5. Shake up your food choices by flipping a coin. When it comes up heads, eat as you normally do. When it comes up tails, force yourself to make a new choice.
This works for excessive exercise plans and obsessive calorie-counting, too. For example, if you usually run five miles or hit the gym for an hour daily, take a day off when the coin lands on tails. Or work up to the day off with baby steps, such as limiting yourself to a brisk walk instead of your demanding routine.
All of these behavior-changing exercises can achieve two goals. First, you’ll learn that even if you don’t have total control over your food, you’ll be all right. Second, you’ll be forced to focus your control issues less on food and more on other sources of stability and pleasure: family, home life, work, and your own happiness.
Set Yourself Up for Success
Remember, the first time you do something will always be harder than the second, or third, or fourth time. As I said earlier, listen to your heart saying, “I can’t do this!” while your logical mind says, “I’m just changing my routine, it won’t hurt me.” You can choose which voice to listen to, even though at first, your heart will be speaking much, much louder. But every time you listen to the logical voice, it gets one percent stronger.
Of course, the whole process is slow, because your emotional voice has ruled your eating for your whole life up until now. So be patient with yourself. Set yourself up to win this fight by being kind and compassionate with your emotions. They’ll come around in the end!
8
Emotional Eating: The Search for Joy
Dede was only seven pounds over her ideal weight, but those seven pounds took up virtually all of her attention. If Jenny’s serotonin-deprived behavior in Chapter 7 was obsessive eating, Dede’s dopamine-and serotonin-fueled pitfall was emotional eating. While Jenny was a prisoner of her fears, Dede was a slave to her beliefs that she was neither attractive nor lovable. “I’m not worth anything,” her mantra declared—and Dede’s hangdog look, her loose-fitting clothes, and her slumped shoulders shouted that message loud and clear.
As an emotional eater, Dede went for her serotonin and dopamine pitfall foods whenever she found confirmation of her negative self-concept. Of course, since she was constantly looking for that confirmation, she usually found it! Dede was so sure she was worthless that she confirmed that opinion for herself before the world could do it for her. If she met a man she might have been interested in, rather than flirt with him or pursue a relationship, she ate. If she had an opportunity for a promotion or a new job, rather than pursue the possibility, she ate. If she spent a difficult Sunday with her mother, rather than either confront her mom or find a more satisfying way to spend her weekend, she ate.
Dede exercised excessively, so she was only seven pounds past her ideal weight. Yet her relationship with food was no less addictive than that of my more severely overweight patients. In many ways, food dominated Dede’s life even more than it did some of theirs.
As with Jenny, my goal with Dede was to give her situations in which she could prove to herself that her pitfall mantra was incorrect and that her core beliefs were wrong. If Dede could truly grasp the possibility that she was lovable and worthy, she would be well on her way to freeing herself from the addictive triggers that left her looking for solace in a bag of chips.
One day, the guy Dede had liked for a long time but always avoided started dating a new woman. Dede responded by eating a whole large pizza by herself. I asked her to go back and recount the moment she knew she wanted to eat. Simply the act of recognizing her trigger was helpful in getting Dede to see herself and her behavior with a new clarity. I also wanted Dede to rewrite her story, asking “What would the ideal Dede with a booster mantra have done in that moment?’
I had Dede practice writing down all the things she felt good about in her life. Every day I asked her to add something to the list. She began reluctantly with “My job is okay,” but by day ten she was writing about her love of fashion and how happy she was to have her best girlfriend in her life.
During the third week, Dede’s mom spent all afternoon with Dede complaining about her problems. In the past Dede would have left her mom’s house feeling both drained and somehow guilty for her very existence. Normally by the time she neared home, she’d know she needed ice cream and she’d stop at the store for a pint of chocolate-chip and a can of whipped cream for topping. But this time, Dede gave her mom a few minutes of encouragement and compassionate listening, but not so much that Dede felt drained. Then she got up and said it was time she got home. As she walked to her car, she felt a little guilty. But she felt okay—not great, but fine—and she didn’t need the ice cream.
The following week, when Dede’s mom started in on her complaining, she also criticized Dede for not listening to her problems. But this time Dede had a new answer for her mom.
“I love you, mom,” she said. “But I think we both need to have some fun together. Sometimes I just feel so overwhelmed at the end of a long work day. It has nothing to do with not
wanting
to listen. It’s just that sometimes, I
can’t.
” Dede even told her mother about the concept of “paralysis-analysis,” where you keep ruminating about your problems without ever really moving on.
Dede then pulled a DVD out of her bag—a funny romantic comedy with an actor they both liked—and suggested that they sit down together to watch it. Her mom was surprisingly upbeat afterward, and Dede knew she’d taken a big step toward letting go of emotional eating.
Doing something that gives you a sense of pleasure like watching a movie can be a simple yet effective strategy for eating more responsibly. Dede had also tested her ability to leave herself out of her mom’s paralysis-analysis pitfall style of thinking, and she had discovered that nothing awful had happened.
Six weeks later, Dede told me she’d met a man. There was a new guy working in her building. Dede thought he was cute, but she never thought he’d be attracted to her. She hadn’t felt comfortable being flirtatious, but she had managed to look him in the eye and smile.
Dede continued to work on standing up for herself, feeling like a worthwhile person and not suppressing her emotions while she ate her booster foods and did the booster activities I’d recommended in her Diet Rehab plan. She started every morning with twenty minutes of learning French with an online program and opened a savings account for her dream trip to Paris. Dede needed these booster activities to remind herself that her life was full of experiences to look forward to—experiences that she could choose to create. When she chose to cook booster foods at home instead of medicating her feelings with expensive takeout, she put the five dollars she had saved into her Paris fund. She wasn’t focusing on what she was taking away but on what she was choosing to add.
As she reprogrammed her behavior, Dede began to notice she didn’t feel those urges to automatically eat whenever she experienced a nasty moment or a low feeling. In fact, she felt those lows less and less often. She became friendly with the man in her office, and he asked her out for a drink.
One day she noticed four of the extra seven pounds she had carried around for years were gone. And they stayed gone. But most important, Dede’s state of mind was improved. She even liked herself enough to realize the remaining three pounds were not noticeable or worth thinking about. Her emotional eating habit was broken and she was able to let go and enjoy herself.
Am I an Emotional Eater?
Sometimes I think that we’ve all been trained to eat in response to emotions. Commercials show people smiling and having a great time after they’ve eaten some sugary doughnuts, a packaged bag of chips, or a can of soda. We’re even taught to associate life’s happiest moments—such as the cake on your birthday—with food.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with occasionally celebrating or comforting yourself with food. But I want your choices to be conscious and deliberate ones. Some treats, like the occasional piece of birthday cake, can continue to be celebratory parts of your life. But if you need something to make you feel better every day, then I want you to look to a serotonin or dopamine booster food, or better yet, an activity. A concrete action will help you tackle the root cause of your emotional eating by getting the peace or excitement you’re really hungry for.
Some of the strategies at the end of this chapter—whether you’re low on serotonin, dopamine, or both—are especially helpful if you struggle with emotional eating. But let’s start by finding out whether emotional eating is an issue in your life. Take the following quiz to find out.
Am I an Emotional Eater? A Quiz
Take a look at the following list. Circle every item that applies to you.
1. I have always felt guilty about eating.
2. When I was little, I ate more than the other kids.
3. I have at least one friend who makes me feel bad, but I can’t seem to let him or her go.
4. I had a difficult relationship with my family.
6. When I eat, I’m not truly satisfied, even when I eat a lot.
7. I eat just to have something to do.
8. I always like to eat something when I get home, because it’s comforting.
9. I eat when other people eat, even if I’m not hungry.
10. I feel powerless around food.
11. I often feel very down on myself.
12. I get very upset when I can’t eat my favorite food.
13. My parents often rewarded me with food when I was a child.
14. I feel quite disconnected from my body sometimes.
15. I berate myself in front of the mirror a lot.
16. My desire to eat comes from above-the-neck emotional hunger, rather than below-the-neck physical hunger.
17. I have gone through phases of trying to limit my eating, but sometimes I eat a very large amount of food without really noticing.
18. I often eat in front of the TV.
19. I’ve noticed I’ll crave my favorite pitfall foods when something unpleasant has happened.
20. I want to eat at weird times of the day and sometimes wake in the night, wanting to snack.
21. I sometimes feel overwhelmingly sad before eating.
22. Other people push me around and I always treat myself with food afterward.
23. I find it almost impossible to stand up for myself and I eat to cover how that makes me feel.
24. When I say no, I feel guilty—and I often eat to comfort myself.
25. I eat almost no calories during the day but then consume a lot at night.
If you checked one or more of the above questions, you have some form of emotional eating behavior, which probably indicates either low serotonin, low dopamine, or, in many cases, both. The interventions outlined in this chapter will help you to gradually let them go. Don’t despair—you can break the cycle and change not only the way you feel about yourself but also the way you react to difficult, unpleasant, or overwhelming feelings. If you are unable to make even slight changes or experience any major symptoms of depression or anxiety, see a mental health professional or go to my website—
www.drmikedow.com
—for treatment referrals.
Emotional Eating and Your Brain Chemistry
If you’re dopamine-deprived, you tend to feel as though life has lost its luster. You might feel empty and down or overwhelmed and drained. You might crave drama and thrills to lift you out of your slump, or you might just long for something pleasurable and fun to relieve the daily stress.
If you’re serotonin-starved, you might feel anxious and on edge, worried about your work, relationships, or personal life simply slipping out of control. Or you might lack confidence and feel pessimistic, fearful that nothing will work out for you, or perhaps even certain that it won’t.
If you’re short on both types of brain chemicals, you may simply feel that life has gotten away from you. You might believe that you don’t have the energy or clarity to make changes or pursue your goals—that it’s all you can do just to get through the day.
In all of these cases, you may well engage in what I call emotional eating: eating in response not to physical hunger or nutritional need, but rather as the result of emotional challenges. Of course, as we have seen, emotional challenges are physical, too. When you feel depressed, overwhelmed, stressed, sad, blocked, or disregarded, your brain chemistry responds accordingly. Your stores of dopamine and serotonin are depleted, and you need more biochemical support for the challenges you’re facing, making your desire to eat sweet, starchy, or fatty foods as much a physical response as the hunger your feel after hours of heavy physical labor.