1. Stop weighing, measuring,
and calorie-counting today.
For some people, weighing and measuring can be a great way to remain aware of what they’re eating. But if you tend to obsess about your food, you will probably benefit from throwing out the scales and ditching the tape measure, and you should definitely stop counting calories and measuring food.
It may seem counterintuitive to let go of those methods of control, but we’re trying to switch from a world of restrictions to a universe of abundance in which you can eat what you want and have what you need. Take a leap of faith with me and begin to act as though you don’t
need
to weigh, measure, and count, because everything you want is simply going to work for you.
Set yourself up for success by starting small. Begin with a low-anxiety situation, such as a dinner where you are eating by yourself. Tell yourself,
just for this meal
, I will not count calories. After making yourself a reasonably sized, balanced meal, throw out the boxes with the nutritional information.
Throughout your meal, I want you to have a conversation with yourself in your head. Perhaps the emotional part of you says, “I’m feeling anxious. If I don’t calculate the exact amount of calories, I’m not going to be okay.” Then imagine the logical part of you replying, “That may be the way you’re feeling right now, and this makes sense, as you’ve been engaging in this behavior for years. But logically, you know that there is actually nothing dangerous about not counting calories when this is a reasonable meal that has the nutritional elements you need. You’re going to be okay.”
Every time you do this, the emotional part of you will begin to become less anxious. Perhaps just a small amount will change, but you will be at least slightly less anxious than before. And the person teaching you this lesson is yourself, because your experience will begin to turn off that fear.
After you’ve mastered that first meal, do another. And then baby-step your way to gradually bigger steps, like not counting calories when you’re eating with a group. If you’re listening to how your body feels, and you know you’re making healthy decisions about the foods you know your body needs, you’ll be well on your way to managing your anxiety. The resulting lesson will be, “I am a resourceful and strong person. I’m working on this, and I’m teaching myself that I can handle what life throws at me.” Allow this improvement in self-worth to help you achieve your goals in all areas of your life.
2. Change one thing about your food rituals or habits, just to prove to yourself that you can.
One of my patients learned the benefits of this involuntarily. Spencer was a successful forty-year-old lawyer who lived in a constant state of crippling anxiety. He was obsessed with the idea that he might screw up at work, or that if he left the office before ten p.m., he wasn’t working hard enough. Spencer had always struggled with his weight and got up at five every morning to work out. But his eating rituals were so boring to his palate and so unsatisfying that he often craved fast food and wasted a lot of time and stress with this mental struggle. If he slipped up and ate something “off menu,” he made himself run five miles. He told me that once he’d gone running at two a.m. because he’d eaten some fries.
Every night Spencer ordered in the exact same steak salad from the same place for dinner at his desk. Then one night disaster struck, as the restaurant changed the menu. Even though he begged and pleaded and finally became furious, the restaurant’s new chef wouldn’t make the old salad.
“I was so upset my palms were sweating!” Spencer told me. “I couldn’t get any work done! I needed my salad to feel okay. It’s hard to explain, but it was the only thing I ever wanted to eat for dinner. It was perfect and I always felt so good eating it.”
Spencer had gotten used to calming himself with food. For him, eating was an island of order and security in his hectic, frenzied life. As a child, Spencer turned to sugar and carbs to help medicate a general feeling of unpredictability and chaos during his parents’ divorce. Keeping rigid control over his eating helped him feel in command, but underneath the rationality he was trying to impose lurked an addiction to serotonin-releasing foods that Spencer desperately needed to help balance his brain chemistry.
First, I helped Spencer to see what emotions he was placing on that steak salad. “Knowing exactly what I’m getting” was really a sense of familiarity and stability. Spencer and I spent some time coming up with other places to put this emotional need, so we could take the need away from the food. Luckily, his serotonin boosters helped him to meet this need by calling friends, forgiving his parents, and taking a walk outside every day. These boosters all gave Spencer an overall feeling of “I’m going to be okay.”
Meanwhile, Spencer had embarked upon a serious research project: calling around restaurants looking for a steak salad like his favorite. Sadly for him, he found that no one made it the way the old place did. He ended up ordering a steak with pepper sauce and grilled vegetables on the side.
We had rehearsed the way Spencer would get through this challenge of eating a new food. I instructed Spencer to have a conversation in his head between the logical and emotional sides of himself. So when the emotional side said, “I can’t eat this. This is not the way it’s supposed to be!” Spencer’s logical side would reply, “I know this is hard, but you know that this new steak salad is not going to harm you. Every bite will be easier than the last and will help you to feel one percent less anxious.”
In many ways, Spencer was being his own loving parent to his own inner, tantrum-throwing child. Although it wasn’t easy, this exercise helped Spencer to get through the experience. In the end, he was surprised to discover how delicious the new dish was.
“When I was eating the new meal, I realized I was really paying attention to the flavors!” Spencer told me. “It’s strange, I felt really happy and proud of myself afterward. I realized I would have felt weird if people had seen me eating the same salad every night. Of course no one ever did because I had this ritual of eating it alone at my desk. But now, trying something new, I felt free. I knew then maybe I could let go a little and it wouldn’t kill me—I might even enjoy it. One night I even called my colleagues and we ate dinner together. I was still at work until ten p.m., but at least I’m taking baby steps!”
3. If rituals around food make you feel safe, create a new ritual that is not organized around food.
If you find yourself using repetitive behavior around food, transfer some of that energy to the relationships in your life. Having a ritualized date night with your significant other or a regular night out with your best friends works as a great replacement therapy.
Bethany, thirty-one, was obsessed with juice fasts. She seemed to be doing one every other week, or else an all-soup week to help “cleanse.” What I could see was that rather than supporting her system, Bethany was starving herself.
When I asked Bethany to share her feelings about herself and what she ate, she shook her head miserably. “I’m fat,” she said simply, referring to the ten to fifteen pounds she was constantly battling. “And if I eat like a regular person, I’ll be huge! I know I will. I need to control my eating this way, or I’ll blow up.”
Actually, the truth was just the opposite: Bethany was ruining her metabolism with self-starvation, encouraging her body to cling to every ounce of fat she had and every measly calorie she consumed. On her no-carb diet, Bethany never had the energy to exercise, so her already-low serotonin levels weren’t getting a boost there, either.
Despite Bethany’s protests, I took a detour away from talking about food and weight and onto emotions and relationships. In the beginning, she didn’t really see how they were all related. But I asked her, “What is it you really want, Bethany?”
Bethany told me how what she really wanted most of all was to be in a loving relationship with a man who loved her. And then I asked about how her obsessive juice fasts were helping her to manifest her most important goal. When Bethany told me that she needed to get these last ten or fifteen pounds off, I replied, “So your current mantra is: I’m fat and no one will love me like this.” She smiled and acknowledged that I was spot on.
We then looked at how her self-critical mantra affected her achievement of long-term, long-lasting weight loss. Ironically, her mantra was making it harder, not easier, to lose weight. When we come from a place of judging ourselves and believing we’re unlovable, that depletes our serotonin. And guess what we need to do when that serotonin goes down? We feel compelled to eat carbs and sugar, and we certainly don’t feel like exercising.
To Bethany, losing ten to fifteen pounds was the precondition for being loved. In our work together, we discovered that it was actually the other way around: Feeling lovable was the precondition for losing ten to fifteen pounds. If serotonin boosters could help Bethany to
feel
loved, then she actually wouldn’t need to go on juice fasts. And instead of just getting love through romantic relationships—which are largely outside of our control—we looked at the relationships that Bethany had more control over.
We examined how establishing a girls’ takeout and TV night could actually help Bethany to not feel so alone. When she was with her girlfriends, they always gave her the sense that what she was going through wasn’t all that unusual. We all struggle with self-worth from time to time. More important, Bethany realized how much love she already had in her life.
The other serotonin booster for Bethany was creating a Monday night yoga ritual. The calming and spiritual nature of the exercise was very healing for her, while the regularity and repetitiveness of the movements reassured Bethany and made her feel secure. Of course, it helped that yoga itself is a serotonin booster. For Bethany, it was the perfect activity, and best of all, she could practice it herself at home whenever she felt anxious. When she was tempted to self-medicate with carbs and candy, she could actually do something else that was good for her while satisfying the craving for a serotonin boost.
With this support and love, Bethany gave up her ritualistic juice fasts in favor of a sustainable way of eating. She had shifted from the sprint mentality to a marathon one. In the end, Bethany ended up losing about eight pounds and keeping it off for the long-term. It wasn’t her “ideal” weight, but it definitely put her in the healthy category. And when Bethany was getting love from so many places in her life and realized she was worthy of love, she was perfectly happy with where she was.
Oh, and Bethany is now dating
and
eating solid foods every day. That’s a win-win!
4. If you feel anxious at just the thought of not having total control of your diet, delegate responsibility to a friend who’s willing to choose a new, healthy meal for you once a week.
Vivian was a forty-three-year-old marketing executive who struggled both with her weight and with obsessive thoughts about eating. Every day she liked to bring to work her own tuna salad, made her own particular way. She sometimes thought about eating something different or going out to lunch, but somehow she got stuck and felt antsy if she didn’t stick to her routine.
I suggested to her that she literally give over control of her eating to a friend—just one meal per week—but even the thought of that upset her. Later she told me that it was as though the “private time” that she spent with her food rituals was being snatched away from her.
Vivian was tired of obsessing about her food choices, though, so she finally agreed to try this suggestion. “When I let my girlfriend decide what I would eat at lunch, I felt so angry!” she told me after her first attempt. “It was ridiculous! I’d actually
asked
her to do it, so I don’t know what came over me, but I was mad.”
With Vivian’s overwhelming success in her work life, I wasn’t surprised that giving up some personal control was a struggle for her. In some ways, it was admitting she had a weakness. But to Vivian, admitting that she was a human being who needed help every now and again was therapeutic in and of itself. In fact, Vivian’s girlfriend said she felt relieved. She had always perceived Vivian as perfect and sometimes was a little afraid to confide in her. Now she felt able to get even closer to her.
After a few weeks, Vivian and her girlfriend called their Wednesday lunches “hump day lunch.” The first two weeks were hard, but after that, it was quite easy. She had replaced her food ritual with a fun Wednesday lunch where she and her friend would try a new restaurant, celebrate their week, and plan for their weekends. This ended up being a much more effective serotonin booster that helped Vivian to create the life she actually wanted to live. After another month, they agreed to take turns picking new restaurants for their Wednesday outings, because going to new places and eating new things were no longer anxiety-provoking for Vivian. In fact, she looked forward to it. Ironically, the very ways she had been trying to make herself feel safe had only increased her anxiety. Opening up and becoming less isolated and more flexible paradoxically made Vivian feel safer.
Another benefit of changing her eating behaviors and improving her relationships was that Vivian felt more satisfied and therefore less likely to snack. She found she didn’t need the calming sugar fixes that had kept her twenty pounds overweight since she was twenty-five. A couple of the other serotonin boosters, such as a five-minute meditation that she downloaded onto her iPod, were extra tools in her toolbox. In the end, Vivian not only gave up her obsessive ritual but also actually got what she was really needing in her life.