Last week, one of my west coast coaching clients told me she was heading east for a family wedding. She is still away…currently struggling…so today’s coaching call focused mainly on the challenges she’s experiencing on this trip…
“Always, the first thing my mom and grandmother do is look me up and down.”
She has been doing some amazing work; taking better care of herself. As a by-product, her weight has gravitated down to a more natural weight for her body. And EVERYONE who hadn’t seen her in a while commented on that fact. And people say the dumbest things!
“One person said, ‘It’s like hugging half the person I used to love.’ Another said, ‘You’re taking up so much less space’. Space? I thought to myself , I guess I have reduced my ‘body footprint’ on this earth. Is that a good thing?”
She relayed an encounter with someone she described as having “just ballooned back up” after losing a lot of weight on a diet.
“She came running up to me and said, ‘Oh my God, you look amazing! You have to tell me everything you’re doing. Don’t leave anything out!’ As I started to explain what we’ve been working on; living in the moment, practicing self-care, reducing emotional eating, eating intuitively… she got this look on her face as if she were thinking, ‘What? Have you joined a cult or something?’
“Part of me liked the new attention. A bigger part of me felt very self-conscious that everyone was looking at my body. No one ever commented on my body before…this all made me very self-conscious and uncomfortable.”
Why?
“Oh, it opens me up to all sorts of new possibilities.”
Like what kind of possibilities?
“Being out in the world and participating, instead of hiding in my house…”
“Next thing I knew I was eating a whole loaf of bread at Buca di Beppo and every greasy cheesy thing I could get my hands on. [private_membership circle] I ate too much at the wedding. My sister and I did what we always do. At the end of the night we commiserated over a large bag of Doritos. It’s what we do. I fell right back into it. Last night I laid in bed with a huge bowl of buttered microwave popcorn and a pop tart. What the f*** was that?”
“I’m so ashamed to admit this. I started hoarding snacks in my carry-on bag, left over bags of chips and peanut butter crackers my kids didn’t eat, snacks that were meant for my kids! Funny, I also have healthy snacks in my bag, almonds and some snack bars. But these I kept in a separate plastic bag. They were my stash.”
“I’ve begun to feel like an unwanted house guest in my own life. It’s like she moved back in and took over. She’s a mess and I want to evict her but I can’t.”
I encouraged her to stop judging herself (which just keeps the downward spiral going) and, instead, to simply look for the lesson here…as well as what she’d like to do today to start living the way she says she wants to live..the same way she had begun living at home.
“I was cocky. I thought I had it all together. I didn’t decide to use my new skills while on vacation. I guess I just expected it to be easier. I guess I didn’t really want to use my skills. I was on vacation.”
In my experience, taking a vacation from ‘mindfulness’ usually means trouble for an emotional eater. I asked her, “OK, so what do you want to do now?”
“I want my footing back…I want to go to bed tonight feeling that I gave as much self-care to me as I did to my husband and kids, my friends and family. “
What was she willing to do to get that feeling back? She committed to taking the hoarded snacks out of her carry-on and to put them in the kitchen with the other snacks for her kids. Right after our call, she was going out for a walk on Lake Michigan. She started a new day with clear new possibilities and commited intentions for living today ‘in the moment’, practicing self-care, reducing emotional eating, eating intuitively…it is a choice we can make…even on a bad day…or midway through a challenging trip!
(I just got an email from her. She did a 90 minute walk around Lake Michigan, on a beautiful day in a wonderful city. She signed her email, “Onward and upward!”)
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Ellen Shuman is a Life Coach who specializes in emotional and binge eating issues. She is the founder of A Weigh Out & Acoria Eating Disorder Treatment, Vice President of the Binge Eating Disorder Association (BEDA), and Co-Chair of the Academy for Eating Disorders Special Interest Group on “Health at Every Size”, ellen@aweighout.com [/private_membership circle]
