Tag Archives: Skinny Thinking

by | December 9, 2010 · 9:40 am

Food for Thought in today’s Washington Post

As it turns out, no, I didn’t ride my bicycle off the end of the earth. I am alive and well and still at it.

John and I started doing this blog as two regular guys writing about food, exercise, etc. because we thought there was a void in that space. There are lots of sources of this kind of info for women, but men seem to fall short.

Now, nearly a year later, we have a number of women readers and each of us has heard from women friends that we are putting out the same info that they are used to getting from their sources.

Guess what, the principles of proper weight management for both men and women are pretty much the same. In addition,
as you can tell from our posts, there can be significant differences among men based on age and place in life. As an unmarried retiree, I face fewer and different challenges from the one’s John does as married man with a career.

In addition, we have carried relevant posts from female sources addressing our common problem. Which brings us to the present. I ran across a really interesting column in the Washington Post this morning that I want to share with our readers.

Jennifer LaRue Huget writes “Eat, Drink and be Healthy” regularly for the Washington Post.

In today’s column she talks about some of her issues with what she calls ‘downsizing.’ You can read it for yourself by clicking the link. I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs here that I think really sum up the situation beautifully for all and each of us.

“When you learn, as I recently have, to start regarding food as fuel for your activities and not as a shield from life’s difficulties, you’re forced to start facing the things you were using food to hide from.

“That means having the unsettling discussions you’d been avoiding, fighting the fights you’d just as soon have skipped. It means sitting down at the computer and doing your work instead of buying time with a big bowl of popcorn. And it means staring down fears, working to resolve nagging problems instead of hushing them with a chocolate bar.

“None of that has been fun. It’s so much easier to dive into a bag of Cheez Doodles (or, better yet, one of those big buckets of Utz Cheese Balls) and wash it down with a stack of Oreos than to figure out how you’re going to afford college for both kids.

“The thing is, though, you’ve got to confront all those issues eventually. And it is much easier to do so once you’ve gained the confidence that comes with finally being in control of your weight.”

Food for thought.

Tony

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by | October 19, 2010 · 7:57 am

More on Emotional Eating – The Quest for Intimacy

My last few posts have touched on the emotional side of over-eating. I’ve mentioned more than once that eating can be a substitute for the people you wish were there for you.

If you’ve over-eaten, you also know eating can be a substitute for physical intimacy with another person. People may be hesitant to admit it but, let’s be honest here, when you’re eating alone, you’re not just wishing some other folks were around. You’re looking for physical as well as emotional pleasure. When you’re eating in large groups, that eating is your substitute for actually being close to someone in that group.
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by | October 18, 2010 · 7:47 am

Get to Where Tony Is, Not Where I Am

Tony wrote a great post over the weekend about incorporating exercise into your life.

All great advice, but to make it all work as he does, you first have to get to an emotional place where you can let go of food as your only friend, the struggle I’ve been writing about.

I contend the vast majority of overweight people, myself included, do not overeat because of hunger but rather because of emotional pain. I think at some level we all know we’re somehow shortening our lives with bad eating habits, but at that same deep level we’re saying ‘so what?’ Why live longer, miserably lives, lives when everyone and everything let’s you down, except for that junk food that’s always so easy to get?
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by | September 10, 2010 · 9:48 am

Laura’s Day 65 – Inquiry

List a Disturbing Belief About What Eating Emotionally Means About You:

Inquiry:
1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?
2. What is the opposite of this belief?

Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief? What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:

1.
2.
3.

By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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by | September 9, 2010 · 7:37 am

Laura’s Day 64 – Uncovering Negative Beliefs About Emotional Eating

DAY 64 – Uncovering Negative Beliefs About Emotional Eating (Five Minutes)

In the next section, we’ll examine the stressful things we may be telling ourselves when we eat to satisfy emotional needs. For example, you might be telling yourself the following when you eat because you’re feeling down:

I’m weak.
I’ll never get the body I want.
I can’t get on the right track in my life, and I won’t attract the kind of partner I have always dreamed of.

To help you uncover your beliefs, read the lists in the next section and circle the ones that apply to you. Hold onto them because a few pages from now you’ll have a chance to question them in the section called “Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Responding, Expressing, and Emotional Eating.”

The more you question stressful beliefs, the less power they have over you, because you get to see that they don’t tell the whole story, the whole truth. When you see this, you can’t believe in them in the same way, and if and when they arise again, you won’t give them a second thought!

What Your Beliefs About Food and Eating Mean About You

We all have so many beliefs about food and eating that it might be hard to know where to start. In addition, these beliefs affect how we feel about ourselves. For example, you might think any or all of the following at different times in your life or even at different times during the day. Food…

Is my Achilles heal
Is heavenly
Is my only source of pleasure
Has to be governed with an iron fist
Makes me fat
Is not safe because I have to control myself when I’m around it
Is my curse

Ultimately, no matter how much you dress it up, food is fuel. It’s the stuff we stick in our tanks to keep the body moving, thinking, working, playing, and breathing. However, as we’ve seen, this basic truth about food has done little to prevent us from forming wildly romantic beliefs, and creating an overblown relationship with it. In this section, circle all of the beliefs about what it means to eat emotionally that cause you stress so that you can question them later.

Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means… (Negative)

What It Means About My Character

I’m weak.
I have no willpower.
I’m a hopeless failure.
I’m unlovable.

What It Means to Others (friends, family, colleagues)

Others will judge me as:

A loser because I can’t get my eating under control
An emotional wreck
Not living up to my potential
Someone to look down upon
Gluttonous
Disgusting
An example of how not to live
Others think my eating is:
Immoral
Repulsive
A turn off
Pathetic

What It Means About How I Live My Life

I eat emotionally and that means:
I’ll never stay in a stable weight range and that means:
I’ll stop socializing.
I’ll stop trying to find a partner.
I’ll feel like a failure.
I’ll always be on a diet, trying to get a handle on my weight, and that means:
I’ll always be unhappy.
I’ll always struggle.
My weight will always yo-yo, so I’ll never be able to maintain a normal weight.

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

My emotional eating means that:

I’ll always be fat, and that means:
I won’t be loved.
I’ll end up alone.
No one will want me.
I won’t be able to attract the kind of partner I want because I’ll be judged for not being more together and in control of myself.
No one will want to be in relationship with me because I’m always in a bad mood when I eat emotionally.

I’ll never be able to reveal this shameful practice to my partner, so I’ll always have to hide my munching.

What It Means About My Career

My emotional eating means that:
*I won’t have the respect of my subordinates, peers, or superiors.
*People at work will think I’m weak-willed and lacking in self-esteem.
*I’ll lose out on promotions.
*I’ll talk out my bad moods on my co-workers
*I’ll never live up to my potential.
* If I can’t do a simple thing like manage my weight, I’ll never amount to much.

If you have other stressful beliefs that weren’t listed, take a moment to list them here:

The next few days of Inquiry will help to uncover and regain power over these stressful beliefs.
By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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by | September 8, 2010 · 10:33 am

Laura’s Day 63 – Wise Self-Expression: Healing Low Self-Esteem

An important part of expressing ourselves wisely rather than using food for comfort is learning wise self-talk. Years of negative self-talk and believing those negative thoughts creates low self-esteem. Despite everything we’ve achieved, thoughts like “I’m no good,” may still plague us and will continue to do so until we begin to question, see through, and detach from them.

To create a new habit of wise self-expression, it’s important to become aware of what you’re saying to yourself. Set the intention to notice the way you habitually talk to yourself. If you say negative things, either replace those thoughts with positive thoughts or question the negative thoughts using self- inquiry.

If you’re feeling bad about yourself, it can drive you to comfort yourself by eating. However, if you can set the intention to notice when you’re feeling bad about yourself and ask, “What am I telling myself that is making me feel this way?” you interrupt the pattern. Then, you can replace your negative self-talk with positive self-talk. But if you eat to feel better, it adds to the problem, causing you to feel less attractive and bad about yourself. It’s a vicious circle.

1. What you’re saying to yourself that caused you to feel bad, and replace the negative thought with a positive thought,
2. Come up with three pieces of supporting evidence and become free of the negative belief that caused the negative feeling.

List the negative belief that is causing you to feel bad about yourself:

Replace the negative thought with a positive belief:

List three supporting examples:
1.
2.
3.
By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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by | September 7, 2010 · 7:31 am

Laura’s Day 62 – What Am I Repressing?

Eating compulsively and bingeing both come from repressed emotions, particularly repressed anger, and may require therapy to heal. Everyone has repressed emotions and it’s usually not a problem. It only becomes a problem when the anger causes us to hurt others or become self-destructive by eating to medicate ourselves.

We often repress the anger that we feel when we don’t go after what we want, when we aren’t true to ourselves, or when we don’t express or stand up for ourselves. We let our negative thinking stop us. When this happens, not only aren’t we following our hearts, we’re not following the dictates of the ego either. Because we haven’t learned to be assertive, we’re not taking action in our lives, and we’re stuck and depressed about it.

Many of us aren’t following our passions because we let our conditioning stop us. For instance, if you want to be an artist, you may not pursue that for fear (conditioning) of not being able to make a living at it. If you aren’t cut out for parenthood, you may end up having children because of conditioning that says you should.

If you follow your conditioning instead of your heart, you may be unhappy, living a life that doesn’t fit for you. And if you don’t do something to change that, you’ll continue to feel unhappy and depressed.

To do some work on this on your own, ask yourself these questions: Is there anything I’m keeping myself from doing? Is there anything I’m keeping myself from saying? How do I avoid asserting myself? Even if you discover an ego-based desire that you’re not following, it’s not healthy to repress it. Instead, let it see the light of day, acknowledge it, and then follow it or not. Record your responses below:

By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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by | September 6, 2010 · 8:27 am

Laura’s Day 61 – Your 5 Minute Exercise

DAY 61 – Doing Something I Love (Five Minute to Unlimited; write down something for what follows)
Here Is what I did:

By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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by | September 5, 2010 · 9:24 am

Laura’s Day 60 – Becoming More Assertive and Saying “No”

One way to change this pattern is to become more assertive. If we feel that we’re not entitled to get angry or say “no,” instead of standing up for ourselves, we get angry in our minds and either repress or feed our feelings. When this happens, we’re likely to be eating at the same time that we’re having an angry conversation in our head that we could have dealt with another way.

If you’re doing this, you need to attend to the emotional issue that’s come up rather than feeding it with food and more thoughts. You can learn to heal it rather than feed it.

Today, pay attention to how you relate to other people. Make a point of asking for what you want and saying “no,” when it feels authentic.
By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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by | September 4, 2010 · 10:20 am

Laura’s Day 59 – Self Assessment

If you’re not happy, it’s because you’re telling yourself something negative or because you’ve made choices that are not aligned with what you love to do or with your life purpose. Our mind can cause us to be unhappy because minds are, by their very nature, negative.

For example, the mind could be telling you that what you’re doing isn’t meaningful or that you’re not doing it well enough. So, it’s possible to be living a life that supports your life purpose but not be happy because your negative mind saps the joy out of it. The mind declares: “This is how things should be and how you should be,” and it quickly follows that with, “and you’re not.” “You’re not the way you should be; you’re not doing it right.”

In our culture we associate eating with celebration and parties and so when we think our lives lack enjoyment, we try to create fun through food. Yet, life often lacks fun because we’ve made it that way, either by creating lives that don’t suit us, doing too many things, or engaging in negative thinking.

Begin by discovering what created the emotion in the first place. Start by examining the structures in your life. For example, if you’re angry or resentful about the way your life is set up, you may need to make some changes. It’s best to stop doing things that you don’t want to do, within reason, or at least take steps in that direction. Even though you may feel locked into your life, you don’t have to spend most of your time doing things you don’t want to do. To become empowered and stop repressing or eating your feelings, you have to begin to listen to your heart and redirect your life so that you’re doing what you want to do.

Unless you realize that you are choosing how you spend your time, you will feel victimized, angry, and resentful and find yourself eating emotionally. There are always tasks that people would rather not do, but no one has to work at a job that just doesn’t fit. Eliminate as many unpleasant tasks and activities as possible so that you can be happy. You’re not meant to live a life that you don’t want to live.

Often we get going in the wrong direction because our mind or other people’s minds tell us we have to do this, that, or the other thing to survive or to attain a certain standard of living. If you’re doing what you want to do, you won’t need to get happiness from things. If you’re happy and fulfilled doing what you’re doing, life will feel good and you won’t feel the need to eat emotionally.

There’s the ego’s version of happiness, and then there’s real happiness. These two versions of happiness look very different. If living your heart’s truth or following your passions doesn’t include the money, success, or admiration the ego desires, then it can take courage to see that you can be happy living simply and doing what you love instead of having all the niceties that other people think you need.

In exchange for doing the things you hate, the ego offers you a nice car or nice house as a reward so that you can feel good about yourself. That’s the trade-off. But you don’t have to get happiness from feeling good about yourself on an egoic level. When you’re being true to yourself, you feel good about yourself because you genuinely like what you’re doing. Then feeling good isn’t conditional. You won’t need to be famous, sexy, or rich to feel good about yourself.

Ask yourself: Am I spending most of my time doing things I enjoy? If not, how can I reorganize my life to be able to do what I love?

Here are the things I love to do:

Here is how I will reorganize my life to be able to spend more time doing what I love:

By Laura Katleman-Prue, author of Skinny Thinking

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