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August 04, 2009

Refusing Under Stress

By Barbara Berkeley

Refusing to regain the weight you’ve lost is a big enough challenge on ordinary days, but what about on life-crisis days? Years of habit dictate that stressful times deserve food relief. Let’s call it “Food Soothing.” Drowning sorrows in a hot fudge sundae is such a cheap, accessible (and delicious) solution. Hey! You’re stressed out…no one will blame you!

There would be nothing wrong with Food Soothing if we were only in a Food-Worthy crisis once in a great while. The problem is that crisis moments are much more frequent than we realize. When my patients have a bad week and have been unable to follow a diet plan, the most common problem they point to is stress. Stress is invoked so frequently that it would seem to be an incredibly common occurrence in most lives. Here are some of the many daily stressors that patients cite as reasons they’ve soothed themselves with food:

• Worrying about a home or work project
• Having a sick relative
• Having trouble with a child
• Arguing with a friend, spouse, or colleague
• Having a marriage issue
• Going through a divorce
• Money problems
• Going through packing or moving
• Throwing a party or attending a large family event
• Traveling for work
• Fighting off a minor illness
• Dating
• Retiring
• Going through a home remodel
• Having a car breakdown
• Having a sick pet
• Worrying about a doctor or dentist appointment
• Being overscheduled

The list could go on for pages. As it turns out, there are basically very few days that don’t contain stressors strong enough to motivate Food Soothing. For this reason, I generally advise maintainers not to use the “just this once” approach when dealing with Food-Soothing urges. But what to do?

When I started running, I bought some books about how to train. I particularly like “Galloway’s Book on Running” (Shelter Press, 1984). Jeff Galloway is an Olympic runner who ran with greats like Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers in the 70s and has currently run over 120 marathons. He is considered an expert in his field. Distance runners like Galloway know a lot about something that maintainers face every day, the struggle to continue on despite discomfort. I did not buy “Galloway’s Book on Running” to learn something about maintaining, but that’s what happened.

About halfway through my first mile of running, I had started to notice a little voice in my head telling me that I would feel a lot better if I stopped. This message would go away for a while, then come back more and more insistently. Sometimes the cue would be so strong that I would pull up and stop running altogether. After all, that is what my body was telling me to do. I was just listening to my body. While reading Galloway’s book, I was startled to come across a description of this “messaging” phenomenon. Here is what Galloway said:

The Mind is Divided: “The power of the mind to push the body to its potential is limited by an internal conflict. The logical side (left brain) does not communicate with the creative side (right brain). A primary mission of the analytical side is to steer you into comfort and away from stress. The more stress you generate from running and other areas, the more negative messages: “slow down,” “stop,” or what is even worse, “why am I doing this?” If you don’t have a mental strategy for dealing with this barrage of negativity, you’ll start losing confidence in your ability to achieve your potential…”

Galloway then goes on to describe strategies for defusing the left brain which include distracting yourself, making yourself laugh, and repeating mantras. I have found, however, that simply knowing my pesky messages are to be expected helps me ignore them. I am learning to notice the message and simply take note of it.

“Oh, that’s my silly left brain talking,” I’ll say.

I now realize that I don’t have to listen to this message. In fact, it doesn’t really mean anything. I’ve learned to take an assessment of myself when the message comes in. Am I really suffering? Am I hurting? Can I still breathe? Do I feel a whole lot different than I did five minutes before? The answer is almost always no. If that’s the case, I keep on going and take a curious attitude. When will I get the next message? Will that one be any more linked to reality? It’s kind of interesting.

This type of thought-noting shares something with meditative practice. Meditators are taught to be aware of thoughts that come into their mind but not to get involved with them. They are told to look at them, almost like balloons that float across the consciousness and then to let them float away. In other words, our thoughts and impulses don’t have to control us if we practice minimizing them. Distance athletes have learned how to do this well; how to get to goal. So why can’t we do the same? We maintainers are the distance athletes of the weight loss world.

After reading Galloway, I realized that I had been employing a similar technique for some years in maintaining my weight. When messages came into my mind that told me I’d feel really good if I bought that Snickers or ate that pie, I had learned to identify them, look at them curiously and let them go. Over time, I had learned to detach these thoughts from any urgency. They became sort of lifeless, or perhaps neutral. Without really knowing it, I had figured out that they were just news flashes from my left brain and were not much related to reality. Once I learned to get a little more zen with these incoming thoughts, I found that a sip of some drink or a handful of blueberries satisfied my soothing needs just as well as the high-calorie stuff and with a lot less consequence.

I’m wondering if any of you have discovered a similar phenomenon? If not, try examining those left brain messages and letting them fly away. You may just find that you’re a marathoner after all.

http://refusetoregain.com/my_weblog...der-stress.html