Hey you, with your habit of smothering your so-called healthy salad with gobs of the Thousand Island dressing you love so much…and you, the one who’s always snitching “just a spoonful” (and then another and another) as you heat up the macaroni and cheese you supposedly bought “for the kids.”
And you, too—the ones subsisting on little more than black coffee, raw carrots and yogurt…or on exactly, precisely the same foods in the same amounts day after day after day.
No matter whether your way of eating is overly self-indulgent or overly rigid, Daily Health News life coach Lauren Zander has a message for you. She wants all of you to stand up right now and say these words: “I am an addict and a liar.”
She means this in the nicest possible way, of course—even if her seemingly harsh suggestion leaves you sputtering indignantly. That’s because name-calling on ourselves is a very effective tool. It motivates us to understand and fix our issues…and lots and lots of us have issues with food. Yes, it’s strong and it’s shocking, she agreed, and that’s a good thing. “If the label says ‘poison,’ you won’t drink it,” she said. Calling yourself a food addict and a liar puts that label right in your face where you can’t ignore it any longer. And that’s the first step toward overcoming the problem…
If you “lie”—by which Zander means make excuses for why it’s acceptable or necessary to eat in the overindulgent or obsessively controlled way that you do—then the truth is, your eating habits are not healthy. Food is fuel, and our bodies are designed to like it because we need it.
But when food turns into something else—the primary source of pleasure in your life or a way for you to exert control over your life (or over other people’s lives)—then it’s harmful. Emotional eating on either end of the spectrum, whether to make yourself feel better or to whip the world into shape, is an addiction, Zander said, because you’re not feeding yourself…you’re filling a hole.
Telling the truth to yourself about what, how and why you eat sets the record straight, so you can then make the changes you need to be healthy and to look and feel good. “Lying and making excuses leaves you in the role of the victim. You need to realize that you can choose instead to be a conqueror,” Zander said.
Why does she insist that you call your unhealthy eating habits an addiction? Because doing so moves you past denial and reframes your unsound approach to food as a challenge you can work to overcome. “If I get stuck with a label that I don’t like, it motivates me to do something about it,” Zander said, noting that this is one reason why 12-step programs such as Narcotics Anonymous suggest that people introduce themselves as addicts.
Zander believes that being honest with yourself is the solution to any and all food addictions (as well as other types of addictions). Honesty, she said, is the road to healing and a better life for the person who is 100 pounds overweight and uses food as a substitute for love…for the person who is 15 pounds overweight because she always has to have a Danish when they’re served at morning meetings and cookies on “difficult days”…and for the marathon runner who never, ever allows himself the pleasure of eating pasta or bread except for the night before a race.
To become rigorously honest, you need to take a hard look at the way you speak to yourself. “The inner dialogue inside your head is sick, and you don’t even realize it. You think that what you’re hearing in your head is the truth, but it isn’t. You didn’t eat the chips because you had a bad day—you ate the chips because you told yourself it was OK to eat them. You put them in your mouth. They only got there because you put them there. Facing that fact and accepting responsibility is the thing—the only thing—that can give you the power to choose not to do it the next time.”
So what’s the fix? Accountability to yourself is the goal. When she coaches a client, Zander inserts herself as the “third party” in the relationship between that client and the voice in the client’s head. “I’m there to literally mediate between the ‘personality’ of the inner dialogue and the actual person,” she explained. “I help people hear how the voice talks to them, and I show them how truly sick it is to allow themselves to become victims of that inner voice.”
If you’re recognizing yourself in any of this, congratulations! You have just taken the first step toward conquering your food addiction by admitting that you have this problem. Get to know the destructive inner voice that’s urging you to eat the way you do. Then give that voice a dark but funny name, Zander suggested—whether that voice is the uber-controlling extremist (Helga the Hater?) who won’t let you have a small slice of your daughter’s birthday cake…or the nasty punishing one who heaps so much shame on you for eating one cookie that you might as well have five more (Sadistic Sam?)…or the overly permissive one who so often reminds you that you really do deserve that double cheeseburger and jumbo-size fries (Please-Me Pat).
Now that you’ve named it, recognize that voice as a criminal in your life—and commit yourself to taking it down. When it speaks to you, tell it firmly, “You are the voice of my addiction, not of reality—and I am not going to listen to you any more.” Once you acknowledge that destructive internal voice for what it really is and stop believing its lies, Zander said, it will lose its power over you.
