by Jonny Bowden, M.A., C.N.S.
From before you can remember, deep in
the DNA of your unconsciousness, food
has always been conditioned to some
amalgamation of love, security, safety
and/or comfort.
It begins with milk—the real kind, not the fake
kind you get in the supermarket. It had more fat than
the bottled kind, less protein and was warm and
sweet and soothing to your infant taste buds—in
short, it was exactly what your body needed and it
washed away the pain of hunger. Plus, since it didn’t
just materialize from the sky, its delivery usually
meant that someone who cared about you was
around to provide it. A nice double whammy in the
conditioning department.
Bingo. Home run. An association embedded in
your cortex, a Pavlovian field demonstration and an
equation is forever formed: Food equals love.
And, boy, did you learn that lesson well.
And in one fashion or another, it has probably
always been this way. No matter how much we
evolved over the past few million years, one truth
remains: The human infant has one of the longest
periods of helplessness of any mammal. Without a
caretaker, it won’t survive. This serves a double
evolutionary purpose—not only does it bond the
infant to the mother but it bonds the caretaker to the
cared for. It is the building block molecule of the
social contract and bad stuff happens.
Fast-forward 20 to 80 years from the cradle. You
feel pain. You feel loneliness. You feel frustration. You
feel empty. What do you reach for?
I’ll give you a hint. It’s not broccoli.
Food and love have been celebrated and ritualized
in one way or another for as long as there has been
community. Holiday meals. Wedding banquets.
Dinner dates. Family gatherings. “Eat, darling!”
Birthday parties. Tribal hunts and subsequent feasts.
Celebration of the Mass. Passover. Ramadan. You
name it, if there is a social meaning to it, there’s going to be food involved. Food is so powerfully
conditioned to feelings that it seems like an
impossibility to consider food apart from
its context. For many people the mere
thought of a favorite food evokes powerful
associations fusing image, taste, sensation,
feeling, emotion and memory into a textured
nugget of experience that is near
impossible to separate into its constituent
parts.
Indeed, this is precisely the mosh pit
into which most folks attempting to change
their eating habits fall and from which
many never successfully climb out.
In other words, when the boyfriend
dumps you, buttered string beans and
grilled fish just don’t cut it.
Oh that it did. Oh that comfort and
console, soothe and calm could be found at
the end of a forkful of vegetables rather
than crème brûlée. Would that at the end of
a day full of stress and anxiety, that pint of
gourmet ice cream in the freezer did not
sing its siren song quite so loudly. Would
that the voices in our heads chanting the
familiar litany (“It’s not going to kill me,” “I
deserve it after what I’ve been through
today,” “I can start tomorrow”) were not so
well milked.
But they are. And if you’re going to be
successful in managing your weight, you
need to stop waiting for them to shut up
and learn how to live amidst their annoying
chatter.
One of the most valuable lessons I ever
learned happened when I stopped smoking.
Like many people, I figured eventually the
craving would stop; I wouldn’t think about
cigarettes so much and the habit would just
sort of go away by itself. Big mistake. It’s
been over 15 years and even now (very
rarely, it’s true, but occasionally), I’ll get an
urge to fill my lungs with irritating, carcinogenic,
cancer-producing cigarette smoke. Don’t ask me why. Who cares? The
important thing is that I don’t do it. What I learned was that if you wait for the little voices saying “taste me, taste me” or “smoke me, smoke me” to shut up, you’re in for a really long
wait and you will probably never stop doing
what you want to stop doing. The real
action, if found, is not in trying to make the
voices go away. It’s in learning how to disempower
them or at least live with them in
peaceful cohabitation. The voices can go
on—in fact, they will go on, whether you
want them to or not—but you don’t have to
give them the power to run your life. What
I learned when I finally stopped smoking 15
years ago was that I could have the impulse
to do something stupid and destructive like
smoke a cigarette and yet not empower it. I
could notice it, watch it, experience it and
let it float by rather than being sucked into
the vacuum of its pull.
That’s empowerment.
And it doesn’t necessarily come cheap.
From infancy we cry when we’re hungry
and stop when we’re fed. We learn that the
pain and discomfort of hunger can be
stopped by a bottle and replaced with the
warm, fuzzy comfort of a full tummy, often
accompanied by affection and a soothing
voice. Food becomes conditioned to the
easing of pain and discomfort, becomes the
means by which we soothe emotional
distress, becomes the tool with which we
self-medicate our anxieties and hurts and
desperations and loneliness, become the
surrogate for human contact or the bridge
with which we form connections. Food is
celebrations: gatherings, lunches, buffets,
dinners, dating. Food is familiar. Food is
solitary.
Food becomes a friend who is reliably,
consistently, dependably always there.
No wonder dieters feel they are going
mad.
What’s more, like a drug, the most
destructive foods feed addictions. Highcarbohydrate,
high-sugar convenience and
comfort foods produce not only corresponding
high blood sugar and insulin levels,
leading to even more craving, but higher
levels of serotonin. In other words, “instant
Prozac.” In sensitive people, particularly
those who may have low serotonin levels to
begin with, a carbohydrate binge is the
equivalent of self-medicating. I’ve heard
more than a few folks describe the feeling
after a sugar binge as being almost “high.”
So what to do?
First let’s frame the question.
Is there warmth and comfort without
food? Sometimes.
But more important, is there warmth and comfort without self-destruction?
TOP 10 questions to ask yourself.
Here are the top 10 things I've
learned to ask when it seems like
nothing else will do the trick but
the food you want the most and
need the least.
1. What am I really feeling?
2. Can I just be satisfied with this feeling?
3. If I eat this food or go on this binge, what is it costing me?
4. What's really important to me rightnow?
5. Is there a better way to take care of myself?
6. What gift can I give myself right now that won't cost me any power?
7. How can I nurture myself right now without hurting myself?
8. If I were a child right now, how would I like to be comforted?
9. What could I do right now that would make me feel good tomorrow?
Finally, and perhaps most important of all...
10. If I do eat this comfort food, can I savor it, enjoy it, relish it and then let it go . . . without beating myself up and without giving up on my commitment?
If the answer to the last one is yes, well then . . .
Bon appetit.
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