When someone comes to me for help, they are seeking guidance
for how to rid the horrific side-effects of dieting. These effects are
described as chronic anxiety, paranoia, panic, fear, and obsessive thinking
about size, weight, clothes, food, and restrictions. They are ridden with incessant
pressure to fix their body, anxiety about food, and are heavily burdened by the
daily task of starving in order to feel safe and adequate in their body.
When you look at the negative emotions one has about themselves,
it's clear why the abuse and dysfunction of dieting is rationalized as a
worthy cause. The obsessive mental focus on restrictions, food, and exercise
are promoted as “healthy”, with the underlying belief that all of the negative emotions
will go away once their body is good enough.
The problem with this focus is that it misdirects and projects the original emotions one has about themselves onto the body. But in fact, the
emotions were there prior to believing weight-loss would make the uncomfortable
emotions go away. Once an individual believes fat loss will make them feel
better emotionally, fat becomes the focal point of cause and effect. In other
words, if you feel ashamed and you believe losing weight will make those
feeling go away, the unintended consequence is that gaining fat becomes a cause
of shame.
For me, days after a traumatic sexual assault, I decided
losing weight would help me direct and control intolerable feelings of loss,
darkness, shame, fear, chaos, and disorientation. Because I didn’t understand
the trauma or recognize why I felt ashamed, my first instinct wasn’t to fix the
experience, but rather to blame and fix myself. My way to resolve feelings of inadequacy,
failure, and chaos was through organization, order, and control of food, and
through a fantasy that fat loss would make me feel powerful and safe.
I consciously made my diet and body my unconscious cause and
effect.
Once I began to successfully restrict food and lose weight I experienced feelings of peace, calm, quiet, safe, and order. But the moment I deviated
from the safety of my diet, my coping
mechanism became my biggest enemy. It became a bigger cause of failure and emotional pain than the original trauma itself.
Feelings of failure, inadequacy, shame, chaos,
disorientation, and panic came flooding back, but worse. The only focus that
would remove those feelings was to eliminate the damage. Purging, excessive exercise and obsessive dieting took over. Like a
rabbit hole, I was sucked into a vicious cycle of mostly shame, fear, panic,
anxiety, starving, and severe psychological pain.
At its worst I would have to exercise to burn at least 1200
calories a day and would starve enough to binge and purge 8-12 a day. All just to
feel fleeting moments of safety. Ninety percent of my day was spend in horror and heavy depression, especially when I realized there was no way
out. It wasn’t until I had decided to
commit suicide that the process unraveled.
In the end, I had to get down to the original emotions and
detach them from my body. I had to experience those emotions as a soul, not a
body, giving me clarity, perspective, and freedom from the torture of trauma and
the suffering of my coping mechanism.
The people who come to me for help, I understand. I know
what Hell feels like and despite feeling inescapable, there is freedom. But not
without going into the original emotions, and not with coping mechanisms to
escape.
When you have the humility to willfully surrender ALL coping
mechanisms you accept responsibility for your emotions. You open your mind to
recontextualize trauma, and have compassion for yourself and others. You open
your soul to the grace necessary to recognize illusions, and the freedom from
having to be defined by them.
There is freedom, and it isn’t with a coping mechanism. Once you open yourself to what you are afraid to feel, you are given perspective. Here is a session with a client where I discuss the insanity of dieting and the truth of what your desire to lose weight is hiding.
SCHEDULE TO WORK WITH ROBIN TODAY: weightlossapocalypse.com
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