Lighten the Load

Do you have any idea just how many women overeat? Not just a little bit every now and then but the kind of overeating that we feel ashamed of, that we hide from our friends, colleagues and family. The kind of overeating that we would be mortified if anyone found out about. The overeating that we think is disgusting, out of control, crazy… So many women do it. The most damaging thing about it is the guilt and the shame that we carry around with us like a heavy rucksack on our backs. What makes overeating so painful, so agonising, is the way we torture ourselves about it. And it’s the secrecy that perpetuates the shame and the pain.

Have you ever talked about your overeating? Or is it a secret? Have you ever talked about you overeating with your mates, your mum, your sister or your partner? Do you mention it at all? Maybe you make light of it, pass it off as an inconsequence, allude to it without going into detail about how you really feel, or maybe you avoid talking about it altogether. Do you talk about what it’s really like to be desperate to lose weight or how you feel about your body? Mostly we stay silent, we hide, we keep the secret. We don’t talk about overeating. The idea of telling anyone is horrifying.

In fact, if we are willing to talk about it, we can lighten the load. By being honest, with others and with ourselves, by not hiding and guarding our overeating as a secret, we make it more ordinary and less dramatic. Barely a decade ago no one would have admitted to feeling depressed. Today there's so much less shame about it than there used to be and so much more understanding and compassion. How would it be to tell someone about your overeating? Someone you trust. You don't have to tell them everything. It doesn't have to be a big confession, it's about taking one small step towards telling it as it really is rather than colluding with womankind about how pathetic we are, how all we need is a bit more willpower, an ounce more self control. When we can talk about it, about what it's really like, even just a little bit, we start to dispel the taboo and we feel lighter, freer and better about ourselves. And in talking and breaking the silence, we give others permission to do the same.

You don't have to carry the guilt, shame, embarrassment (whatever it's like for you) around with you all the time. Join us for the Beyond Temptation Workshop on 3rd March and lighten the load. Meet like minded women, have an eye opening, enlightening, memorable day - one which will show you how to transform you life with food so that you feel normal and in control around food.

Why everything you have tried in the past hasn't worked and why Beyond Temptation will

Virtually every conventional approach deals with overeating in one of two ways.

THE JUST STOP IT APPROACH
The dieting industry’s favourite answer to overeating is simply to tell you to STOP IT! You know it’s bad for you. You know it’s why you’re overweight, you’ll feel better if you don’t... so just stop it. Summon every ounce of willpower or determination or whatever it takes to resist the urge and control yourself. If you want to lose weight badly enough, then you’ll do it, right?

THE OVEREAT, BUT ONLY ON FREE FOODS APPROACH
Some programmes incorporate overeating as part of their solution. The alternative to eating too many chocolate bars is to overeat as much as you like as long as you choose foods that they say are not fattening. They suggest you turn to low calorie, low fat, low carb foods (or whatever isn’t on their forbidden list) or fill yourself up with low calorie drinks. Binge on carrot sticks or celery, stuff yourself with ‘free’ soup, cram in as much cucumber or spinach as you like, nibble on rice cakes all day if it helps or pick at lettuce leaves and sunflower seeds in an attempt to satiate the insatiable. Some of these programmes positively encourage overeating with days when you can ‘eat as much as you like’ as long as you stick to certain foods. They go as far as to exhort you to ‘pile your plate’ with as much as you want.

None of them address the question of why we overeat and how we can stop. Not just for the few weeks or months but for good. Relying on willpower or simply replacing overeating chocolate with overeating carrots is not the answer. The sad reality is that the diets pave the way to overeating. Whatever diet we choose, we spend so much time depriving ourselves of the food we really want that as soon as we give up dieting, we’re eating for Britain... overeating all those off limits goodies, taking the brakes off... until the next diet.

THE BEYOND TEMPTATION APPROACH
In our first book, Beyond Chocolate, we wrote about own experience as two women who had struggled with our weight for years. We shared our personal stories and described how we transformed our relationship with food and our bodies. It’s six years since we wrote Beyond Chocolate and we haven’t stopped exploring and experimenting for a minute. We certainly have not stood still, happy in the knowledge that we’d cracked it! The 10 principles are the basis of a healthy and balanced relationship with food. As we say in the book, we didn’t invent them (well, the ‘Be your own guru’ principle is unique to Beyond Chocolate) we simply took age-old, common sense ideas and made them accessible. And since then we’ve been looking at overeating in depth, we’ve questioned and investigated. We’ve watched all our wonderful participants grappling and experimenting and out of their work and ours has emerged a process, a way of engaging with the part of us that is driven to overeat, the part of us that turns to food for comfort, or sweetness or distraction or just because it’s there, the part of us that falls into the trap over and over again, despite our very best intentions, despite everything we know. We have created a process which is not only unique and effective but which teaches us so much about ourselves and our overeating that we believe it enriches every part if our lives.

We have been diving into the subject of overeating day after day, we have put it under the microscope and observed it, we’ve worked with it and we’ve carried out experiments (on ourselves!). We know more about overeating than we could ever have imagined was possible to know. And we’ve poured all of that knowledge and understanding into our new book and our new Beyond Temptation Workshop.

The aim of both the book and the workshop is to guide you to stop overeating and discover how to live your life without turning to food, any food, as a treat, a salve or an escape. The way to stop is to identify the reasons you overeat and then deal with them, with a set of practical, effective tools.

Join us on March 3rd, we'll be taking you on an overeating tour and by the end of it you will have all the information, insights, experience and tools you need to have a relationship with food which feels balanced, healthy and free. See you there!

Revenge Eating

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.
Revenge eating occurs when something has happened to annoy or inconvenience us. Revenge eating is a way of ‘getting back’ at whoever or whatever that was; whether it was a rude shop assistant or an empty shelf or an ungrateful relative or even when we wake up in a bad mood.
Imagine that you’ve seen a photo in a cafe window of a succulent sponge pudding, upside down in a pool of creamy yellow custard, and it has a slice of pineapple on top with a cherry ... and you decide that tomorrow lunch time you’ll go to that cafe and have that pineapple sponge pudding for lunch. You look forward to it all the rest of that day and all the next morning. But when you get to the cafe and order the pudding, what appears in front of you doesn’t look anything like the photo in the window. What appears in front of you is a rock solid disk of something that has apparently drowned in a bowlful of custard. There may be a pineapple slice and a cherry in there somewhere but you lack the necessary tools to excavate them from this sorry mess.
And besides, this wasn’t what you ordered. So you take it back, complain, get the money back – but the lack of pineapple upside down pudding in your life is causing a problem. The problem is that the body was expecting that pudding, the mind and senses had been anticipating the enjoyment of the pudding and now – no pudding.

So, revenge eating becomes an increasingly attractive option. Revenge eating consists of instantly purchasing something similar or even bigger than the thing you’ve been deprived of and eating it defiantly whether or not you actually wanted it. In the case of the pineapple upside down pudding, it was an iced Belgian bun with fresh cream in and a cherry on the top. No need to excavate to find any of those ingredients.

But it’s not the same. It’s not satisfying. Advanced revenge eating then entails eating everything else in sight that’s (a) edible, (b) not nailed down and (c) not someone else’s. And at the end of this restless bingeing the revenge eater was left with a profound dissatisfaction with herself, life and the continuing lack of pineapple upside down pudding.

At some point it may well become essential to the preservation of life as we know it, for this particular revenge eater to procure a satisfactory pineapple upside down pudding one way or another, but at the end of that particular episode I was left with an over-full stomach and an aching dissatisfaction in my chest.

What Beyond Chocolate has helped me to see is that revenge eating hurts no-one but myself. It won’t matter how much I eat; the cafe that cruelly deprived me of pineapple upside down pudding will not suffer in the least if I eat myself into a catatonic state or feel sick all afternoon. It’s only me that has to cope with the after-effects of my revenge eating. So I am gradually learning how to cope with food disappointment and the lack of availability of what I want on occasions, and to do so without revenge eating.
Enjoy is one of the keys to this process – if I won’t enjoy eating the substitute, it’s better to wait until I can find something else I would enjoy. Tuning In will help too – what is it that I actually want? The sweetness of the pineapple? The creaminess of the custard? The fluffiness of the sponge? And Stop When You’re Satisfied will save me from the uncomfortable after-effects of over-eating.
It’s time to take revenge in other ways ... ;)

I've been on a diet...

I spent the last week of my holiday on an enforced diet. It was horrible. A friend of mine who works in tourism had got us a great deal in a 4 star hotel in Sicily and I have to say the place was beautiful (the picture above is the view from our room). Unfortunately the food was absolutely disgusting. And we were full board. And we were miles from anywhere...

Now I am a fussy eater at the best of times, I have to admit. Not in the sense that I won’t eat many foods because actually I’ll eat pretty much anything apart from bell peppers and large amounts of raw garlic (and not because I don’t like them but because they really don’t like me!). No, what I’m fussy about is the quality of the food I eat. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a mum who cooked great food, maybe it’s because my Dad took me to the best restaurants from a very young age and passed on his love of fine dining. Maybe it’s years spent at boarding school being forced to eat truly revolting meals. Whatever the reason, I cannot, will not, eat badly prepared, low quality food.

It was really quite awful. All meals were served buffet style and I found myself faced, three times a day, with rows of tables, groaning under the weight of platter after platter of bad food. The ingredients were cheap and of poor quality, the cooking was sloppy and everything tasted wrong. Even my other half who is the opposite of fussy (and often complains about my exacting standards) found himself staring glumly at his plate and picking reluctantly at the gloopy mess on offer, agreeing with me that it was downright awful. 

I was thrown right back to my dieting days...wanting so badly to eat but not being able to, hungry a lot of the time and constantly, desperately searching for “something nice”. I drank a lot of Coke and practically lived off these dry, tasteless biscuits they served at breakfast (a sort of bad version of Rich Tea biscuits) which at least didn’t make me want to gag. I’d stuff my pockets with them in the morning and nibble on them all day. It was hugely dissatisfying.

The whole experience reminded me of what it’s like. I have been so comfortable around food for so long now that I sometimes forget what it was like back in the old days when I surrendered control and put myself on some ridiculously restrictive regime, forcing myself to eat tiny quantities of tasteless food. Back in the days when large chunks of my day were spent thinking, obsessing about food. Thinking about what I could eat, what was available on my meagre rations and what I wanted to eat, what I craved. Back in the days when eating or thinking about food was always accompanied by feelings of anxiety and frustration. Back in the days when I was always on the lookout for ways to beat the ‘system’ and spent a lot of time day dreaming about the wonderful foods I couldn't have. It reminded me that there are millions of women out there who CHOOSE to live like this and of just how stressful it can be.

Of course I survived and we made up for by going out for a fantastic seafood meal at one of Palermo’s best restaurants on our last day. One of the best I’ve ever had.  And just like every other ‘diet’ I’ve come off in the past I stuffed my face. I shoveled the food in, ate with my fingers in a frenzied delight and ate and ate and ate until I couldn’t eat another crumb. Heaven.

Ooo I get soooo cross sometimes!

Gretel Hallet, is a Trained Chocolate Fairy and is running the Getting Started half day workshop in Norwich - perfect for beginners to experience the core principles of Beyond Chocolate and equally great as a refresher for any Beyond Chocolater. If you live in East Anglia and want to know more about Beyond Chocolate or her workshops, get in touch with Gretel.

Ooo I got cross today! It doesn’t often happen, but there are only so many times I can hear my chronically misguided workmate (let’s call her Vee) say things like, ‘I don’t have any self-control’, ‘If I had those biscuits on my desk, I’d just eat them all,’ ‘I can’t eat that because I’m being good’, ‘I eat too much because I like food, there’s no other reason’...
I got cross and pointed out that self-control is nothing to do with it – she’s over-eating not just because she ‘likes the taste of food’ but because it’s doing something for her, because it helps her in some way. Vee denied this and repeated that she just likes the taste of food. I asked how many of the biscuits in the jar on my desk she would actually taste if she really did sit down to eat them all? Vee laughed and repeated that she would definitely be able to eat them all. I said it would probably be only the first few she would actually enjoy, because after that, the taste would be gone, along with the enjoyment. Vee doubted it and seemed stuck on the idea that she overeats because she enjoys food.

I feel so cross that so many women are so stuck in the diet/fail/self-blame/diet/fail cycle. Vee has been dieting since she was 12 years old, she informed us today. She has lost and gained weight over and over and over again. From some of the things she’s said, I can tell that somewhere she knows that dieting doesn’t, work because if it did, she wouldn’t have gained the weight back again so many times. Unfortunately she hasn’t got that far in her reasoning. Vee thinks that she gains weight because she has no will-power. She has now embarked on a self-punishing diet of undressed salad with cooked chicken or ham, low fat yogurts and cereals without milk and lots of fruit, in her latest attempt to lose weight. When I brought a salad in for my lunch she praised me for being so ‘good’. I said "It’s salad weather and I like eating salad at this time of year". Vee replied that it was never salad weather for her. SO WHY IS SHE EATING SALAD?!?!? Oh, she has to because she’s got to lose weight and she has no will-power around food, so she has to surround herself with diet food and avoid all other ‘bad’ foods ....
As you may have gathered, Vee is a VERY strong minded woman. She lives by certainties and one of her certainties is that she overeats and that she has no self-control around food. Vee is not open to considering her eating habits in any different way, nor does she seem open to any point of view that doesn’t chime in with her own.

This has been compounded recently when one of our colleagues (Bea) was told by a health care professional that she has to lose weight for the sake of her health. Vee pounced eagerly, instantly trotting out all the diet clichés you can imagine. ‘You’ll have to be good now,’ ‘You’ll have to eat low-fat foods now,’ etc. She watches everything Bea eats and comments on whether it’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ and even asks Bea what she ate at home last night and for breakfast in the morning.

Vee and another colleague (Jay) recently had a conversation that showed very clearly that both of them know that diets don’t work. They did a duet about how ‘being good’ leads to bingeing and failure and how they would then try to ‘be good’ again, even though they know that as soon as a cream cake leapt out at them, they would fall victim to its evil charms and ‘fail’ all over again. THEY KNOW THIS BUT THEY KEEP DOING IT!!

Oooo, I feel so cross! I usually keep quiet when I hear these conversations around me because attempting to reason with Vee or Jay results in them asserting very powerfully their own ‘truths’ and not wanting to engage with my suggestions that it could be different. But today I did challenge Vee to eat all the biscuits in my jar ... she hasn’t done so, yet– but then that’s because she has ‘no will-power’ not because she physically couldn’t, didn’t want to or agreed with me that it wouldn’t be enjoyable. Grrrrr!