Work With T Makes Me Eat More

Hi, people. New here in this forum. Now I have a relevant problem and would very much like your advice. A year and a half ago I started therapy, and it's going great. Not as great as I'd like, but still very good. I'm trying (so far without success) to connect with all those really terrible emotions T and I know I must have had as a very small child when it became apparent to me that my mother was entirely out to lunch and dissociating almost all the time. So T and I are working on this very hard.

Well, interestingly enough, over the past couple of months, while T and I have been working on figuring out my mother, my appetite has more than doubled. I've become obsessed with food. And, yes, I smoke and drink too. But those haven't increased, only the food. My wife is really upset. She tells me I'm getting fat. I listen to her in the house, but when I'm out and about I give in to these desires. I long ago swore off Chinese buffets for lunch, but now I hear their siren song again. As well as large orders of everything at 5 Guys.

The connection's as plain as the nose on my face, but that doesn't help me stop eating. For dinner tonight, because she yelled at me, I ate a head of lettuce with cocktail sauce and if I can keep that up it'll help, I suppose, but it's not going to help when I'm out of the house.

What do you do when you're around these places serving delicious food and you're just overwhelmed with raging hunger? How do you resist? If I give in on a regular basis I'll be obese. I haven't had this problem before. For all of my previous life I've weighed in at a reasonable number. Now I have a problem fitting into my clothes, and I can't afford a new wardrobe! Help!

Ygrec, I've gone through periods where I just could not eat enough. My stomach might be in pain from the amount of food I'd eaten, but I'd still feel hungry. For me it's a reaction to stress. Maybe you're stressed over what you're dealing with in therapy? HAve you mentioned this to your T?

I get the impression you are looking for real world tips how to cope. It helps me to use protion control both at home and when I go out to eat. I measure what I put on my plate at home and limit myself to that amount. If I go out to eat I order smaller portions or I set part of the serving aside to take home.

Did your T tell you that, or is it your own explanation?


Once upon a time I was very interested in having whatever I did make sense to myself and others. It wasn't hard at all for someone to convince me (or for me to convince myself) that I had to be repressing one thing or another. After that, it obviously became my duty to unrepress it by any means necessary. For some perverse reason or other, though, the more I struggled to feel whatever way I knew I needed to feel, the less I actually felt that way and the harder it seemed to ever feel that way. Logically, of course, this proved I wasn't trying hard enough and didn't know what was good for me.

It took me quite a while to discover that I'd always experience whatever I experienced; I'd never experience anything I didn't experience; and if I ever failed to experience something I was supposed to, the problem wasn't with the experiencing but with the supposing.


What, exactly, comes up for you when you don't "give in to these desires"? I'm not saying you have to post about it, just notice it for yourself. It could very well turn out to be one of the things you're working on in therapy, only viewed from a different angle.

I think you may be getting a little ahead of yourself here, trying to be where you aren't. If you keep giving in you may become obese, and if you become obese you may not like it... etc. I say, start from where you are. Be here now. Say you're in the place that serves the food and you experience hunger. You have a choice. You can decline the food and notice what comes up for you: feelings of hunger, thoughts about deprivation, memories of your mother, or whatever. Or you can eat the food and notice what comes up for you then, quite likely including thoughts about becoming obese. It's much less important which you choose than whether or not it's your choice and you allow yourself to experience it (along with whatever comes up for you after that, and after that, and after that...)

That hasn't happened. I have not been successful in "not eating." That's why I started this thread.

I don't think I'm getting ahead of myself at all. I've added twenty pounds and more is coming. When I get that hungry I do NOT have a choice. I just eat. My "willpower" has nothing to do with it. My "conscious" choices and desires are just steamrollered. It's obssessive. That's why I started this thread.

I'm trying to picture what that's like. What occurs to me first is that I've been in lots and lots of situations where I thought I didn't have a choice, only to find out that I did.

When you get hungry, as you're describing here, what would happen if you decided to wait five minutes (or two, or one, or 30 seconds) before actually eating? I'd guess you've sometimes ended up waiting that long anyway, if only to get to a fast food restaurant, order a sandwich and have someone put it on your tray. Here are some of the possibilities I can imagine:

• You decide to wait, then immediately change your mind. "The heck with this! I'm not waiting any five minutes." I gather you wouldn't call that a choice, though I would.

• You experience some sort of distress that you want no part of, and the fastest way to make the distress go away is to eat something.

• You find some way to shut down or distract yourself while you're waiting, so you won't notice the distress.

• You say, "OK, I'll try waiting five minutes." The next thing you know, you're looking at a pile of empty sandwich wrappers on your tray, wondering what happened.

• You hear yourself saying, "I'm going to wait five minutes, I'm going to wait five minutes, I'm going to wait five minutes..." but it's as if you're watching yourself from a distance and even while you're still telling yourself you'll wait, you're already eating.

Are any of these anything like what happens for you?I've never found "willpower" very useful myself. I'm not even sure that there is such a thing. What seems to work best for me is to just do what I do, watch myself do it, and choose to do what I'm doing. I think if I found myself being steamrollered I'd be looking to climb on the steamroller and share the driving.

Your mileage may vary.

I noticed in that article that Ygrec was just discussing...

(The article)

(Where Ygrec discusses it)

... that the title of the PC article refers very definitely to "willpower" but the word is used only one more time, in the first paragraph.

OK, so maybe Rick Nauert (at PC) is only repeating what the University of Alberta article says, and the author of the University of Alberta article will explain to us how willpower works. But no! -- "In an article recently published in the journal Appetite, Fisher’s research notes that while people know the rules surrounding good eating and proper nutrition, they seem to lack one common component that often costs them the battle of the bulge: willpower." Again, that's the only mention of willpower; and again, that's only from an announcement (by one Jamie Hanlon) of Fisher's article, not from the article itself. I haven't found out where to access "the journal Appetite" to see what Fisher himself has to say.

I continue, for the moment, in my suspicion that "willpower" is actually a myth. We're apparently expected to understand it as part of our cultural heritage, though, so it's rare for anyone to try to define or explain it and the myth goes on uncontested.

"Daddy, why isn't the emperor wearing any clothes?"

Of course you're right, FooZe. I just haven't had to do this much before, so it's new territory for me. One thing I do along your line of thinking is the twenty minute rule. If I can, I only eat what I think I should eat, with the bargain being that if I'm hungry again twenty minutes after finishing what I think I should eat, then I can get some more. And, of course, at the end of twenty minutes I'm not hungry any more. So the twenty minute rule works well for me. I'd suppose that your suggestions are along that line.

What actually happens, what I describe as being steamrollered, goes like this: I'm doing whatever I have to do, not feeling hungry. Then hunger begins and, with it, a fight. This happens as I'm driving around, doing errands. It doesn't happen at home. Part of me wants to go eat at place X, where I'm sure to eat too much. Part of me wants to do what I should. This "fight" gets more and more intense. I feel uncomfortable. I push the whole thing out of my mind. Then I start to have ideas about why, just this time, I HAVE to eat more than I should. Or in a place I shouldn't go to. Or compromise by not going to Place X but going to Place Y where, it's true, I'll eat less but still more than I should.

And so ultimately, "me," the person having these ideas, is persuaded that it's really in my best interests to go wherever it is I choose but wind up eating more than the correct amount or variety. The opposing ideas have long since been left far away. I have a feeling of "rightness," of "correctness" in my final decision (which is the wrong decision), of "doing what I have to do." And it's all, all wrong.

• Quote:

  Are any of these anything like what happens for you?I've never found "willpower" very useful myself. I'm not even sure that there is such a thing. What seems to work best for me is to just do what I do, watch myself do it, and choose to do what I'm doing. I think if I found myself being steamrollered I'd be looking to climb on the steamroller and share the driving.

It would be wrong for me to say that this happens to me literally "all the time." It doesn't. At least half the week I'm at home and we simply never have bad food in the house. Not having kids, it's not all that difficult. No snack foods of any kind. No desserts. No convenience foods. We've lived that way for years. So if I want to eat a hot lunch I have to actually cook something. The only cold lunch would be a peanut butter sandwich. So it's much easier at home to keep myself under control.

As to "choosing what I'm doing," I think I've tried to explain above how I always wind up "choosing what I'm doing." And I am driving the steamroller. It's just pre-programmed. I'm always the boss. My assistants just put the wrong speech in the teleprompter. I would think that anyone doing anything compulsively operates like that. They wind up thinking that what they're doing is the right thing to do.

I guess everyone deals with "competing impulses." In all kinds of different situations. And I'd suppose that what you usually have is a kind of political competition among the impulses, each one coming up with as good an argument as they can in favor of their proposed course of action. And the sole and only voter (me) has to figure out how to compromise among these different parties to form a government. And I don't know about you, but I've spent a lifetime doing this on a large number of issues (at least those that my unconscious lets me have some control over.) So when it comes to food and eating, I don't know how to "privilege" (as the French say) the "healthy" choice over all the others automatically from the beginning. Take care.

Thanks, Ygrec. I'll respond eventually but right now I wanted to mention a thought I had about "willpower".

To me, someone's saying that "to deal with overeating [or almost anything else] you need willpower" is roughly equivalent to:

"To deal with __________ (fill in any condition from this list) you need mental health."

I found some interesting references to willpower in an article linked from today's PC Newsletter: 9 Tips for Setting Authentic New Year’s Resolutions.

FooZe quoted: "Instead lasting change derives from “letting go, accepting, opening, allowing, discovering… connecting to our essential selves, and ditching the whole idea of fixing ourselves."

Now THAT sounds good!