The numbers of women who are dissatisfied with their bodies have steadily increased over the years.
US research shows that:
> About half of its adult female population are on a diet (even though many are not overweight) at any one time. It is believed that in urban South Africa the figures are very similar.
> Approximately 30% of all women involved in weight-loss programmes are binge-eaters.
> Around 95% of dieters are not able to maintain their lower weight for any length of time. This figure is almost universal in the Western world.
In South Africa, more and more women are dieting yet obesity (sometimes associated with eating disorders) is skyrocketing.
We overeat for many reasons. Only when you understand your unique reasons, can you change your relationship with food. This implies that there may be more to lose than weight. You may need to lose some emotional baggage from either your recent or childhood history, or you may have to lose the habit of using food to cope with feelings of loneliness, anger, fear, anxiety or depression. A preoccupation with food may be providing a place of safety where you can dump feelings of frustration, disappointment, rage and sorrow. As one participant in my Mind over Fatter workshops put it: I get angry with my husband and think, Stuff you! And then I sneak off to my secret stash, and I stuff me. It was far easier (and safer) for her to stuff her anger down with food than to deal with her anger.
In addition, food is a good excuse. He doesn’t love me because I’m fat is less painful than the fear that he doesn’t love you because you’re not lovable. When your most intimate relationship is with food, it becomes your lover, your comforter and your best friend. Letting it go is tantamount to splitting from someone you love and need. Its no wonder diets are often so unsuccessful.
DO YOU RECOGNISE YOURSELFY
The following accounts from Mind over Fatter workshops of compulsive eating are not uncommon.
> Stay-at-home-mom Lorien*, to quote her friends, has it all. Two beautiful children and a successful husband. She should be content, but she lives with a nagging emptiness; a sense of longing yet for exactly what, she cannot say. She loves her 4×4, but not for the reasons her friends may think. It screens her in, and others out. Her car is her private binge-bar where no-one makes demands, disturbs or criticises her. In those moments between lift-clubbing, grocery shopping and laundry, she binges and, while that lasts, is oblivious to her uneasy longing.
> Phindile* places all her forbidden foods at the bottom of her shopping trolley and covers them with cereal, fruits and vegetables. Furtively, she watches other shoppers, feeling better when she spots someone she thinks shares her shame, but simultaneously feeling panicky in case they recognise hers. Waiting at the check-out, she mentally assigns women into thinner-than-me and fatter-than-me categories, vigilantly scanning their trolleys, irritated when thinner-than-me’s have illegals boldly displayed in their baskets. Alone at home, she chomps through crackers, crisps and buns while she unpacks: legals are headed for the grocery cupboard; and the illegals get stashed in her sewing cupboard where only she ever goes.
> Eleanor* waits until the family is asleep, and then tip-toes downstairs. By the light of the fridge, and on autopilot, she makes a cake batter with sugar and butter, flour and milk, eggs and vanilla, and raisins. In the dark, her spoon conducts a two-beat mantra, soothing her hungry heart, her loneliness within her marriage and her guilt at her ongoing affair. She slides back into bed hoping for a night devoid of dreams of shame.
> Zaida* seldom shops at the same store, convinced they might twig. When in company, she picks at food. Alone, she shovels it in fast, and shoots it out just as fast, fearful that someone will notice the noise or stench. At least this way no-one will know, she tells herself. But she has sores around her mouth and she is looking for a new dentist the last one intimated that he is suspicious. She lives with helplessness, powerlessness and feeling out of control. She has lost count of the times she has promised herself never again, only to find herself surrounded by empty wrappings, her belly bursting.
THE CONTRADICTION
When you feel you have to hide what you eat, you’re trying to conceal a part of yourself that you find unacceptable. Alternatively, it can be a way of denying that your needs are valid and worthy of fulfilment. On a conscious level, food, eating, and a large body may be thought of as enemies; while subconsciously they may be friends who help you cope.
In Weight, Sex and Marriage, (Simon & Schuster), researcher-writers Richard Stuart and Barbara Jacobson reveal that over 9000 women in their study related how eating had become their way of expressing unconscious struggles. It follows then, that one of the many reasons they might struggle to maintain weight-loss is that they’re often unaware of the ways in which their minds might perceive that their size may be protecting them from fates worse than fat. For instance, someone who has been sexually abused may choose to inhabit a large body, thinking that in this way they can avoid uncomfortable sexual advances.
As with any secret love, when you wrap your life around an affair with food, you have to sneak around, fearful of being caught. You have to hide it and any evidence of it, you have to sometimes lie to those close to you. Being seen in the open with it is potentially dangerous, potentially shameful and holds the fear of discovery. You lead a double life that traps and ensnares you.
On the outside Lorien, Phindile, Eleanor and Zaida might appear to be cool, competent and in control; on the inside, they share feelings of their lives being overtaken by chaos, guilt and powerlessness; and feel that, like their eating, they have to hide this part of themselves. While they may have this in common, each of them has very different reasons for their eating behaviour. Until these individual reasons are understood and dealt with, no eating plan is going to help them in the long run. Unresolved issues will send them back into the arms of food.
* Names have been changed.
ARE YOU HANGING ON TO FAT?
Whether you’re a secretive eater or not, the following questions might highlight whether weight-loss is really something you want. Think deeply before answering, for it is only when we dig through our immediate pain at being fat in a thin world that we can consider some of the possible rewards. It is often these hidden issues that drive us to undermine our own weight-loss efforts.
1. What emotional or sexual strain/frustration does food relieve?
2. If you didn’t worry about fat, what would be the thing you would have issues with?
3. As your body gets bigger, what gets smaller in your life? And as your body gets smaller, what gets bigger that may not be welcome?
4. What sadness in your life exists because you’re overweight? Not being deserving of pleasures or happiness, not being loved, and staying in an unhappy or empty relationship?
5. What behaviour do you tolerate from others that you might not put up with if you were slender His/her substance abuse, neglect, absence, infidelity, abuse (verbal, physical, emotional or sexual) or disinterest (sexually or otherwise)?
6. What does your overeating numb or tranquillise? Unhappiness, negative feelings or intolerable thoughts?Depression or fatigue? Feeling unloved, rejected or abandoned? Sadness or pain? Ignored needs? Anger or anxiety? Boredom or mundaneness? Loneliness or emptiness? Helplessness or powerlessness? Worthlessness or lack of self-esteem? Fear: of failure, of success, or not being able to meet expectations?
7. What are some of the pitfalls of being thin? Unwanted attention; fears of becoming promiscuous or finding your own sexual desires might be bottomless; being tempted to be unfaithful to a partner? Would it mean that you had to be more sexual than you want to be? Would you be judged as too attractive to be competent? Would you become a threat to same-sex friends?Would you become more assertive and more demanding, and in so doing change comfortable power balances in your relationships? Not being able to live up to the expectations of others? No longer having an excuse not to risk or participate in things? Your relationship failing anyway? Having to feel unwanted feelings? Not being found worthwhile as a person? Becoming completely invisible to others around you?
8. Why might your partner want to encourage you to be (or stay) fat? Would it perhaps make him/her worry that he/she might lose you? Might he/she have to give up some of their habits now that you have given up yours? Would you expect more from your partner? Might they feel jealous of you? Would you want to move out of the background into the spotlight more which may make others in your life feel uncomfortable?
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