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Numerous individuals want to lose weight because they believe it will make them hurt less. They believe it will make them happier
That is: it’s not the weight they want to lose, but rather the hurt
Let’s admit it – have the diets you’ve tried up until now worked? The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, M.S.W, Emotional eating’s therapist, will help you to take action correctly in order to develop open channels of communication and healthy relationships with people instead of being in a “master and servant” relationship with food
Lots of people are unwilling to give up on their “celebrations” with food, which fill an internal empty gap. A baguette won’t say “no” in the middle of the night. On the other hand, you’ll meet people who will. Through the process of change, one learns to fill that empty gap and to replace “celebrations” with food with “celebrations” with people and relationships
If you also think it’s time to "divorce the baguette", you are invited to a workshop-balanced eating methodology-where you’ll learn to manage your feelings, recognize Feed-Back, and understand it without eating yourself and everything around you up
A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life
ARTICLES
"Divorce the baguette"
Numerous individuals want to lose weight because they believe it will make them hurt less. They believe it will make them happier.
That is: it’s not the weight they want to lose, but rather the hurt.
Tip 1:
If you want to maintain a steady weight forever, check how prepared you are. Are you ready to be introduced to new parts of yourself through personal growth? Studies show that obesity is a global disease whose recovery rate is among the lowest of all diseases in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people who lost weight and reached their desired weight will succeed in permanently maintaining it. Numerous diets end with ravenous hunger and maniacal eating to make up for weeks, months and maybe even years of the weary war against the urge to eat. Diet, abstention, and attempts to control ourselves produce a single result – failure. We must give up on that beforehand.
So what’s it going to be? A baguette or a courgette? Do you have to battle the bulge your whole life? How can you make a real change and win?
Tip 2:
The lasting change will come when you believe that your life will go on past tomorrow. Only then can you make small changes, and then another few small changes, and a few more teeny tiny ones, and you will discover a change in your relationship with food. What I mean is that food won’t control you anymore. You’ll eat only when you’re hungry. The change begins when you gather together your courage and change your eating habits forever. Let’s admit it – have the diets you’ve tried up until now worked? The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, M.S.W, Emotional eating’s therapist, will help you to take action correctly in order to develop open channels of communication and healthy relationships with people instead of being in a “master and servant” relationship with food.
You have lots of logical reasons to hang on to the emotional eating habits you’ve acquired over the years. These are the defense mechanisms which will give you refuge when a storm of events floods you with negative feelings. Deserted? Disappointed? Hurt? Are you eating yourself up?
Emotional eating feeds an inner need more than it does any physical need for food. We’re all “emotional eaters”. The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, will teach you to reduce the scope of your emotional eating.
Tip 3:
Lots of people are unwilling to give up on their “celebrations” with food, which fill an internal empty gap. A baguette won’t say “no” in the middle of the night. On the other hand, you’ll meet people who will. Through the process of change, one learns to fill that empty gap and to replace “celebrations” with food with “celebrations” with people and relationships.
“ Through the course of one-on-one therapy sessions or group meetings, I promise to put people inside the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake that disease wandering around their souls and in this way to wake them up, to open their eyes and to examine what kind of future they wish for themselves.”
If you also think it’s time to divorce the baguette, you are invited to a workshop-balanced eating methodology-where you’ll learn to manage your feelings, recognize Feed-Back, and understand it without eating yourself and everything around you up.
Tip 4:
Divorce that baguette! Stop that frustration that comes from repeat weight loss and gain. Stop focusing on food, internalize that the real frustration is food, look the truth in the eye and stop eating yourself up from the inside. That’s the only way you’ll achieve the long-awaited results: weight loss and maintenance.
A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life. A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life.
End to Emotional Eating?!
Research shows that obesity and overeating has the lowest chance of recovery of any disease in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people will succeed in keeping the weight off.
Why do only 2% succeed in keeping the weight off over time?
Let’s try to touch on a number of ways in which food represents a great deal more than concrete and physical nourishment for a person.
I’ll start from a personal perspective. Since the age of five, I have been coping with weight problems. I have succeeded to lose weight countless times only to gain it all back. I have never been obese but I certainly have been fat. Over the last few years, in parallel to an internal emotional process I underwent, my weight also dropped and that is the result of the subconscious decision I made with myself to confront my fears related to my relationship with people and to be less concerned with a successful relationship with food.
One of the most significant turning points happened two and a half years ago during a trip to India (my second out of three) when I told myself one of the evenings that it was time for dinner. For the first time I stopped and asked myself: “Why? Are you hungry?” After I answered myself that I wasn’t, I decided that I wouldn’t eat dinner that night. The new connection that I succeeded in building with my physical and nutritional needs is the end of a dark era on the one hand and on the other, a new period of coping during which I experienced disappointments and defeats at the same time I made my choice for physical and emotional health. This is the root of my decision to take absolute responsibility for my life.
Because of the stipulations we learned when we were young (for example, every time we watch TV, we also eat, coffee always comes with cake; when it’s cold, we need to eat something to warm up) and because of the emotional attachment to food (for example, every time we feel lonely we eat and then we feel a little less alone for a little while and if we have no one to party with, there’s always food which will party with us – a baguette will never tell us “No” if we want it in the middle of the night, while a person we love can certainly reject us….).
It is important to understand that we have a lot of good reasons to keep these habits because they have taken care of us in difficult times. We call these reasons defense mechanisms that have kept us from giving others control over our lives and that’s after those same people may have hurt us, disappointed us or just deserted us. Our developing personality at a young age knew that in order to be able to survive the difficult period, it was in our interest not to emotionally invest in human beings so it was preferably to look for what we wanted elsewhere. Some of us chose food as the first and natural option because it is so familiar and available and has already demonstrated that it knows how to fulfill us, warm us, calm us, and blur unwanted emotional and physical feelings.
Therefore, there is something tempting about keeping old habits, in particular those pertaining to our need for certainty and stability and our lack of ability to get through changes and transformations in our lives. Those who participate in the workshop primarily describe the “other side” of the wall as being frightening and empty particularly with regard to going to an unfamiliar place and dealing with everything the years have managed to take away from them.
However there comes a day when most of us say to ourselves “enough”. Our defense mechanisms have caused us to repress, deny, forget, be cynical, to hurt those closest to us but we want something new. For the most part, we want to trust people again, to allow ourselves to be needy, to be weak, to put our heads on something close and to know ourselves more completely.
Building new eating habits is a slow process with a number of phases. According to the model of change (the spiral rather than the linear) of researcher James Prochaska (1982), we will undergo six phases:
1. Pre-contemplation – The person does not consider the possibility of change. He is not aware of his problem or of his need to change and he demonstrates a relationship of arguments and defenses while preserving his behavior and habits. All this stems from fear related to the change and a difficulty to cope with reality.
2. Contemplation – The person is aware of his problem but he is ambivalent in the way he relates to change. He understands that he is supposed to consider changing his ways but at the same time he is aware of the inconvenience of the change and of the demanding price involved.
3. Preparation – The person devotes himself to changing his behavior. All the doubts and ambivalence the person feels towards his decision need to be eliminated. This is the stage where golden opportunities present themselves for a limited time so the person can undergo change.
4. Action – The person implements real actions in order to bring about a change, i.e. learning new habits, appreciation and understanding of old skills, development of control of stimuli and temptations, finding alternative activities to eating and more.
5. Maintenance – The person needs to promise that the change will be permanent and will become part of his personal behavioral repertoire.
6. Termination – The person breaks out of the spiraling circle of the change. This phase will come when he develops a new image of himself (“I feel and not just think that I am worthy”), situations which were temptations in the past no longer are, and the achievement of solid self-capabilities.
The model is spiral and not linear so we sometimes move forward, and then backwards, and then forward again. In this context, I offer two personal examples: About a month after my decision not to go to dinner that same evening in India, I got to the end of journey and about two days before my return to Israel, I was waiting for the bus to take me back to the airport and I decided that in order not to be hungry later, I would eat then. For an hour, I didn’t stop eating from the buffet of the hotel yet I didn’t feel satisfied. For the next two days, I felt nauseous and had headaches and I tried to understand the attack of ravenousness I experienced. The only explanation that came into my head was the fear of returning home, the uncertainty of my personal and professional fate and, most of all, the change in my life from a vacation and hedonism to a life full of obligations and responsibilities.
In another event that took place a few months later, during a conflict with my former girl friend, I said, “you annoy me; I’m going to the refrigerator to eat.” When I said that, I felt my whole history coming back to me at the same because food had been a calming drug for years. On the other hand, when I said it, I burst out laughing because I knew that food could no longer bring me serenity and that I needed to solve the problem in another way. This event underscored for me how much I will always be emotionally vulnerable to food and that I will always need to keep my eyes open and take care of myself in that respect.
Numerous overweight people admit about themselves, as do those around them, that they are social, pleasant, nice, laughers and most of them don’t have a problem with the way they see their bodies. From my experience, there is no such animal. Deep, deep down, individuals who fall into this group of people usually admit that this mask they have been wearing from a young age protects them from loneliness and despair. They are ready to do anything to build proper eating habits and are prepared to compromise in order to be a little less nice. And even though the road to change includes the fear of the fat person coming in conflict with other people and not continuing in the same concentrated emotional patterns which are expressed by unnecessary eating.
The heading End to Emotional Eating?! represents on one hand the paradox that we believe that it is possible to abandon our old habits and our problematic history while on the other hand there is a fear that we won’t always know how to preserve our accomplishments and that even if we’ve succeeded in eating from the right place for a long period of time, a surprise will always be waiting around the corner to knock us down again. My answer to that paradox is that there is no concrete answer and that you need to keep your eyes wide open and learn to live with these fears.
My daily work is to bring people into the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake up the Disease (sometimes, that’s how I call my work – “Shake the Disease) that are running around in their souls. In this way I wake them up, open their eyes and examine with them what future they wish for themselves.
ABOUT
Roni Maislish, M.S.W
Clinical social work, Emotional eating’s therapist. Roni gives individual counseling at the eating disorder unit at Soroka Hospital, leads parent and teenager groups within a number of frameworks, including the Klalit Health Fund, in a broad range of areas including: emotional eating, assertive communications, parent-child relationships, emotions management, anger control and negotiations management and conflict.
ARTICLES
"Divorce the baguette"
Numerous individuals want to lose weight because they believe it will make them hurt less. They believe it will make them happier.
That is: it’s not the weight they want to lose, but rather the hurt.
Tip 1:
If you want to maintain a steady weight forever, check how prepared you are. Are you ready to be introduced to new parts of yourself through personal growth? Studies show that obesity is a global disease whose recovery rate is among the lowest of all diseases in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people who lost weight and reached their desired weight will succeed in permanently maintaining it. Numerous diets end with ravenous hunger and maniacal eating to make up for weeks, months and maybe even years of the weary war against the urge to eat. Diet, abstention, and attempts to control ourselves produce a single result – failure. We must give up on that beforehand.
So what’s it going to be? A baguette or a courgette? Do you have to battle the bulge your whole life? How can you make a real change and win?
Tip 2:
The lasting change will come when you believe that your life will go on past tomorrow. Only then can you make small changes, and then another few small changes, and a few more teeny tiny ones, and you will discover a change in your relationship with food. What I mean is that food won’t control you anymore. You’ll eat only when you’re hungry. The change begins when you gather together your courage and change your eating habits forever. Let’s admit it – have the diets you’ve tried up until now worked? The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, M.S.W, Emotional eating’s therapist, will help you to take action correctly in order to develop open channels of communication and healthy relationships with people instead of being in a “master and servant” relationship with food.
You have lots of logical reasons to hang on to the emotional eating habits you’ve acquired over the years. These are the defense mechanisms which will give you refuge when a storm of events floods you with negative feelings. Deserted? Disappointed? Hurt? Are you eating yourself up?
Emotional eating feeds an inner need more than it does any physical need for food. We’re all “emotional eaters”. The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, will teach you to reduce the scope of your emotional eating.
Tip 3:
Lots of people are unwilling to give up on their “celebrations” with food, which fill an internal empty gap. A baguette won’t say “no” in the middle of the night. On the other hand, you’ll meet people who will. Through the process of change, one learns to fill that empty gap and to replace “celebrations” with food with “celebrations” with people and relationships.
“ Through the course of one-on-one therapy sessions or group meetings, I promise to put people inside the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake that disease wandering around their souls and in this way to wake them up, to open their eyes and to examine what kind of future they wish for themselves.”
If you also think it’s time to divorce the baguette, you are invited to a workshop-balanced eating methodology-where you’ll learn to manage your feelings, recognize Feed-Back, and understand it without eating yourself and everything around you up.
Tip 4:
Divorce that baguette! Stop that frustration that comes from repeat weight loss and gain. Stop focusing on food, internalize that the real frustration is food, look the truth in the eye and stop eating yourself up from the inside. That’s the only way you’ll achieve the long-awaited results: weight loss and maintenance.
A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life. A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life.
End to Emotional Eating?!
Research shows that obesity and overeating has the lowest chance of recovery of any disease in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people will succeed in keeping the weight off.
Why do only 2% succeed in keeping the weight off over time?
Let’s try to touch on a number of ways in which food represents a great deal more than concrete and physical nourishment for a person.
I’ll start from a personal perspective. Since the age of five, I have been coping with weight problems. I have succeeded to lose weight countless times only to gain it all back. I have never been obese but I certainly have been fat. Over the last few years, in parallel to an internal emotional process I underwent, my weight also dropped and that is the result of the subconscious decision I made with myself to confront my fears related to my relationship with people and to be less concerned with a successful relationship with food.
One of the most significant turning points happened two and a half years ago during a trip to India (my second out of three) when I told myself one of the evenings that it was time for dinner. For the first time I stopped and asked myself: “Why? Are you hungry?” After I answered myself that I wasn’t, I decided that I wouldn’t eat dinner that night. The new connection that I succeeded in building with my physical and nutritional needs is the end of a dark era on the one hand and on the other, a new period of coping during which I experienced disappointments and defeats at the same time I made my choice for physical and emotional health. This is the root of my decision to take absolute responsibility for my life.
Because of the stipulations we learned when we were young (for example, every time we watch TV, we also eat, coffee always comes with cake; when it’s cold, we need to eat something to warm up) and because of the emotional attachment to food (for example, every time we feel lonely we eat and then we feel a little less alone for a little while and if we have no one to party with, there’s always food which will party with us – a baguette will never tell us “No” if we want it in the middle of the night, while a person we love can certainly reject us….).
It is important to understand that we have a lot of good reasons to keep these habits because they have taken care of us in difficult times. We call these reasons defense mechanisms that have kept us from giving others control over our lives and that’s after those same people may have hurt us, disappointed us or just deserted us. Our developing personality at a young age knew that in order to be able to survive the difficult period, it was in our interest not to emotionally invest in human beings so it was preferably to look for what we wanted elsewhere. Some of us chose food as the first and natural option because it is so familiar and available and has already demonstrated that it knows how to fulfill us, warm us, calm us, and blur unwanted emotional and physical feelings.
Therefore, there is something tempting about keeping old habits, in particular those pertaining to our need for certainty and stability and our lack of ability to get through changes and transformations in our lives. Those who participate in the workshop primarily describe the “other side” of the wall as being frightening and empty particularly with regard to going to an unfamiliar place and dealing with everything the years have managed to take away from them.
However there comes a day when most of us say to ourselves “enough”. Our defense mechanisms have caused us to repress, deny, forget, be cynical, to hurt those closest to us but we want something new. For the most part, we want to trust people again, to allow ourselves to be needy, to be weak, to put our heads on something close and to know ourselves more completely.
Building new eating habits is a slow process with a number of phases. According to the model of change (the spiral rather than the linear) of researcher James Prochaska (1982), we will undergo six phases:
1. Pre-contemplation – The person does not consider the possibility of change. He is not aware of his problem or of his need to change and he demonstrates a relationship of arguments and defenses while preserving his behavior and habits. All this stems from fear related to the change and a difficulty to cope with reality.
2. Contemplation – The person is aware of his problem but he is ambivalent in the way he relates to change. He understands that he is supposed to consider changing his ways but at the same time he is aware of the inconvenience of the change and of the demanding price involved.
3. Preparation – The person devotes himself to changing his behavior. All the doubts and ambivalence the person feels towards his decision need to be eliminated. This is the stage where golden opportunities present themselves for a limited time so the person can undergo change.
4. Action – The person implements real actions in order to bring about a change, i.e. learning new habits, appreciation and understanding of old skills, development of control of stimuli and temptations, finding alternative activities to eating and more.
5. Maintenance – The person needs to promise that the change will be permanent and will become part of his personal behavioral repertoire.
6. Termination – The person breaks out of the spiraling circle of the change. This phase will come when he develops a new image of himself (“I feel and not just think that I am worthy”), situations which were temptations in the past no longer are, and the achievement of solid self-capabilities.
The model is spiral and not linear so we sometimes move forward, and then backwards, and then forward again. In this context, I offer two personal examples: About a month after my decision not to go to dinner that same evening in India, I got to the end of journey and about two days before my return to Israel, I was waiting for the bus to take me back to the airport and I decided that in order not to be hungry later, I would eat then. For an hour, I didn’t stop eating from the buffet of the hotel yet I didn’t feel satisfied. For the next two days, I felt nauseous and had headaches and I tried to understand the attack of ravenousness I experienced. The only explanation that came into my head was the fear of returning home, the uncertainty of my personal and professional fate and, most of all, the change in my life from a vacation and hedonism to a life full of obligations and responsibilities.
In another event that took place a few months later, during a conflict with my former girl friend, I said, “you annoy me; I’m going to the refrigerator to eat.” When I said that, I felt my whole history coming back to me at the same because food had been a calming drug for years. On the other hand, when I said it, I burst out laughing because I knew that food could no longer bring me serenity and that I needed to solve the problem in another way. This event underscored for me how much I will always be emotionally vulnerable to food and that I will always need to keep my eyes open and take care of myself in that respect.
Numerous overweight people admit about themselves, as do those around them, that they are social, pleasant, nice, laughers and most of them don’t have a problem with the way they see their bodies. From my experience, there is no such animal. Deep, deep down, individuals who fall into this group of people usually admit that this mask they have been wearing from a young age protects them from loneliness and despair. They are ready to do anything to build proper eating habits and are prepared to compromise in order to be a little less nice. And even though the road to change includes the fear of the fat person coming in conflict with other people and not continuing in the same concentrated emotional patterns which are expressed by unnecessary eating.
The heading End to Emotional Eating?! represents on one hand the paradox that we believe that it is possible to abandon our old habits and our problematic history while on the other hand there is a fear that we won’t always know how to preserve our accomplishments and that even if we’ve succeeded in eating from the right place for a long period of time, a surprise will always be waiting around the corner to knock us down again. My answer to that paradox is that there is no concrete answer and that you need to keep your eyes wide open and learn to live with these fears.
My daily work is to bring people into the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake up the Disease (sometimes, that’s how I call my work – “Shake the Disease) that are running around in their souls. In this way I wake them up, open their eyes and examine with them what future they wish for themselves.
Would love to hear from you - [email protected]
That is: it’s not the weight they want to lose, but rather the hurt
Let’s admit it – have the diets you’ve tried up until now worked? The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, M.S.W, Emotional eating’s therapist, will help you to take action correctly in order to develop open channels of communication and healthy relationships with people instead of being in a “master and servant” relationship with food
Lots of people are unwilling to give up on their “celebrations” with food, which fill an internal empty gap. A baguette won’t say “no” in the middle of the night. On the other hand, you’ll meet people who will. Through the process of change, one learns to fill that empty gap and to replace “celebrations” with food with “celebrations” with people and relationships
If you also think it’s time to "divorce the baguette", you are invited to a workshop-balanced eating methodology-where you’ll learn to manage your feelings, recognize Feed-Back, and understand it without eating yourself and everything around you up
A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life
ARTICLES
"Divorce the baguette"
Numerous individuals want to lose weight because they believe it will make them hurt less. They believe it will make them happier.
That is: it’s not the weight they want to lose, but rather the hurt.
Tip 1:
If you want to maintain a steady weight forever, check how prepared you are. Are you ready to be introduced to new parts of yourself through personal growth? Studies show that obesity is a global disease whose recovery rate is among the lowest of all diseases in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people who lost weight and reached their desired weight will succeed in permanently maintaining it. Numerous diets end with ravenous hunger and maniacal eating to make up for weeks, months and maybe even years of the weary war against the urge to eat. Diet, abstention, and attempts to control ourselves produce a single result – failure. We must give up on that beforehand.
So what’s it going to be? A baguette or a courgette? Do you have to battle the bulge your whole life? How can you make a real change and win?
Tip 2:
The lasting change will come when you believe that your life will go on past tomorrow. Only then can you make small changes, and then another few small changes, and a few more teeny tiny ones, and you will discover a change in your relationship with food. What I mean is that food won’t control you anymore. You’ll eat only when you’re hungry. The change begins when you gather together your courage and change your eating habits forever. Let’s admit it – have the diets you’ve tried up until now worked? The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, M.S.W, Emotional eating’s therapist, will help you to take action correctly in order to develop open channels of communication and healthy relationships with people instead of being in a “master and servant” relationship with food.
You have lots of logical reasons to hang on to the emotional eating habits you’ve acquired over the years. These are the defense mechanisms which will give you refuge when a storm of events floods you with negative feelings. Deserted? Disappointed? Hurt? Are you eating yourself up?
Emotional eating feeds an inner need more than it does any physical need for food. We’re all “emotional eaters”. The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, will teach you to reduce the scope of your emotional eating.
Tip 3:
Lots of people are unwilling to give up on their “celebrations” with food, which fill an internal empty gap. A baguette won’t say “no” in the middle of the night. On the other hand, you’ll meet people who will. Through the process of change, one learns to fill that empty gap and to replace “celebrations” with food with “celebrations” with people and relationships.
“ Through the course of one-on-one therapy sessions or group meetings, I promise to put people inside the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake that disease wandering around their souls and in this way to wake them up, to open their eyes and to examine what kind of future they wish for themselves.”
If you also think it’s time to divorce the baguette, you are invited to a workshop-balanced eating methodology-where you’ll learn to manage your feelings, recognize Feed-Back, and understand it without eating yourself and everything around you up.
Tip 4:
Divorce that baguette! Stop that frustration that comes from repeat weight loss and gain. Stop focusing on food, internalize that the real frustration is food, look the truth in the eye and stop eating yourself up from the inside. That’s the only way you’ll achieve the long-awaited results: weight loss and maintenance.
A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life. A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life.
End to Emotional Eating?!
Research shows that obesity and overeating has the lowest chance of recovery of any disease in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people will succeed in keeping the weight off.
Why do only 2% succeed in keeping the weight off over time?
Let’s try to touch on a number of ways in which food represents a great deal more than concrete and physical nourishment for a person.
I’ll start from a personal perspective. Since the age of five, I have been coping with weight problems. I have succeeded to lose weight countless times only to gain it all back. I have never been obese but I certainly have been fat. Over the last few years, in parallel to an internal emotional process I underwent, my weight also dropped and that is the result of the subconscious decision I made with myself to confront my fears related to my relationship with people and to be less concerned with a successful relationship with food.
One of the most significant turning points happened two and a half years ago during a trip to India (my second out of three) when I told myself one of the evenings that it was time for dinner. For the first time I stopped and asked myself: “Why? Are you hungry?” After I answered myself that I wasn’t, I decided that I wouldn’t eat dinner that night. The new connection that I succeeded in building with my physical and nutritional needs is the end of a dark era on the one hand and on the other, a new period of coping during which I experienced disappointments and defeats at the same time I made my choice for physical and emotional health. This is the root of my decision to take absolute responsibility for my life.
Because of the stipulations we learned when we were young (for example, every time we watch TV, we also eat, coffee always comes with cake; when it’s cold, we need to eat something to warm up) and because of the emotional attachment to food (for example, every time we feel lonely we eat and then we feel a little less alone for a little while and if we have no one to party with, there’s always food which will party with us – a baguette will never tell us “No” if we want it in the middle of the night, while a person we love can certainly reject us….).
It is important to understand that we have a lot of good reasons to keep these habits because they have taken care of us in difficult times. We call these reasons defense mechanisms that have kept us from giving others control over our lives and that’s after those same people may have hurt us, disappointed us or just deserted us. Our developing personality at a young age knew that in order to be able to survive the difficult period, it was in our interest not to emotionally invest in human beings so it was preferably to look for what we wanted elsewhere. Some of us chose food as the first and natural option because it is so familiar and available and has already demonstrated that it knows how to fulfill us, warm us, calm us, and blur unwanted emotional and physical feelings.
Therefore, there is something tempting about keeping old habits, in particular those pertaining to our need for certainty and stability and our lack of ability to get through changes and transformations in our lives. Those who participate in the workshop primarily describe the “other side” of the wall as being frightening and empty particularly with regard to going to an unfamiliar place and dealing with everything the years have managed to take away from them.
However there comes a day when most of us say to ourselves “enough”. Our defense mechanisms have caused us to repress, deny, forget, be cynical, to hurt those closest to us but we want something new. For the most part, we want to trust people again, to allow ourselves to be needy, to be weak, to put our heads on something close and to know ourselves more completely.
Building new eating habits is a slow process with a number of phases. According to the model of change (the spiral rather than the linear) of researcher James Prochaska (1982), we will undergo six phases:
1. Pre-contemplation – The person does not consider the possibility of change. He is not aware of his problem or of his need to change and he demonstrates a relationship of arguments and defenses while preserving his behavior and habits. All this stems from fear related to the change and a difficulty to cope with reality.
2. Contemplation – The person is aware of his problem but he is ambivalent in the way he relates to change. He understands that he is supposed to consider changing his ways but at the same time he is aware of the inconvenience of the change and of the demanding price involved.
3. Preparation – The person devotes himself to changing his behavior. All the doubts and ambivalence the person feels towards his decision need to be eliminated. This is the stage where golden opportunities present themselves for a limited time so the person can undergo change.
4. Action – The person implements real actions in order to bring about a change, i.e. learning new habits, appreciation and understanding of old skills, development of control of stimuli and temptations, finding alternative activities to eating and more.
5. Maintenance – The person needs to promise that the change will be permanent and will become part of his personal behavioral repertoire.
6. Termination – The person breaks out of the spiraling circle of the change. This phase will come when he develops a new image of himself (“I feel and not just think that I am worthy”), situations which were temptations in the past no longer are, and the achievement of solid self-capabilities.
The model is spiral and not linear so we sometimes move forward, and then backwards, and then forward again. In this context, I offer two personal examples: About a month after my decision not to go to dinner that same evening in India, I got to the end of journey and about two days before my return to Israel, I was waiting for the bus to take me back to the airport and I decided that in order not to be hungry later, I would eat then. For an hour, I didn’t stop eating from the buffet of the hotel yet I didn’t feel satisfied. For the next two days, I felt nauseous and had headaches and I tried to understand the attack of ravenousness I experienced. The only explanation that came into my head was the fear of returning home, the uncertainty of my personal and professional fate and, most of all, the change in my life from a vacation and hedonism to a life full of obligations and responsibilities.
In another event that took place a few months later, during a conflict with my former girl friend, I said, “you annoy me; I’m going to the refrigerator to eat.” When I said that, I felt my whole history coming back to me at the same because food had been a calming drug for years. On the other hand, when I said it, I burst out laughing because I knew that food could no longer bring me serenity and that I needed to solve the problem in another way. This event underscored for me how much I will always be emotionally vulnerable to food and that I will always need to keep my eyes open and take care of myself in that respect.
Numerous overweight people admit about themselves, as do those around them, that they are social, pleasant, nice, laughers and most of them don’t have a problem with the way they see their bodies. From my experience, there is no such animal. Deep, deep down, individuals who fall into this group of people usually admit that this mask they have been wearing from a young age protects them from loneliness and despair. They are ready to do anything to build proper eating habits and are prepared to compromise in order to be a little less nice. And even though the road to change includes the fear of the fat person coming in conflict with other people and not continuing in the same concentrated emotional patterns which are expressed by unnecessary eating.
The heading End to Emotional Eating?! represents on one hand the paradox that we believe that it is possible to abandon our old habits and our problematic history while on the other hand there is a fear that we won’t always know how to preserve our accomplishments and that even if we’ve succeeded in eating from the right place for a long period of time, a surprise will always be waiting around the corner to knock us down again. My answer to that paradox is that there is no concrete answer and that you need to keep your eyes wide open and learn to live with these fears.
My daily work is to bring people into the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake up the Disease (sometimes, that’s how I call my work – “Shake the Disease) that are running around in their souls. In this way I wake them up, open their eyes and examine with them what future they wish for themselves.
ABOUT
Roni Maislish, M.S.W
Clinical social work, Emotional eating’s therapist. Roni gives individual counseling at the eating disorder unit at Soroka Hospital, leads parent and teenager groups within a number of frameworks, including the Klalit Health Fund, in a broad range of areas including: emotional eating, assertive communications, parent-child relationships, emotions management, anger control and negotiations management and conflict.
ARTICLES
"Divorce the baguette"
Numerous individuals want to lose weight because they believe it will make them hurt less. They believe it will make them happier.
That is: it’s not the weight they want to lose, but rather the hurt.
Tip 1:
If you want to maintain a steady weight forever, check how prepared you are. Are you ready to be introduced to new parts of yourself through personal growth? Studies show that obesity is a global disease whose recovery rate is among the lowest of all diseases in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people who lost weight and reached their desired weight will succeed in permanently maintaining it. Numerous diets end with ravenous hunger and maniacal eating to make up for weeks, months and maybe even years of the weary war against the urge to eat. Diet, abstention, and attempts to control ourselves produce a single result – failure. We must give up on that beforehand.
So what’s it going to be? A baguette or a courgette? Do you have to battle the bulge your whole life? How can you make a real change and win?
Tip 2:
The lasting change will come when you believe that your life will go on past tomorrow. Only then can you make small changes, and then another few small changes, and a few more teeny tiny ones, and you will discover a change in your relationship with food. What I mean is that food won’t control you anymore. You’ll eat only when you’re hungry. The change begins when you gather together your courage and change your eating habits forever. Let’s admit it – have the diets you’ve tried up until now worked? The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, M.S.W, Emotional eating’s therapist, will help you to take action correctly in order to develop open channels of communication and healthy relationships with people instead of being in a “master and servant” relationship with food.
You have lots of logical reasons to hang on to the emotional eating habits you’ve acquired over the years. These are the defense mechanisms which will give you refuge when a storm of events floods you with negative feelings. Deserted? Disappointed? Hurt? Are you eating yourself up?
Emotional eating feeds an inner need more than it does any physical need for food. We’re all “emotional eaters”. The Feed-Back method, the balanced eating methodology by Roni Maislish, will teach you to reduce the scope of your emotional eating.
Tip 3:
Lots of people are unwilling to give up on their “celebrations” with food, which fill an internal empty gap. A baguette won’t say “no” in the middle of the night. On the other hand, you’ll meet people who will. Through the process of change, one learns to fill that empty gap and to replace “celebrations” with food with “celebrations” with people and relationships.
“ Through the course of one-on-one therapy sessions or group meetings, I promise to put people inside the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake that disease wandering around their souls and in this way to wake them up, to open their eyes and to examine what kind of future they wish for themselves.”
If you also think it’s time to divorce the baguette, you are invited to a workshop-balanced eating methodology-where you’ll learn to manage your feelings, recognize Feed-Back, and understand it without eating yourself and everything around you up.
Tip 4:
Divorce that baguette! Stop that frustration that comes from repeat weight loss and gain. Stop focusing on food, internalize that the real frustration is food, look the truth in the eye and stop eating yourself up from the inside. That’s the only way you’ll achieve the long-awaited results: weight loss and maintenance.
A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life. A participant in the proper eating workshop I conducted nicknamed me “the disco teacher”, saying that she hated making up the dance steps alone. She liked having someone else always telling her how to move. In the workshop, she agreed for the first time to take responsibility, to undergo an emotional process which meant trying to understand why food represents such a central part of her life.
End to Emotional Eating?!
Research shows that obesity and overeating has the lowest chance of recovery of any disease in the Western world. Only 2 out of 100 people will succeed in keeping the weight off.
Why do only 2% succeed in keeping the weight off over time?
Let’s try to touch on a number of ways in which food represents a great deal more than concrete and physical nourishment for a person.
I’ll start from a personal perspective. Since the age of five, I have been coping with weight problems. I have succeeded to lose weight countless times only to gain it all back. I have never been obese but I certainly have been fat. Over the last few years, in parallel to an internal emotional process I underwent, my weight also dropped and that is the result of the subconscious decision I made with myself to confront my fears related to my relationship with people and to be less concerned with a successful relationship with food.
One of the most significant turning points happened two and a half years ago during a trip to India (my second out of three) when I told myself one of the evenings that it was time for dinner. For the first time I stopped and asked myself: “Why? Are you hungry?” After I answered myself that I wasn’t, I decided that I wouldn’t eat dinner that night. The new connection that I succeeded in building with my physical and nutritional needs is the end of a dark era on the one hand and on the other, a new period of coping during which I experienced disappointments and defeats at the same time I made my choice for physical and emotional health. This is the root of my decision to take absolute responsibility for my life.
Because of the stipulations we learned when we were young (for example, every time we watch TV, we also eat, coffee always comes with cake; when it’s cold, we need to eat something to warm up) and because of the emotional attachment to food (for example, every time we feel lonely we eat and then we feel a little less alone for a little while and if we have no one to party with, there’s always food which will party with us – a baguette will never tell us “No” if we want it in the middle of the night, while a person we love can certainly reject us….).
It is important to understand that we have a lot of good reasons to keep these habits because they have taken care of us in difficult times. We call these reasons defense mechanisms that have kept us from giving others control over our lives and that’s after those same people may have hurt us, disappointed us or just deserted us. Our developing personality at a young age knew that in order to be able to survive the difficult period, it was in our interest not to emotionally invest in human beings so it was preferably to look for what we wanted elsewhere. Some of us chose food as the first and natural option because it is so familiar and available and has already demonstrated that it knows how to fulfill us, warm us, calm us, and blur unwanted emotional and physical feelings.
Therefore, there is something tempting about keeping old habits, in particular those pertaining to our need for certainty and stability and our lack of ability to get through changes and transformations in our lives. Those who participate in the workshop primarily describe the “other side” of the wall as being frightening and empty particularly with regard to going to an unfamiliar place and dealing with everything the years have managed to take away from them.
However there comes a day when most of us say to ourselves “enough”. Our defense mechanisms have caused us to repress, deny, forget, be cynical, to hurt those closest to us but we want something new. For the most part, we want to trust people again, to allow ourselves to be needy, to be weak, to put our heads on something close and to know ourselves more completely.
Building new eating habits is a slow process with a number of phases. According to the model of change (the spiral rather than the linear) of researcher James Prochaska (1982), we will undergo six phases:
1. Pre-contemplation – The person does not consider the possibility of change. He is not aware of his problem or of his need to change and he demonstrates a relationship of arguments and defenses while preserving his behavior and habits. All this stems from fear related to the change and a difficulty to cope with reality.
2. Contemplation – The person is aware of his problem but he is ambivalent in the way he relates to change. He understands that he is supposed to consider changing his ways but at the same time he is aware of the inconvenience of the change and of the demanding price involved.
3. Preparation – The person devotes himself to changing his behavior. All the doubts and ambivalence the person feels towards his decision need to be eliminated. This is the stage where golden opportunities present themselves for a limited time so the person can undergo change.
4. Action – The person implements real actions in order to bring about a change, i.e. learning new habits, appreciation and understanding of old skills, development of control of stimuli and temptations, finding alternative activities to eating and more.
5. Maintenance – The person needs to promise that the change will be permanent and will become part of his personal behavioral repertoire.
6. Termination – The person breaks out of the spiraling circle of the change. This phase will come when he develops a new image of himself (“I feel and not just think that I am worthy”), situations which were temptations in the past no longer are, and the achievement of solid self-capabilities.
The model is spiral and not linear so we sometimes move forward, and then backwards, and then forward again. In this context, I offer two personal examples: About a month after my decision not to go to dinner that same evening in India, I got to the end of journey and about two days before my return to Israel, I was waiting for the bus to take me back to the airport and I decided that in order not to be hungry later, I would eat then. For an hour, I didn’t stop eating from the buffet of the hotel yet I didn’t feel satisfied. For the next two days, I felt nauseous and had headaches and I tried to understand the attack of ravenousness I experienced. The only explanation that came into my head was the fear of returning home, the uncertainty of my personal and professional fate and, most of all, the change in my life from a vacation and hedonism to a life full of obligations and responsibilities.
In another event that took place a few months later, during a conflict with my former girl friend, I said, “you annoy me; I’m going to the refrigerator to eat.” When I said that, I felt my whole history coming back to me at the same because food had been a calming drug for years. On the other hand, when I said it, I burst out laughing because I knew that food could no longer bring me serenity and that I needed to solve the problem in another way. This event underscored for me how much I will always be emotionally vulnerable to food and that I will always need to keep my eyes open and take care of myself in that respect.
Numerous overweight people admit about themselves, as do those around them, that they are social, pleasant, nice, laughers and most of them don’t have a problem with the way they see their bodies. From my experience, there is no such animal. Deep, deep down, individuals who fall into this group of people usually admit that this mask they have been wearing from a young age protects them from loneliness and despair. They are ready to do anything to build proper eating habits and are prepared to compromise in order to be a little less nice. And even though the road to change includes the fear of the fat person coming in conflict with other people and not continuing in the same concentrated emotional patterns which are expressed by unnecessary eating.
The heading End to Emotional Eating?! represents on one hand the paradox that we believe that it is possible to abandon our old habits and our problematic history while on the other hand there is a fear that we won’t always know how to preserve our accomplishments and that even if we’ve succeeded in eating from the right place for a long period of time, a surprise will always be waiting around the corner to knock us down again. My answer to that paradox is that there is no concrete answer and that you need to keep your eyes wide open and learn to live with these fears.
My daily work is to bring people into the darkest caves of their hearts, to find the sharpest knives in their guts, and to shake up the Disease (sometimes, that’s how I call my work – “Shake the Disease) that are running around in their souls. In this way I wake them up, open their eyes and examine with them what future they wish for themselves.
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