Martin S. Somewhere in the South, Alabama maybe?

Eat 3 meals and two snacks. On a schedule.
Only eat 3 meals.
Eat 6 small meals
Eat mostly protein
Don't eat too much protein. Eat mostly carbs.
Don't eat saturated fat
Eat some saturated fat just eat lots of unsaturated fats preferably omega 3 fatty acids for your brain and polyunsaturated fats for your HDLs.
Don't eat red meat.
Too much turkey with triptophan will make you sluggish.
Coffee is bad for you.
Drink coffee, the caffeine is good for you.
Eat lots of whole grains.
Don't eat carbs, especially grains.
Eat lots of superfoods.
Do lots of ab exercises for a flat stomach
Ab exercises just give you big abs.
Running is the best exercise.
Running lowers your blood sugar and makes you hungry.
Eat this. Don't eat that. Substitute raw onions for pasta or white beans for rice or yogurt for ice cream or cardboard for bread ...
You get the picture.
My first ever diet had started on Thanksgiving day when my dad grabbed my hand as I was reaching for a chip. "I'm putting you on a diet," he said. The whole family was in that living room. All of them were staring at their feet. No one was there to stand up for me.
I ran screaming and crying out of the room.
My step mother came. Finally, I thought, someone to offer comfort.
She told me about her own diet experiences. She gave me her hints and tips from last year's weight watchers adventures.
She shared with me how God had spoken to her and told her she should weigh 126 pounds.
This did not make me a believer.
Dieting was simple really. I just wouldn't eat. For a week. And then I'd be OK.
And I didn't eat. Until dessert.
When we got home I got out the dried mustard. My teacher had said if you ate poison and needed to throw up you could heat dried mustard with water.
It made me sick. But my prize winning stomach of steel was just as full. Just tied up in knots.
And I was still fat enough to merit being humiliated in front of the whole family at Thanksgiving.
That was the beginning.
After that there was the cream cheese only diet. There was the 1 cookie for each meal diet. I was only going to eat a special kind of salad I'd invented with vinegar and no oil.
As a teenager I discovered Programs.
Jenny Craig.
Nutrisystem.
Weight watchers.
Atkins
South beach
By the time I was 19 I knew everything there was to know about dieting. What all I was not supposed to eat was astonishing. The list of things I WAS supposed to eat was terrifying.
No ice cream.
Lots of broccoli.
No cake.
Brussel sprouts.
Ixnay on bread.
No red meat, beans and dry chicken instead.
No ice cream.
I was supposed to find a piece of fruit to be a good dessert. Fruit as dessert.
That was like wearing toilet paper as a dress. Or building a house out of toothpicks.
It was.... Highly unsatisfactory.

By the time I was 29, 10 years later, I was 75 pounds overweight. I still knew everything there was to know about dieting, but by now I had given up. I was going to eat whatever the hell I'd wanted because the no-fat diet and the no-carb diet and the no-food diet and the highly confusing magic glop in the cereal bowl diet had all been... Highly unsatisfactory.
Not to mention painful. And humiliating. And in the end rather pointless.
It wasn't long before I found myself 130 pounds above my ideal weight. Morbidly obese.
I was going to die. This time I was going to have to do something, and I was going to have to do it right rather than keep doing it over and over again.
Google and amazon became my best friends. I read articles and magazines. Text books with 1000 pages.
They told me what I already knew. I needed to eat less and move more. Duh.
Until ...
I stumbled across Geneeen Roth's Breaking Free of Emotional Eating.
She wasn't a professor or a doctor or a fitness trainer. She was just a lady who had been fat.
Like me.
Her prescription, her secret to success, her magic bullet for staying thin? Eat what you want.
When you're hungry.
It sucked.
That is what had got me to my gigantic weight problem to begin with. What the hell was she thinking?
Reading on I realized there might be some merit to it:
Eat what you really want, not just what's around, or what you think you want, or what was just advertised on TV. Those are not things you want. They're just things someone has made you believe will make you feel good.
But really, what makes you feel good is gramma's grilled chicken.
A piece of cheese.
Very rarely, almost never but sometimes, a whole bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough.
And, if you really think about it, your not as hungry as you claim to be. You're tired. Your blood sugar is low. You're crabby.
Crabby is not hungry. Crabby is just an emotion you're trying to feed and magically change into happy.
But what's wrong with crabby? It's normal to be crabby. Or guilty. Ashamed. Angry. Depressed. Lonely. Disappointed. Helpless. Anxious.
The answer to these things is not a piece of chocolate cake. In fact, you are probably going to eat the piece of chocolate cake and still be crabby or guilty. Ashamed. Angry. Depressed. Lonely. Disappointed. Helpless. Anxious.
My story is that I had got so in the habit of reaching for food whenever I felt bad that I could no longer even identify What I was feeling. A book I was working with asked me to remember the last time I'd felt disappointed. I couldn't remember. I had to think all the way back to the seventh grade when my friend Jason had been the only one to ask me to dance.
After that I wracked my brain.
I was disappointed that time my boyfriend had chosen an "important" soccer game over me, ice cream and my best lace under things ON Valentine's day. That was a no-brainer. I ate the ice cream by myself.
I was disappointed in fact, a thousand times over in my adult life. Always culminating in me putting on my bravest brave face, telling myself it was silly to feel that way (the man I loved was not a complete douche bag. Of course not. It had really been an important game. It must be a cultural difference), polishing off that last bit of ice cream because there really wasn't that much left.
And still disappointed. No less in fact.
But now ashamed of myself for having eaten the ice cream.
Angry with myself for being unreasonably, stubbornly disappointed.
But I have forgotten how to cry and that has made me awfully hungry.
And when I was doing all this work remembering the stupid man (whose name by the way was Martin and no I don't mind using his real name and really I'd give you his address and phone number, too if only I had it) who had treated me poorly and how I had aimed my grief at myself, I realized that so much of my problem had come from the mistaken notion that whenever something bad happened it must be that something was wrong with ME. Martin (watch this spot, if I ever find it I'll at least paste his e-mail here) was innocent. If he treated me like trash it must be because I'd behaved like trash. Or something.
And all at once, remembering how I stood there, 19 with my ice cream and my black lace and was told like a naughty child that Valentine's day would have to wait, I suddenly realized, I hadn't been hungry in years. I had just been disappointed, angry, tired, bored, guilty. Ashamed. Depressed. Disappointed. Helpless. Anxious. I didn't know how those things felt anymore. And I didn't know what it meant to be hungry and now I was going to have to find out.
I spent the ensuing months inspecting every morsel before it went in my mouth. Was I hungry? Was it going to satisfy my hunger? If not, what was causing me to put it in my mouth? I spent days figuring out what I was feeling that had driven me to go through a whole packet of dried figs in 2 days. Three, six mile runs were dedicated to whether I had been really and truly hungry when I'd had that block of brie or if I was just feeling ashamed of how I had fibbed to my boss about an important e-mail.
I did that for months.
I still do that.
It took me a week to figure out my sudden pumpkin latte wave had been brought on by a guy I was dating who felt the need to tear me down to make himself feel less threatened (his name was Roberto. I do have his address but this is a fairly small town so you won't need it). The endless stream of candied walnuts? Well, sis was up for a visit and making sure she and I both survived the week with no more sibling induced permanent scars that we'd gone in with had been no easy task.
I'd come to all these brilliant conclusions while jogging. And I am happy to say that at least 95% of the time I'm able to figure out whether I'm really hungry for that morsel, and if not why I would ever dream of putting it in my mouth in plenty of time to put it down and back away.
The other 5 per cent? Well, a little emotional eating is just... Normal.
After all, an occasional rain does not cause a flood.

Alyshia
Whole Health Renovation Specialist


"Nothing is safe Someday or other it will all end in tears. You can't avoid disappointment but you can enjoy success." -Me