DAY 2: Stop the Madness!

I'm still a fan of the Slim-fast plan, so I'm sticking with that as my diet choice. However, I've almost given up the calorie counting -- it was too depressing seeing those 3,000+ days when I was overeating.

But overcoming the overeating is more important than whatever diet I choose. If I can't stop myself from binging, I'm not dieting anyway. So far it's been 4 days since I overate, and that is an enormous accomplishment. (Last night was a little touch and go when I was lying in bed thinking about a loaf of bread dipped in olive oil... But I didn't give in!)

Accepting that I can't change some of the things that are going wrong in my life this year has gone a long way to calming my need to stuff myself. But I needed more help. Since my experience with Dr. Beck's book was so positive and worthwhile, I overcame my aversion to self-help books and looked for one on overeating.

The first book I tried was Overcoming Overeating. The writers apparently have helped thousands of people with weight issues, and to be fair I didn't (couldn't) finish the book, but their advice struck me as a lot of nonsense.

My first problem was the assertion that the only source of all emotional eating is the frustration of being a woman in a male-dominated world. Now that is crazy a bold statement. I could have ignored that, but then I got to the grand plan for overcoming overeating: allow yourself to overeat. In fact, force yourself to overeat! The theory (very much simplified) is that eating whatever you want, however much you want, whenever you want will remove the taboo and cause you to lose interest in overeating, and then you'll slim down. Since I've been "practicing" the first half of that theory for the last 4 months and gained back 25 pounds in the process, I don't believe this theory works. Not for me anyway.

So now I'm trying Stop Stuffing Yourself. I'm only on chapter 3, but I'm liking it (except for the Weight Watchers commercials on every other page). The first step is dealing with family issues that cause overeating, from the lessons you learned as a child to the messages you hear now. Family didn't identify as an overeating trigger for me on the quiz in chapter 2, but I think it's because I don't see or speak with my family much anymore. But I do carry around the ideas they gave me as a kid, and some of those are still hurting me now. So it's time to deal with those wrong ideas instead of trying to bury them under a loaf of fat-soaked focaccia.

Here's hoping the remaining 6 steps are as helpful; I want to be thin and healthy, so the overeating must stop!