A key pillar of the Weight Loss Mindset is dealing with the “I deserve some nice food” script. People I work with seem to be able to cleverly come up with this rationale when things in their life are equally either going well or going badly! (And then when things are so-so, a treat seems to make an enormous amount of sense to make life more interesting!)

For people with this problem we need to come up with ‘non-caloric’ ways to treat ourselves when this script kicks in. A patient of mine and I recently came up with this list –  a great starting point for anyone who has this problem. The trick is to print it off and keep it in your purse/wallet and refer to it as needed – the human mind has a strange habit of getting us to forget these strategies at the critical points when they are most needed. Here are some thoughts – as you can see they vary from what can be done at home in a few minutes (the time it takes to prepare and eat a bowl of ice cream) to larger rewards:

• Buy your favourite trashy magazine and then read a few pages
• Buy some luscious teas from the tea speciality shop and enjoy a cup
• Buy yourself a bunch of flowers from supermarket
• Paint nails or toenails (guys are generally less keen on this one)
• Go to movies
• Call a friend (very powerful if loneliness is the emotional driver)
• Shop for costume jewellery and other inexpensive stuff
• Watch favourite recorded TV show
• Internet surfing for fun (great way to allow cravings to pass)

Everyone needs their own, personalised list, so if this is an issue for you (or the people you work with) get writing!

Ever since I published Weight Loss for Food Lovers, I have been asked, ‘When is the sequel coming out?’ Well, after four years of work I should have some rush copies next month, but I need to warn you all that it will not be what you might expect. You see the ‘sequel’ doesn’t mention the words ‘weight loss’ or ‘eating lifestyle’ or any other words around weight management at all. ‘What’s going on, how is that a sequel?’ would be a fair question. Let me try to give you a fair answer.

I don’t know how many people I have worked with on their weight management over the years – it’s been a lot – and then I have trained and supervised hundreds of other therapists with their more challenging patients. What I have come to see is that the vast majority of people who struggle with their weight are unhappy at some level. They are not necessarily clinically depressed, but they are unhappy.

Food is the self-medication. It promises that ‘being-cuddled-in-your-mother’s-arms-as-you’re-being-fed’ primal, soothing experience. It is the same for my patients who drink too much or use recreational drugs. Others are looking for more love (which often reads as ‘sex’). People make the understandable mistake of thinking that having pleasure, in any of these forms, will make them happier, will sooth their troubled soul. The paradox is that trying to make ourselves happier through pleasure will, in the long run, actually add to our unhappiness. Pleasure is fine along they way, but it does not work as a strategy to be happier. Eating to self-sooth causes most of my patients to feel guilty, angry at themselves and more unhappy.

Paradise Lost, Inadequacy found
Modern life can be tough – technology and greater opportunity creates frustration, confusion and a greater sense of not being good enough, a greater sense of missing out. I remember visiting an idyllic tribal village in Fiji ten years ago where they had just gotten TV. The schoolteacher on this gorgeous island was lamenting how these kids, who previously thought they lived in paradise and had all they wanted, now thought otherwise. Television showed them everything else that they could have, that they did not, and their paradise suddenly fell way short. They started to find that their life as they knew it, was no longer enough, it was inadequate, they were inadequate.

I don’t think turning back the clock is the answer. I’m not convinced life was better a hundred and fifty years ago, or even fifty years ago. Back then, life was simpler, there may have been a greater sense of community and your extended family may have lived nearby. If a parent, or grandparent, was abusing you, however, the legal system was largely unable to stop this and it went unchecked – and the abuser knew this. Thankfully it is not so today where abusers can be punished twenty years, or more, later. And for half the population back then – women – opportunities to be who you could be, who you wanted to be, were very limited.

In working with people  who have been deeply traumatised, as well as the obese, I have only found two things that really sooth unhappy souls – truly loving relationships and having a sense of meaning in life. Amongst the demands, the incessant consumerism and rush of the modern world, life will be meaningless unless we make it meaningful. Meaning, in turn, informs our purpose in life. Lots of things will make us unhappy, how quickly we bounce back will depend on the meaning and sense of purpose that we have in our life. Nothing else, not even loving relationships, has the power to heal major trauma experiences.

For those of you less inclined to read a 300+ page book, in upcoming posts I will walk you thru some of the key principles that have come out of my research, clinical work and writings on how to find meaning and purpose in our lives. This is what I have found to be the most powerful treatment for having too much food, alcohol, drugs or sex in our lives.

PS I would love to hear comments from you about this and other recent posts – to comment, just click on the title of this post and this will open the ‘Reply’ box under the article.

I have been looking over an interesting website – www.obesitymyths.com and while I cannot vouch for its accuracy, it does  make some assertions worthy of closer consideration. I was particularly interested in their comments on how the obesity epidemic was accelerated by a simple change to the definition of obesity. The site tells us that “35 million Americans went to sleep one night in 1998 at a government-approved weight and woke up ‘overweight’ the next morning, thanks to a change in the government’s definition …  ‘Overweight’ had previously been defined as a BMI of 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women; in 1998 it was lowered to a BMI of 25 for both genders.”

A recognised problem with the Body Mass Index, is that it simply measures our weight relative to our height. It does not allow for muscle. The site goes on to cite a research letter published in JAMA (the journal of the respected American Medical Association) that reported that 97% of players in the National Football League are technically overweight and more than 50% are obese. Celebrities who suddenly found themselves overweight included Will Smith and Pierce Brosnan, while Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson immediately became obese. Tom ‘the sexiest man alive’ Cruise woke up to find himself  obese as a result of his height deficiency against his broad-shouldered, muscled body. Read more »

In July 2011, the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) approved the EndoBarrier^® Gastrointestinal Liner (the EndoBarrier) for inclusion on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. The TGA has approved the use of the EndoBarrier for up to 12 months for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity.

It is an interesting approach that is designed to mimic the effects of gastric bypass surgery without the risks of surgery. It looks like a clear plastic sock, open at both ends (see image). It is inserted into the top part of the small intestine just after the stomach. The barrier is placed endoscopically, via the mouth, with imaging assistance so that the doctor can position it precisely. The device works by simply stopping food from making contact with the lining of the small intestine where so much absorption takes place: the duodenum and jejunum. Read more »

I often see people make decisions much more quickly than they need to. It is certainly a habit I am trying to rid myself of. As humans we feel the need, when presented with a question or a problem, to answer it sooner rather than later. It comes from a need, that we all have to varying degrees, for closure, to take the issue off our mind. Alternatively, we can feel we look like we are not that smart if we cannot come up with a quick response. One of my favourite writers, Mark Twain, dealt with our need to respond more quickly than we need to. With his inimitable wit he suggested, “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”

Our drive to respond quickly in making important decisions is not a problem if we’re choosing a movie, big problem if we’re choosing a car, a house, a career … or a partner. From a weight management perspective you would be surprised how much less you eat if you slow down your decision making when it comes to choosing what to put in your mouth next. You see all of these choices are initially driven by emotions around these needs for closure, comfort, or not to feel a fool, or to keep up with the Joneses. Over time, the emotions will be replaced by rationality as our higher self  is given the space to do what it does.

In certain situations, one has to make lightning fast decisions. The following comes from a pre-flight briefing from a Canadian Starfighter F104 instructor (thanks to Noel Whittaker the financial guru who sourced this lovely quote). These jet fighters were the first combat aircraft capable of sustained Mach 2 flight – yes, that is twice the speed of sound – and at full noise, it could go quite a bit faster again! NASA later used them for spaceflight training. So things happen very quickly in these machines and they did not have a great safety rating. Indeed, the Canadians’ nickname for it was the ‘Widowmaker’. Accordingly, the briefing by the trainer to trainee co-pilots went like this:

‘If you hear me yell, “Eject! Eject! Eject!” the last two will be echoes.

If you stop to ask “Why?” you’ll be talking to yourself, because by then you’ll be the pilot.’

Fortunately, we can generally make decisions more slowly in life. I would suggest that as a rather obvious guideline, the more important the decision, the more time should be put aside to make it. So a movie, several minutes; a car several weeks and a partner several months – and then a couple of years more before embarking on the complete lock-in – having children!

When I have to make an important decision, my first response is a question: When is the deadline? Read more »

In response to my last article on meal replacements, I had this insightful response from Cindy, so insightful I want to reprint it in full. Here is what she said:

I have been on the Tony Ferguson meal replacement diet, and it has worked well. It has a Progress phase where you add in normal meals and snacks with some MR. This has been great in learning about food, carbohydrates in particular. It also encourages mindfulness, and after shakes for a while, every mouthful of normal food is a taste sensation and I certainly enjoy it.

What Cindy did not know is that I did some consulting to Tony Ferguson (TF) and actually developed their Progress program. I was very impressed by their preparedness to embrace the principles of the psychological research that I cover in my book. To clarify a couple of points, right from the start the TF program encourages having at least one healthy meal a day made up of lean protein and salad or vegetables. In the Progress phase, this is increased to two meals on some days as we gradually rebuild our relationship with food. This is the phase where we also add back in the more fattening foods that people love like chocolate and cheese. The trick is to learn to eat these foods on your terms, where you control them rather than them controlling you! The reason why diets fail is because people a) feel deprived of these foods and b) when they sneak back into the person’s diet, they go back to their old ways of overeating – having  not learnt to eat them mindfully as Cindy reminds us. Read more »

From time to time I’m asked why it is that I use meal replacements (MRs) in all their forms – shakes, soups, food bars etc – in working with people to lose weight. How does this fit with me repeatedly saying the ultimate goal is not weight loss but developing a new relationship with food and a healthy eating lifestyle?  The short answer is that when it comes to weight loss there is a hierarchy of the totality of interventions that can be used – starting at the bottom. These are outlined in the pyramid on the right.

A couple of key points to note. The most effective form of weight loss and the inevitable one if all those below it fail, is premature death! As you can also see from the pyramid, working on an understanding of the psychological issues that lead to sabotage sits over every intervention.

In the first instance, of course, as any good dietitian will tell you, we should try to manage our weight by eating in a healthy way.  But the question is what to do when this fails? This is when we start to move up the hierarchy – hence my interest in the next level up of MRs because after this level things get more problematic. Read more »

I’ve been asked to talk abit more about Urge Surfing, given its wide application for managing all urges not just those of the food craving fraternity. Indeed Urge Surfing was originally developed to help people manage alcohol and other substance cravings (could it have been that there once was a surfie with a marijuana problem – what would be the chance of that?!). Successful Urge Surfers are to be found in all walks of life – usually at the top end of their game – resisting the seduction of all kinds of problematic urges.

What to do?

So what does being a cool urge surfie look like? Imagine your desires to be like ocean waves. (Which also means there’s no shortage of them and they just keep coming – that’s the human mind for you.) You’re a cool surfer dude/ss and you catch this nice-sized wave and start riding it. As soon as you’re on the wave you start to pay it close attention – your safety and well-being depends upon it. You realise this wave is a dumper, stick with this wave and there’s a good chance that you could be eating sand, or worse, end up on the rocks just over there. What to do? Exit. Pull a turn up the face of the wave, slide over its back and let it go. Let’s paddle back out and wait for the next wave. Take too long to make the call and you won’t have a choice as it turns into a vertical wall of green mashing power and takes you down. In effect, we thank mother nature for all the waves, but we only stay on the ones we want to.

In the same way, we will find ourselves with a desire that’s a problem – a craving for an unhealthy food, drink or smoke. The trick is to see it for what it is and decide early on: Are we going to ride it all the way home or let this one go? You might decide to eat that donut or have that glass of wine. Fine, but on just one condition – you’re going to mindfully savour it and enjoy it to the max. If you decide to use this urge surfing strategy, you will let the craving roll on without you. We’re not going to do battle with it, just, in a Zen way, notice it and let it move on.

First, acknowledge its fullness by saying to yourself, “Thank you mind for that old strategy for dealing with my current emotions, but I would like to see if I can come up with a healthier solution.” You do this, in essence, by giving yourself something healthier to do that will occupy your mind e.g. work on a project, go for a walk, watch TV, take a shower, read a good book/magazine or distract yourself. Make a list of what you can do at these times and keep it in your purse/wallet and refer to it – we often can’t remember what we’ve decided to do when our cravings cloud our mind. Check back in fifteen minutes later. If the craving is still rampant then you may decide to give into it. Remember when it comes to food, the mantra is “I can have it if I really want it, but is it worth the calories?” – but then note the one condition above, if you’re going to ride that bad boy all the way up the beach then do it on your terms and enjoy the hell out of it!

In a comment to this site, Joanne asked me to write about “purpose and the daily manifestation of joy.” I thought I would start with Joy. I have to be a little careful here, because it is a small word that people expect a big emotional experience from. It is learning to appreciate the smaller joys to be found in the now that is the real ‘daily manifestation of joy’. I have tried to capture it thus:

AN ODE TO JOY IN THE NOW

Amidst the unending demands of day to day life

Please help me to be aware of your constant presence

From your small forms like a single cloud in a vast, blue sky

To the large forms like the antics and laughter of the innocent child

Keep me in touch with that same child within me that enjoys to joke and laugh

And remind me to appreciate the good things of my life which I tend to take for granted

Help me to leave my fears in the future where they may or may not come to be

While doing what I can today to prevent their outcome

So that I may return to my appreciation of your eternal presence in the now

Help me to learn what I need to from the pain and sadness of the past

Such that they no longer need to haunt me in the present

So that I may return to my appreciation of your eternal presence in the now

Allow me to receive the care of those who are so kind as to offer this treasure

Appreciating the very full value of your presence at these times

Finally, help me to remember how to be the best that I can be, for that is you within me.

by George Blair-West

In a recent post I told the story of how my wife and I sadly left a spectacular looking dessert that failed the taste test. Sitting behind this is the Mantra:

AM I BEING MINDFUL?
I can have it if I really want it,
is the taste worth the calories?

Many of my patients stick this up on their fridge, pantry and in their wallet (to remind them at the shop) to help themselves develop mindfulness around food. Here is the printout for you to print off, cut up and place in strategic places – The Food Lover’s Mantra

For a long time the Buddhists have reminded us that it is attachment and desire that causes us emotional distress. From unhappiness about current circumstances, to anxiety about the future – as humans we are plagued by the distress of things not being how we want them to be. How do we marry this old Buddhist teaching to modern life?

Surrender is a word that is often thought to equate to giving up. I’m thinking here of voluntary surrender as a way of accepting where we are. But when I examine how life goes badly for people, I rarely find that they surrendered. Not in these terms of surrender as a voluntary process. No, what I see people do is struggle against what is happening to them until they become overwhelmed with anger, unhappiness or anxiety while things get steadily worse. A good example is when people are having relationship problems. They rage at their partner for things not working out, but the healing doesn’t begin until they surrender and start accepting where they are and look to themselves, rather than to their partner. It is a similar process when jobs, or finances, or our weight are not working out the way we desire them to.

But when I hear stories of how people voluntarily surrendered, I hear about a very different process. Mind you, I don’t hear this so often, because if they did this, they are less likely to need to consult me. A defusing occurs with the surrender as they accept where they are, as they open themselves to accept the painful reality of it. As they consciously and voluntarily decide to stop fighting with another, or raging at themselves, a space opens up in which things can move in a very different direction. I think of this as the ‘saving grace’ space. I’m not coming from a religious position here at all. I think of  ‘grace’ as a lovely word with deep connotations around peace and emotional healing.

As the Buddhists tell us, often what we need to surrender is our sense of how things should be or how we desire things to happen in our time frame. Countless times now, I have worked with people with traumatic experiences that turned out to be major turning points for the better in their life. Sometimes they learn to love better than they ever have before. Sometimes they realise that at the time of what seemed to be a horrible trauma they were on the wrong track and that they needed a wake-up call. The higher truth is that we often don’t know what is good or what is bad for us. Adversity is always an opportunity for personal growth. When we surrender, on our terms, we step out of the struggle. We don’t surrender to failure, we simply decide to stop doing what obviously is not working and create a healing space – the space for grace. This is the space, the rich soil, that nurtures the eternal flower of personal growth.

What does it really mean to feel sorry for ourselves after something goes wrong in our life, after we screw up? Why might we want to beat ourselves up? To think of ourselves as a loser? I see people doing it after they go on a binge and gain weight, say something they wish they hadn’t or do something they’re ashamed of. As I have watched many patients do this over the years I have realised that feeling sorry for ourselves and beating ourselves up has certain benefits.

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want
The alternative to beating ourselves up is to focus on what we can learn from the experience. To turn the dissappointment in ourselves, or the pain of allowing others to hurt us, into motivation to grow and do things diferrently next time round. As the saying goes, ‘experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.’ Greater wisdom comes from greater experience. So, in theory, we should try to move to embracing things not working out as soon as we can by letting go of the self-pity and the self-flagellation. So why might we choose not to turn setbacks into learning experiences?

In simple terms, the first benefit in feeling sorry for ourselves, for beating ourselves up, is a protective one. It slows us down, causes us to pause, as we doubt ourselves, so we don’t get ourselves deeper into trouble. The greater benefit however, is that it keeps us safe from the threat of success, of growth. To learn, to grow, takes us to new, higher levels. The higher we go the further we can fall. Much safer to stay down at the lower rungs of failure. Moving into victim mode, feeling sorry for ourselves, seeing ourselves as losers is a superb way of avoiding the opposite of this mode i.e. authoring the meaningful life we might just aspire to … with all of the anxiety inherent to this aspiration.

(By the way, for those of you who are interested, I have just run you through the concept of  ‘Existential Angst’ – the anxiety that goes with taking responsibility for authoring one’s own life.)

The Master of Public Health  Organization (mphdegree.org) offers Masters qualifications from some of the world’s top Universities in this space including the New York Medical College and Liverpool University in the UK. They recently published on their blog site their list of the international top 20 most influential obesity experts from around the world – yours truly made the list – and no, I’m not ranked third, the list is alphabetical! Here it is: mphdegree.org/2010/top20

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

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). So unfortunately, for those using this strategy, people are often still attracted to what’s below the surface – true 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 gave a lovely example of how she used her fat to keep men away.

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 she achieved the end result of avoiding the risk of potential intimacy. I never cease to be fascinated by the endlessly creative spirit of we humans!

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

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.

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 …

It was Laura Lovett who described The Popeye Principle in her detailed paper published in 2005 on the First Nutrition Crisis.* In the 1920′s, following the Great War it was not obesity that was a problem in the USA, it was malnutrition. Created by Elzie Segar, Popeye debuted on 17 January 1929 in the comic strip Thimble Theatre. In 1933, Max and Dave Fleischer adapted the characters of Popeye, his sweetheart Olive Oyl, their foundling adoptive child Sweet Pea and his arch enemy Bruto,  into a series of Popeye the Sailor cartoons for Paramount Pictures. The cartoons were such a success that they ran until 1957 while the comic strip is still rerun today, 80 years later.

Other than being the star of an iconic cartoon series, a movie (played by Robin Williams), video games and hundreds of advertisements, why is Popeye of such interest? Popeye single-handedly (admittedly he does have ferocious forearm muscles!) made spinach the third most popular food in the USA after turkey and ice cream!! And it was not spinach lightly sautéed in butter and garlic and served with a juicy eye fillet, that he made so popular – it was canned spinach!!! All this with the 1930′s technology of an animated cartoon. Imagine what a clever advertising company could do now (and of course  they do do now) with the post-George-Lucas-era wizardry of 21st century technology!

*Published in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Vol 30 No. 5.