Life with Pie - Forget Dieting!

This past weekend I heard some advice given about dieting by an older woman that has spent most of her life as a slender person.  She suggested the way to eat - “If you like fried chicken, eat it a couple of times a month, not every day.  Eat fruit pie or lemon meringue instead of cheesecake, and take smaller servings.”

It made me smile.  But, also made me start thinking about how naturally slender people think.  It is not about depravation, it’s about making conscious choices. It would seem that she has no issues with binge eating or trigger foods.  She has food in a proper perspective.  And her recommendation makes perfect sense to other people like her, but not to a compulsive or binge eater or chronic, life long dieter.

To the compulsive/binge eater and dieter it’s not really about the food, it’s about the power the food holds.  Somewhere, somehow food has taken on a bigger meaning. Good food, bad food. Also attached to the food are lots of emotions - eating to numb out pain, eating over loneliness, eating to bury old hurtful memories, eating for boredom, sadness, reward, frustration, you name it!  And, the big one -- eating as a replacement for love.

Oh, how wonderful it would be to just see food as nutrition, something to enjoy.  It is a big undertaking for lots of people to move into that space.  But there is something I have learned over the past few years and that is about change.  Sometimes the power that we have attached to food has shifted and we are unable to see the shift so we continue to repeat the old behaviors with food.  That’s because the behavior has become as familiar as driving a car.  We do it without any conscious thought - automatic pilot.  That happened to me.  I realized that my patterns of living were built around my food addiction.  It didn’t start out that way, but after years of the cycle it just became a habit.  With lots of therapy, self help books, retreats and workshops, not to mention thousands of pages of journaling, I have worked through most of the painful stuff in my life.  However, the patterns I have around eating have been habitually engrained in my life. I see myself continuing the eating behaviors without the trigger.  I have become conditioned to be an over eater.

In order to find my way to a healthy relationship with food, I don’t have to change the food.  I have to change my habits in relationship to food and eating.  This is big stuff!  And that’s a topic for another post!   More on this topic to come!