To Eat or Not to Eat, That Is the Obsession

Breaking Out of Food Jail: How to Free Yourself from Diets and Problem Eating, Once and for All
by Jean Antonello, R.N., B.S.N.

If you've tried every diet out there, if you've counted every gram of fat, every last calorie and every meal exchange, and you're still fighting the food wars, it's time for Breaking Out of Food Jail, a commonsense approach to food, eating, and appetites.

Jean Antonello's practical, step-by-step program pinpoints and eliminates the most common cause of eating problems — the fear of overeating. That's right — if you've tried everything and you're still battling your appetite, it's probably because you're not getting enough to eat at the right time. When you deprive your body of food for any reason — and as you do on most diels — your body goes into a famine state. Your hunger soars, along with cravings for fatty foods and sugars — the foods your body can most quickly turn into stored fuel to protect you from starvation. If you're like most dieters, you eventually respond to those signals by bingeing. And then you go back to your restrictive eating and start the cycle all over again. Breaking Out of Food Jail will release you from this trap and show you:

• How not eating enough results in cravings, overeating, disturbed eating behavior, and weight gain

• How the "feast or famine" pattern undermines even the most conscientious eater

• How to have a normal relationship with food — including learning to eat whenever you're hungry and stopping when you are full

• Why most eating problems are not psychological but physiological

• How to prevent eating problems in children and young adults by teaching kids how to tune into their hunger and eat right

Filled with self-tests, affirmations, simple exercises, and the latest research on dieting, as well as Jean's list of "real foods" that should be in every refrigerator and pantry, Breaking Out of Food Jail will transform your relationship with food and your body and eliminate dieting from your life, once and for all.

Chapter 1

Nowadays, the person who is able to eat freely and enjoy her dining experiences from day to day, unhampered by guilt, anxiety and a dozen other pressures, is truly an exception. If you ever come across a person like this, don't you hate her? Almost everyone is, at the very least it seems, watching her weight. Most of us have lost our love of food and eating. It has been contaminated by guilts, superstitions, prejudices, false information, undocumented beliefs, crazy body-image standards, fashion pressures, diet madness, excessive and contradictory research studies, and, especially, fear. We are afraid of food. We are afraid of food. We believe it makes people fat and that, if we don't stay on guard, it will make us fat, too (if we aren't already so, to some degree).

We are, almost as a nation, obsessed with eating less! The calorie is synonymous with evil, and fat grams have come to represent the very measure of success or failure in foods — an inverse relationship, of course. Terms like "low-fat," "low-calorie," "light" or "lean" are an integral part of our vocabularies. We think, talk and read these terms and concepts, meditating on their meaning and influence on our bodies. Eat light, eat less, eat low-fat, we say, if we're among the "liberals" who condone eating at all. We are obsessed this way because we are all afraid of getting fat and we are all positive that too much food, by itself, makes people fat.

But where's all this food avoidance, fat phobia and calorie obsession leading, anyway? For a growing number of people, straight to eating problems.

By the time she was forty-three, Paula had dieted, one way or another, for twenty-five years. In that time she had joined Weight Watchers over ten times, tried Jenny Craig, gave Weight Loss Center two efforts and Optifast just one (because it was so expensive), and attended seven years of regular Overeaters Anonymous meetings. In addition, she had read dozens of books and magazine articles in her attempts to control her eating.

Paula was an expert on nutrition. She knew so much about food groups, calories and fat grams that she could have started her own consulting business, Diet Madness, Inc. She knew by heart and in her sleep what she should eat, exactly how much and when, according to the experts. Paula was queen of portion control and truly gifted at policing fat grams. She had been trying to eat less, eat light, eat low-fat all her adult life. And she had been losing control of her eating for just about as long. Paula couldn't remember back to a time when she wasn't preoccupied with her eating and her weight. Over the years she learned multitudes of diet skills and tips, hints and tricks. And now Paula was heavier and more desperate than she had ever been in her life.

Let's not forget the "enlightened" wave of the nineties: diets don't work in the long run so exercise is the answer! And since most people today have passed through the anti-eating culture of the seventies and eighties, many are adding exercise to their deeply ingrained habits of avoiding food. Work that body fat, jog that belly off, burn that blubber with aerobics! And where are all these underfed, overworked bodies headed? Once again, more and more are headed toward disturbed eating patterns and straight into "food jail."

Just after she turned thirty, Arlene started working out with her boyfriend, who was an avid weight lifter. After they broke up she discovered she had learned to love exercise. At first she just felt sort of a natural high when she finished her aerobics class, but later Arlene noticed that her stomach was getting flatter. That was a plus she hadn't expected. Not long after she was "single" again, one of the personal trainers embarrassed her by making a friendly comment about how great she looked. Arlene was flattered. No one had ever really noticed her in this way before. Why not help the process along with a little dieting? She thought, so the fruit and salads began to replace the sandwiches and pasta.

The Friday night of the first week into her new diet/exercise program, Arlene thought about ice cream as she watched TV. She had never into sweets much, so this was unusual for her. Oh, just a little. I've been so good, she rationalized.

Thirty minutes and a quart of Rocky Road later, Arlene was surprised and a little afraid. A quart of ice cream! What happened? At first she felt confused, but quickly shifted her attitude to determination. Tomorrow I'll work out two hours and just have juice for breakfast, she promised. And she did. Nothing but a Caesar salad for lunch and plenty of mineral water to keep the hunger under control. But after a dinner of broiled fish that night at a restaurant she found herself eating the leftover fries from her friends' plates and drinking four beers. French fries were definitely forbidden for Arlene. And beer, well, one was usually enough. Under the influence of the beer, and her nagging hunger, Arlene topped it all off with a big fudge brownie delight, complete with ice cream and hot fudge.

Arlene looked at herself in the mirror in the ladies' room at the restaurant and felt disgusted. What is wrong with me, anyway? she wondered. I I've got to get rid of this feeling — I'm completely stuffed. I can't stand feeling this full. I'll just throw up this once, then get back in control. My college roommate did it all the time and it never hurt her.

Of course, if we are already fat, we've proven it to ourselves repeatedly: food and lack of exercise have made us fat. We stand as a warning to others: Beware! This will happen to you, too, if you eat too much and/or drop your aerobics class. Those who are already overweight are sometimes the most afraid of eating because they stand as a nonstop warning to themselves: The pounds and bulges will keep piling on if you don't stop eating so much. Eat less! Don't eat at all if you can help it! You're not that hungry. Get some exercise. What's the matter with you?

Is there another way? Is there hope? Is it possible for us to befriend food without getting fat? Is there a way to improve our diets without going off the deep end? Can we ever get back to enjoying the natural, lifelong pleasure of eating? Can exercise ever be enjoyable, free of obsessive pressures and fears? And the most important question of all: Can we learn to enjoy eating plenty of good food, have moderate activity levels and be thin, too?

To all of these queries, I answer a resounding YES! Keep reading. The "hows" are just ahead.

The Wrong Tree

At the heart of all this confusion about food, weight gain and eating struggles lies a very real problem — prejudice, even among professionals and researchers, about the cause of overweight and eating disorders.

For decades we have been taught that overeating and underexercise cause overweight, and that psychological problems cause eating disorders. I believe these two presumptions are overly ] simplistic and incorrect, and account for the immense frustration within this field of study and among the millions of people who suffer from eating and weight problems. We have truly been barking up the wrong tree in this important field of human behavior, with extremely serious consequences to both mental and physical health for millions of us.

Complete with plenty of diet advertisements, and occasionally an ad for an eating disorders treatment facility,popular women's magazines rarely fail to highlight a weight-loss method on the cover or tell some celebrity's story of weight loss, weight gain or eating disorder. These topics ensure sales because editors know what women are obsessed with. We seem to have an insatiable appetite for information about dieting, weight loss and eating problems, but what we're being fed is almost all junk food.

Everyone in this culture has been programmed by the media and especially by health professionals (who inform the media) to believe that fat people need to eat less and exercise more, and people with eating problems need to see a therapist. Moms and dads learn it from newspaper articles and doctors, and pass it on to their children. Teachers teach it, preachers preach it. There isn't a shadow of a doubt about these two sacred tenets in most people's minds, especially in those who are overweight or eating disturbed themselves. (The term "eating disturbed" applies to anyone for whom eating has become a problem.) The funny thing is, these well-established approaches rarely lead to cures. They cause a lot of people to work hard and dole out plenty of money off and on over decades, but they just never manage to correct the problems they're designed to remedy. In fact, they often make them worse! The reason is simple: The theories behind these treatment methods are not completely true, so the methods cannot succeed. They are more likely to backfire.

Although the physicians, therapists and other professionals who work with this clientele may be committed, caring people who make sincere efforts in their roles, they are so misled in their understanding of the problems they treat that, like their clients, their struggles usually bear little fruit.

Let's take a look at some specific eating problems, from the traditional descriptions as well as from some newer popular terms and definitions. This will help you identify your own symptoms and later, in Chapter 3, learn why you experience them.

Copyright © 1995 by Jean Antonello

About the Author

Jean Antonello, R.N., B.S.N., an obesity, eating disorders, and co-dependence specialist, is the director of the Naturally Thin Training Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is the author of How to Become Naturally Thin by Eating More. She lives in St. Paul.