How to deal with a compulsion to eat

It's time to go into more detail about ways to deal with a compulsion to eat. I listed the techniques in this earlier post.

By the way, if you have a compulsion to eat, you might want to check out Overeaters Anonymous. OA is a group based on Alcoholics Anonymous principles; they have local chapters that hold meetings you can attend. I've never had any personal contact with members, so I can't give an opinion on it. Nevertheless, working on a compulsion problem with others can certainly be helpful.

One technique that worked for me, quoted from that earlier post, is: "Removing yourself from temptation, that is, food: An example is staying out of the kitchen."

Removing yourself from temptation means staying away from food. Here's my story:

When my kids were about 9 and 11, I started to realize that sitting down to dinner with them was a disaster for me. I always overate. If they left over anything on their plates, I scarfed that down in front of the sink.

I loved having dinner together. I have great memories of dinner time with my parents. We discussed the issues of the day and talked about science, history, politics, and more. I remember many times getting up to get the dictionary or encyclopedia during dinner to resolve some question.

But it wasn't working for me. I couldn't control myself. I had to break my attachment to having dinner together as a family. As soon as I did that, I was able to lose weight. I sat my kids down (my husband came home later) and gave them food, but I didn't sit with them. I put some vegetables in a bowl (plenty of food for me in the evening!) and ate them separately. Then I did other things.

Although I now cook two meals a day, I still don't sit and eat with the family at dinner time (I do for lunch), except on Friday nights. While the dinner is cooking, I take my own meal, which is different, and eat it. When dinner is ready, I get out of the kitchen and let others eat in the dining room. I go back to work in my office or do other chores. My husband, bless him, is repsonsible for cleaning up the dishes after dinner.

Whenever I come into the living room after dinner, where my husband is often parked in front of the TV, eating pretzels, I eat, so I try to avoid that, too.

All in all, this has been a very effective technique for me, a life-saver, in fact.

Reason 2 for being overweight

In recent posts, I've explained that there are 3 reasons for being overweight, and discussed reason 1. Today, I'll talk about reason 2, a compulsion to overeat.

A compulsion to overeat is more than a bad habit. It's a stress, lodged somewhere in your body, that makes you feel uncomfortable if you don't take that cookie and put it in your mouth.

Many people have a compulsion to overeat, although I'm not sure why. Well, I think I have an idea, but it's probably different for different people. In general, when people experience some anxiety, they find that eating makes them feel better. Over time, whenever that stress comes up, they continue to eat. Eventually, the sight of food triggers the need to eat and people lose control.

Most diet books and even dieticians ignore the compulsion to overeat. "Just eat a little bit less at each meal." " Take smaller portions." Yeah, right.

However, there are a number of tools for dealing with compulsion:

• Rules: "I am not allowed to eat sugar."
• Motivational techniques: One is fear. The kind that happens when your doctor tells you that if you don't lose weight, you'll be dead in a few years of a heart attach or stroke. But you can also be motivated by the desire to look good, be sexy, and so on.
• Removing yourself from temptation, that is, food: An example is staying out of the kitchen.
• Removing the temptation: An example is not buying fattening foods, so they're not in your house.
• Desensitization: This is similar to the techniques used for people who have phobias.
• Stress reduction: Here I can only recommend what I know, which is the Transcendental Meditation technique. There's lots of research on it.
• Finding the stress point: If you can find where the stress is, you can put your attention on it and start to heal it.

So, all is not hopeless, if a compulsion is one of the reasons you overeat.