"Do people really get over this?" Susan asked. "I'm afraid it's just been too long...." Her distress hinged on thirty years of binging on candy and donuts. Can people stop after this long a stretch?
I told Susan yes, in fact, people can stop binging after decades. However, I understand the frustration. It follows seemingly endless attempts to change. Diets of all kinds, complete abstinence from sugar, medication-in Susan's case, whatever relief these approaches brought proved fleeting. Before long, she'd find her hand in the candy bag again. What seemed to work for others just hadn't worked. And her weight, about forty pounds too high, rarely budged.
When behaviors resist change for years, maybe eating behaviors especially, they seem to mock the promises of self-help: Here, neither the high protein diet, the switch to organic, nor the power-walking program helps for long. The old behavior pulls too hard. Yet, people who do break entrenched patterns often report that their self-help efforts taught skills that eventually held. Beyond that, though, they'd needed to shed light on an emotional blind spot, or a few. Then they could slow the unwitting self-sabotage, or the unhealthy use of food as emotional balm. Finally they could relax the old behavior for good.
Diana's is one of several such stories of change that I'll share in the coming weeks. At 40, she'd made millions on Wall Street, holding her own in a very competitive all-male environment. People respected her. She had friends, a social life. She had the house she wanted and money in the bank. Her husband, who she considered a great guy, held a lower-level job that enabled him to pick up their kids from school. Friends and family saw her as the one who always knew what to do. An ongoing problem, however, was the extra 100 pounds she carried. Besides spiking her blood pressure, Diana felt physically limited by the weight, and she felt unattractive.
In her typically competent way, Diana could get herself going-eating right, working out. She'd lose twenty pounds, though, and then creep back up-always. She couldn't drop below that mark. Why? Restaurant meals, for one. "I took it for granted that I had to keep up with the guys, and there were lots of lunches and dinners. On top of that, I rewarded myself with food." These rewards took the form of unlimited pizza, ice cream, or brownies. She knew how to skip these traps for weeks at a time, though....so why did she always fall back? Especially since, "I always felt really good when I ate well and exercised."
Diana found a therapist after one of her lapsed South Beach Diets. To her surprise, she found herself talking about her working class family. As the highest achiever, the one outshining them all, it brought a type of comfort to have an area of life where she did poorly and was seen as someone who struggles. While she was hardly aware of this, she'd felt this way since childhood. She'd excelled at school as her siblings did not, and her ambitions outshadowed her parents'. Thinking about, and then accepting, her differences--and feeling less guilty about them-seemed to help strengthen her self-care resolve.
There was more, though. Diana had never really faced, much less said aloud, certain feelings about her husband. Her great guy was in fact depressed and unhelpful. With money and options and a fit attractive body, would she really stay? Did she want to have to grapple with that? Not really. But in line with her efforts to take better care of herself, she eventually suggested couples therapy to her husband. The admittedly stressful process brought some new understandings and habits. Better decisions around food and "rewards" for hard work came easier still.
Here is how Diana explains the process now, seven years and almost 100 pounds later: "I guess I started dealing with things. I had always dealt with work, but I ignored other problems. I was in a kind of denial. I buried myself in work, and then in food. And I pretended all that eating out and those ‘rewards' didn't add up." She'd known she felt awful about the weight, though, and the blood pressure prescription was a wake-up call.
Now she adds, " It's painful to look at what you haven't been handling, at how you've ignored things. But I'm at the point where it just feels better to do what works." One example-she'd doesn't think of a large pizza as a reward any longer. She'll get herself a massage or a facial instead. Or, if it's got to be food, "I'd much rather have something smaller and healthier, but really good."
When people have struggled with overeating for decades, the paths to their eventual change will differ-this diet or that technique won't do it for everyone. One person's struggle may not match the next, and neither will the insights and changes that finally allow for transformation. What people's stories share, though, is the message that Susan sought: with persistence and an awareness how we may block our own success, change can finally happen.
