The Overweight Mind and Body

Your Unique Psychological Journey Towards Weight Loss

Kathy Leach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000541748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Abnormal Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Overweight Mind and Body is a self-help guide to understanding the psychological issues that lead to overeating and weight gain.

The book enables the reader to discover the psychological drives that lead to unwanted weight and to find ways of meeting those drives other than with food. It introduces a simple, user-friendly theory of Transactional Analysis to promote weight-related self-awareness. The author includes exercises that empower readers to uncover their own stories. She understands that, for many, carrying extra weight is emotionally and physically painful and so gently encourages readers to explore at their own level. She uses case studies to demonstrate the many unconscious influences on one's eating and how, when people discover and resolve these influences, they no longer need extra food. Reading them shows that "you are not alone".

This book will also be of interest to, and a useful guide for, practitioners in the caring professions who work with clients struggling with eating and overweight.

Part 1 The foundations of your journey towards understanding and change

Chapter 1 Important points to think about as a foundation to your self-exploration

DOI: 10.4324/9781003240877-1

This chapter is an introduction to the main focusses of the book. It sets the groundwork for your journey of self-exploration. Please take your time to read and think about each paragraph and the points in each one. There is no rush! A slow journey allows for deeper understanding and slower weight loss is more likely to be permanent.

This self-help book is written for people who are unhappy about, and struggle with, their eating and weight. It is these people I have worked with psychologically for over 30 years.

My belief is that everyone deserves to be happy and to make their own choices as to how they want to be in the world. You are worth looking after and worth positive attention. You deserve to be who you want to be at whatever size you want to be. You may not feel this is possible right now but if you have this as your aim, you will find the ensuing chapters helpful and rewarding.

In each chapter, you will have the chance to look at what goes on psychologically for you. To see how your past, and others around you now, can influence your thoughts about yourself and about your body and eating. You will see how you have made unhelpful decisions about yourself in response to others both past and present and how to update those decisions.

You can make your own new decisions about how you want to be in the world. Your weight, your size and your eating are nobody else’s concern.

There are many aspects contributing to being overweight and overeating when you don’t want to be. In this first chapter, I would like to visit some of those with you, starting with practical issues and moving on to the more intricate and intriguing psychological concerns. Some will remain as brief paragraphs in this chapter and others will be the focus of future chapters.

I am trained in, and practise, Transactional Analysis Psychotherapy (TA). It maintains a highly in-depth theory of personality, ways of understanding ourselves and ways of making positive changes in our lives. It enables us to understand what goes on between ourselves and others and within ourselves at both a conscious and unconscious level. A good deal of the language of TA is simple but it can reach the subconscious quite rapidly and sometimes unexpectedly. It is therefore important for you to think about seeking therapy if challenging or unsettling issues are raised for you that cannot be met in a book.

In this school of psychotherapy, we have some very fundamental beliefs. It is worth thinking about each one and what they can offer for you. They are what I believe about you, others and myself. I have added a daily mantra for each focus of belief. The thinking behind this is that the more you repeat a positive thought, the more likely you are to be open to believing it. Maybe it is not possible for you to fully commit to each one yet, but you can start that upward ladder of belief.

Belief 1

That everyone is OK

In other words, everyone is worthy, deserves respect and is essentially good. We may not like what they or, in fact, we do, i.e. the behaviour, but that does not change the stance of everyone having worth and value as human beings. We aim to give everyone a chance. (Historically and internationally, there are some notable exceptions, but they are not you). We believe that we are OK too. “I am OK and you are OK”.

Feeling OK is something that is lost for many people struggling with weight. You need to know that you are OK whether you are big, small, fat, thin, tall or short. Just because you have put on unwanted weight does not mean you are not an OK person. Make “I am OK” one of your daily mantras. Repeating it will help you believe it and come to know it is true. Part of what we will be exploring is the loss of the feeling of “OKness” because, often, it is that loss that makes us eat and then the extra weight gained can lead to us thinking even more deeply, that we are not OK.

You are OK: This is at the core of you and does not change just because you have put on weight.

So your first daily mantra will be: I am OK.

Belief 2

That everyone can think and decide what is right for themselves

You are an adult. You can make your own mind up about yourself, what you do and how you do it. This may sound obvious and even irrelevant, but as you work through the book, you will see how often your unconscious self will respond to others from the past and present and feel influenced by their thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Throughout this book I am inviting you to claim back the full you.

When we are reaching for that extra food, we aren’t thinking with our grown-up selves. And we are not deciding to eat the food from a rational, grown-up place.

So your second daily mantra is: I can think for myself.

It is interesting that many overweight people feel that, either they cannot think, or that other people don’t believe they can think. This, of course, is nonsense. You can think and, as you can think, you can also make decisions for yourself. You can and do make decisions. In fact, from when you were tiny, you have been making decisions about yourself, other people and the world around you, even though you have not been conscious of doing so. Some of these decisions have been made when you were too young to be rational and many of these types of decisions remain in operation until you re-decide or change those decisions. For example, many overweight people have decided at some stage in the past that they are not worth bothering about. It is irrational because everyone is essentially worthy. Or perhaps they have decided that they need to look after others’ needs and wants and so must never put themselves first. Though this might be seen as admirable, we are entitled to think about our own needs. The need to please others can lead to self-neglect and self-denial. With new information and a little thought, these decisions can be changed. They are not set in concrete as people often believe. With some personal understanding, you can decide anew and that is what you will be encouraged to do throughout this book. So the third belief is that your past decisions are free to be amended.

Belief 3

Decisions made in the past can be changed and new, valid, decisions made

In TA, we consider what decisions we have made about ourselves, others and the world, even from infancy. We make decisions in response to who is, and what is going on, around us. The beauty of this is that we can re-decide once we have understood what is behind the decisions that are no longer helpful or appropriate. You will find that a good deal of the time you are acting in response to what has gone on in the past and particularly in childhood, even from infancy. You will discover that you often respond to a parent in the same way you did as a child. You may find you still carry out their “orders”, such as “clean your plate”, “if you don’t do as I say you won’t have a treat”. Often we continue to do what we were told to do as kids, some of it very helpful and some of it restricting. And we may repeat the same “orders” to our own children! You may recall some of the orders in your household and will be encouraged to look at these in later chapters.

We also behave in accordance with what we think others expect of us and this is not always helpful. For instance, if you are out with friends do you eat less and then eat more when you get home? Do you get anxious about eating in public because you think others will be watching and judging you? Do you eat secretly? hide food? Pick when no-one is looking?

In the past, we may have decided, because of family sayings, or social opinions, that, if we are “overweight”, we are not good enough. We are not deserving. This again is so unhelpful and certainly not true.

In addition, it is common for people struggling with weight to think they shouldn’t do things, such as swim, dance, wear bright clothes, or shorts. Is this familiar to you?

(I discuss the use of the term overweight in chapter 3.)

If you can think for yourself, then you clearly have choices. You can decide what you choose to do. Your thinking in this book will be geared to understanding why you eat extra food or are overweight. Once you get this understanding you can make new decisions about yourself, food and weight. There are always choices, even if it doesn’t feel like it at this moment.

So your third daily mantra is: I can make my own decisions for myself and about myself.

A battle with food?

I often find that people who consider themselves overweight have a sense of food being both a comfort and an enemy, hence the words “struggle” and “battle”. We will look at the food being a comfort later in the book but here I want to make the statement for you that food is not your enemy. It is what you need in order to survive, to live your daily life and to thrive. For this reason food is your friend.

What is important to consider is this: If you do not have an enemy, you cannot have a battle.

If food is not your enemy then you do not need to create a battle with it. The struggle that goes on in your head over food is counterproductive. You will learn that you have different sides of yourself that play their part in “making” you eat; One part is called Child, and another is your Parent. It is usually your Child self that wants, or even feels that she/he needs, food beyond your biological needs; That is to say, it is the Child self that holds erroneous beliefs about self, others and the world around it and feels the pain that leads to using food to resolve emotional issues. Sometimes it is the Parent self that tries to deny the Child this food. Once this dialogue of contradictions between Parent and Child selves is set up in your mind, the Child pushes for the extra food and this gives rise to compulsive and impulsive eating.

In the beginning, I suggest you can allow yourself to eat what you wish so that this Inner Child calms, because when thinking of stopping that Inner Child from eating, she/he becomes more agitated and leads you to eat more. Since the pathways I suggest for your journey do not include diets your Child self will not encounter deprivation. You will, hopefully, feel calmer. There won’t be the urgency that is produced by the Child always being told “no” or being made to feel guilty, weak-willed, or even disgusting when eating. Until we have discussed a number of aspects of your eating and possible psychological reasons for your need to overeat, it is best that you feel OK about what you do eat. This is not, however, an invitation to eat more and more but to feel Ok about what you eat now, knowing you are going to learn what that food means to you.

Many people I have worked with have experienced real relief on hearing the suggestion that they can eat what they want as a first stage. Many have found that through this permission they already started to eat less because there is no sense that they might not be able to have that food at all. In addition the messages that tell someone they shouldn’t eat the food often result in more agitation or rebellion against that command which leads toactually eating more. Overeating is regularly seen to follow conscious or unconscious anxiety that there will not be enough, a sense of deprivation or scarcity. In most parts of the world, there is always enough food and it is never far away. I suggest that you are rarely very far from food outlets and shops, even if your fridge and cupboards are empty. So there is no likelihood of there “not being enough”.

I have only once found that a client couldn’t bear the thought of being able to eat what she wanted at this stage of the journey. It made her feel angry and scared. If this is also your response, then you need to stay with the way you think about food at present. That will be fine too.

If you have been eating a lot of extra food, you have essentially been eating what you want but, no doubt, accompanied by all the negative feelings. When we get a feeling or “message” in our heads that says “you can’t eat that” we are more likely to rebel and eat more of it. Then, self-deprecating messages often follow. Sometimes these are accompanied by feelings of guilt at best and maybe self-loathing at worst. So why not have permission to eat what you want instead? You may continue to eat in the same pattern, or you might find some of the pressure is off and you automatically reach for that extra food less often. Either way it would be good to write down your experiences about this “permission”. You can do so at the end of this chapter.

You will see that I do not recommend “dieting” and that there is no call to change your eating habits until you have explored why you are “overeating” or maintaining a larger body size. After all, the purpose of this self-guided book is to enable you to understand your eating. If you resolve underlying issues, your eating will change.

You will be encouraged to use healthy eating that is right for you rather than follow a fixed regime dictated by someone else. If you feel you ought to go to a slimming group, (which would be a Parent message) then it is likely you will not keep off the weight you may lose. “Oughts” and “Shoulds” that plague you from within, from other people in your life and from our cultural messages are exceedingly unsupportive. If you go to a slimming group because you have been persuaded to go or you feel you should in order to be OK with other people, then you are more likely to sabotage yourself and put any weight loss back on. And, people often put on more pounds than before after each arrested diet phase. If there are psychological reasons as to why you carry more weight than you want and eat more food than you want and need, th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author: Introducing myself
• PART I: The foundations of your journey towards understanding and change
• PART II: Your unique psychological journey towards understanding and weight loss
• Appendix: Pages for your notes