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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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 …

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.

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.

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.