Elizabeth Babcock, LCSW, LLC

 

Most compulsive eaters get their start in childhood.  It often begins with the child’s discovery that when life hurts or disappoints, food is one of the few things the child can gain access to and control, and which seems to help.  For some of us, eating becomes our primary emotional survival strategy, to the point where many of us stop even trying to manage our emotions any other way.  We arrive in adulthood with more knowledge, intellect, and life skills, but still cling to that survival strategy we discovered in early childhood, and which we have practiced ever since. 

 

If you are a compulsive eater, your eating is likely still controlled by the part of you that discovered eating as salvation all those years ago.  That part of you -- the child self -- is deeply emotional.  The child self doesn’t respond well to logic, which is why it doesn’t help that you know better.  The child self absolutely hates to be told “no,” which is why you have irresistible urges for forbidden foods.  The child self hates to be told how it should behave, which is why you feel so resistant to health-related choices like exercise and quality foods.  Unfortunately, the child self has a lot of power in your system, which is why you repeatedly lose when you try to conquer it with brute force and willpower.  Worse yet, the child self is highly impulsive, cannot consider the long-term damage caused by its knee-jerk decisions, and is satisfied with the mere illusion of control, even if it creates self-destructive results.  This is why a part of you feels relief when you give in to a food urge (the child self now feels in control) even as another part of you knows that you’re hurting your body and spirit with every bite.  Your child self has been convinced for decades that eating is the most reliable strategy for achieving emotional comfort, and until you are able to deal effectively with that part of yourself, nothing else you ever try will last. 

 

This helps to explain why traditional weight management efforts repeatedly fail.  They don’t deal nearly enough with the emotional needs that drive the eating in the first place, but worse, they are structured to provoke battle with the child self by creating an atmosphere of deprivation and coercion – precisely what stirs the child self most surely into defensive action (which you experience as resistance to protecting your health, and powerful urges for foods that you know will hurt you but which happen to taste good).  You can hold it off with brute force for a time, but the child self will eventually prevail.  This is an important part (in addition to physiological processes) of the yo-yo diet syndrome; you can beat the child self into submission for a while and lose some weight, but once you tire from the effort, the child self rises back up, reactively overeating until you’ve regained all the lost weight, and then some.

 

The good news is that the child self need not be eradicated or conquered in order for you to get control with food.  Learning to work effectively and lovingly with your child self is essential in conquering your food/eating addiction once and for all; for most people, this will require some work with a therapist who has specific experience in dealing with overeating issues.  When you begin partnering with your child self, amazing changes begin to occur:

 

You can gain a genuine interest in and desire for higher quality food, and the many emotional and physical benefits of regular physical activity.  The processed foods that have tempted you for so long will become less compelling – some of them will even lose their appeal altogether.  You can begin to truly enjoy food for the first time, rather than merely shoveling it in while feeling tormented.  You can end the battle within once and for all.

 

Copyright © 2007, Elizabeth Babcock, LCSW.  All rights reserved.