Weight-ing for Dating?
Wednesday, July 11th, 2007This started out as an article about food and became one about addiction. Why is this relevant to your relationships? Only because addictions can have a massively negative impact on your ability to either get with a great partner or hold on to one when you’ve found them. In fact an active addiction running in a relationship is enough of a reason for me to refuse to coach a couple that are in crisis, unless it’s being handled.
It’s an area that really matters to me because a considerable number of my clients have had addictions in the past and as a result I have more experience of them than most. Addictions vary wider than the usual food, alcohol and smoking you’d expect.
Even if you’re not suffering from any obvious addictions I suggest you read this article because you probably know someone who is.
I was recently at a friend’s house for dinner. She’d just started in on her newest diet and it left me feeling sad. The rest of us are tucking into dinner and she’s eating a bowl of the most uninspiring cereal you can imagine. Last year she was on the ‘meat with meat’ diet plan and funnily enough that didn’t fix her issue either. Weight comes up a lot in my work around relationships. It links closely to your self esteem and image and therefore to your beliefs about who you are able to date.
Has your weight ever got in the way of your dating?
My favourite writer on the subject is Susie Orbach who wrote a couple of fantastic books, the first of which is called Fat is a Feminist Issue and the second is called On Eating. If there’s one thing I’d like the whole world to understand about this subject it’s just one line from ‘On Eating’;
‘You can’t stop eating until you figure out what’s eating you!’
In one of my past incarnations I was a personal trainer. (I used to spend so much time in the gym that it seemed like a good idea. Turns out I seriously underestimated just how tedious counting to ten can get 
) Weight management is theoretically very easy: eat less, exercise more and up your base line metabolism by building some muscle. If it was that simple then we’d all be winning on the weight front and we are clearly not. Weight management is a major industry, lots of people are getting rich yet people are still getting bigger. Except in the States where according to research the average weight recently stabilized, at huge.
You’d probably be shocked to know how much money people are willing to spend on a trainer or intense diet plans whilst never really losing any weight. You see, eating less or exercising more isn’t really the full answer. In its simplest form, research and statistics prove that dieting will actually make you heavier in the longer term. We live in a society with some fairly twisted ideas about what is healthy and attractive. I read recently that a particular celebrity stays thin by going to bed hungry. Her idea of a snack is six raisins. Another eats nothing but dinner and gets by on coffee and cigarettes for the rest of the day. The scary thing is that these stories are not unusual and people seem to miss the fact that it’s an absurd way to live.
There are two groups of people with food issues, the stuffers and the starvers. Those terms aren’t meant to be offensive, I just prefer them to the medical terminology. There’s something a lot more visceral and immediate about them. If you struggle with food then you’ll generally fall into one of the two groups under stress or maybe even both.
Food and the control of food is just another addiction. Any addiction is purely a strategy for not feeling some emotion or other. A great question to ask yourself is ‘If I didn’t decide to eat (or whatever your thing is!) right now what would I have to feel?’
So on the stuffers’ side I’ve got one client who eats chocolate when ever he feels sad or lonely, another who starts chewing on cakes when ever she feels angry. Feelings are there to be felt. They are a natural mechanism for healing hurt. Stuffing those feelings down with food causes all kinds of problems.
On the starvers’ side I’ve got a client who stops eating whenever any piece of her life feels a little scary or out of control because food is the one area she feels like she can control. Whilst the results of these two behaviour patterns may appear different they both exist around the issue of control.
Maybe food isn’t your addiction but generally we all have a place we run to in order to feel better about ourselves. Some of them are healthy and some of them are not. No one is to blame for any of this but we are all responsible for coming to a better understanding of how to take care of our emotional needs.
So if your sense of self is low because you are not at a weight that makes sense for your size be very careful about how you decide to deal with it. Sometimes weight has very little to do with what you eat, it’s much more about how you eat.
If weight is an issue for you I’d ask you to consider that the real issue is not what you eat but why you eat. I highly recommend the two books I’ve listed above to instil some sanity around the subject of dieting. Remember…
‘You can’t stop eating until you figure out what’s eating you!’
Best wishes
Michael
Tips On Addictions
Addiction as a way of numbing
Over eating is just one of many addictive behaviours that run in society. Other examples are smoking, drinking, over working, compulsive exercise and watching TV, particularly stuff that involves naked people. These are all things that allow us to numb out. Engaging in behaviour that numbs is referred to as acting out.
Identify what feelings trigger you
We all have emotional needs and when they are not being met there is a tendency to search out something to ease the pain. For some people it’s loneliness they’d rather not be dealing with, for others it’s anger. If you can pay attention to what feelings trigger the desire to act out you’re halfway to meeting the need in a healthier way.
A step in the right direction
Sometimes addictions shift around; you can get yourself off chocolate and suddenly you’re consuming dried dates by the pound. This is a natural process and in my experience so long as the new addiction has less impact on your health you’re moving in the right direction. Most recovering alcoholics develop a serious smoking habit and that’s OK, it’s a step forward and those are to be celebrated.
Get help
If you’ve got a serious issue that you are willing to admit to then get help. I am a very firm believer in the twelve step program. There are groups all around the world who get together and support each other through what ever they are trying to get off. Alcoholics, co-dependents, love addicts, over-eaters and a whole bunch more. No one has to be on their own with this stuff.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.