it, not because she was judging her. Being able to identify
how Harriet is operating in the people around you frees you up to
have real relationships with those people. Just like a good therapist,
you will do some detective work to see what role Harriet is playing
in your challenging relationships.

Stop Reinforcing Your Powerlessness

With regard to your self-doubts, making a powerless choice looks
like this:
Something happens. There's a situation (below are a few examples,
but I'm sure you can identify what affects you personally in
your life) where you feel you're being measured by someone or
yourself.

	Someone makes a comment.
	Someone gives you a look.
	You get a poor report at work.
	Someone tells you your child was misbehaving.

When that happens, you begin evaluating your life, your performance,
your accomplishments, your love life. You arrive at the misinterpretation
that there's something wrong with you.Your self-doubts
make you feel powerless, and you eat, seeking refuge in the food
trance for a few moments. This makes you feel guilty. The whole
process confirms your self-doubts. Let's see what this looks like in
practice.

Powerless Choice Example

When Alexandra comes home from work, her husband asks, "What
are you wearing?" (what happened in the external reality of today).
She misinterprets his statement to believe that he's criticizing her
outfit. He never likes what she wears; he's not attracted to her.
Finally it turns into a catastrophe prediction: He doesn't really love
her. She concludes that there's something wrong with her (this happens
in her internal reality, where things are weighed against her
fears and past experiences). She goes to the kitchen and eats, arid
when she's done she feels even more full of self-doubt. This experience
of eating reinforces both her self-doubts and her experience of
powerlessness.

Powerful Reinterpretation When something happens, you have two
choices: you can dialogue with Harriet or you can evaluate the situation
based on what is happening today. You can see if the negative
evaluation that you assume someone has made against you is
accurate
downright wrong
exaggerated
politically motivated
an example of how a person is dumping on you
perhaps partly true, but doesn't mean that's the only truth about
you

Powerful Reinterpretation Example When Alexandra comes home
from work, her husband asks, "What are you wearing?" She thinks
about what's really going on. He asked her a question, nothing
more. She evaluates what could be going on. Maybe he's never seen the outfit; maybe he's wondering why she's so dressed up since it's
casual Friday. There's no way for her to know what he meant and so
she doesn't immediately eat, she asks him. If the answer is negative,
she can still weigh his comment against the list above. Perhaps he's
exaggerating; perhaps he doesn't like it when she buys new clothes,
perhaps he just doesn't have the same dress sense as she does. She
doesn't have to conclude that there's something wrong with her
because of the comment her husband made.



SESSION 5
Defeat Your Defeatism

In this session:

You'll learn that the frustration in your life leads you to food as
a reward.

You'll learn that your frustration is based on a false sense of
powerlessness. After you learn to recover your agency over
your own life, food will have less power over you.

You'll make whatever changes are necessary to improve your
relationships.

You'll make sure your legitimate needs get met, and that your
immature needs are given up.

You'll take responsibility for your unfulfilled potential.

You'll take charge of your stress and improve the skills that
make that possible.

You'll learn that you have two methods to recover your power
over your own life:

1. You can proactively deal with your life challenges and
make your life work in the areas we've covered.

2. You can avoid defeatism (adding to your false powerlessness)
by not letting obstacles and difficulties become reasons
to be a victim of your life, rather than the one in
charge of it.

We have now looked at the different types of feelings that make
you eat, and what events and which people trigger those feelings.
Now we'll look at the things in your life that are frustrating and disappointing.
When you can confront your frustration directly, food
won't seem like the only reward available to you.
Here are four common areas where most people are frustrated:

1.	relationships
2.	unmet needs
3.	unfulfilled potential
4.	accumulated stress

There are always things you can do to make your life better
that are not contingent on anyone else. You no longer need to defeat
yourself because you don't do what you can, and if you stop defeating
yourself, you won't have to overeat to feed that emotional hunger.
It's Harriet, your critical conscience, that keeps you from being
the total author and agent of your own life. To get real satisfaction
in life you have to step out of your defeated identity and take real
action.
In the exercises that follow, I am only trying to help you give
yourself some concrete examples of what you can do by making a
decision to do it. I want to remind you that you can choose the powerful
pathway in life and be much better off for it. This book alone
cannot "fix" your life, but these exercises can get you going in the
right direction.

EXERCISE

Make Your Relationships Work Better

Here are some specific things you might do to improve a close and
important relationship. Think of a specific person and a recent
incident of friction or disappointment, and ask yourself whether you
would have handled it better if you were

trying to open an honest dialogue
expecting less from your partner
accepting that you have different opinions on certain topics

learning not to take certain things so seriously
calling him/her more often
not being so stubborn or hardheaded
not trying to control everything
letting your partner have some space

acknowledging he or she is temporarily under a lot of stress
other	(specify)

Observe, Catch Yourself in Mid-Act, and Choose

One way you can improve relationships and diminish emotional
hunger is to get real about your relationships--including your
expectations of others. Just as you have foibles and they don't add up
to the entire you, your partner has foibles that most likely comprise
only part of the picture of who he or she is.
If you are frustrated with a relationship, there are things you can
do, and they all involve some change in you, your attitude, your
behavior, your sensitivity, or your intimacy skills. You need to work
on these in order to stop eating. You don't have to solve them all at
once, though. Making small changes can actually offer a lot of relief.
If you find yourself in a conflict with someone, stop, try to pinpoint
what part of the conflict you're responsible for, and choose a different
way from the list above to handle it.

EXERCISE

Harriet Checklist

We'll repeat this exercise in each of these four areas in this chapter.
It's important for you to see just how pervasive your inner critic is.

If
You reward yourself with food instead of facing the struggles in your
life because of your belief in your defeatism. Your defeatism is based
on believing that what Harriet has been saying about you is true--
that you're not able to take charge of your life. Pinpoint in what way
Harriet is stopping you and then go back to the accusation exercises
in Session 4 (chapter 13) and start talking back. Anytime you're convinced
that you're ready to try something different or new in your
relationships, Harriet has something to say about it.
You say: "In order to improve my relationship with my husband,
I can make a request instead of just being angry and disappointed
when he doesn't read my mind and do what I want." When you propose
that, Harriet says to you one or more of the things from the
checklist below in order to defeat you, to stop you from being your
own free agent of change:

1.	You won't be able to do this perfectly, so you'd better not do it at all. If you do it, you will fail.

2.	You have real faults, and everyone will know them if you try to do this. No one will want to be around you or with you.

3.	You'll lose your protective armor and be out of control. Anything might happen. (Example: If I stop being a people
pleaser and focus on myself, people won't want to be around
me.)

4.	You have no right to aspire to anything more than you already have or to speak up for yourself.

5.	You'd better not think your accomplishments or the compliments you get prove you're a good person. Don't try to make
your life any better.

6.	You know who is going to put you down for trying this and what they're going to say about you, so don't even bother.

These six statements that Harriet will make when you try to take
action in your life correspond to the six accusations we dialogued
with in the last chapter. You'll have to go back to the last chapter and
do the accusation exercise for whichever one or ones apply to you
with regard to how you deal with your relationships.

Get Your Realistic Needs Met

From the moment we are born, we have needs. We are hungry, we
are cold, we're uncomfortable. And as we get older, our list of needs
grows more complex and our ability to have them met becomes a
real challenge. Part of growing up includes differentiating which
needs we can and should be meeting on our own and which can be
met only by another person, and how to relate to and share mutually
so our needs can be satisfied. Once we've identified this distinction,
then we will still have to take responsibility for communicating our
needs to those around us and working out a fair and mutual
exchange with the others.

EXERCISE

Identify Unmet Needs

Here is a list of legitimate needs that my patients have talked about
in our therapy sessions. Think about which of these needs is calling
out within you for more satisfaction, or a higher priority, or an
absolute demand. Here you will be looking for what you want,
whether it is easy to get or not. You will have to know what you want
if you are to conquer emotional eating.
Pick out the needs that are at least partially frustrated in your life
right now by completing the following sentence:
"I want more	_."

acknowledgment and acceptance
attention and recognition
caring and consideration
challenge and stimulation
closeness and intimacy
financial reward
freedom and personal space
guidance and support
onesty and trust
opportunity for advancement
physical contact and passion
power and status
reliability and stability
respect and appreciation
responsibility and authority
safety and security
sensitivity and communication
sharing and participation
structure and direction
togetherness and belonging
understanding and empathy
other	(specify)

You've now completed the first step: acknowledging your needs.
Until you admit you have needs, you can't satisfy them. Next you
need to separate out realistic from unrealistic needs and identify the
specific reasons why you haven't satisfied your realistic needs. That
is the analysis you will need in order to make a wise decision about
how to get either satisfaction or resolution of your frustrated needs.
Think about one of the needs on your list, then ask yourself
Why haven't I satisfied this need yet? You can repeat this for all of the
needs if you have time for that. If not, just pick the one that you feel,
on a gut level, is the most frustrating to you today, and the most
likely to send you looking for a food trance reward.
Example: "I'd like to get my degree, but I have three children
and I don't believe it is fair to the family to pursue this now.")
"I have not satisfied this need yet because	."

it hasn't been a high priority
it's in conflict with another important need (for example, I may
want both continuity and change at the same time)
I just haven't figured out how to get this need met

I don't believe it is obtainable in my current situation
I know what I need to do to get this need satisfied, I'm just afraid
to try

it may be obtainable, but not worth the effort

I'm afraid to try to satisfy this need because I'll be too stressed trying
to get it and too disappointed or depressed if I don't get it

the way I would like this need satisfied is unrealistic (for example,
my age, social status, resources, education, or physical
health prevent me from being able to do what is necessary to
achieve this dream)
to get this need met, I would have to make big changes in my life
that I am not now prepared to make

I can get this need met only if someone else will grant it to me or
change their behavior or attitude toward me, and I'm not sure
I can influence them to do that or I don't know how

I want this need satisfied, but I think I am asking for too much or
will never be satisfied no matter how much I get

I want this need satisfied, but it's too unfair to the other people
involved to make it happen

Only you know what these answers mean in the fabric of your
life, but at least you have a starting point to understand why you
have not been able to get this need satisfied. This will start you
thinking, and that's what we want: think instead of eat.

Don't Interpret Frustrated Needs
to Mean You Are Defeated

As you think about the reasons your frustrated needs have not been
satisfied yet, you'll be face to face with your defeatism. Because these
needs are not being satisfied, you might be confusing frustration
with defeatism, and jumping to the catastrophe prediction that your
needs will never get met, ever.
It's more likely that you've made a conscious and deliberate
choice not to pursue a specific need satisfaction for one of the reasons
above. If that's so, you're not defeated and don't need a reward of
extra food to compensate for being a victim.You're not a victim, but in
fact, a mature adult. You may have decided the need is not a priority,
or that it's a childish wish rather than a mature realizable need, or that
it puts other more important needs in jeopardy, or that it's something
you'll pursue later rather than now.
As you further explore the need you may finally realize that getting
a particular need satisfied is something you want to, should, and
will pursue. That's fine, and the same thinking applies: you're not a
victim and not defeated, you're just learning more about yourself.
But you may have decided that this is a realizable and important
need but that you're in conflict with yourself about getting it satisfied.
In that case, you have been defeated by Harriet, and it's Harriet
that you have to deal with. If you don't, you'll be left with food as
your only possible reward.
Finally, you may decide that what you want is unrealistic, unrealizable,
excessive, and maybe even childish or impossible to get. It
may even be unwise to get even if you could, like having your partner
take care of all the finances that you should really know about
yourself. You know you shouldn't lean on other people to do things
for you that make you whole, but, rather, you should be developing
the mature competency to do those things yourself.

Make Decisions to Become the
Agent of Your Own Life

As the agent of your own life, you have to make a highly conscious,
thoughtful decision that will put the frustrated need state to rest.
There are three possible resting spots, and you won't find full relief
from the gnawing aspect of the frustrated need until you arrive at one of them. After minutes, hours, days, weeks, or months, you should
have decided on one of the following ways to best handle this need.

1. Try to get my need satisfied more actively, either by my own
efforts or by expressing them to someone.


2.	Accept a compromised form of this need so I can enjoy what I already have or what is possible.
3.	Make a decision that this need can't or shouldn't be fulfilled. Accept that there are other satisfactions in life, so life can go
on without feeling deprived and defeated.

Whether you know it or not, you have just outlined a short plan
on how to deal with this need. Even if it goes unfulfilled, it won't drive
your emotional hunger so strongly because you have decided consciously
how to deal with it. Of course, you have to follow through
with your plan, but even thinking about needs in this new, open way
generally provides most of the relief from emotional hunger.

EXERCISE

Harriet Checklist

Let's pinpoint how Harriet has been playing a role in your frustrated
needs. Then go back to the accusation exercises in chapter 13
(Session 4) and start talking back. Anytime you're convinced that
you're ready to try to get realistic needs met, Harriet has something
to say about it.
You say: "In order to get my need met for more affection, I'm
going to initiate sex more often with my partner." When you propose
that, Harriet says to you one of the things from the following
checklist.

1.	You won't be able to do this perfectly, so you'd better not do it at all. If you do it, you will fail.

2.	You have real faults, and everyone will know them if you try to do this. No one will want to be around you or with you.
3.	You'll lose your protective armor and be out of control. Anything might happen. (Example: If I stop being a people
pleaser and focus on myself, people won't want to be around
me.)

4.	You have no right to aspire to anything more than you already have or to speak up for yourself.
5.	You'd better not think your accomplishments or the compliments you get prove you're a good person. Don't try to make
your life any better.

6.	You know who is going to put you down for trying this and what they're going to say about you, so don't even bother.

Now that you've identified which one applies to you, you'll have to
go back to the last chapter and do the accusation exercise for
whichever one or ones apply to you with regard to how you deal
with your frustrated needs.

Let Your Potential Live

Part 1: Expand Your Life Skills
Just by Making a Decision

Our goal today is to stimulate you to think about your challenges
and your potential. Again, all you need to do is think about it, and to
entertain the notion that you are wrong when you believe you can't
do anything more to become the person you want to be. Making
good changes in yourself and improving your life situation is part of
an ever-evolving life flow. Getting back into this stream is what will
help you conquer your emotional hunger. First let's do a broad survey
of the ways you know you would like to improve your life.You're
probably well aware of the big challenges looming in your life.

EXERCISE

Let Your Potential Live

Identify what parts of you are begging to be reborn by completing
the sentence:
"It would make me feel better about myself if I	."

use my business or career-related talents
use my creative talents
maintain commitments
become more romantic or sexual
use my leadership talents
become more loving and nurturing
become more religious or spiritual
become fun-loving and enjoy life
become independent
receive love and warmth
settle down
cooperate and be sensitive to others
become more moral
use my teaching talents
use my thinking abilities

Any area of personal development you chose from the list above
is something you can do without anybody else's help or permission.
All it takes is a decision to do it. All that is stopping you is your fear
of failure. Think about any mistakes you've made or humiliations
you've experienced. How did you feel when you failed or made a
mistake in public? In private? Don't forget the small mistakes or
embarrassments, such as asking "a stupid question" or coming in
last in a race.
What was the end result of your mistake or failure? For instance,
if you once had a terrible singing performance, did you stop singing?
Or did you take lessons and improve? What does the way you
handled your failure tell you? Have you avoided putting yourself
forward in order to avoid the possibility of looking stupid again in
public? What's the worst that might happen if you did look stupid?
What do you fear? What opportunities have you missed by holding
yourself back? How do you feel immediately after holding yourself
back? What are the long-term effects?
If you actually spend a few moments thinking about these questions
and possibly writing down your thoughts, you will discover a
very bad cold feeling in the pit of your stomach. Note it well. It's not
pleasant, but it is bearable. It's your shame/fear condensed into a
small compact space felt somewhere inside what seems like your
gut. It's easily converted into phantom hunger. If you could separate
out the two feelings and become expert at distinguishing fear/shame
from hunger, you would make another big step up in your conscious
awareness and deal another big blow to your emotional eating
habit. Once you can do this, you might be ready to reclaim some of
your dreams that you've put in cold storage.

Part 2: Reclaim Your Personal Dreams

Remember what I said about passion and pleasure. If you don't find
things to be passionate about in life, that creative energy that dwells
in all of us will be forced into unproductive things like eating, arguing
with your spouse, watching television constantly, and so on.Your
life actually depends on you finding things that make your heart
sing. Everyone has lists of things that they once dreamed about,
everything from being president of the United States to flying to the
moon to being a rock star. Some of those dreams may no longer be
realistic but let's revisit those dreams for the sole purpose of using
them to create new life goal dreams.

1.	Think of two dreams you had when you were a child. For instance, maybe you wanted to be a teacher or an astronaut.
Maybe you wanted to live in a castle and marry a prince or
princess. Then list two dreams you had in your late teens or early
twenties. Finally, list two dreams you have now. Don't worry
about how far-fetched your dreams are. We will deal with that later.

2.	Now write a list of things you love to do (everything from flipping the pages of a shiny magazine to singing), the things that
you envy other people for doing. No one is going to see this list,
so dream big.

3.	Now look at your dreams. Consider them one by one, starting with your childhood dreams. If your dreams were not at all realistic,
try to capture the grain of reality within them. For instance,

if you wanted to live in a castle when you were a kid, the adult
version of that wish might translate to wanting to live in a beautiful
home. If you wanted to be in a magical land, that might
translate to having a mystical practice now and being surrounded
by people who have similar interests. The dreams that
honestly no longer interest you, cross off and accept that you are
letting that one go.

4.	Pick two dreams that you can actually begin to work toward achieving. For each one, break it into three parts, something you
will do this week that will bring you closer to your dream, something
you will do in six months, and then something you will do
a year from now.

5.	When you apply the Harriet Checklist, use the specific act you plan to do this week to get started on this dream.

EXERCISE

Harriet Checklist

Living your true potential, either your personal development issue
from the list beginning on page 222 or the life goal dream you are
considering, is one where Harriet has a field day. She loves to tell you
how you can't try the things you secretly long to try. You can't dream.
You can't hope. She is the ultimate party pooper, the rain on your
parade, a real cynic. She basically tells you you're damned if you do
and damned if you don't. If you try something and fail, you won't be
able to live with yourself, and if you try something and succeed you'll
be so full of yourself and people will be so envious that they'll leave
you. You may not hear Harriet talking to you, saying these things, but
you can be sure that she is down there stoking the fire on your fear
and fueling your procrastination. If you believe all the things above
that she has to say about you going after your dreams and goals, then
you really only have the choice to eat. It is the only source of fulfillment
you can expect. But if you see that all of this is just a projected
fear, not a real fear, even though it feels real in the moment, you may
be willing to try something anyway. After all, "courage is not the
absence of fear, it's action in the face of fear." Think of a time when
you felt something on you and thought it was a bug. In your belly you
feel real fear, and then upon closer inspection you see that it is a leaf
or a piece of lint and suddenly you feel better. The fears you have may
feel really bad, but you can make yourself bigger than them if you
find answers to Harriet's incessant chatter.
Let's pinpoint how Harriet has been playing a role in preventing
you from living your true potential. Then go back to the accusation
exercises in chapter 4 and start talking back. Anytime you are convinced
that you shouldn't even bother giving your dreams a shot,
Harriet has something to say about it.
You say: "In order to feel like I'm on my way to living my dreams,
I am going to take an acting class." When you propose that, Harriet
says to you one of the things from the list below.

1.	You won't be able to do this perfectly, so you'd better not do it at all. If you do it, you will fail.

2.	You have real faults, and everyone will know them if you try to do this. No one will want to be around you or with you.

3.	You'll lose your protective armor and be out of control. Anything might happen. (Example: If I stop being a people
pleaser and focus on myself, people won't want to be around
me.)

4.	You have no right to aspire to anything more than you already have or to speak up for yourself.

5.	You'd better not think your accomplishments or the compliments you get prove you're a good person. Don't try to make
your life any better.

6.	You know who is going to put you down for trying this and what they're going to say about you, so don't even bother.

Now that you've identified which one applies to you, you'll have to
go back to the last chapter and do the accusation exercise for
whichever one or ones apply to you with regard to how you deal
with your unlived potential.
Be in Control of Your Stress,
Don't Suffer from It

Stress is the enemy of all emotional eaters. Stress, broadly defined,
involves everything we discuss in this book, so for our purposes I
would like to focus on what you can do about it. First of all, be aware
that you are already doing something about it as you explore the
alternatives to powerlessness. Stress usually means we are temporarily
overwhelmed with either too much to do or too many problems at
the same time, leading to the feelings that trigger your eating pattern
(see chapter 11, Session 2). It's the catastrophe predictions that create
the overwhelmed experience. To the degree you have pinpointed
them and started to master them, you have already cut down your
stress load and your tendency to draw the powerlessness conclusion.
When you go back to look at your notebook entries for Session 2,
you'll find your list of stressors to use for this next exercise.

Personal Development and New Skills
Are Key to Mastering Your Stress

Stress is caused by unsolved problems in living. You can better manage
or resolve any problem in living if you are good at managing
your money, your time, and your self-discipline. The exercise below
will help you to identify ways to reduce your stress level by improving
your day-to-day life skills.

EXERCISE

Mastering Your Stress

Select three items from the list below. Put them into categories
(for example, money management, taking care of one's self, time
management).
"To improve my day-to-day life I should	."

make a budget
balance my checkbook
control spending and stay within my budget
pay bills and meet other financial commitments on time
make wise investments
plan for my retirement
plan for and pay my taxes
prioritize needs and desires and make purchases based on my
priorities

define what it is I really want and need

let go of the security of being taken care of and stand on my own
two feet
get the household chores done on a more regular basis
make plans and follow through on them
follow instructions or directions
discipline myself to complete my tasks
assemble appropriate tools and resources
frame and structure my day
establish and follow a schedule
set realistic deadlines or specific time limits
be on time for appointments and other commitments
accept help or support from others
frame and structure my day
allow myself the freedom not to be serious or responsible all the
time

set goals that are within my reach

take care of my responsibilities so I can feel okay about having
fun

schedule time for leisure activities or enjoyable events

schedule time to do what I want to do and feel entitled to establish
realistic demands for myself

set more realistic deadlines or specific time limits

1.	In your notebook, record the three improvements you need to make.

2.	Under each improvement, write three to five bullet points describing how you will make that improvement, and by
when.

3.	Choose one bullet point to complete by tomorrow.

EXERCISE

Harriet Checklist

Dealing with stress is something that everyone must deal with. It's
such a common issue because we as human beings get easily overwhelmed
as we juggle so much and live in such uncertain times.
Let's pinpoint how Harriet has been playing a role in preventing
you from powerfully dealing with stress. Remember that anything
you chose on the list above is a life skill that will increase your
autonomy, independence, and sense of adultness, as well as improve
your self-esteem. And you know that your nagging critical conscience
sees that as a threat. Anytime you back away from your personal
development, you can be sure that Harriet's talking to you.
You say: "In order to feel more empowered with my daily
responsibilities I am going to make a schedule and stick to it." When
you propose that, Harriet says to you one of the things from the list
below.

1.	You won't be able to do this perfectly, so you better not do it at all. If you do it, you will fail.

2.	You have real faults, and everyone will know them if you try to do this. No one will want to be around you or with you.
3.	You'll lose your protective armor and be out of control. Anything might happen. (Example: If I stop being a people
pleaser and focus on myself, people won't want to be around
me.)
4.	You have no right to aspire to anything more than you already have or to speak up for yourself.
5.	You'd better not think your accomplishments or the compliments you get prove you're a good person. Don't try to make
your life any better.

6.	You know who is going to put you down for trying this and what they're going to say about you, so don't even bother.

Now that you've identified which one applies to you, you'll have to
go back to the last chapter and do the accusation exercise for
whichever one or ones apply to you with regard to how you deal
with stress.

Don't Be Overwhelmed

In this session you've laid out and looked at all the hard work of
having a fulfilling adult life and fulfilling adult relationships. It may
seem like too much when it's all written down in your notebook, but
take some comfort in two facts.
First, you don't have to do everything at once. In fact, this is just
a list of ongoing life projects that you can do at your own pace.
Second, it's what everybody has to do when they become an adult.
Your list is not much different from that of all the people you know.
This is what you need to do to manage your life. If you don't do it,
who else is going to do it for you? I remember that when I first
started my psychiatric practice, young adults asked me what they
should do. I said, "I'll tell you how to lead your life if you'll do what
I tell you to do." Nobody ever took me up on that proposition. You
may think you want someone to take over for you, but you really
wouldn't let them even if they would. If you don't take charge, you'll
be frustrated like everyone else in a similar position. Don't fool yourself
into believing that you can't do anything about it, so you have to
reward yourself with food. You can do these things. You can resume
your adult development and your journey toward autonomy. Your
phantom hunger will go away. You won't have to reward yourself
with food, because the work you'll be doing in your life will be
reward enough. If you choose not to do the work, you'll be frustrated
and want to eat. Remember, you're only fooling yourself. You don't
have to eat because these problems are unsolvable.They are solvable
and you have a choice.

Stop Reinforcing Your Powerlessness

With regard to your frustration and feelings of being able to get
rewarded in life, making a powerless choice looks like this:
Something happens. There's a situation where you feel things are
not going your way. You feel faced with too many obstacles and frustrations.
This makes you feel defeated. One of the following things is
happening.

	There's something not happening, or not happening when
you want it to.

	There are obstacles making goals look too difficult to achieve.
	You have relationships that aren't going the way you want
them to.

	You have needs that are not satisfied.
	You're aware of your unexplored potential and missed
opportunities.

	You have too many stressors all at the same time.

	You've collected a series of failed attempts.

When any of those things happen you arrive at a misinterpretation:
"I can't make my life work at all. I can't improve my relationships. I
can't get my needs met. I can never reach my potential, and I can't
develop the skills to master the stress in my life." Your frustrations
make you feel powerless and you eat, seeking refuge in the food
trance for a few moments. Then you feel guilty. Solving the problem
with food confirms the fact that you can't make your life work. Let's
see what this looks like in practice.

Powerless Choice Example

Liz tries out for the church choir and is not accepted (what happened
in the external reality of today). She misinterprets what
happens to believe that she can never get the things she wants and
then it turns into a catastrophe prediction: she can't really sing at all
(this happens in her internal reality, where things are weighed
against her fears and past experiences). She goes immediately from
the audition to a fast food restaurant, and when she's done she feels
even more frustrated. Eating reinforces both her frustrations and her
experience of powerlessness.

Powerful Reinterpretation When something happens and you feel
defeated, you have two choices: First, you can always recognize that
you can try again. The second is that you can evaluate the situation
based on what's happening today. You can see how else you can
interpret what happened.

You can look for alternatives or adjust expectations.

You can accept that while obstacles are real, they can be worked
with.

You can understand that relationships ebb and flow, and just
because something is not going well doesn't mean it'll always
be that way.

Getting needs satisfied happens between two people, and you
have to figure out your part in it.

If a potential is not being fulfilled, perhaps it's not the right time
or you need more training.

Handling stressors one at a time is less overwhelming.

A history of failures may be only a call for a fresh approach.

Powerful Reinterpretation Example Liz tries out for the church choir
and is not accepted. She thinks about what's really going on. She
realizes that perhaps this wasn't the best time for her to be in the
church choir, especially since her daughter is a senior in high school
and will need a lot of her help this year. The choir is such a huge time
commitment. Liz decides she'll use this year to take some voice lessons
and will audition again next year. After thinking about things,
Liz feels empowered and doesn't need to eat to deal with her
frustration.


SESSION 6

Creating Real Safety

In this session:

You'll have to face the anxiety that you are hiding in the illusion
of being safe or independent by being fat.
You'll have to see how you eat more to feel safe but it doesn't
make you safe, it just helps you avoid things and keeps you
from recognizing the life decisions you've made that should
be reviewed.
You'll see that there are better ways to deal with the challenges
you're hiding from other than using fat as a cover-up
and excuse.
You'll have to do the grown-up work in the real world that
could actually get you real safety and real independence.
You'll know that you have two methods besides arriving at the
false conclusion that you're incapable of providing your own
safety in life:
1. You can use the insights you'll learn in this session to stop
hiding so you can discover for yourself that you're not
powerless.
2. You can stop misinterpreting the small dangers in your
daily life that have added to your conclusion about
powerlessness.

When we spoke about defeatism, you saw how your self-doubts
and Harriet made you afraid to be the agent of your own life, made
you afraid to try. You were so afraid and in need of a hiding place,
and the hiding place you found was fat.
These exercises speak to the side of yourself that sabotages your
efforts to diet, the part of you that wants you to stay fat, that actually
uses your weight to prevent you from having the life you want. Most of this book has been dedicated to the rational side of yourself, the
you that's fully committed to losing weight, that wants to have a
healthy and attractive body, better relationships, and life fulfillment.
But this other part of you, which I call the safety-seeking self, not
only resists your efforts to diet, it's terrified of losing weight. It's
almost as if you have two beings inside at odds with each other.
There is a part of you that feels powerless to create and maintain
your own sense of safety without being overweight. You need to
uncover how that part of you is thinking, and decide for yourself
whether that makes any sense. I am convinced it doesn't, so let me
show you why.

Identify What You're Trying to
Hide under Your Fat

Look at the list below and see which ones you identify with.
"It serves me to stay fat	."

because fat gives me an excuse to avoid contacts or make more
overt efforts at meeting and being with people

so I can be more at ease with members of the opposite sex
because there is no chance of a potential romance

because I don't have to deal with attention

because certain bodily or facial features will not be noticed if I
am overweight

because I'll fail, and therefore I'd be worse off for trying (for
example, going for a promotion, playing a sport, dancing,
being an active parent)

because it is a way for me to have lower expectations of myself.
(All of the items that you listed in chapter 5 are the things you
have been avoiding as a way for you to decrease the demands
you make on yourself.)

I'm sensitive to abandonment and rejection based on self-doubt
and unloveability. (You've already dealt with this in chapter 4.)
because it controls certain impulses that I don't know how to
control otherwise (for example, rage, tears, sex)

because I don't have to deal with my sexuality

because I don't have to be ambitious and perhaps disappointed

because it gives me an excuse to not express my need for
closeness

because it helps me control my competitiveness with family
members, friends, and colleagues

because it is a way for me to deal with my anger toward others

Fat doesn't bring you any real safety. It only helps you avoid
knowing more fully what you already know to some degree, and
keeps you from being clear about the decisions you have already
made, which means you can't question them with the most conscious
and intelligent part of your mind, so you remain stuck at-a
lower level of decision making.
Using fat this way is also a way of fooling yourself. You are not
admitting to yourself that you have made certain decisions about the
way you are now conducting your life.
Look at the items you chose from the list above. Now ask yourself
whether being fat actually protects you from anything real. Are
you not just fooling yourself about some fear-based decisions you
have already made and are afraid to fully acknowledge? Wouldn't
you be better off dealing with, rather than avoiding, the work
needed to master

	shyness and fear of intimacy
	life challenges and opportunities
	self-doubts
	control of your impulses and passions

In this book, and in these sessions, I have already guided you to
understand you are not powerless in these areas, so there is really no
good reason to keep on avoiding facing them squarely and continuing
your personal development. Here are some examples of the
decisions you've already made and might want to rethink how you
deal with.

	If you're using fat to avoid being sexually involved, then you've
made a decision not to be sexually involved. Why not just
accept that as fact and either stick to your decision (it's your
right and your body), or reevaluate your decision and work on
your fears? Either decision would be more clearly adult, and
would make you a more powerful person. But using fat to
avoid sexuality makes the whole decision process muddy.

	If you don't want sexual attention, just say no, or dress conservatively,
or stay away from bars and clubs, or send out signals
to your boss that you're unavailable.

	If you're shy, either work on it or accept it. Plenty of shy people
do that without having to be overweight. Being overweight
actually calls attention to yourself, which is the
opposite of what most shy people consciously want.

	If you don't want to have affairs or be promiscuous, either
decide to remain monogamous and stick to your decision, or
figure out why you're looking outside your relationship, or
why it feels impossible to remain committed.

	If it's intimacy, success, failure, or competition you fear, deal
with it or live with it. There's no need to add fat to the equation.
These are separate life course decisions that you have to

make or have already made that end up getting more complicated
when you add fat to the mix. They need to be separated
out and dealt with for what they are, not covered over and
buried by food and fat cells.

It's better to own up to the decision and not be fat. Then you have
only that one problem to resolve: fat doesn't protect. It only covers
over a decision already made, and prevents an honest review of that
decision. It keeps you stuck. And being stuck means you're at least
temporarily powerless.

Here's where you are now. Here's how you've been keeping
yourself from a full awareness of the work you can and need to do.
Select the one that applies to you:

Overeating and being fat doesn't protect me from knowing
things, but it does prevent me from focusing on certain things
I can't or don't want to face.

Yes, being fat keeps me focused on the struggle to lose weight,
the guilt I feel when I fail, and how unattractive I am. Being
focused on those things protects me from feeling what I'm
really upset about.

Being engaged in the vicious cycle of overeating keeps things on
a surface level where I don't have to face the pain of the big
real issues. I know how to deal with my guilt and shame about
overeating--those are common feelings that every fat person
feels--but the other things make me feel too isolated, too
marginalized.

Do you want to stay in this state of avoidance knowing that it is
just avoidance, not real protection? You know that fat doesn't protect
you against impulse control, it simply provides you with a less
stigmatized impulse to control. For example, you may have been
shamed for your sexual impulses, and being fat may prevent you
from having to deal with sexual attention. While it may feel better to
be dealing with your impulse to overeat, just like so many other
people are, your need to be sexually self-expressed doesn't really go
away by staying fat, it just gives you another frustrated need.

If
Maintain Your Old Role in the
Family or Emerge as Yourself

As I described in chapter 6, the safety chapter, there is a deeper layer
of fear related to your family of origin. Whenever you take up a life
challenge and personal development task rather than avoiding it,
you're unconsciously changing your role relationship to your family
of origin because you're actively charting your own path through life,
realizing your own potential, and becoming who you really are, rather
than who you used to be. If you stay stuck in the roles you've been
assigned or assigned yourself, you'll feel frustrated, but you'll also feel
safe. Every role we occupy is connected to people, both past and
present, and all these people have a stake in you remaining in your
familiar role. Stepping out of your role is necessary but dangerous,
both real danger that comes from disrupting social patterns, but
mostly exaggerated danger that accompanies the individuation quest.

EXERCISE

Identify Your Role in Your Family

Look at the list below and think about which roles were assigned to
you or accepted by you in your family and which ones were given to
your siblings.
alcoholic
bad-tempered one
oversexed one
bad student
shy one
stubborn one
ugly one
caretaker
troublemaker
peacemaker

athlete
brain
drama queen
most likely to succeed
beauty
hunk
black sheep
angry one
rejected and unloved one
favored

I.*
Judi was a typical late 1950s teenager. She wore poodle skirts
and cardigans. She dated nice boys and was a good student. Her
sister Marlee would never get noticed in the family if she were so
similar to Judi. So Marlee became the black sheep. She dyed her
blond hair black and dated college guys with motorcycles. She's
now in her sixties, but she still maintains the family role of the rebel.
You and everyone you know fit some role stereotype like these
while growing up. These assigned roles are our family legacy and
control much of what we do and how we think about ourselves until
the time that we emerge from them. Most of us do emerge completely
over time, but some don't. When fat is used as a hiding place,
the emergence is prolonged.
Family-assigned roles distort who you are and limit who you're
capable of being. That's why there is such a strong drive to transcend
these roles. They're not sacred and fixed. They can be questioned,
altered, or given up. But you have to fight hard to do this and ultimately
become the one in charge of who you are and how your life
works.
The real danger of stepping out of a family role and reclaiming
yourself is the danger of being punished, ostracized, and envied by
others. You fear being talked about, labeled, and excommunicated
from the clan. When you lose weight and become intent on remaking
your life, you expose yourself to these ancient anxieties. Your
critical conscience tells you that you can feel safe again only if you
get fat again.

EXERCISE

Remodeling Your Family Role

Look at the most important family-assigned role you've been working
on changing (everyone is always working on at least one). Ask
yourself these questions:

If I make the changes I want to make, would I really face unbearable
punishment or be ostracized immediately and irrevocably,
either by family, friends, or co-workers?
If there were some real threat or real danger incurred by doing
this, could I work it out if I approached it with an open mind
and mature adult perspective?
Can I separate the real consequences from my catastrophic predictions
that have been keeping me from fully emerging?

If, in the previous exercises, you've come to the conclusion that
fat doesn't make you safe, then of course it's not worth paying the
price for an empty illusion of feeling safe. But in case you still think
fat gives you some real protection other than just avoidance, think
about whether the protection you get is worth the price of being fat.
Make a list of what fat costs you in your life. We can start you out
with the obvious:
"Using fat as a source of safety means I won't be able to

feel like an adult who can make empowered choices
solve problems
feel loveable
feel worthy
be healthy
earn the respect and admiration of others
live a fulfilled life
be seen for who I really am


Being overweight has surely protected you from some very
frightening emotions and core beliefs, but it has cost you a lot. One
way to retreat from center stage, to allay expectations, is to get fat. As
we mentioned on page 98, people suffer from being fat. They suffer
salary discrimination, they are not considered for promotions, and
they are exempt entirely from certain areas of employment. Fat people
also suffer in the area of relationships. Taking all of these things
into consideration, you might want to ask yourself if being fat is
really worth the illusion of safety that it provides.

Real Ways to Feel Safe

If you apply only a half-mindful effort to your career or marriage
because you want to avoid certain pieces of psychological work or
difficult decisions, if you hide behind fat in these arenas in order to
"duck out," your marriage and your work will be less likely to continue
successfully in a way that's satisfying.
You can increase your real safety in the world by facing reality,
looking for real dangers, anticipating problems, and looking for
solutions. You can keep your relationships strong and invest yourself
in good people who are trustworthy, decent, and well put together.
You can avoid impulsive big decisions like falling in love and marrying
before you really know the real person, or marrying the wrong
person to spite your parents. There are hundreds of things you can
do and skills you can further develop to provide yourself as much
safety as possible in what is at times an unpredictable world. But to
be your own adult provider of real safety, you have to face reality,
whatever it is, and work with it. When you hide in fat to give yourself
the illusion of safety by avoiding challenge, you're not facing up
to reality, and you are missing the opportunity to take charge of your
own safety and make it as real as possible.

Create Real Safety

Now make your own list of what you can do to give yourself real
safety in the world, using the principles I outlined above. First,-look
at the areas in your life where you feel vulnerable, for example, a
relationship, your finances, your health or someone else's health, or
your children. Now address each of those with what you know could
and should be done to make you be more safe, not just feel safe. For
example: You see that the family finances are very uncertain, you're
concerned that you won't have enough money for your child's college
fund, and you know that you can and you should go back to
work to begin earning that money. Up until now, you've just been
worrying about it and hoping that your spouse could make you feel
safe with the statement, "Everything will work out somehow." You
finally see that only taking an action that changes the situation can
provide real safety.

Stop Reinforcing Your Powerlessness

With regard to your feeling safe in life, making a powerless choice
looks like this: Something happens. There's a situation where you
feel like you're stepping out of a familiar role. This makes you feel
scared, and you look for a place to hide. One of the following things
may be happening.

You have an opportunity to perform at a higher level, either at
work or at play.
You're in the spotlight for some reason.
Your passions are aroused and you're tempted to act on them.
You're making a life course decision. You're beginning to admire and enjoy people not usually
accepted by your family or spouse.
You're caught up in a past experience where you were abused or
hurt, or something similar to what happened in the past is
happening now.

When any of those things happen you're likely to arrive at a misinterpretation:
"I can't protect myself. I expect to be punished for
daring to change. I expect to be attacked, falsely labeled, humiliated,
embarrassed, put down, or expelled from the family." Your fears
make you feel powerless and you eat, seeking refuge in the food
trance for a few moments, and then you feel guilty. Using food in
this way confirms the fact that you can't possibly deal with life in a
brave way. Let's see what this looks like in practice.
Powerless Choice Example

Marissa is in an unsatisfying and almost verbally abusive relationship
(what's happening in her external reality of today). She misinterprets
her relationship to believe she's better off with him than
alone. She fears that her family would never approve of her decision
to leave him; after all, her family role is the martyr. She fears she
won't be able to manage money on her own, and then it turns into a
catastrophe prediction: I was abused as a child and this relationship
is not nearly as bad. Perhaps this is the best treatment I can expect
from those who love me (this happens in her internal reality, where
things are weighed against her fears and past experiences). Marissa
can't find the courage to leave her husband, but she's created a separation
from him by gaining two hundred pounds. Being fat reinforces
both her lack of safety and her experience of powerlessness.

Powerful Reinterpretation There are two ways to transform your
experience of powerlessness. You can dialogue with Harriet, who
tells you that you must hide yourself and avoid being the agent of
your life because you're not really an adult (accusation #4), or you
can reassess the situation rather than make an immediate misinterpretation
that reinforces your powerlessness. Marissa needs to analyze
the situation based on what's happening today. You can assess a
situation where you're afraid and don't know how to create a sense
of safety in one of the following ways:


You can assess the real risk and reward of your decision.

You can value your own opinion over the opinions of others. .

You can deflect others'feelings of envy by understanding that it's
a form of flattery.

You can work toward creating real safety.

You can bravely adopt a new role that's different from your
family role of the past.
You can learn to maintain boundaries.

Powerful Reinterpretation Example Marissa is in an unsatisfying and
almost verbally abusive relationship. She thinks about what's really
going on. She realizes that she's done all the work she can possibly
do, she's asked her husband to go to couples counseling, she's
altered her own attitude (she did this in the frustration/reward
layer), and her husband is unwilling to make any compromises. She
realizes that while getting divorced and living on her own will be
difficult, she can't continue to hide under layers and layers of fat. She
realizes that only by having her own home will she be safe from his
constant barrage of abusive comments. After thinking about things,
Marissa feels empowered by deciding to move out, and she no
longer needs her fat to hide beneath.


SESSION 7

Maturely Dealin;
with Anger



In this session:

You'll identify how you deal with your own anger, so you don't
have to eat to control it.

You'll see how by eating to deal with anger, you're attacking
yourself rather than anyone else.

You'll recognize that eating to defy or punish someone only
gives you the false feeling of power, and that's not real
independence.

You'll learn the six different ways that you mask or excuse
using food and fat as an aggressive weapon.

You'll see that you can recover your power by becoming more
skilled at expressing anger appropriately in the context of very
specific situations. You'll identify who you have grievances
with.

You'll have to remember that you have two methods to void
your powerless conclusion about anger and eating:
1.	Remember that rebellion and defiance are not the same as healthy independence and autonomy.
2.	Stop adding to your anger by confusing old anger with current situations.

The next tricky reason you overeat is to rebel. Often you might
be getting back at a parent, a partner, or someone else in your past.
Sometimes you're taking things out on your own body because it
feels safer than showing your anger and defiant attitude, and risking
abandonment. Sometimes it's just your way of throwing up your
hands when frustrated and expressing your anger through a kind of
primitive defiance: "If I can't control my world, I can at least hurt
myself." You, like most people, find it difficult to give up your blame
in order to accept full responsibility for overcoming the past, exercising
your resilience, and making your life work despite past battles.
Letting go of revenge and anger is hard, but it's what you must do if
you ever want to truly grow up. Eating to rebel is a drama played out
upon yourself, only incidentally and peripherally exacting revenge
on others. Let's look at how this drama plays out in the familiar
forms of eating rebellion. We talked about them in depth in part one;
now let's look at what you can do about them.

1.	Love me first, and then I will lose weight.
2.	They made me this way, so I can't change.
3.	I'll get back at them.
4.	I am not this body.
5.	Food is my only pleasure, so I'm not going to give it up.
6.	I can't be perfect, so I'd rather be fat.

Love Me First, and Then
I Will Lose Weight

When one feels unworthy of love, they put their partner through
many tests in an effort to get their partner to prove how much they
are loved. Being fat may seem to be a good test.Your spouse should,
after all, love you just the way you are, right? But you may want to
ask yourself who your weight is really punishing.
Are you treating your current or former romantic partner in this
unrealistic way--asking them to love the fat that you hate? Asking
them to be the unconditional loving object? When you expect or
demand that they treat you with unconditional love, you're asking
the impossible in order to replay an image you have about "others"
who say they love you, and this image was generated in the home
you grew up in. You partner will always lose. If he or she seems to
love you when you're fat and you decide to lose weight, he or she
might like it. Then you pounce on that and say they like you more
thin than fat, therefore they were lying to you when you were fat, so
you get fat again to punish the hypocrite and deceiver. This will
always keep you fat and your partner off-balance. You'll always be
angry and mistrustful. What you need to keep in mind is that this is
not about you and him, it is about the way you felt a long time ago
and the parent who you think didn't love you in the right way.

EXERCISE

Is It Your Partner or Your Parent?

What you need to do to stop this pattern is use the insight above
and write out the conversation you would like to have had with that
parent who didn't give you the unconditional love you wanted (you
don't actually have to give what you wrote to the parent who disappointed
you).You should do this to keep the past separate from the
current conversation you need to have with your partner. With your
partner, you need to explain the pattern you've been producing, ask
him or her to be understanding about why you've done this in the
past, and make a commitment to him or her to not do it again in the
future. That'll help you sort out the real world from the old tapes that
keep you defying your own best judgment about food in order to
play out this angry, mistrustful scenario. Tell him about how you feel
with regard to being overweight, and how you wouldn't expect him
to say it's all right when it's not, and that you know real love is based
on honest feedback and honest self-awareness.
They Made Me This Way,
So I Can't Change

Perhaps you've stayed overweight because "your parents made you
this way" by overfeeding you or using food alternatively as a reward
or a punishment. Perhaps you even say that there's a genetic component
to your weight, so that they literally "made you this way." If
you're still using your weight to get back at your parents, you're giving
them far too much power over your life. Remember, they don't
rule you anymore, you do. It's your anger that's keeping them in
power in your head. You don't give up your blame and anger, but you
don't express it directly, either, so you act it out on yourself through
overeating, having a fictional argument with parents who are not
there to listen or answer back, and are not there to be hurt. When
you keep this pattern up, it means you're scared of your anger and
don't know what to do with it other than hurt yourself and give
yourself some illusion that you're punishing them through your suffering.
Although it may be true that that works on some parents, I
have seen people perpetuate this pattern long after their parents
were dead.

EXERCISE

Why Are Your Parents Still in Charge?

You need to recognize that this is an internal drama and work on
stepping outside this drama into the real world. Who did this to you,
and what did they really do? Even if you were too young to reject
this parenting and feeding, what makes you still think that you have
to accept this historical fact as the final statement about you and
your body? Use your Harriet Dialogues to talk to the ghosts within
you. Give yourself back the ultimate authority over your life.
Recognize that you're keeping this up with your unexpressed anger
and blame, and that only you are being hurt. If you have real grievances
with your parents, then either decide to air them out, or let go
of them. Either way is better than eating yourself into poor health.

I'll Get Back at Them

This one builds on the last one. Not only does it make your parents
responsible for the way you are today, but it adds a component of
punishment for their parental failures. You have dedicated your life
and are using your body to frustrating them at any cost.

EXERCISE

Do You Want to Use Your Body
as a Battlefield?

Do you still harbor anger at parents who didn't treat you well as a
child? Are they still doing it? If so, do you want to tell them how
angry you are? Are you afraid to do it or not sure it's right or wise?
In any case, looking at and deciding what you want to do in the
circumstances of now is much better (even if you do nothing) than
continuing holding a grudge and acting out on yourself a silent
revenge (even if it annoys them to this day). Look at the difference
between now and then. Don't be afraid to feel your hurt and anger
and then decide what to do with it. If you don't, your anger will eat
you up, a totally futile, harmful, and useless thing to do with your
life. Just recognize that you have been using your body as a weapon
of revenge, and ask yourself if that is what you still want to do.

I Am Not This Body

Perhaps for you, due to a history of physical or sexual abuse, you
decided that being in your body was not a safe place to be. You may
have separated from your body as a way to protect yourself, but time
has passed and you're safe now. When it happened, you were overwhelmed
and flooded with feelings, fears, and guilt. Now you can
sort this out. You can protect yourself from more abuse. You can deal
with the emotions that come up through insight and understanding,
and counseling if necessary. You have to find ways to begin to invite
yourself back in. If, however, you are in a situation where you are still
being abused, please get help.

EXERCISE

Beclaiming Your Body

While it may not have felt like your body for a long time, it is your
body. Try these three techniques for increasing body awareness
when something upsets you:

1.	Spend 5 minutes at a time looking in a full-length mirror, talking to yourself.

2.	Slow down your breathing. Remember to breathe from your diaphragm. Make sure that you take complete breaths. Focus
all your attention on your breath.

3.	Get into a bathtub and massage yourself. Better yet, get someone else to massage you. Pay attention to each part of
your body as it gets touched.

These are the physical acts you can do to start the reunion process,
but remember, it is a psychological journey that has to happen, and
it's a return to the natural state of being, so your own body will get
you there if you give it a chance. Fat only separates you from yourself,
and defying yourself in order to stay fat is just another way of
expressing your anger at what happened and maintaining the split
that makes you feel safe, as if you were not now older and more
capable of handling the emotions of the past.

Food Is My Only Pleasure, So I'm
Not Going to Give It Up

In chapter 14 (Session 5), you got to see how food can never fill the
place of real pleasure. It cannot love you, it cannot make you proud,
it cannot get you the affection, attention, and acknowledgment that
you so deeply crave. That's a fact. There is another fact: when you say
to yourself that food is your only or last pleasure, you're operating
off an image of yourself that you should question. Are you really so
ruined as a person that you can't get pleasure from relationships and
the abundant opportunities in life? Is it true that only an inanimate
thing, food, is capable of satisfying you, filling you up? Do you recognize
that this is the angriest statement of all regarding food, that
it says the whole world is useless to you? No one can provide you
with the pleasure that food does?

EXERCISE

Finding Real Pleasure

What you need to do now is prove to yourself that this image of
yourself--as a person who can get fulfillment only out of food--is
an old image you fell into and perpetuated out of habit by not looking
closely at yourself. It's not who you really are. It is an idea about
yourself that has grown out of your disappointment. Perhaps in earlier
chapters you began to outline what you really have been craving
in your life. Take three things and begin making them a reality this
week. Pay special attention to the pleasure you get from doing the
things you've put off doing.

I Can't Be Perfect, So I'd
Rather Be Fat

Once again, I'd like to remind you that you'll never be perfect--no
one will. It's a hard ideal to give up, but it's one that every happy,
successful person must at some point let go of. Be aware that this is
a colossal excuse, and the aggression is directly toward your own
critical conscience, Harriet. You're eating to defy her because she has
you believing you must be perfect in order to accept yourself and be
acceptable to others. If you're still addicted to being perfect, please
revisit the Harriet dialogues in chapter 13 (Session 4).
EXERCISE

Putting Perfection in Perspective

Dialogue with Accusation #1 in Session 4, chapter 13.

EXERCISE

Mature Ways to Handle Anger

You'll have to rely on the principle that we've repeated many times in
this book: Look to the reality of the situation, and start by assuming
that all realities are complex and open to multiple interpretations.You
have to be a "reality detective" and analyze each clue, and only after
that decide on a response.You'll have to accept that your first blush of
anger is a reflex based on a misinterpretation that the old anger situation
and the current anger situation are the same. That needs to be
followed by a thinking pause so you can see the difference. In that
pause you can choose a mature way to deal with your anger. Choose
a new way to handle a specific anger situation maturely.

You can use it to motivate yourself.
You can clear up a misunderstanding.
You can admit your responsibility in the matter.
You can compromise.
You can interpret envy as flattery.
You can discover that the act against you was unintentional.
You can realize that your sense of entitlement or expectations is
what led you to feeling angry.

You can assert in an appropriate way your rights and reasonable
expectations.

True independence comes from acting appropriately, wisely, and
maturely according to your own values of what is right and wrong.
The more you keep your anger response keyed to the specifics of a
particular reality situation, the more powerful you will be as a person.
That will eliminate your defiant eating patterns.
EXERCISE

Address Grievances or Give Them Up

Everyone has a list of people who have hurt or disappointed them
throughout their life, beginning with their ancestors who determined
their physical features and genetics, to their parents, to the
person who just cut them off driving 5 minutes ago. In your notebook,
make a list of people you have grievances against. Like I
helped you to do with your unmet needs, we need to find a resting
place for these grievances so that you can address them in an
empowered way or let them go.

1.	Have a conversation with or go to counseling with the person.

2.	Own your responsibility in the grievance.

3.	Make a decision that resolution cannot be made with this particular person (either because they're dead, they're not in
your life anymore, or they're unwilling), and let it go.

Stop Reinforcing Your Powerlessness

With regard to your ability to deal with anger in life and how that
makes you rebel, making a powerless choice looks like this:
Something happens. There's a situation that makes you feel angry
and vengeful. One of the following things may have happened:

You've been disrespected.
You don't feel appreciated.
You feel misunderstood.
You feel used.
You feel abused.
You feel belittled.
You feel betrayed.

When any of those things happen you're likely to arrive at a misinterpretation:
"I don't know how to handle my anger." Suppressing
your anger makes you feel powerless, and you eat because by chewing
on food you avoid a confrontation and the possibility of "biting
someone." Let's see what this looks like in practice.

Powerless Choice Example

John, as a child, always felt like his mother was more interested in
other things besides him: her magazines, her needlepoint, talking
on the phone, going shopping, soap operas, you name it. Feeding
him was the only way she offered him any kind of attention. She
made his favorite meals and sat down at the table to eat with him.
John has been overweight his whole life. He recently went on a Date,
an online dating service. He put a photo up from when he weighed
less. He had been having a nice correspondence with Ruth for about
three weeks, but when he finally met her, she seemed disappointed,
and came right out and said he was too fat (what happened in the
external reality of today). John is angry and misinterprets what Ruth
said to believe that he'll never get a date. He calls his mother and
says it's her fault that he's fat, and then it turns into a catastrophe
prediction: I'll never find a woman who'll love me. (This happens in
his internal reality, where things are weighed against his fears and
past experiences.) John ends up eating to get back at Ruth, and at his
mother for making him fat in the first place. How eating can possibly
punish either one of them is illogical from the outside, but makes
sense at the time he's doing it. Being fat reinforces both his rebelliousness
and his experience of powerlessness.

Powerful Reinterpretation There are two ways to transform your
experience of powerlessness. You can dialogue with Harriet, who
migrates into other people to confirm your own self-doubts (accusation
#6), or you can reassess the situation rather than make an
immediate misinterpretation that reinforces your powerlessness.
John needs to analyze the situation based on what's happening
today. You can assess a situation where you're angry and think of
other ways to deal with that anger rather than rebelling. You can
Communicate and clear up any misunderstandings.
Learn breathing techniques.
Own your responsibility for how things went wrong.
Make amends with people from the past so you're not harboring
the resentment of old grievances.


Forgive when you can.

Powerful Reinterpretation Example John recently went on a Date, an
online dating service. He put a photo up from when he weighed
less. He had been having a nice correspondence with Ruth for about
three weeks but when he finally met her, she seemed disappointed,
and came right out and said he was too fat. He thinks about what's
really going on. John realizes that he was deceptive to put up that
photo in the first place and that Ruth had a right to feel disappointed.
He also realizes that while his mother didn't provide him
with the attention he needed as a child, he's limiting the possibility
of a real relationship with her today by harboring an old resentment.
Finally, he realizes that by eating he's only hurting himself; he's not
really getting back at anyone. After all, being so spiteful is not such
an attractive quality. John sends Ruth an e-mail apologizing. She's
so touched by his honesty that she agrees to stay in touch with him.
They start biking together and John is finally losing weight effortlessly.
They agree on things, they laugh, and he's finally getting the
attention from a woman that he always longed for.


SESSION 8

Fill Yourself Up

In this session:

You'll understand your experience of emptiness to see exactly
what it means to you and how you can take charge of your life
to deal with it so you don't have to keep trying to fill yourself
up with food.

You'll understand the mystery layer of emptiness. You'll identify
your abandonment fear and see it for what it is, an outdated
image and memory of what you feared as a child.

You'll become intimately acquainted with your expectancy
pattern and the catastrophe prediction you make about being
deprived or disappointed.

You'll have to prove to yourself, by the experience of catching
yourself, that your expectancy pattern is not the right way to
deal with your relationships in life.

You'll have to stop adding to your emptiness by mistrusting
what is being given to you by those who love you.
You'll have to remember that you have two methods to void
your powerlessness conclusion about emptiness:

1.	Remember that emptiness can never be filled with food.
2.	Stop adding to your feelings of emptiness by confusing your childhood fear of abandonment with current situations.

EXERCISE

What Does the Experience of
Emptiness Mean to You?

For every person, emptiness is different. You'll need to determine
when you specifically feel empty. "I feel empty when	."

Self-Doubt Layer
I am filled with self-doubts
I don't feel good enough about myself
I feel judged

Frustration/Reward Layer
I feel unsatisfied in my relationships
I'm lonely
I'm far from people I love
my needs aren't met
I am not involved in something I'm passionate about
I'm overwhelmed and can't manage my life

Safety Layer
I'm anxious
I'm having conflict with my family
I'm scared to try something new

Rebellion Layer
I feel misunderstood

I feel alienated

I feel marginalized or unimportant

Emptiness Layer
I am in a moment where life doesn't make sense
I'm with people I love, but I don't feel like I fit in
I'm going through a big change in life
I feel as if I never get my expectations met by anyone

Look at which categories your feelings of emptiness fall into, and
that's how you'll determine the work you need to do. If how you feel
falls into one of the first four categories go back, and work in those
areas. If how you feel falls into the last category (the emptiness
layer), then proceed through this session and I'll show you how to
work with those feelings.

Understanding the Fear
of Abandonment

In chapter 8, you saw how the fear of abandonment is our most
deeply ingrained and oldest fear and that it often leads to feelings of
emptiness that you try to fill with food.You also saw how your childhood
fear of abandonment can exacerbate your current day fear of
abandonment. It's normal for you to be afraid that the people you
love--your parents, your partner, your friends, your children--will
go away or die. But these fears become unbearable when they're
associated with our old fears of abandonment. Let's separate those
out now. In your notebook, draw two columns. On the top of the
lefthand column, write "Old Abandonment Fears," and on the other
one write "Current Abandonment Fears."
On your list of "Old Abandonment Fears," write out times when
you feared you were abandoned, times when people stopped being
your friend as a child, when someone died or moved away, or any
nightmares or fears you had. Explore the feelings and what you did
with them. On your list of "Current Abandonment Fears," write
down your current fears such as someone getting sick or dying, relationships
breaking up, an anticipated move, children moving away,
and so forth.

EXERCISE

Abandonment Fears

Look at the lists side by side. Here's what you should ask yourself
about your current abandonment fears: "How can I find a resting
spot for these fears?"
You can find a resting spot by asking:

1.	Can this abandonment be prevented? If so, how? (For instance, if someone has a life-threatening illness and they're
not taking good care of themselves medically, they can get
treatment.)
2.	Can this abandonment be prepared for? If so, how? (For instance, if your children will be going away to college soon,
you can begin to develop your own interests and activities so
that when they're gone, your life is full.)
3.	If a certain abandonment can't be prevented or prepared for, then how will you cope with it? For instance, if you're going
through a divorce, you can make sure you have appropriate
support systems and good legal counsel.

When you look at the two lists side by side, can you identify
ways in which your old fears intensify your current abandonment
fears? Simply identifying them will be enough to awaken a new
awareness.
In chapter 8, you saw that you may still be longing for the people
in your life to love you the way a parent loves an infant, immediately
attending to their every need. However, back then your needs
were simple. You needed to be picked up when you cried and fed
when you were hungry. Even at that early time, you began to form
images in your mind about what to expect when you were in need of

human contact. Each mother-child relationship sets in motion an
expectancy pattern for all relationships to come. If you recognize
within you (this may not be true for everyone or to the same degree)
a tendency to mistrust the love that's given to you, to hold yourself
back in an effort to be self-protective, or to constantly be disappointed
by the people who are meant to love you, then you may
have an expectancy pattern that is creating your feelings of emptiness.
If when you're being loved you don't accept it, then it doesn't
fill you up.

EXERCISE

Observe

You'll need to find a way to put that expectancy pattern aside,
acknowledge when you're getting real love, and let the warmth of
real love fill you up without being afraid. The way you do that is to
catch yourself in those moments when you know you're being loved
but don't let it happen. For example, your spouse tries to make you feel good when you're in a bad mood, and instead of getting
annoyed, as if to say that what he/she is doing isn't enough, you
pause and tell your partner that you appreciate the effort that's
being made.

EXERCISE

What Fills You Up?

You'll need to ask yourself what really fills you up. Look into your
past and see which moments in your life felt full of meaning--
moments when you felt awake, present, loved, seen, known. "I feel
full when	."

I'm in love
I get a good report at work
I feel like my life is on track
I feel connected to God
all my loved ones are happy and healthy
I'm passionately engaged in something
I'm connecting with someone
I'm taking care of myself
I'm taking care of others or engaged in some kind of service

Make your own list full of specific situations (the more specific
you make them, the better), so that you can refer to it at times when you feel overwhelmed with a feeling of emptiness.

Stop Reinforcing Your Powerlessness

With regard to your feeling fulfilled in life, making a powerless
choice looks like this: Something happens. There's a time or situation
or person that leaves you feeling empty. The emptiness is so
uncomfortable that you immediately seek to try to fill it with food.
One of the following things may be happening:

Someone is holding a grudge against you.
A loved one has died.
A relationship has ended.
You don't feel loved by anyone.
You're not appreciated.
You're far away from those that you feel connected to.
Nothing in your life makes sense.

When any of those things happen, you may arrive at a misinterpretation:
"I'll never feel loved or fulfilled. Nobody understands me.
I'm all alone in the world." Your emptiness makes you feel powerless,
and you eat to momentarily have a tangible feeling of fullness.
Let's see what this looks like in practice.

Powerless Choice Example

Denise's boyfriend left her. They had been making plans to get married.
While Denise was on a business trip in Denver, Alan packed up
all his things and left. When she returned home, his closets were
empty (what's happening in her external reality of today). She misinterprets
this to mean she'll never be properly loved, and then it
turns into a catastrophe prediction: My father died when I was ten,
men always leave me, I'll always be alone (this happens in her internal
reality, where things are weighed against her fears and past
experiences). Denise starts eating all the time. She just can't stand
that empty feeling in her gut. In six months, she's gained forty
pounds. Eating reinforces her emptiness by intercepting her ability
to look for things that would really fill her up and confirms her experience
of powerlessness.

Powerful Reinterpretation There are two ways to transform your
experience of powerlessness. You can dialogue with Harriet, who
tells you that you're not perfect, so you're not good (accusation #1),
or you can reassess the situation rather than make an immediate
misinterpretation that reinforces your powerlessness. Denise needs
to analyze the situation based on what's happening today. You can
assess a situation where you feel empty and don't know how to
create a real sense of fullness in one of the following ways:

You can ask for forgiveness.
You can form new relationships.
You can get grief counseling.

You can accept that your abandonment fears of yesterday are different
from your abandonment fears of today.

You can stop expecting people to provide you with the unconditional
love of a parent.

You can find ways to connect with people or activities.

Powerful Reinterpretation Example Denise's boyfriend left her. They
had been making plans to get married. While Denise was on a
business trip in Denver, Alan packed up all his things and left. When
she returned home, his closets were empty. Alan was not even willing
to discuss why he left. He just says that it's what he needs to do.
Denise stops and thinks about what's really going on. She realizes
that her feelings are made worse by the fact that her father died and
"left" when she was ten. She dialogues with Harriet and accepts
that just because Alan left doesn't mean that she is deeply flawed or
that she'll always be alone. The pain of her emptiness forces her to
get counseling, where she discusses not only the pain of losing her
relationship but also the pain of her father's death. Only then does
Denise realize how her father's death and her fear of abandonment
have been affecting all her adult relationships. She had been holding
back and not really loving her partners the way they were loving her.
After all, she was too afraid because they might leave. When Denise
begins to do this adult work to fill her emptiness, she feels empowered,
she doesn't need to eat to make herself feel full, and she finally
can see that the chance for a fulfilling relationship can be possible.



Shrink Yourself Conclusion

By now you've done a lot of work. You've thought a lot. You've
explored a lot. You may still feel overwhelmed and long for a simple
magical solution to losing weight and having the body you want. We
all long for an easy way out, and I wish I could've offered you that,
but it simply wasn't an option. Taking your power back, one choice at
a time, is in fact the only way to take control of your weight forever.
As you practice these skills in your life, you may at first be able to
handle one of the five layers with ease while still having trouble with
emptiness or some other layer. I explain to my patients that this
doesn't mean they haven't progressed, it just means that there are
areas where they've been more dependent on food. And those areas
require more time, more patience, and more perseverance. You may
at first be able to control your afternoon snacking at work, but not
your nighttime bingeing. Whatever areas are still challenging for you
are only indications of where you need to do deeper work--where
you need to ask more questions, make more choices, reinterpret,
dialogue with Harriet, or look more closely. Managing your life is a
lifetime project, and mastering your relationship with food is just
one very important project within that project.

Ultimately, your goal should be to catch yourself every time
before you overeat, to find that pause between when something
happens and when you have the uncontrollable urge to eat. In that
pause is where the real you lives--the person who has dreams, feelings,
ideas, needs, goals, and unfulfilled potential--the person who
has been kept down all this time with food. When you don't eat, you
allow that person, the real you inside, to emerge, and then your life can be full of possibility and you can finally have the body you want.
At www.shrinkyourself.com you'll find the Hunger Coach, a program that will help you capture that pause before you overeat.
There isn't much more to say except to remind you of the obvious
(which I always find to be the most important):

	It's your life and only you can make it work.
	It's better to have the power of self-determination than to give
away your power to your own primitive conscience. A mature
conscience makes life a hell of a lot easier.
	As the adult author of your life, you can write the book any
way you want.


The End.