Don't Diet, Live-It!tm
A JourneyBook for Healing Food, Weight and Body Issues
Introduction
(excerpt from The Don't Diet Live-It Workbook)
As licensed counselors, with many years of experience leading groups and helping individual clients with food, weight, and body issues, we've long had an interest in creating a book to help others. At least as important as our professional credentials is the fact that we've both "been there" with food, weight, and body issues of our own.
Having spent most of our lives in the grips of dieting, overeating, sneaking food, being fat and miserable, being thin and miserable (and being every weight in between), we each embarked on a journey of recovery. We think it's important that you know a little bit about who we are and how our separate Journeys began.
Andrea:
I spent most of my life hating my body, obsessed with food, and starting and failing countless diets. As a young person, I dieted with friends and family members, and snuck food after meals. However, as the years progressed, and the pain that fed my eating continued to go unchecked, so too did my insane relationship with food and my body.By the time I started college, I had gained and lost the same 30 lbs. so many times that (as Lily Tomlin once said) "my cellulite had déjà vu." I did not know the source of my pain because all my attention was focused on my weight and the food I ate. I became bulimic (although I had not even heard of the term then). What began as an innocent experiment in weight control turned into an eight year addiction to bingeing on excessive amounts of food and then purging. At one point I realized I was out of control and could not stop. What strikes me so deeply now about that period is how many friends and family members I had around me and yet nobody knew of my silent agony.
Each day I courageously tried to "start fresh," "be good," eat only a little. Each evening, however, after finally breaking down and stuffing myself with food, I ended up full of remorse and self-hatred. Vomiting as an attempt to get rid of the food and feelings only made me feel worse. These were extremely painful years. My sickness around food and disgust with my body colored every area of my life. Because of my low self esteem, I felt inferior to other women and had unhealthy interactions with men. I was always uncomfortable in my clothing, and I had difficulty focusing on my studies because, although I ate a lot, I was undernourished. I was also unclear about what I was going through.
It was Geneen Roth's first book Feeding the Hungry Heart that finally proved to me that somebody else (actually, lots of somebody elses) felt out of control with food and weight. Realizing for the first time in my life that I was not alone was the most liberating feeling I had ever experienced. This revelation led me to seek therapy and a support group. I began to learn about the pain inherent in my binges, the anger in my vomiting, and the deep grief hidden within my excess weight. It has been a long, hard, and wonderful road since then. The Journey is what this book is about. I am committed to recovering from bulimia and body perfectionism, and I am succeeding. It's hard to believe that my greatest pain has led me to my greatest joys: a wonderful career, self-love, and intimate, loving relationships in which I can fully be myself. I could never have dreamed of so much during my days alone on the couch with food as my closest friend.
Marsea:
Part of me will always be amazed that I actually recovered from what was once a lifetime of binge-eating, dieting, bingeing, starving, bingeing, hating myself, and more bingeing.When I was 17 years old I wrote in my diary, "I have to eat nothing or else I eat everything, that's just the way it is." Around that time I turned fasting into an art form, starving myself for weeks at a time in order to "reduce the damages" from my binge-eating. I also became an expert on nutrition and health foods so that I could eat "perfectly" in front of others and keep my secret life with food unknown to anyone but me. The way I ate in public prompted people to tell me "You have such amazing willpower!" or "I could never discipline myself like you do!" They only saw me eating salads and vegetables, never eating boxes of cookies, gallons of ice cream, or all the leftovers from the plates in the kitchen.
Years later, at the height of my food addiction, I could no longer even pretend I had willpower. I was 60 lbs. above my most comfortable weight, living alone in the mountains (in an attempt to get away from food) and unable to work. It seemed to me that every job involved food, looking good, or the ability to concentrate, and I was so out of control I couldn't even consider trying. I felt like I was on the outside of society, looking in: my whole world was about my eating and my weight, while other people seemed to have actual lives they were living.
Recovery hasn't been easy, yet it has become my greatest accomplishment. I am no longer obsessed or out of control with food. In fact, food and I have a friendly, peaceful, and sometimes distant relationship. I have achieved the weight loss I had always dreamed of, but the process was slower, deeper, and longer lasting than I would have expected. And it had very little to do with what I ate! (Quite different from the quick and easy, short-term fix that diet clubs enticed me with.) I now have a body I like, a life I enjoy (much of the time), and a self that is good to me and fun to be around.
About Our Journeys
We refer to this book as a JourneyBook because we have found that recovery is a process, a Journey. It is not a single event, a destination, or a number on the scale. It is a way to live. The process involves changes, challenges, and insights. Much like traveling to any unknown location, it can be scary. The only reason that we were both willing to go on this Journey was that we had each come to a point in our lives where we knew we were at a dead end: our food compulsions, self-hatred and body obsessions had us trapped in a prison with no other way out.The first necessity on our respective Journeys was to break our isolation. We each had thought we were the only ones who struggled daily with food and weight issues. There were no maps or directions on boxes of cookies or bags of chips to tell us where to go for help. And there was no one to guide us after our latest diet ended or failed. Fortunately, we were each led, separately, to a support group where we learned to be honest about our feelings and our lives. When we began to admit our problems to and share our pain with people in the group, we learned that we were not the only ones who suffered in this way. We discovered there were other people who had found or created maps and directions to guide them, and later us, on the journey of recovery.
Next we learned that hating ourselves was a hindrance rather than a help in this process. We had always thought that if we could just get to the "perfect" weight we would like ourselves and be happy. We now know that no weight is ever perfect enough to do the enormous job of creating happiness. We found that we had to first accomplish the difficult tasks of liking ourselves and treating ourselves well before we could ever live comfortably in our bodies and end up with bodies we liked.
The next leg of our Journey has been a long one (in fact, we're still on it). Instead of focusing on where we are going and whether or not we will ever arrive (and how many calories, or lost pounds it will take to get there), we have begun to focus on the trip itself. We began to notice who was traveling with us and to be curious about the scenery around us. We found that focusing on food and weight had kept us from seeing and being where we were at the moment and from knowing what we really needed. We have had to teach ourselves to pay attention while driving, to travel at our own pace, stop when necessary, honk the horn when in danger and to get regular tune-ups along the way. In other words, we have had to learn how to be present, how to take care of ourselves in the present, and how to cope with problems that come up. Yes, it has gotten rocky at times, and sometimes we have even gotten lost or broken down; but we, and hundreds of our clients, have found this Journey incomparably more rewarding than that old trip from the couch to the refrigerator, to the scale and back again.
Our journey of recovery has taught us how to be where we truly want to be, go where we want to go, and how to get off roads we don't want to be on. As a result, we now enjoy our travels. We live with full lives rather than full stomachs. Our latest adventure, creating this JourneyBook, has been another fulfilling road trip. We invite you to join us.
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