Inside Emotional & Compulsive Eating

No need to run & hide from disorder, no matter where it lives in your life. As you come to take care of it, just like magic, other things will fall into place".... Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht

As I write to you about your children, do know that I'm also writing about you, the parent. In order for children to gain control, it is absolutely imperative that you, the parent, not only understand the issues surrounding the problems, but take action to correct your own short-comings.

Of course, One doesn't have to look far to find an emotional or disorderly eater. All I have to do is to look in the mirror, but as I look at myself I'm not really seeing the emotional eating part of me because it is hidden. While we all live behind masks, emotional eaters are especially good at this. Even though I've met thousands of people with this problem, I'm still taken aback by someone who looks "so together" who comes to tell me their unique story.

Take yesterday for instance. A beautiful thiry-something woman, Denise, came to my office to work on "some issues." As we got to know each other, I learned that she is a very successful television producer with a long, impressive resume. I also came to learn her deepest secret, that of being a serious closet binge eater who vomits every night before taking her antidepressant & a sleeping pill, so "they will work faster & take me away from my desire to eat more & more."

Secrets such as these form a big part of the problem, as well as being able to help individuals such as Denise. I remember a publisher telling me that "no one wants to be seen with a book whose cover reveals their secret." And so, the title of your book or audio may or may not speak to the person who needs to benefit from it, but the material must. This is one good thing about mp3's. They are simply downloaded to one's own computer or ipod & no one else but the listener "needs to know." Three of my biggest sellers in mp3 are Managing Bulimia & Emotional or Compulsive Eating. Next on the list comes Skin Picking & Nail Biting, most likely for the same reason.

What about diet books? It's seems to be ok to buy one of those, but for emotional or compulsive eaters, what they need is not going to be found in those books. In fact, some of them tend to make the problem even worse because it is very difficult for the emotional eater to stay with a plan, when the underlying issues are not addressed at the same time. Also, many people with emotional eating are not over-weight & believe because they are not, then it's ok to continue down their unhealthy eating path. Unfortunately, they are very mistaken. Luckily the television producer decided to take the "risk" & to bring her issues out into the open where she could learn to take care of them.

FACETS OF THE SECRET

Emotional & compulsive eaters tend to be disorderly in their nutritional & stress management care. If you've been following my blog, you know about the desire for perfection, the rigid thinking, the excessive need for approval, low self-esteem, extremely high expectgations of self & the need to be in control. And while they may bring this to other parts of their life & may even present themselves as "being in super-control of their eating" while others are watching, there is one part of their eating life that is for their eyes only. This is where the emotional release takes place & it is private & personal.

For Julie, another one of my patients, it means getting into her car at the end of a normal stress-filled workday & stopping at her favorite binge supermarket, usually where she is confident that she won't meet up with anyone she knows. What could be worse than having a shopping basket filled with binge foods & meeting up with someone from the office or church? Once she is safely out of the market, Julie repacks the bags in the trunk of her car. On the way out to the car, she grabs a few additional plastic bags, so the stash can be divided into groups & hidden under the seats of the car. That way, her husband will not see them or question her about them. Her husband who is very health-conscious, believes Julie to be the same. According to Julie, he would be horrified & lose all respect for her.

Julie takes one bag of chips to the front of the car. These are designated for the ride home, whatever left going under the seat & out of sight. Julie's ritual includes ripping the bag open with her teeth. Her thoughts & her body sensations are already deep into the "fix". She takes a solitary chip in her mouth before starting the ignition & sucks the salt, enjoying the sensation as much as the taste. Then she shoves a small handful into her mouth, moving them around with her tongue....finally relaxing, the sensation of satisfaction & safety entering her body, as she carefully reviews her stash in her mind. Ahhhh.....feeling so good, but lingering in the back of her mind is the voice of judgment. "What is wrong with you? Why do you do this? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" Julie pushes the thoughts away, answering with another handful of chips.

Everything will be just fine now.....or will it? Julie knows better. Bingeing in the car presents all sorts of problems including crumbs on her clothing, on the floor of the car & grease on the steering wheel, but this binger is no amateur. She's walked this dangerous road before & was even caught once, or at least there were "suspicions" which of course, Julie flatly denied & then quickly dodges the trouble, by hurrying inside. As she tells it, "that was a close call." Julie pulls the car to the side of the road a few blocks before arriving home. The place is her favorite because it is quite safe. Few neighbors enter her subdivision from this entrance. Making sure she is unnoticed, she steps out, brushes off her clothes, checks the floor & the seat for evidence & then wipes the steering wheel with a packaged cloth she keeps in her purse for "such occasions." Mission accomplished.....so far.

After dinner, while her husband brushes his teeth, Julie moves the stash inside, artfully carrying it past her kids who are doing their homework. Some she places inside her blouse. Her heart pounds but her defiant part laughs as she heads for her carefully chosen hideouts. "It's all worth it....every bit of it."

Julie is a night binger. After everyone in the house is sleeping, including herself, part of Julie wakes her up. She carefully gets out of bed, looking back at her sleeping husband, measuring his breaths. No change.....good. She walks to her hiding places & makes her choices. Tonight it will be salt & crunch first & then sugar. Sitting in her favorite family room chair, she carefully opens each package, still keeping her ears on alert for any footsteps on the stairs, never letting her guard down. "Somehow it's part of the game & enjoy being with this devious part of myself. It's powerful, like some of the girls I knew in high school. No one knows this part of me & I've kept it a secret for as long as I can remember. I don't know if I can ever say good-bye to her."

The attention to detail is very important to the binger. Julie has stored a toothbrush & paste in the guest bathroom to use after her eating ritual. If the binge was big, she may use the toothbrush handle to induce vomiting, but this means be extra careful. No one can hear her & she cannot leave any signs of this; another thing to clean up. "I try not to vomit because of all the complications, but sometimes I know I'll never fall asleep unless I do. I'd truly like to get rid of this part, but then again, it does help me to relax deeply."

Not all binge or emotional eaters are women, nor do all have such complicated rituals as Julie. One of my clients, Harold, is a investment broker. He sought out my services as a clinical hypnotherapist because he had a medical condition called bruxism, meaning he mashes & grinds his teeth. During his assessment, Harold asked me if I could also help him manage an annoying problem. Just about every evening, precisely around 9PM, he would start having mad cravings for soft ice cream. Both Harold & his wife had sworn off sugar years ago & everything about their lifestyle spoke of health.

So, Harold started making up stories about needing to go out for gasoline or back to the office because he forgot something, etc. A good part of his waking time was spent thinking up new ways to get to his "stash." As he was telling me of his plight, I couldn't help but notice how excited he was, rather like a young boy telling me how he goes about fooling his mother.

SIMPLE EMOTIONAL OR DISORDERLY EATING

There are many people who maintain that they have emotional or compulsive eating issues, when what they really have is something I call "disorderly eating." Some eat continually, others having more of a pattern. In order to explain this way of managing their eating life, stress or the label of emotional eating is attached to the behavior. There is no discipline whatsoever; no plans for meals or snacks. I call this living by the seat of your pants & the numbers of people who participate in disorderly eating is huge. Just look around. You don't have to look far.

While all of this is very sad for adults, it is even more so for teens & kids because they are setting lifetime patterns. As a parent, you are their chief mentor & this is seen as "normal." I see many of these children in my practice & sell more mp3's than I'd like to count that address some of the negative outcomes of disorderly eating. These include concentration, focus, sleep issues, early alcohol addiction, early smoking & many others.

I look forward to sharing more with you through this blog. Always feel free to visit my websites & send me a message if you have further questions.

For children and adults alike, there are 4 steps to staying healthy and getting well. These include nutritional balance, awareness or mindfulness, thought and emotion managing, and the practice of Interactive Self-Hypnosis or inner imagery. But before climbing these steps, we must be willing to wake up from our deep sleep, and to pay close attention. Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht

INTRODUCTION

No parent wants an overweight child, but the stress of helping an overweight child, or keeping a child from the diseases connected to obesity or poor nutrition, can appear overwhelming. The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way. On a side note, overweight children aren't the only children who need to follow the "rules" of health. I hear over and over again from parents who have thin or normal weight children, "Thank goodness I don't have to worry about what he/she eats. I'm so lucky that my child has no weight issues & is so very active." The truth is that no one gets away from practicing poor nutrition and the piper will always be paid.

As an RN & Clinical Medical and Behavioral Hypnotherapist, I work with thousands of people with all sorts of disorderly eating issues, both adults and children. Some have weight issues and others do not, but all need to be helped to live a healthier lifestyle. If not, there will be consequences. This blog is about waking up and then finding out what needs to change, then activating, or motivating the change long-term. This is the same format I use in my private practice, as well as in the programs I design. In order to benefit from the blog, you will need to read it ongoing, for these problems have multiple facets, and for successful outcomes, all facets need to be addressed. I suggest you download the blogs, and keep them in a 3 ring binder. Highlight what speaks to you. Besides knowledge, I'll also be sharing direct suggestions, as well as self-hypnotic exercises that will speed up progress.

LET'S BEGIN

I'm starting off right at the beginning.....WAKING UP. Keep in mind that while the focus is your child, this blog is written for you, the parent, for you are the teacher/mentor, perhaps needing to change as well. In fact, I'll bet on it.

One thing that I find when I first meet a patient, especially a parent or adult, is the desire for immediate gratification. We are all in such a hurry to climb the steps to success, and why not. Most of us are sick and tired of our problems and we want to be free of them. Many issues are heavy, interfering with our life as a whole. Others prove to be an annoyance, perhaps a mystery at the same time. How is it that one can be so successful in one part of life, and be such a complete failure at things that appear so simple on the surface, such as managing food or getting a child to eat in a healthy way? "What's wrong with me, that my child is obese?"

Have you ever considered that perhaps these things are not as simple as they appear? Disorderly eating and bingeing fall into this group. Addictions are the same. And to make matters even more different, your problem or the problem of your child, will not be exactly the same as that of someone else. All problems are colored by personal experience, as well as gained expertise at managing different aspects of them.

We talk about our problems “as if” they were singular, but indeed, they are not. They all are all multi-faceted and here sits the reason for failure in most of us. We have a tendency to rush into solutions without first studying the facets or assessing our own strengths and weaknesses. We begin our climb far too soon, while we are still asleep. So now you are beginning to awaken. You can see the steps, but you must be patient if you want to climb well and not fall back.

I’m no different from you. I woke up many years ago, and as the days pass, I wake even more. I know what it is to eat the wrong foods, to over-eat and to binge. I know what it is to have disorderly eating and to live a life of disorder. I know what it is to feel anxiety and depression. I know what it is to have and live an addiction. I also know what it feels like to be free of all of these and what has to happen on a daily basis to earn this freedom. I also know why I have these problems and I do know that it is not my fault. While I have no guilt or shame, I do accept that I am totally self-responsible for keeping myself healthy, at optimum health & high performance levels. I accept that I am the teacher/mentor for my family, and as I work to stay healthy, they will soon follow. I like it this way and you will as well.

Disorderly eating, addictions and binge behaviors are pervasive in our country, as well as in most other industrialized nations, so we are far from alone in having these issues. We wake up from our preoccupation with these disorders at different times of our lives. I was a long sleeper. As the decades passed, I often thought I was awake, but I wasn’t. Something always seemed to be tripping me, keeping me out of balance. I wanted to feel whole, but the brass ring on the merry go round seemed out of reach. I would wake up with good int,entions, but before sunset I would take two steps backward. I remained the optimist; hopeful that I would live long enough to experience what is called optimum health and performance. I also wanted this for my children. Here's a peak at my thought processes. "One day I will be my healthy weight. One day I will be free of anxiety and panic attacks. One day I will sense my pure creativity from morning to night and know that it was mine to keep." But as the years passed, I came to doubt this would ever happen for me, nor for my children. We were all to stay on the path of illness.

I was invited to my very first emotional binge eating experience at the age of three. My father had died in an automobile accident. It was my birthday. In those years the deceased were waked or viewed from the home. I found my father “asleep” in the living room. I still remember everyone screaming to take me away. Whenever I asked “why he didn’t go up to bed”, someone gave me a cookie and sat me in the garden by myself to watch the birds. I don’t know how many cookies I ate that day, but this was my first remembered association of great-tasting cookies with sadness & being alone. There are times when I still can connect with that very early negative food experience.

Once an emotional food pattern is placed, the subconscious mind will look to find more opportunities for releasing stress, often choosing particular foods. These then take on the job as binge trigger foods. As years pass and more stressful situations present themselves, one can understand how very easy it is to become a disorderly or binge eater. As the child becomes become older, other addictions join in. Some children start smoking, drinking and experimenting with drugs in elementary school. In addition, children often follow the habits, behaviors or addictions of the parents. If the parents cannot teach the child to release emotions in a healthy fashion, the child is left with few options for managing their internal stress other than the addiction of choice. The purpose of the addiction is to help the child feel safe and to release the stress.

My addiction of choice was food-related, especially junk and sugar in just about any form. Regular meals held little interest for me. Healthy foods were not my first choice. To make matters worse, the more sugar I ingested, the less healthy foods I would eat. My taste buds were now programmed towards sugar and salt. My mother was busy with the many trials and tribulations of widow-hood and being a single parent in a society that, at that time, did not support this.

And so, I became invisible, free to keep my disorderly eating, as long as there was still some cake for my brothers.. As the years moved along, I graduated to caffeine and smoking, then exploring diet pills with my nursing student colleagues. It was normal to skip breakfast, have a liquid diet lunch and then binge at dinner. No one thought anything about it, nor what might be happening inside our bodies and our minds. There was never a thought of a consequence, short or long term. We were totally invincible. As long as there was enough money for donuts and beer, it was a great time, or so I thought then.

My first wake-up call came in my senior year when I fainted in class. I was sent home to recover, but no one knew what I was supposed to be recovering from, not even the family physician. Stress, sugar addiction or disorderly eating was not part of the medical vocabulary.. No one ever questioned my nutritional intake, or if I was taking drugs or smoking. Looking back, I can certainly appreciate my body and mind trying to get my attention, but it would be many decades before that would come to pass. I had no idea that my body was over-producing insulin and building insulin resistance, the precursors to the major killers. I was already on the road to diabetes, heart disease and circulatory disease. I was building tendencies towards other chronic medical conditions and a compulsive personality that would come to plague me for years to come. Yet, I believed I was having a good time.

We meet helping angels along the way. Mine came in the form of my husband-to-be who insisted that I stop smoking. Although resisting every step of the way, I did so, but replaced that release mechanism with more sugar, junk and caffeine. Remember, I had never learned to release my emotions in a healthy way and so my addictions were all I had. My body was busy responding to my lack of nutrition and other negatives that were ingested everyday.

The body is like a bank, busy recording and responding to both positives and negatives. In those days there was mainly a negative balance. Keep in mind that we do not sense all of these, some only presenting themselves when it is too late to change. Of course, I wasn’t awake for that gem of knowledge during those years. To quote an old saying, but appropriate nevertheless, I always wonder how different life would have been if I knew then what I know now.

I invite you to think about your own food history. Go back to your early childhood, your teen years, your early adult, right up to today. These are your original patterns. Some may be healthy, but others may have a serious impact on your future. In fact, you may already have pre-diseases in process or maybe you already have a medical diagnosis. Now, review your child's life and patterns. Make some notes about these. You will need these as we continue our travels together.

Elizabeth Bohorquez, RN, C.Ht is a Clinical Hypnotherapist, President and Program Designer for Sarasota Medical and Sports Hypnosis Institute located in Sarasota, FL and online at http://www.hypnosis-audio.com and http://www.sugar-addiction.com She is the author of Sugar....the Hidden Eating Disorder and How to Lick It & Beyond Disorderly Eating...The Truth About Sugar, Bingeing and How to Stop. She has also written and produced +350 audio CD's and mp3's. The websites include moderated discussion groups, ezines, library and a host of other educational tools for life-changing experiences.