In order to maintain a 250 pound weight loss for nearly a decade I had to dis-illusion myself about myself. To put it simply, I had to stop living with blinders on. I began by observing my thought processes and watching my body reactions. I discovered that whenever I felt I didn't have a real choice in a given situation -- that someone else was "making me" do something -- my stomach would ache, and I would feel stressed. It's probably no accident that by some perverse twist of etymological fate desserts is stressed spelled backwards. What was really going on, however, was that the helpless-powerless button in my irrational thinking was being pressed automatically.
Most people who are binge eaters or who have other addictions have these buttons. I call them their panic buttons. We tell ourselves that we are powerless, rather than acknowledging that we are, in fact, actually choosing the situation and putting ourselves into it. Now before you go off on me about all the people who have lost their jobs or are on the street or other dire circumstances, I am not talking about them. I am talking about those of us with garden variety eating disorders. Those of us who at some point felt threatened as kids or didn't learn healthy coping skills. Those of us who didn't learn that by truly embracing that we had a choice in any given situation, we could regain our power.
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