Greed and saing ok to stress

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pangelsue
Posts: 571
Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:13 pm
Location: Wisconsin

Greed and saing ok to stress

Post by pangelsue » Mon Jan 29, 2007 5:27 pm

No gain or loss this week but I am still happy with the results. I think I am making headway on gerbil wheel thinking. I just finished reading a book called "How to Survive Your Diet" by Linda Moran. It is a very small book. Even though she is careful to not recommend any particulate diet, she does talk about her own diet and it is a lot like No S. She was an emotional eater and even though it took almost 2 years to lose the weight, her plan to overcome emotional eating was, like Reinhard's diet, basically so simple. There are 2 and only 2 suggestions. Resist greed and let the phrase "stress is tolerable" become our mantra. By resisting greed she means calling overeating what it is, greed. There comes a point when we all realize we are no longer hungry. That no matter how hard we try, we can't duplicate the first wonderful, mood lifting, awesome bite. The experieince is done and it is the time to stop. She suggests going into eating something wonderful looking for that moment and practice......stopping. Like any habit, she says, it will come. Her suggestion is pausing and asking "will another bite be greed?" She talks about resisting other types of greed, like greed for the scale to change or greed to be skinny or greed for people to notice we've lost weight. If it is a lifestyle, we relax into it and start maintaining now.

Even more important is realizing that we all experience 20-40 stressful situations every day of varying intensity and it is not necessary to smother them with food to cover the pain. Pain and discomfort are real parts of life and inescapable. We can experience the stress and tell ourselves, no stress lasts forever and it is ok to feel unhappy and uncomfortable right now. We can try to be extra good to ourselves until the pain passes. She suggests acknowledging and experiencing the stress, feeling the discomfort, then changing gears and moving on. Finally, if the stress was survived without a food bandage, we can pat ourselves on the back. It actually sounds a lot like dealing with a panic attack and I've done plenty of those. She says eventually the battles won against stress will build our confidence to battle emotions without binging to cover the pain. It takes lots of practice and quite a number of failed attempts. But any time we fail and don't let it escalate into more binging, we are winners and need to acknowledge that triumph. I'm going on armed with this information and thought I'd share it with anyone who might find it helpful.
A lot of growing up happens between "it fell" and "I dropped it."

kccc
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Joined: Fri Oct 27, 2006 1:12 am

Post by kccc » Mon Jan 29, 2007 8:48 pm

Thank you for sharing this.

The way she uses "greed" reminds me of "attachment" in some zen podcasts I listen to. Hadn't thought of wanting the scale to move as "greedy," but I can see the concept.

Also like the notion of experiencing the stress/discomfort, acknowledging. Again, it has some zen qualities (or resonance with ideas I'm getting from that.)

Appreciate the info. :)

pangelsue
Posts: 571
Joined: Sun Mar 12, 2006 2:13 pm
Location: Wisconsin

Post by pangelsue » Tue Jan 30, 2007 5:05 am

My daughter said she thought it had Zen qualities too using the same attachment idea. We talked about it for quite some time. Was very cool.
A lot of growing up happens between "it fell" and "I dropped it."

Sinnie
Posts: 1373
Joined: Sun Jul 17, 2005 10:09 pm

Post by Sinnie » Sat Feb 10, 2007 12:30 am

Sue, thank you so much for posting this. I always read Linda Moran's site. She has a blog which she posts little articles on intuitive eating. Very cool to hear what her book is about.

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