Geneen Roth – Lefkoe Eating Report

Emotional Eating Can Manifest in Different Ways

The single best book I’ve read for understanding all aspects of emotional eating is Geneen Roth’s best-seller, Women, Food and God.

Here are two approaches to emotional eating as she describes them:

… there are two kinds of compulsive eaters: Restrictors and Permitters.

Restrictors believe in control. Of themselves, their food intake, their environment. And whenever possible, they’d also like to control the entire world. Restrictors operate on the conviction that chaos is imminent and steps need to be taken now to minimize its impact.

For a Restrictor, deprivation is comforting because it provides a sense of control. If I limit my food intake, I limit my body size. If I limit my body size, I (believe I can) limit my suffering. If I limit my suffering, I can control my life. I make sure bad things don’t happen. That chaos stays away. …

Permitters find any kind of rules abhorrent. If they’ve ever lost weight on a diet, it was through wrenching, abject misery. They are suspicious of programs, guidelines, eating charts.

Permitters say, “I’ve gained fifty pounds in the last six months and I just can’t understand what happened.” Whereas a Restrictor operates with hypervigilence, with their antenna in constant motion like those of a sea anemone, Permitters prefer going though life in a daze. They way, they don’t need to feel pain—theirs or anyone else’s. If I’m not aware of it, there’s nothing to fix. If I go through life asleep, I don’t need to be concerned about the future because I won’t be aware of it. If I give up trying, I won’t be disappointed when I fail.

Like Restricters, Permitters operate on the need to be safe in what they consider hostile or dangerous situations. But unlike Restrictors, who try to manage the chaos, Permitters merge with it. They see no point in trying to control the uncontrollable and have decided it’s best to be blurry and numb and join the party. Have a good time. …

Restricting and permitting are subtypes of compulsive eating, which is the metadefense. A compulsion is a way to protect ourselves from feeling what we believe is unfeelable, what we are convinced is intolerable. It is a compulsion because we are compelled to engage in it. Because in the moment we are acting it out, we believe we have no choice. …

A few last words about labels. Everyone is both Permitter and Restrictor. A Restrictor turns into a Permitter the moment she binges. A Permitter becomes a Restrictor every time she decides she is going to follow a program, even if that resolution lasts two hours.

Both these types of emotional eaters feel compelled to eat and the compulsion is caused primarily by conditioning and to some extent by beliefs, as I explain in my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating for Good. http://emotionaleatingreport.com. For example, you will feel compelled to eat whenever you experience one of your specific triggers, such as loneliness, boredom, feeling unlovable, feeling anxiety, etc.

But it is possible for Restrictors and Permitters to de-condition their conditionings and eliminate their negative beliefs, reaching a peaceful state where their emotional eating is nothing more than a distant memory instead of a constant cycle of pain.

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.

I Am Someone With A Weight Problem

Many people with an emotional eating problem can’t even imagine themselves not obsessing about food and eating all the time. It has become a part of their identity.

As Geneen Roth put it in her book, Women, Food and God, as long as you have an eating problem, “you always have something to do. As long as you are striving and pushing and trying hard to do something that can never be done, you know who you are: someone with a weight problem who is working hard to be slim. You don’t have to feel lost or helpless because you have a goal and that goal can never be reached.”

I suspect that if you consciously identify yourself as someone with a weight problem long enough, you will ultimately create an unconscious sense of yourself as someone with a weight problem regardless of how much you actually weigh.

Check it out for yourself. Close your eyes and look inside and ask yourself: What is my sense of myself?

Some people will have positive sense: I’m someone who is okay with myself; I’m fine just the way I am. Others might have a negative sense: I’m someone who doesn’t feel good about myself. There’s something basically wrong with me. And others might have a sense of themselves as: I am someone with a weight problem. I will never be okay until I reach a weight where I really look good.

Eating when we are not hungry is an attempt to not experience the “bad” person we mistakenly think we are. These negative feelings about ourselves are more than we think we can handle. So in an attempt to go unconscious and not experience those feelings, we eat.

In fact we are not the terrible person many of us think we are. Those negative feelings are nothing more than the feelings that come from negative beliefs about yourself, beliefs that have never been really the truth. Beliefs like I’m not good enough. I’m not important. I’m not worthy or deserving. I’m not loveable.

These beliefs were formed as a result of the meaning we gave to childhood interactions with our parents. If the beliefs were eliminated, the negative sense of we have of ourselves would disappear.

We might experience ourselves in a negative way. Yet it is not who we really are. We have that sense as a result of beliefs and conditions. And we might experience ourselves as someone with an eating problem. That also is not who we really are.

For more information about overeating and weight, please see my eBook, The Secret to Ending Overeating For Good, at http://emotionaleatingreport.com

Unconsciousness Is What’s Important, Not The Food

Most people who overeat claim that they eat because “it just tastes good.” But food tastes good to everyone, not just people with an emotional eating problem. So that can’t really be the reason.

Geneen Roth, in her best-selling book, Women, Food and God, perceptively points out the real underlying issue in all cases of overeating.

“The bottom line, whether you weigh 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug, grappling with boredom or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejection. Food is only the middleman, the means to the end. Of altering your emotions. Or making yourself numb. Of creating a secondary problem when the original problem becomes too uncomfortable. Of dying slowly rather than coming to terms with your messy, magnificent and very, very short—even at a hundred years old—life. The means to these ends happens to be food, but it could be alcohol, it could be work, it could be sex, it could be cocaine. Surfing the Internet. Talking on the phone.

“For a variety of reasons we don’t fully understand (genetics, temperament, environment), those of us who are compulsive eaters choose food. Not because of its taste. Not because of its texture or its color. We want quantity, volume, bulk. We need it—a lot of it—to go unconscious. To wipe out what’s going on. The unconsciousness is what’s important, not the food.”