February 2011 – Lefkoe Eating Report

Why Do You Keep Eating After You’re Full?

In order to understand why people with an emotional eating problem keep eating after they are full, you have to understand what eating means to them.

Emotional eaters don’t want to face unpleasantness in their lives. They don’t want to feel any negative feelings. So they eat to get a pleasurable distraction from the feelings, to numb themselves, or to go unconscious when negative feelings show up in their lives. (I call these negative feelings “triggers,” because they “trigger” eating as an automatic response.)

How long are you able to escape the negative feelings? Usually only for as long as you are eating! So if you are having feelings you want to escape from, how long would you want to eat? … For as long as you possibly can, because the feelings will be suppressed only while you are eating and will re-surface as soon as you stop eating.

So you will start eating whether you are hungry or not in response to your triggers. And you will keep eating long past the point of being hungry whenever the triggers are present. Most emotional eaters have at least 15 different triggers, so at least one is present almost all the time.(As I point out in my free eBook, How To Stop Emotional Eating For Good, http://emotionaleatingreport.com/, triggers are the main source of emotional eating, but beliefs usually are involved also for most people. And the beliefs are affecting you all the time.)

When you de-condition eating as the conditioned response to the triggers, you will no longer automatically want to eat when a trigger appears in your life. At that point you can choose other things to distract you from the negative feelings; you can find alternative ways to cope with the triggers.

But there is a better way to handle the negative feelings.

Instead of looking for a healthier way to suppress your negative feelings, why not just allow them to be? True, they don’t feel good, but what if you just allowed yourself to feel bored, lonely, stressed, anxious, etc. when those feelings arose? What if you faced your feelings instead of looking for some way to avoid them?

Here is a suggestion on how to do it.

After you eliminate a belief using the Lefkoe Belief Process (if you haven’t already done so, go to http://recreateyourlife.com/free where you can eliminate some of the most common beliefs free), you go into an altered state of consciousness where you have the profound experience that you are the creator of your life. You no longer experience yourself as the sum total of your beliefs; you experience yourself as the creator of the beliefs, as consciousness.

In that state it is clear you have feelings, but you are not your feelings. You have thoughts, but you are not your thoughts.

When you are in that state it is easy to make a distinction between your “self” and your “SELF.” After you’ve made that distinction you are able to observe your feelings (which still feel very real) without being at the effect of them, without being run by them.

When I use this method when I am having an upset, I imagine myself outside my body, looking at Morty, and saying to him: “Morty, you are really upset. I wonder what you believe that is causing this upset.” The mere act of talking to myself in this way enables me to distinguish between who I really am and the “Morty” who is having the feelings. And doing that significantly minimizes the impact of the feelings.

Whatever technique you use, once you have de-conditioned eating so it is no longer an automatic, unconscious response to your triggers, see if you can allow yourself to experience your feelings. They might not feel good. But you will survive them, I promise. And facing them is the first step to getting rid of them permanently.

For more details, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good, at http://emotionaleatingreport.com. You also can get answers to specific questions at my office, 415-884-0552.

It’s About Escape, Not Food

If you truly want to understand the nature of emotional eating, you should study Geneen Roth’s best-selling book, Women, Food and God. It is beautifully written and filled with really useful information.

“I tell them [people in my retreats]that if compulsive eating is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don’t want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be. I tell them that ending the obsession with food is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment. To not leave themselves. I tell them that they don’t have to make a choice between losing weight and doing this. Weight loss is the easy part; anytime you truly listen to your hunger and fullness, you lost weight. But I also tell them that compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can’t stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting—of leaving ourselves—hundreds of times a day.”

Apart from the lovely way that Geneen says this, she is extremely perceptive when she says that compulsive/emotional eating is the refusal to face reality, the refusal to face anything uncomfortable or difficult. So emotional eating is a way to escape reality.

Again Geneen describes the real issue so well:

“Her [the compulsive eater] problem is not about the food she consumes. Her problem, though it eventually would become excess weight, is not weight. It’s that she doesn’t know—no one ever taught her—how to “face” (as she calls it) her “deficiency.” The emptiness. The dissatisfaction.”

I’ve found over 20 distinct triggers that cause emotional eating. But what they all have in common is something uncomfortable that we don’t want to face. Emotional eaters chose eating as a way to numb themselves to that discomfort. But as Geneen clearly points out, the real issue is not the eating, it’s our unwillingness to live in the moment and face the uncomfortable.

Solving this problem is three-fold:

First, you need to de-condition eating, so it isn’t what you automatically use to go unconscious, in order to numb yourself to the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings you don’t want to face. Once you’ve done that, you will no longer eat automatically whenever you have uncomfortable feelings you want to escape.

Second, you need to eliminate the beliefs and conditionings that cause the thoughts and feelings that are so scary to you.

Third, you need to discover that you have thoughts and feelings, but they are not who you are. (The “Who Am I Really?” Process will help you with this.) That realization will make it easier to allow yourself to experience and just “be with” your negative thoughts and feelings, without needing to do anything to escape them.

For more details, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good, at http://emotionaleatingreport.com. You also can get answers to specific questions at my office, 415-884-0552.

Weight Problems Are NOT Inherited

According to a recent article in The News & Observer (Raleigh-Durham, NC) that was reprinted by the Life Extension Institute, research is now showing that much emotional eating is due to our genes.

“Rich foods work much like heroin on the brain, making it hard to stop eating them. A recent study indicates a genetic link between overeating and drug addiction, explaining why obese people have such intense cravings and build up such tolerance. …

“A team of scientists that included UNC-Chapel Hill researchers reported in 2009 that they had found a gene, NRXN3, associated with obesity in some people. The same gene previously was identified as playing a role in substance abuse.

“Keri Monda, an epidemiologist at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and one of the study’s authors, said the finding draws a strong inherited link between overeating and drug addiction, problems characterized by difficulties limiting enjoyable experiences.

“‘We do know there are common underpinnings,’ Monda said, adding that additional studies are needed to make a definitive association.”

The problem with “evidence” showing that psychological problems really are biological/physiological problems is that the psychological problems go away when the psychological aspects are resolved.

Depression is not a brain problem

Several years ago Time reported a study that used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect distinct changes in the brains of chronically depressed people compared to the brains of non-depressed people. This was interpreted to mean that the cause of the depression was the changes in the brain. The article went on to report that after a few months of cognitive-behavioral therapy, the patients reported their depression was gone. At which time the MRI showed a “normal” brain.

In other words, the different brain state was not a cause of the depression, it was the result of the depression.

Genes do not cause overeating

Similarly, there might be genes that predispose one to eat sweets or to continue to eat when one is not hungry, but my personal evidence that genes are not the cause of emotional eating and being overweight is that when people eliminate all the conditionings and beliefs that appear to be the source of the eating problem, overeating stops. Without any changes in the genes.

Dr. Bruce Lipton is a former medical school professor and research scientist. His experiments, and that of other leading edge scientists, have examined in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. The implications of this research radically change our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. (See his book, The Biology of Belief.)

In other words, our genes and DNA only contribute a “potential” that must be activated by our interactions with reality and by our beliefs. If the outside environment (the source of our belief and conditionings) does not activate a gene, it has no impact on us at all.

As many biologists have said, “Genes load the gun, but environment pulls the trigger.”

That being the case, don’t worry about whether or not you have the wrong genes or brain structure. If you have an emotional eating problem, get rid of the conditionings and beliefs that really cause it and the overeating will stop— regardless of your genes and brain structure.

For more details, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good, at http://emotionaleatingreport.com. You also can get answers to specific questions at my office, 415-884-0552.