Tag Archives: EATING DISORDER

Eating Disorder or Mind Disorder?

Posted on August 24, 2012 by Michael

This week’s guest blogger is Melissa Costello. Melissa, founder of KarmaChow.com, is a Culinary Nutritionist & Wellness Coach living in Santa Barbara, California. On October 2nd, her first cookbook, The Karma Chow Ultimate Cookbook, will appear at bookstores nationally. She is the co-host of the online cooking and yoga series, Food & Flow produced through YogaMint and host of Beachbody’s Ultimate Reset Cleanse.

I have had a life-long struggle with a mild eating disorder and distorted body image. As I learn more and more about myself and my “not-so-fun” addictive habits and thoughts, what I have come to realize is that I don’t have an eating disorder – I have a mind disorder.

My mind is what creates the obsessive thoughts about food and my body. And in the past, everything my mind told me, I tended to believe. My thighs are too big, my arms are too fat, and my butt is too big. No one will love me if I don’t have the perfect body. If I eat anything with fat in it, it will make me fat. If I eat ANY food, I will get fat. And the banter goes on and on. You can imagine how tiring that could be.

When I was in my 20’s, I had an exponential amount of energy, so I would just obsessively exercise thinking that would solve my “fat” problem. The banter in my mind would still be there, but I would numb it out with exercise or drinking alcohol and partying. Now as I move into my mid 40’s, I find that I want to be gentler on myself, that numbing out is not an option and hasn’t been for a long time.

The other day I was on a hike and there was a couple up in front of me hiking together. The girl was rambling away the whole hike up the mountain, while I silently was behind them huffing and puffing, thinking; “Wow, that girl is in shape. I can barely catch my breath.” I immediately went into judging myself. As I approached the top of the hike, they were there taking a rest. The guy was huffing and puffing just like me and she was still jabbering away! We ended up chatting and hiking down the trail together, and in our conversation I came to learn that she was 26 and loved beer and coffee. I chuckled to myself inside, because I remembered those days vividly when I would treat my body not-so-good and still have a ton of energy to work-out and do life.

As I have been on a spiritual journey, I am listening to my mind less and less and tuning into the voice of my heart. In my heart, there is no such thing as a disorder, or a fat body or any of these other horrendous things my mind likes to make up to trick me. Nothing my mind tells me is real. It only says the things that it knows from when I was a young kid and absorbed any negative comment that I heard from other people as true. As a teen and young adult, my brother would tease me and say I had a big butt. Mind you, I was a thin rail my whole adult life and was never fat, but just by him saying this, I believed I had the biggest butt in the world and that led me to a bout with bulimia (which wasn’t for me), going on the fat free binge, obsessive exercising and wearing long shirts that covered my butt no matter what. For years, I believed these four words, “you have a big butt.” My mind attached onto them like a leech and never did I even consider that it wasn’t true. I’m sure you can relate to that in some other area of your life.

Now what I do to get past these obsessive and untrue thoughts is to observe my mind, talk to it and tell it to be quiet. I know when those old beliefs are running versus when I am truly in my heart. That mind disorder will always be there, but as I connect more to myself, and the Universe, it gets quieter and quieter. The way I do this is to engage in activities that bring me joy, because when I am feeling joy, I am present and when I am present, there is NO WAY I can be listening to the un-serving commentary that goes on in my disordered mind.

I would be lying if I said I was no longer attached to the way I looked and that I didn’t still have these thoughts of a big butt or fat whatever. It’s a process and I know that the more I love myself, honor my body, do the things I enjoy and spend time with people I love, the disorder and my mind have less power over me.

So I ask you…How can you bring peace to a constant mind chatter that may leave you feeling broken, sad, fat, whatever? What has someone told you about yourself that you took on as a truth, even though it was farthest from it?

What can you do to experience joy and freedom for yourself?

Find what you love and do it now, because this is one of the only things that will help you be free if you find that your mind likes to run the show!

 

Melissa Costello, founder of Karma Chow has always had a passion for healthy, delicious food and nutrition. As a Nutritional Educator and Wellness Coach, Melissa works one on one with clients teaching them how to live a happier, healthier life through a plant-based, whole foods diet. On October 1st, her first cook book The Karma Chow Ultimate Cookbook, will appear at bookstores nationally. Melissa has been featured on TV Guide’s, “Secrets of the Hollywood Body”. She is also the co-host of the online cooking and yoga series, Food & Flow produced through YogaMint.com. She teaches cooking classes at local Los Angeles Whole Foods store and private homes across the US.

Check out her website: http://karmachow.com/

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Forget Willpower! Stop Mindless Eating (and Other Bad Habits) Through Disruption

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Michael

This week’s guest blog is written by Heidi Grant Halvorson. Dr. Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science. Heidi is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School. She is a an expert blogger for Fast Company, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBrief’s SmartBlog on Leadership. Her writing has also been featured on CNN Living and Mamapedia. Her new book “Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals”, and her Harvard Business Review ebook, “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently” are available on Amazon.
You can contact Heidi at heidi.grant.halvorson@gmail.com

Do you snack every night in front of the television? Do you drink a little too much when you are out with your friends? Do you ever find that you’ve smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, bitten off half your nails, or eaten an entire bag of Doritos without realizing you were doing it?

That’s the real problem when it comes to ridding yourself of bad habits – back in the beginning, when the behavior was new; it was something you did intentionally and probably consciously. But do anything enough times, and it becomes relatively automatic. In other words, you don’t even need to know that you are doing it.

In fact, as new research shows, you don’t even need to want to do it. If you develop the habit of snacking in front of your TV at night, how hungry you are or how tasty the snack is will no longer determine whether or how much you eat.

Many bad habits operate mindlessly, on autopilot. They are triggered by the context (e.g., watching TV, socializing, feeling stressed), rather than by any particular desire to engage in the behavior. So, the key to stopping a bad habit isn’t making a resolution – it’s figuring out how to turn off the autopilot. It’s learning to disrupt the behavior, preferably before it starts.

Take for example a recent study of Movie Theater popcorn-eating. Researchers invited a group of people to watch fifteen minutes of movie previews while seated in a real movie theater. They gave the participants free bags of popcorn, and varied whether the popcorn was fresh or stale. (The stale popcorn was actually a week old, yuck!) Then they measured how much popcorn each person ate.

Not surprisingly, everyone who got the stale popcorn reported liking it less than those who got fresh. And people with a weak popcorn habit (i.e., those who didn’t usually eat popcorn at the movies) ate significantly more fresh popcorn than stale. But here’s the kicker – for people with a strong popcorn habit (i.e., those who always ordered popcorn at the movies) it didn’t matter how stale the popcorn was! They ate the same amount, whether it was an hour old, or seven days old.

That’s worth thinking about for a moment – people with a strong habit were eating terrible popcorn, not because they didn’t notice it was terrible, but because it didn’t matter. The behavior was automatic, not intentional. So if tasting like Styrofoam won’t keep you from eating something, what will?

The researchers found that there were, in fact, two effective ways to disrupt the automatic popcorn-eating.

First, you can disrupt the habit by changing the context. When they conducted the same study in the context of a conference room, rather than a movie theater, people with strong popcorn habits at the movie theater stopped eating the stale popcorn. The automatic popcorn-eating behavior wasn’t activated, because the situational cues were changed.

If you have a habit you’d like to break, spend some time thinking about the situations in which it most often occurs. If you snack in front of the TV at night, consider doing something else in the evenings for a while – reading a good book, spending time with friends or family, even surfing the web. Any alternative activity that is less likely to trigger mindless eating. If you just can’t give up your favorite TV shows, you might try rearranging the room or sitting in a different chair – anything that alters the context can help.

Second, you can disrupt a habit by changing the method of performance. In another study, the researchers found that asking habitual popcorn eaters who were in a movie theater to eat with their non-dominant hand, stopped them from eating the stale popcorn, too.

So if you can’t change the situation, you can change the way the habit gets executed. If you mindlessly eat or smoke with your right hand, try using your left. If you mindlessly drink from the glass that the bartender keeps refilling, try sitting at a table instead of the bar, so you’ll have to consciously get up and ask for a refill. Making the behavior a little more difficult or awkward to perform can be a great way to throw a wrench in the works.

Too often, we blame our failures on the wrong things. When it comes to ridding ourselves of bad habits, we usually chalk our difficulties up to a lack of commitment or willpower. But as I’ve argued in my new book, “Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals”, conquering your behavioral demons needs to start with understanding how they really work and applying the most effective strategy. In this case, success comes from not making it quite so easy for your autopilot to run the show.

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“What to do with a client that may have addiction issues” Part 2 – Cognitive Distortions, Stages of Change and ACE Assessments

Posted on October 18, 2011 by Michael

Cognitive Distortions

As I interview the client, I keep in mind their language, way of talking and their perceptions. I listen for Cognitive Distortions in their conversations. Dr David Burns, author of “Feeling Good” has a list of Cognitive Distortions that comes into service here, as it can identify certain key phrases that reveal the cognitive distortions that are characteristic of an addict . I am sure you have heard these types of cognitive distortions in past interviews

1) They didn’t show up on time, they’re completely unreliable! This is an example of All or Nothing thinking, a cognitive distortion
2) I’ll never get that promotion/ My boss always tries to swindle me out of my commission. This is an example of Over-generalization
3) I forgot to send that email! My boss won’t ever trust me again, then I won’t get that raise, we will loose the house to foreclosure and my wife will leave me. This is an example of Catastrophizing, which is seeing things as dramatically more or less important than they actually are.

Identifying the Stage of Change

My next series of assessment questions include the Annis, Schober & Kelly interview questions, to identify the stage of change the client is in . This series of interview questions are drawn from the Identifying the Stage of Change research by James Prochaska, John Norcross and Carlo DiClemente. There are six questions in this interview and the questions start out very simply:

1. Did you drink during the last 30 days? YES or NO
2. Are you considering quitting or reducing drinking in the next 30 days? YES or NO
3. Did you knowingly attempt at least once, to quit or reduce your drinking during in the past 30 days? YES or NO

At this point in my assessment work, I have to decide whether I can help this person or not. I call the Annis, Schober & Kelly assessment the “knowing when to hold them or knowing when to fold them” assessment. If in completing this assessment, the coaching client does not present that they are in the Preparation Stage or the Contemplation Stage of change, I cannot help them. I have to regretfully say I cannot help them and why.

Adverse Childhood Experiences

The last series of questions are from the ACE survey (Adverse Childhood Experiences) which are highly personal questions . In the executive coaching world these are not questions an executive coach would ever ask, but for a recovery coach, these are important questions. However, I still have to tread very lightly on these queries. I preface the questions with a warning that I will be getting very ‘close’ to the client with the next series of queries, and if he/she chooses not to continue with answering these questions, we can move on.
Some examples are:

1. Did a parent or other adult in the household swear at you, insult you, put you down or humiliate you?
2. Did a parent or other adult in the household push, grab, slap, or throw something at you?
3. Did you often or very often feel that no one in your family looked out for each other, no one feels close to each other, or no one supports each other?

 

The ACE questionnaire is important in identifying behavioral addictions, primarily eating disorders or compulsive sexual behaviors, so I use it specifically for queries that may identify these addictions.

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