Compulsive Overeating (Long)

[Guest guest]

I've been lurking in the background for a long time and just want share what my experience has been.

First, I've been associated with CR since 1994. I've had two very long periods of weight reduction toward CR yet only to have pain agents in my life and my response to them, cause me to fall off the wagon.

I've associated myself with several groups to help me keep focus and I think its better to fall off the wagon and continue to strive for CR than to fall of the wagon and give up. (almost like periods of starvation and receiving CR benefits; then returning to normal eating)

The first group I associated myself with (outside of cronies) when I recognized I had behavioral issues with food, was overeaters anonymous. My thoughts were if extremely heavy people can loose huge amounts of weight, be normal and keep it off for years, then why not take a normal sized person, apply the OA techniques and see if they can practice CR.

It took a while to do all the OA work and I found great benefit. They used things like creating a food plan every day and calling it in to your sponsor. (behavior modification)

Here I used Walfords software and have faithfully created a food plan for over a year and half and emailed it out daily. It's difficult at first, but now I can create a food plan and email it in less than 5 minutes. (everything is hard until you learn it and then it becomes easy)

They use things like the 4th & 5th step to resolve unprocessed trauma. I found a tremendous amount of release when painful emotions were brought to the surface and released. It almost seemed that I used food to cover these painful emotions for my whole life and once the eating behavior was established, it became automatic.

OA uses meetings to help you avoid isolation, remain motivated and prevent backsliding. (I would love to incorporate this feature into CR)

I found this to be of the utmost value. First, I recognized that as a child my needs were never important. I learned to become intimate with food and not people. (especially under stress) When stressed surfaced in my life, my instinctual drift was toward my learned child hood behavior.

How do you reverse 35 some years of learned behavior and replace it with something more positive? Once again, building relationships with like mind people has kept me toward that goal.

Also, in regard to handling unprocessed trauma, I found something that is relatively new in the psychotherapy world called EMDR. It is bilateral stimulation of the left and right sides of the brain. For some reason, this bypasses the thinking part of the brain and allows one to experience the emotions from trauma. (REM Sleep for example)

Huge amounts of unprocessed trauma came to the surface and allowed me to thaw long frozen emotions. This was almost done at what one therapist described as "warp speed." It was like a 100 pound weight was lifted from my shoulders after just 3 sessions.

Slow and steady wins the race.

More later,

Mike Bell