As we look at and work on various treatment issues in weight management, a major topic is of course emotional eating - a powerful coping behavior that often pulls people off their weight management path. Emotional eating is in fact something we all do. It is a central, deeply seated and very powerful coping mechanism that we turn to so we can regulate our emotions. Emotional eating is what we call a competing motivation because it competes with your weight management motivation for control of your eating. While we should not aim to extinguish emotional eating (it is an impossible and unwise aim), we should aim to take hold of our emotional management so that we turn to emotional eating less frequently and more consciously. With that as our aim, I think it is exceedingly import for us to consider the role of "shame" in all of this. Please pay attention to the following point: the first step in emotional eating management involves the practice of being curious about your emotional eating by responding to an urge to eat by first stopping for a moment to consider what it is about. Please start that now. With practice, you really can train yourself to see a STOP sign as the conditioned response to recognizing an eating urge, so you have a moment to be curious about what is happening. In order to execute the suggestion of stopping to be curious about what is at play when you have a strong eating urge, you must be willing and frankly actually able to catch up with the triggering emotions. I use the term "able" because of shame - because shame is often what is at play when people cannot see or catch hold of certain emotional nuances to an eating urge. And so we turn to shame... Shame Shame is most
often what is at play when we have a difficult time "experiencing
our experience". People often ask what we mean by shame and how it is
different from guilt. You can research that easily on the web. Here
are a couple of suggestions: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/shame/201305/the-difference-between-guilt-and-shame http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hale-dwoskin/guilt-and-shame_b_3862489.html BODY SHAME: A rather ubiquitous experience of shame for patients at NCWW is shame about experiencing your body. Shame about the weight makes you turn away from looking, from feeling, from experiencing your body. This is why so many people are shocked when they unexpectedly see a photograph. Shame keeps you from being in touch, being in tune with your body. It leaves you handicapped by taking away the feedback loop of being aware of your body. Our emphasis on yoga is to help you restore body awareness. EATING SHAME: Shame is of course also true when it comes to experiencing your eating.
Shame is at root in sneak eating. Shame is often at root in mindless
eating. Shame makes it difficult to keep food records when you are
veering off the path - even in the face of knowing that lapsing is when the food records can be most helpful. This is how powerful the shame can be. You care sooooo much about getting
back on a good path. But shame about facing the eating keeps you from
using one of the most helpful tools! It's a problem. EMOTION SHAME: Shame is often also at root in the difficulty people have experiencing some of their emotions
(sometimes all of their emotions). This shame may be about the feeling
itself, or it may be about the intensity or the target of the feeling. Shame is one cause for emotional eating
since the eating can distract from the shameful feelings - even though
the person is ashamed of the eating, it is somehow more acceptable than
the shame of the emotions. Please
note: We need to look at shame because it stands directly in the way
of being able to utilize the systematic approach I am teaching for the
management of emotional eating. My approach features "pay attention."
Shame features "don't pay attention." 6. Finally, I highly recommend The Obese Child for anyone who was (or thought they were) obese as a child and anyone who has a child with obesity I offer, but do not think I need to introduce, the other articles below. Start with the ones above. Some of the others are more focused on body shame. If you like reading, all have merit! Please note that my diagram of Variable Consciousness is something we will reference in class. You will come to understand how it can serve to organize your work on shame and on emotional eating. |
