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- Herausgeber: Hammersmith Health Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Did another 'New Year's resolution' to lose weight fail? Maybe overeating and staying overweight are unconscious 'survival decisions' for you or someone you care about? If they are, no matter how many tried-and-tested diets you follow, you will not succeed. Therapists Sally Baker and Liz Hogon offer this practical guide to understanding the emotional reasons for overeating and how to overcome these, based on their training and experience in emotional freedom technique (EFT), hypnotherapy, PSTEC and other related therapies. Throughout they illustrate their approach with client case histories and help readers to put theory into practice with step-by-step exercises, worksheets to complete and related free downloads from their website.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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‘We have been very early adopters of talking therapies [– including EFT, PSTEC and hypnotherapy –] and anecdotally believe these to be the most important of all our interventions for keeping weight off…. This book gives a detailed insight into these techniques and how successful they can be.’
Dr Matthew S Capehorn, Clinical Director, National Obesity Forum and Clinical Manager, Rotherham Institute for Obesity
‘I believe the work Sally and Liz are doing is the missing link between knowing what we should be eating and actually doing so.’
Barry Groves, Researcher and author of Natural Health and Weight Loss and Trick and Treat
What our clients say:
‘No-one is more surprised than me. I get on the scales every week and every week I’ve lost a few more pounds. I kept waiting for it to stop working – nothing works for me – but this does, and the weight is still coming off me!’
‘I had decided to go for sessions in order to lose weight. However, I got more than that. I lost weight in the weeks I was attending the sessions, and I am still losing now. I am on holiday right now and went off the plan. After two days my mind and body easily switched back. I have been programmed not to fail!’
‘I don’t even notice the biscuits and cakes at work now. It’s not like I feel I‘m denying myself. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but I don’t even notice them anymore. It feels easy; I’m just not interested in eating that kind of stuff anymore.’
‘I have a meal and I’m enjoying eating it as usual. After a while I look at the food and think to myself – you know what, I don’t want any more. It feels like I’m really smiling inside because it just feels natural, and easy to leave it – nothing at all to do with will-power.’
‘Working with PSTEC and EFT has changed my life! I’ve lost 7 kilos in eight weeks, am happier than I have been in a long time, and I am taking control of my life at last. I would recommend working this way without hesitation – it has worked for me on so many levels!’
‘I feel finally able to clear away the physical and “emotional” fat to allow my true self to shine out there in the world. You have supported me to learn how to do this for myself, on my own. I can really do this!!!’
‘I always knew that the reasons for my difficulty in losing weight were hidden deep inside of me. I needed to find the way in there to deal with it. This has helped release old stuff with very little pain.’
‘I have made significant and positive changes to my life and there is now potential for who knows what? I do know though that I am working on it, and I feel so much more hopeful about my future.’
‘Food no longer feels like an ugly demon. Instead it’s something I can manage and enjoy. And, you’ve given me my confidence back!’
‘I am a chocoholic who has not had chocolate for two months and I don’t miss it!’
For more go to page 189.
Seven Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating
targeting your body by changing your mind
Sally Baker & Liz Hogon
Foreword byDr Matthew S Capehorn
This book is dedicated to my husband, the painter Arnold Dobbs, and to my wonderful son Eliot Breen, who together have given me their unwavering support every step of the way. I love you both with all my heart.Sally Baker
I would like to dedicate this book to my three children, who have all been amazing inspirations in my life.Liz Hogon
Contents
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Tim Phizackerley, the creator of Percussive Suggestion Technique (PSTEC), for his tireless encouragement and support for our work. We feel privileged to know both him and his wife Karen, and count them as friends; We feel very fortunate to continue our professional relationship with the Hawaiian-based Jeff Harding, also a fellow PSTEC Master Practitioner, and our favoured go-to for our web-based presence. Annie Rickard Straus’ illustrative skill and unique style has added another positive dimension to our book. She has been a joy to work with. We would also like to express our gratitude for this opportunity to our Commissioning Editor at Hammersmith Health Books, Georgina Bentliff, for seeing the potential for Seven Simple Steps’s in-depth approach in our earlier, embryonic e-book. Finally thanks are due to the late Barry Groves PhD, a pioneering health crusader, who also at an early stage saw the value of our therapeutic approach to resolve and release issues around emotional eating for successful weight loss.
In conclusion, we would like to thank our clients who have taught us so much. We are especially grateful to those who volunteered to be case studies for this book as well as the hundreds of others we have worked successfully with over the years. We are often humbled by the courage and determination we bear witness to in overcoming some of life’s less than positive circumstances and experiences, plus the humour and grace expressed in the face of great adversity. May they all continue to thrive.
Foreword
We are currently facing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes that could bankrupt the NHS and affect the quality of life of millions of people. Over recent years there has been increasing focus on the psychological barriers to successful and sustainable weight loss, with an appreciation of the need to address the underlying causes for why we overeat and become overweight or obese.
Behaviour change has been shown to be an important part of the multi-disciplinary approach to weight loss, and is likely to be the vital factor in maintaining any weight loss. Comfort eating, habit eating and other self-sabotaging behaviours can result in unsuccessful weight-loss interventions or may be factors in why we regain any weight lost, which may in turn lead to a sense of failure and decreased motivation. It makes sense that whether we lose weight through diet and exercise, or weight-loss medications, or very low-calorie diets, or even bariatric surgery, if we do not address the underlying reasons why we became overweight in the first place we are at increased risk of putting that weight back on.
The term ‘talking therapy’ has become common-place to describe interventions that aim to help identify the emotional issues that underlie problems such as over- or under-eating, and teach individuals the techniques to manage them. The term is wide ranging and can be used to include holistic approaches more associated with life-coaching, for the identification of barriers and appropriate goal-setting, together with motivational interviewing. However, it also includes techniques to help facilitate the behaviour changes required. This can include established techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), but also neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), emotional freedom technique (EFT), percussive suggestion technique (PSTEC) and hypnotherapy, which all work in different ways, allowing therapies to be tailored to the individual. At the Rotherham Institute for Obesity we were very early adopters of talking therapies, and anecdotally believe these to be the most important of all our interventions for keeping weight off. Practitioners working within the field of weight management need to embrace talking therapies, consider their use for appropriate individuals, and help to add to the evidence base to allow us to know which interventions are most effective for tackling obesity. This book gives a detailed insight into some of these techniques, and how successful they can be.
Dr Matthew S Capehorn Clinical Director, National Obesity Forum (NOF) Clinical Manager, Rotherham Institute for Obesity (RIO)
About the authors
We met by chance in North London more than 15 years ago and instantly became good friends as well as growing to become enduring professional colleagues.
Although when we met we were already busy building up our own general therapy practices, we decided to work together as co-facilitators delivering a series of weekly group-therapy weight-loss workshops in London. Working in this way allowed us the chance to originate, design and create a therapeutic course of our own, based on our shared interest.
Central to our work, now as then, is the discovery and releasing of the underlying reasons for emotional eating and emotional obesity, which we continue to believe are the key to successful long-term weight loss.
We are qualified to work in this field for several reasons. First, of course, there are our many years of therapeutic training (see below), and our professional qualifications, often to trainer, or advanced level, in several modalities, including hypnotherapy, emotional freedom technique (EFT) and, in more recent years, Master Practitioner level in percussive suggestion technique (PSTEC).
We are also empathetically qualified for this work as we have both watched with dismay our own waistlines expand in our late 40s and 50s. We have both been married and divorced, and one of us (Sally) has happily married again in recent years. We have both raised children, now grown up, of whom we are very proud, and spent years keeping our homes together, mostly on our own, while often doing two jobs. We too have faced the prospect of feeling invisible in a youth-obsessed world. We have felt hot and cold in quick succession, and come out the other side, feeling able, finally and fully, to step into our own power, and it feels wonderful!
We are the sum of everything that has ever happened to us and everything we have ever done – the positive and the negative. It informs and enriches who we are, and our work. We too are works in progress.
Over the years we have continued to learn, and refine, the therapy tools we use by working one-to-one with clients to allow them to end emotional eating and achieve their weight-loss goals.
This book is a distillation of how we work with clients in our own private practices. Thank goodness for modern technology as we are now living on different sides of the globe.
We hope, and trust, that by following our Seven Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating you will be able to learn, and use for yourself, the therapy tools we have found to be most effective, so that you too can free yourself, gently and non-judgementally, from your entanglements with food to lose excess weight, and step into your power too.
All we ask is that you treat yourself always with kindness and forgiveness while you do the work. If you question and doubt your own past behaviour – if you focus on times when you wish you had behaved differently – know that you were only ever doing the best you could at that time.
Breathe, and let go.
Sally and Liz
Sally Baker
Sally Baker is a full-time therapist and writer who has been working for over a decade in private practice in London. She sees clients, both face-to-face and the world over via Skype, for a wide range of presenting issues. Her professional specialism and passion is the development and application of effective therapeutic approaches to help clients resolve and release the reasons for emotional eating so that they can achieve and maintain successful weight loss. As well as being a hypnotherapist, she is a Master Practitioner of PSTEC (percussive suggestion technique), and she is an Advanced Practitioner of EFT (emotional freedom technique).
Born in Birmingham in 1956, Sally came to London for a weekend when she was 21, and has stayed ever since. Her first job was as a trainee journalist based in Soho, writing about television and film. After 10 years of magazine publishing and editing, she made the move from theory to practice, working in visual effects production for top-end commercials, music videos and feature films.
Sally married for the first time in 1984. The marriage ended in divorce seven years later, leaving her a single parent to their five-year-old son. She continued to work in the media while juggling the demands of raising her son with those of doing a full-time job. In 2000 she met her second husband, the painter Arnold Dobbs, who welcomed both Sally and her son into his life. Two years later he offered her an invaluable opportunity when he suggested she take a break from working to discover what she would really like to do with her life.
She turned her attention to formal study and graduated with an Advanced Certificate in Post-Compulsory Education from Canterbury University. She went on to be employed as a tutor teaching young adults with severe learning difficulties at an inner-city college for over five years.
Sally has a long-term interest in the mind-body connection and its vital role in wellbeing and mental health. Around this time she qualified in holistic (Swedish) massage and was drawn to working with women survivors of sexual and physical abuse. She soon came to realise she needed more resources to enable her to hold a safe space for their emotional distress. Liz Hogon, her friend, co-writer and fellow therapist, whom she had met in the same week as she had met her second husband, introduced her to EFT. It proved to be an effective therapeutic approach to enable her clients to release their traumatic experiences and to feel more accepting of themselves.
The therapy element of her work became her main focus. Reducing her teaching hours, she undertook more advanced therapeutic training and research until this work became her sole occupation.
The experience of working in her own private practice, and the close collaboration she enjoys with Liz, have formed the basis and inspiration for The Seven Simple Steps to Stop Emotional Eating.
Liz Hogon
A qualified, full-time therapist since 2001, Liz Hogon has helped thousands of people overcome issues surrounding emotional eating, smoking, phobias and chronic anxiety. She became interested in alternative therapies when she failed to recover from a severe bout of Ross River fever in her native Australia. This debilitating mosquito-borne virus attacks the immune system and left her exhausted, with no medical resolution. Of all the therapeutic approaches she explored, it was emotional freedom technique (EFT) that proved to be the most effective in increasing her energy levels and reducing her neurological symptoms.
As a therapist, Liz became frustrated for clients who were battling emotional eating and arrived with arm-long lists of interventions they had unsuccessfully tried: expensive diet programmes, traditional therapies and even surgical procedures. She also realised that hypnotherapy was often a short-term fix, and that suggestions could wear off, leaving people to revert without having resolved the psychological issues that caused the emotional eating in the first place.
Liz sought lasting solutions to these problems and was the first to use PSTEC for emotional eating. It had previously only been used for negative feelings, with which it had enjoyed enormous success. Liz, along with Sally, has developed the specialist approach recommended in this book, which successfully addresses at a very deep level the psychological factors that create emotional eating, and uses these tools daily in her successful clinic in Melbourne, Australia.
Prior to her return to Australia, Liz worked full-time in her busy private practice in London. She initially trained there in hypnotherapy before becoming an advanced therapist and trainer in EFT. More recently, she was invited to become a Master Practitioner of PSTEC (percussive suggestion technique).
Liz’s children are all grown now and she moved back to Australia in 2010 to allow herself time with her growing brood of grandchildren. She settled in Melbourne where she has established a cutting-edge therapeutic practice. Liz is committed to Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and has also qualified in several other modalities.
NOTE: In writing this book, we have changed the names of our personal clients and not revealed their geographical locations in order to maintain their anonymity. It should be noted, however, that each of us has our own private practice and we do not see clients together as a team.
Introduction
What is ‘emotional eating’?
Too much on your plate?
Swallowing down your anger with food?
Frustrated at your yo-yo dieting?
Eating when bored, or on your own?
Feeling out of control around food?
Eating in secret?
Bingeing and purging?
Feeling sad and eating to fill a void inside?
Rewarding yourself with food after a hard day?
Let’s first be clear, and define emotional eating as a behaviour that occurs only in the developed world, the lands of perceived plenty. Negative self-judgements; obsessive over-thinking about calories; skipping meals; bingeing and purging; or any of the other many aspects of emotional eating do not exist in countries of food scarcity or where people struggle for survival. It’s noteworthy that as third world countries emerge economically onto the world stage they open their doors to western influences and their seductive power. The socially mobile classes of any indigenous population quickly develop a taste for western fashion, and music, as well as western foods. The Standard American Diet of refined carbohydrates, calorie-dense fast-foods and fizzy drinks is now exported all over the world. Adopting it is a way of aping western consumption, and values, and can be found in the cities of China, Russia and India, as well, increasingly, as in more remote outposts. It also causes sectors of the population of these countries to judge themselves negatively against the narrow, westernised standard of perfection. With that comes self-dissatisfaction – a step on the road to emotional eating that was not apparent just a few decades ago.
The pressure to be perfect
Over-thinking about food and negative self-judgements, both of which are key indicators of emotional eating, require a level of compliance to socially accepted norms. In the West the definition of an acceptable body-type for women, and increasingly for men, is force-fed to us through the media, and imposes an impossible ideal. Unattainable standards of physical perfection are loudly proclaimed on all media platforms by ‘body fascists’ who deride anyone, especially the famous, who fails to comply with their narrow definition of perfection. The constant dog-whistle of not being good enough – read ‘slim enough’, read ‘perfect enough’ – forms part of the almost subliminal white-noise of self-admonition heard constantly by many men and women, reminding them of their own failings and inadequacy. No one is exempt from some degree of negative self-judgement about their body as the bar of perfection is out of any normal human being’s reach. This not-being-good-enough influences everyone to varying degrees, and, as well as colouring how most people judge themselves, it also inevitably affects how they relate to food.
It is impossible not to have made some emotional connection with food as we grow from a dependent, vulnerable baby through to the beginnings of self-definition in adolescence, and into the autonomy of adulthood. Food is an enjoyable, vital source of sustenance for every human. It is impossible to grow and thrive without proper nourishment. Food and eating become complicated for many people when they become something other than an aspect of being alive and well. Social, cultural and psychological constructs influence everyone, and not all these influences encourage a healthy relationship between oneself and food. The effects on each individual are unique.
The degree to which negative versus positive emotions are triggered around food and eating is a key factor in whether a person develops emotional eating issues. Another factor is the extent to which a developing person is allowed to express their emotions within their family. Families that do not permit their offspring to express uncomfortable emotions – such as anger or sadness – often demonstrate in non-verbal ways that those emotions are unwanted, perhaps even shameful. Children learn ways to compensate for not being heard, and may turn to food as a coping mechanism to swallow down, or cover over, their true emotions. Other scenarios where food is used as a tool of control, or reward, can sow the seeds for an emotional response to food in future life. So too can memories of growing up in a chaotic household where the provision of food was erratic or inadequate.
A recent scientific paper presented by clinical psychologist Johnathan Egan, at the 2014 annual conference of the Psychological Society of Ireland, discussed how research showed parental behaviour can have a lifelong effect on a child’s relationship with food. The research looked at a group of 550 individuals, most of whom were women. It highlighted that the daughters of strict parents who put their own needs first ahead of those of their children had a higher incidence of emotional or comfort eating, and were typically most likely to gain excess weight in the long term. The daughters of easy-going, liberal parents fared somewhat better. The most favourable outcome for the women – having the lowest levels of emotional eating and correspondingly lower body mass index (BMI) – was found in those with a strict but responsive mother and an easy-going father.
In the work that we, the authors, have undertaken we have become aware of a link between emotional eating and the mother of the household being emotionally absent in some cases. It is worth noting that emotional absence is completely different from physical absence. A working mother who leaves her children each day so as to work away from the home is not necessarily increasing her children’s chances of emotional or comfort eating. If the working mother has an adequate emotional connection with her children when she is at home, her offspring can expect to have similarly positive outcomes to if she had been a stay-at-home mum.
Young children learn in non-verbal ways if their mother is withdrawn through depression or mental illness; or is emotionally immature herself and egotistically puts her own needs above theirs; or if her behaviour is chaotic and her emotional absence is due to drug addiction or alcohol abuse; or if she lives under the constant threat of sexual or violent behaviour. These, and similar situations of maternal emotional absence, can block children’s natural search for care as they observe their world to be fragile and unsafe. They learn not to express their emotions, to withdraw, and to use food as a way to sooth themselves, literally swallowing down their emotions.
Non-emotional eaters
There are people out there in the wide world who generally eat what they like and, remarkable as it may sound, are not racked with self-loathing or guilt. Feeling relaxed about food means these very same people pay little mind to what they ate at their last meal; nor for that matter do they agonise over what they will eat at the next one. These people have developed few negative triggers around food and view eating as just one of life’s many and varied pleasures. They feel little or no concern when considering the prospect of being invited to a celebratory party with a lavish gourmet buffet; they even relish the prospect of a fancy restaurant meal with friends; they don’t even baulk at the idea of eating together with their extended family. Their calm take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards food magically keeps their minds liberated to muse on things other than food in their lives, such as their hopes and aspirations, their career, their interests and their loved ones.
It will come as no surprise that these men and women are not our client group. The clients who seek out our therapeutic approach to stopping emotional eating make almost constant negative judgements about themselves in the context of their eating and what their bodies look like. These negative judgements, and the effect of these on their self-esteem, morale, and ability to accept themselves, are what set them apart from non-emotional eaters.
Emotional eaters
There is no single definition of a typical emotional eater. It’s a common misconception that all emotional eaters are overweight. Many are within normal weight range but only because of their obsessive dieting, bingeing and disordered eating that will be a well-kept secret they share with no one. The same negative judgements emotional eaters make about themselves are common to the overweight and the obese, and the dangerously underweight for that matter. All share the trait of unrelenting over-thinking about food coupled with harsh, critical self-judgements.
To give you a sense of a typical emotional eater you need to understand that their innate sense of self-worth – how they actually see themselves as a worthy person – is closely linked to the numbers on their bathroom scales. A pound lost, or a pound gained, can set the tenor of their entire day. Also, foods are never neutral. They are forensically studied and determined to be good or bad.
Emotional eaters battle with their own body’s hunger and cravings. They know there have been times when they have succumbed and eaten one ‘bad’ food only for it to start a tsunami of overeating, or even bingeing and purging, with all the accompanying feelings of shame and self-loathing. An emotional eater’s attitude towards him/herself and food is not logical. The extent of his/her preoccupation with food and body weight is often a private source of great personal distress and shame. The reasons for this all-consuming link between food, body weight, self-definition, and how the individual feels about being him/herself in the world, are varied and inevitably complex.
Defined by their weight
Non-emotional eaters also come in all physical shapes and sizes. Some may decide they are heavier than they would like to be. This realisation may come to them gradually over an extended period or more suddenly, as they think about wanting to look their best for a wedding or graduation, or a special birthday or some other milestone life-event. Around this point they now have two main choices – to lose their excess weight or to accept themselves as they are.
For non-emotional eaters who decide to lose some weight, this would mean making appropriate changes and adjustments to their food choices and portion sizes, and maybe even incorporating regular exercise in their routine, until they have reached their goal weight. Unlike emotional eaters, non-emotional eaters do not define themselves completely by how much they weigh or what they look like. Therefore, for them losing weight is no more of a challenge than any other aspect of their lives, such as learning conversational French or taking up water-colours as a hobby. They often successfully lose weight, and even if they do eventually pile on some extra pounds they have the option of just applying their tried-and-trusted methods until they are at their goal weight again.
For non-emotional eaters who decide to stay as they are, being over-weight is not an important issue. Having had the wake-up call that their ‘love handles’ have become grab rails, they may realise that their weight doesn’t really bother them enough to do much about it. It makes it easier to accept their expanding waist lines and bigger clothes sizes when most people they know are, similarly, expanding versions of their former selves. They may consider it hard to feel their weight gain is all that important when the trend of increasing pounds is a familiar trait with their partner, members of their family and friends. They simply get used to buying a size or two larger in their clothes, let out their belts another notch and ultimately pay it little mind.
