Marie from NZ wrote to me saying: I have just read your book and putting the tools into practise and for once feel a HUGE relief around the whole issue and am very excited about the future of my weight journey.  BUT I have so many questions but topical right now is how to deal with the ‘binge’ feelings and actions that still occur esp mid-afternoon onwards – it is my danger time.  This has become MORE dangerous as I have my high sacrifice foods in the house (am a stay at home mum) for morning tea time.  I have already eaten through (in one sitting) my whole supply of cheezels for next week!!! In some ways am feeling more out of control.  Help

Thanks Marie for raising this critical issue. This is very common in the early stages as your mind is still operating on the lifelong hangover belief that you still really aren’t allowed to eat cheezels (or whatever). So when you make them available your mind thinks ‘I’ve got to make the most of this opportunity.’ This will improve over time as your mind come to see that you really can eat whatever you want. But in this transition phase of ‘food relationship recovery’ you are at risk of overeating the foods you love. The solution? Pause Points. What has no pause points? A big packet of cheezels. Surprisingly the solution is provided by the food manufacturers (you won’t hear me say that very often!)

The pack on the right is for the smail ‘variety’ packs – each with only 100 Calories (not that I want you to count calories). This is what a great pause point looks like. To start a second packet you have to go back to your cupboard, take it out and open the second packet. It’s not the work involved to do this – it’s the fact that it creates a space in which you decide if you really want more. Effective pause points include making your favourite muffins (not too big) and freezing them so you only defrost one at a time (to binge you have to really love rock hard ice-cold muffins and have good teeth!) There are all sorts of ways to make pause points – get creative. The ultimate pause point is a shop. Just buy one portion e.g. a small chocolate snack bar and take it home – make sure it gets the full savouring treatment. Ultimately, no one can stop you from overeating if you’re committed to it, but creative pause points are the way to manage the risk.

I was out to dinner with my wife recently and we had just eaten a light meal. We decided to indulge ourselves with dessert. Being food lovers, we are always interested in new delicious food experiences, so we chose a cake from the dessert cabinet  we had never seen before – A Chocolate Diana cake. Designed to be the mother of all desserts, this cake had a chocolate sponge base, a layer of chocolate mousse, a layer of cheesecake, a layer of vanilla sponge, and was topped with chocolate icing, a chocolate stick, and a blob of vanilla icing, served with cream and ice cream with a strip of chocolate sauce and caramel sauce beside it. WOW!  The cake was an uncut virgin so we knew our serve would be fresh.

With great anticipation, I mindfully tuned into my first mouthful. The texture was certainly moist and fresh, but the flavours were so bland that I could not distinguish between the cheese cake layer and the mousse layer. It just tasted like a soft, moist mouthful of choclatey stuff. But it looked so good! Surely I was mistaken? So my next mouthful included some of the caramel and chocolate sauce …. now it tasted like choclatey stuff with commercial supersweet, bottled ice-cream topping! Even the chocolate stick on top had no flavour and was obviously made from cheap compound chocolate. I had had enough. If you are going to enjoy yourself, it has to be worth the calories. My wife agreed that this cake was definitely not worth it, so we were comfortable with abandoning the mission at this point – leaving half the serve behind.

My wife observed that what she was most pleased about as we left the restaurant, was that her mind was happily commenting tha she had “saved calories”. In the past, her mind would have been berating her for “wasting food”. By repeatedly leaving a little food on her plate over the last few years (especially when noticing she was no longer hungry, or the food was not tasty) she had finally retrained her brain to undo those childhood scripts of eating everything on her plate. So now the customary guilt was being replaced by self-congratulation – way cool!

For a long time I have been uncomfortable with goals and all the rah rah around trying to achieve them. To be specific the problem is the timeframe. This means that when people don’t achieve goals in their often arbitrarily allotted timframe they become demoralised and give up.  I heard one righteous presenter argue the dogma that ‘a goal is a dream with deadline’. What a great way to kill a dream!! So often, in both my life and others, I have seen dreams arrive long after they were hoped for, and it was the very lack of a deadline that kept them alive long enough to allow their delivery.

And then my daughter and wife have clarified for us all an entirely different problem with goals. I don’t think I can explain it any better than my daughter has on her blog. We teach best what we are grappling with ourselves! Have a read by clicking here

Our mantra needs to become ‘I can have it if I really want it, but is it worth the calories?’ For most people who struggle with their weight the default mantra is ‘I can’t have it – so I will!’  But to shift mantras, first we need to be mindful enough to be aware that our unconscious is in play. Mindful awareness comes from learning to pause just before we eat something to wonder what is going on in our minds. So often we think we are making a conscious decision when we simply are not – when an unconscious mantra is in play.

I read a fascinating study published in Nature Neuroscience* that showed that our conscious mind becomes aware of a decision that we have already taken at an unconscious level up to 10 seconds later! This means that when we think we are taking a conscious decision we are often just rationalising a decision that we took using processes we have little awareness of. The challenge is to pause before we put food in our mouth and ask the question, ‘Which mantra is at play here?’

*CS Soon et al. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain.  Nature Neuroscience 11:5;543-5, 2008.

Yesterday I attended a stimulating workshop with Bob Neimeyer a psychologist expert on bereavement and grief  who has published widely on the subject (click here for his website). It was all about managing the loss of a loved one, especially children, through finding the benefits and the meaning in the loss – not something that is easily done, especially early on. BTW, he recommended this website as an excellent resource for assistance in dealing with losses of all different kinds: www.opentohope.com.

We were asked to do an exercise that he gets his patients to do, as way of opening up a different, meaning-based dialogue around a person’s grief. We were asked to write a story, that incorporated, in no particular order, the following elements: a crying child, a talking animal, a mountain, an empty house and a sunrise. In the 8 minutes we were given the essence of the following came to me:

The Mountain was less concerned about the child’s crying. The Goat and the Mountain had been good friends for a long time.

“Without death there is no life,” the Mountain reminded the Goat.

“But the human child is in pain,” the Goat said.

“Who said pain is a bad thing?” the Mountain asked the Goat. ” It always ends, and from pain our most important growth occurs.”

“In this life or the next,” the Goat added softly.

By the time the sun rose the next morning on the empty house, the child too, like her mother, had passed over. The Goat ate grass and the Mountain just was.

I heard this great line at a workshop with American grief expert and psychologist, Dr Robert Neimeyer yesterday (more on this in another post). Men, listen up! This is something we are often rubbish at. (Although more and more these days in some relationships it’s the career woman!) Too often us blokes step in to try and fix what others (partners, children, parents, workmates) are telling us about, instead of just ‘being’ with the person as they tell us their story.

We often grossly under-value the power of just being present and bearing witness to people as they tell their story. Even as a trained psychotherapist, where this is drummed into you, it took me many years to fully appreciate how powerful it often is just to listen actively to people. Usually, if there is a simple solution, the other person would have thought of it. Your quick solutions can leave them feeling unempathised with at best, or, at worst, that you just want to get them off the subject because you don’t like the discomfort of it.

If we ‘do something’ what should it look like?

Even if you can see a way forward for your partner, child or whoever, it is much more powerful to ask them questions that help them come to this realisation. We don’t look as clever, but then who do we most want to help? The person we care about, or our flagging ego …

The first day is the one on which we fully realise that we came into this life for a reason. We realise that we have what Aristotle called our ‘Daimon’ – our unique mix of abilities and talents, however small or unvalued by the world at large – and our job is to express them. This expression is accompanied by the highest emotional state of ‘happiness’ that humans can experience – what Aristotle called ‘Eudaimonia’.

Which brings us to the second day, often months or years after the first. This is the day when you truly meet your Daimon – its birthday – and you begin to dance with your Daimon. You start to live your life around doing what has meaning for you. It might be the day you finally start to confront the anxiety of putting pen to paper (or these days finger to keyboard!) or brush to canvas. It might be the day you enrol in the first subject that will ultimately allow you to study what really turns you on. It might be the day you do something just for you and the people around you and the world be damned for a few hours! (You have given them way too much of your precious life anyway!)

Life is inherently meaningless – until we find our meaning. Only one person can give it meaning.  If you look for a meaning outside you, if you look to others, you will find nothing. If you do not bring meaning to your life, if you do not go looking for your Daimon, you will be confronted by its meaninglessness. On the other hand if you go looking for your meaning, the ultimate knight’s quest, you can’t help but find it … eventually. While I consider myself to be a spiritual being having a human experience, I’m not at all religious, but I know that young Matthew was speaking an old truth when he said: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

Some wisdom on the all important subject of meaning through choice. And how awesome is the wise author of this article … here’s the link: The consequences of choice …

Many people put on weight as a defense against intimacy arising from past hurts. Their fat becomes a buffer, a shield to keep the opposite sex at a distance. But the truth is that it doesn’t work quite how we might think. In reality there are lots of men out there who are attracted to big women (and vice versa). Unfortunately for those using this strategy, people are often attracted to what’s below the surface – beauty is not skin deep … dammit!! So if getting fat does not keep people away, how do we get it to work?

One of my patients today spoke with great self-honesty about her response to our work in trying to help her with relationships. I’ve been suggesting that she put herself out there to meet men for some time (we needed some material to work with in therapy!) Finally, she announced, that after considering a range of options, she was going to join RSVP. But … she had realised that since making this decision (but not yet signing up) she was eating more and had gained 5kgs i.e. about a dress size.

“Now I can’t fit into any of my fashionable clothes. So I guess I’m not going anywhere until I lose this weight.”

By putting on weight so we are too big to leave the house to socialise – for whatever rationalisation – we achieve the end result of avoiding the risk of potential intimacy. I never cease to be fascinated by the endlessly creative spirit of the human state!

PS In the end she agreed that she had to get out there irrespective of her weight … we’ll see.

While the pain of childbirth with a mother’s first child is considered to be one of the most severe pain levels a human can experience, surprisingly few women are traumatised by it. This is because they understand what the pain is and because it comes with enormous meaning – creating life.

Today I was working with one of my patients (let’s call her Sophia – Greek for ‘Wisdom’) who was sexually abused by her father. We were talking about telling her brother who was abusing drugs and alcohol and had said to his sister that he too thought he had been molested. Sophia had actually been present when he had been abused. Sophia’s fear was that the truth would bring her brother undone. She did not want to cause him emotional pain by revealing the truth of who had abused her (he only knew ‘someone’ had).

Sophia initially came to me with feelings of depression, sexual dysfunction, low self-esteem and was drinking too much. At that stage she had unclear memories of having been sexually abused as a young child. From our current vantage point, I asked Sophia about which pain was worse – the pain she had when she knew something ‘bad’ had happened in her past – but did not understand it, or the pain she had now as she was processing the abuse in full, distressing colour. Sophia had been doing it particularly tough in recent sessions as she was doing EMDR and was in the thick of recalling the detail and working through her abuse experiences. Despite the disturbing memories she was working on, Sophia did not hesitate, “I would rather have the pain of the truth, because from here I can grow and heal. I can see a way forward. The other pain was slowly destroying me and God knows where it was going to end up.”

“Which pain would you rather your brother had?” I asked gently.

“The pain of truth,” Sophia responded – again without hesitation.

The way in which the truth sets you free is by opening a pathway forward into personal growth. Without knowing, or confronting, the truth we are caught in a loop that slowly but surely spirals downwards. The pain of truth, is such a very, very different pain.

Our children’s book has been a little while coming and while it will be a little longer before it is in stores (you can order your advance copy by clicking here) what we are really excited about is the song! Two really talented people – singer Jenny Wilson and musician Sean Peter – have just sent us their first cut of the Taste with your face song. One of the big issues for adults is that we ‘forget’ how to eat mindfully and savour our food – this is what the song is all about. While kids are much better at being present in the moment than us adults, we need to make sure that we don’t let them lose this wonderful skill. Mind you, while kids are better than adults at being present-centred, they also need help to keep focussed! Click here to have a listen:  The Taste with your face song. Please do us a favour and give us your feedback by clicking on ‘Comments’ below. If your computer has problems playing it then you can right click on it and first save it to your computer (e.g. to Desktop) and then play it from there.

Recently Lulu wrote to me saying:

I have just finished reading Weight Loss for Food Lovers. I found that overall the methods that the book outlines have made an enormous impact on the way that i feel about and perceive my eating habits. Now that i have finished the book however, i feel that i am still lost in terms of knowing what foods i can eat freely and which ones i need to be careful with. Although the table at the end of the book gives a guide to eating based on Glycemic load, it does not incorporate the consideration of fats.

Please help!

Lulu is quite right, my book does not provide dietary details – it’s the book you read before you go on a medically sound weight loss plan – I recommend two in my book The Low GI Diet and the CSIRO Diet, or visit a recommended dietitian – here is a link to the one’s I have trained: approved dietitians. My book’s focus is on how deprivation of the foods we love will ultimately cause us to crash any weight loss plan. The only reason that I do talk about GL is to help people make sense of carbohydrates, which are now contributing to obesity much more than fat intake is. Most people know which are the healthier fats and lower fat foods, but they’re much more confused about carbs and GL is a great tool for making sense of this.

In my book I do go into some detail about how and when to eat the more fattening foods you love – both snacks and meals – around these times we need to eat in a healthy way. If you would like a brief (one page) overview of what I advise my patients to eat the rest of the time, click here.

An issue that often gets overlooked when trying to lose weight is portion control. If you are eating well and not losing weight the next thing to look at is portion size. All too often we mindlessly eat more than we need to feel satisfied. By mindfully savouring our food we will find that smaller portions are as satisfying as larger ones – this is the key to  successful and sustainable weight loss.  But what is the correct portion size? Fortunately, in Australia we have an absolute expert in this field. I have known and worked with Amanda Clark, a superb dietitian, for some years now and am thoroughly impressed by her very practical approach to this problem.

Her brilliant book, Portion Perfection, shows you exactly the right amount to eat if you want to lose or maintain weight. The book includes everyday and occasional foods (including the high sacrifice foods you don’t want to live without) and spells out just how much to eat for everyone over the age of 5 years. It has hundreds of pictures showing popular Australian packaged foods, including almost every brand of yoghurt, cereal and muesli bar available in Australia, as well as common take-away foods. There’s also a Portion Perfection plate and bowl to make sure you serve up the right amount. All the Portion Perfection products are available at www.greatideas.net.au along with all the healthy cookbooks and resources recommended by Australian Dietitians.

I was fascinated to read about research* showing that people diagnosed with heart failure did better, up to four years later, the better their marriage was. How much love was in their hearts correlated with how well they did as much as did their hard medical risk factors! Yet another study correlating psychological well-being with physical health. Another reason why we should work on having more loving relationships. As always, start by thinking about what more you can do to make your partner feel loved.

*Coyne JC et al  Prognostic importance of marital quality for survival of congestive heart failure. Am J Cardiology 2001; 88:526–529.

Following my last post, I looked at a recent Australian study of 324 four-year-olds. While one in five of these youngsters were overweight or obese, 83% of their mothers did not think they were! The study, lead by Michele Campbell*goes to the heart of our complicated psyche. These mothers were not ‘bad mothers’, this is something I see all the time in adults whether it’s their obesity or their child’s – this is our mind keeping us from seeing and feeling painful information. This is the first and foremost role of our unconscious – to keep us safe from emotional pain.

Generally mothers were more concerned about daughters than sons – presumably because it’s okay to be a ‘big and strong’ boy. All parents should, at least once a year, check their children’s position on the ‘BMI for age’ chart (see the previous post).

*Maternal concern and perceptions of overweight in Australian preschool-aged children. Medical Journal of Australia, 2006.

For parents to define if their child is overweight is not simple because weight depends on both age and height and children have this annoying habit of inexorable growth, they just don’t stop! (Our 16 year old son has just hit 6 foot 3 inches – we are going to have to stop feeding him steroid enriched chicken!) The research shows that parents are reluctant to admit that their children are overweight. There is an objective way to avoid any doubt. I recommend that you involve your children in this process – they also deserve objective feedback to know where they are in the spectrum. If they are at the higher end then this allows a less emotional, more ‘scientific’ discussion to occur.

As with adults we use, the Body Mass Index, or BMI, calculation which factors in height as well as weight. For children we need a further layer – a standardised chart that brings in their age. Fortunately the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA has done all the hard work of collecting the data. If you go to this link – Clinical Growth Charts – you can download the charts and plot your children’s BMI and age over time. There are a lot of charts on offer, which can be confusing. I suggest you download, under the ‘Children 2 to 20 years (5th-95th percentile)’ heading the Girls/Boys ‘BMI-for-age’ chart.

To work out your child’s BMI to plot on the chart go to this link – Child and Teen BMI Calculator (we Aussies will need to click on ‘Metric’ to switch input data to kgs) and fill in the information. If they are at the 85th percentile or higher they are overweight. This means that they weigh the same or more than 85% of their peers. At the 95th percentile they are obese.

I recently read a well-balanced article on this contentious subject in the Los Angeles Times (December 21) by Amina Khan. In the first case of its kind, in June 2009 a South Carolina mother, Jerri Gray lost custody of her son, Alexander, after being charged with criminal neglect. At the age of 14 he weighed 555 pounds (252kg). Ms Gray is facing 15 years on two felony counts. Other parents have been told to demonstrate progress in helping their children to lose weight or risk losing them.

Should parents be held responsible for their child’s obesity? The proponents of advertising junk food to children argue that what children eat should not be controlled by regulation, by a ‘national nanny’, it should be up to parents to ultimately decide what their children eat.  But can they? Can parents compete with the one billion dollars spent each year on the estimated 30,000 advertisements their children will see and be influenced by? Can parents compete with cheap junk food being available at every turn? It’s a  simple idea to blame and charge parents – but ‘simple’ is the only word I can find to explain the attraction of charging parents with abuse – pity that obesity is an incredibly complex pyschophysiological condition.

To my mind, we can’t blame parents until we first give them the resources they need to do the job properly and then they fail to use them. Government need to help them by treating the marketing of foods to children in exactly they same way as they treat the marketing of cigarettes and alcohol to children – for exactly the same reasons! Excess food, like excess alcohol, is dangerous to the health of our precious children. Secondly, parents need help in how to create healthy eating habits in their children – while our work is obviously all about this – we are at the beginning of a very long haul.

Let’s remember exactly why it is that we don’t advertise cigarettes and alcohol to children and why we don’t rely just on parents to discourage kids from smoking and drinking …

Guy Hendricks, on writing about Fearless Living, has some profound thoughts (thanks to my wife for passing them on). When we work out who we are and what we do, the day to day achievements and material rewards become secondary – or a hindrance. Here is what he has to say:

The purpose of life is to discover an existence within ourselves that passing time can’t take from us. Fear is born from what is taken away from us loss of kids/career/health  etc.

When we win, achieve, have family – all pass with time. We lose our sense of self because we have identified with something in time. Our sense of self is confined by what it is defined through. We have pain because we have identified with something temporary and hoped it to be eternal.

Deciduous trees lose their fruit and leaves, but even though they look barren, they have not lost their potential. A bare tree is something nature requires of the tree so it can meet the winter and store energy to create new life in the spring. When life comes along and blows the leaves off us, and all our fruit is gone. The disappearance of the leaves and fruit is not the disappearance of our possibilities. It is setting us up, to realise there is something greater coming if we will allow it.

The purpose of life is to discover who and what we are intended to be – created anew, brighter, broader, better every moment. When we allow the moments in our lives to reveal that who and what we’ve been has gone as far as it can go, but not as far as there is to go, our happiness is eternal. We are part of ceaseless transformation. And we are both creators and creations ourselves. Life reveals for us where we can take part in an internal and eternal creation. But we need to give up the part of us who only knows ourselves through our creations. Life inevitably reveals to us what needs to change.

I’m really pleased that my wife, Penny, who did so much to make my first book a success, has agreed to co-author these children’s books with me. My wife and I have had a lot of fun (mostly) finalising the first book in our Food Loving Kids series. It has just gone off to the printer in the UK for a pre-Christmas release over there. It will be out in Australia in March 2010 (to find out the latest on this just subscibe to this site as I will be posting updates as we get closer to the release date.)

The first book, Taste with your face: Adventures in healthy eating, is all about teaching children to savour their food. Tasting with your face, rather than just your mouth, is about using your eyes and nose as well. In this way we come fully into the now to get maximum tasting pleasure – remember, we eat more because we taste less. By tasting more, it becomes so much easier to eat less.

I say ‘mostly’ had a lot of fun, because when I’m writing I normally only have myself to argue with. I could ask an opinion of someone and if I didn’t like what I heard, I could go away and do it my way. Not so now …

Today, driving to work, I had this troubling insight come to me. … I’ve realised Penny has this extremely annoying habit - she significantly improves any work I do!

At a recent workshop I was talking about ‘other-sabotage’. This is when a partner does things like starting to buy chocolates and taking their ‘loved one’ out to their favourite restaurant as their weight starts to fall. This lead me to talk about my working definition of love. As a relationship therapist one needs a clear way of understanding love, or else relationships (and life) get very confusing. When people finish a sentence about an abusive parent or partner with ‘… but I know he/she loved me in their own way’ they end up very confused as they hang onto a dream that maybe one day…   True love is not hard to recognise when you apply this definition that I modified from Scott Peck:

True love is a commitment to nurturing personal growth – in both you and the other.

Love is not a feeling – it is a commitment. When we are putting our irritable (and irritating) tired, grumpy child to bed without responding to their annoying behaviour, the dominant feeling is not a loving feeling – but the action is loving. If we see love as a feeling, all long-term relationships must become loveless eventually, for longer periods, as the ‘novelty’ wears off – but not so when you see it as a commitment to nurturing personal growth.  And then, to nurture another’s personal growth requires deep empathy for where they are at and what they need at that point in their life to grow into better people.

If  you only nuture the growth of others and not your own, you clearly don’t love yourself. This will limit how much you can love others by limiting how much they can love you. You will sabotage the relationship once someone loves you more than you do. Equally, our children need to see us take time to meet our own needs, otherwise they will grow up thinking they are only ‘good’ if they are looking after others.

If someone is sabotaging your weight loss, or stopping you from educating yourself, or getting therapy, or maintaining your friendships – it’s not love you’re looking at, it’s the opposite …