Day Two Hundred and Eighty Five!!!!!

The goal to achieve ‘clear mindedness’ in regards to the maintenance of a healthy diet is to be able to understand the link between negative emotions and pain. Understanding the link helps you to be able to not only tolerate your own feelings and what it is that your truly wanting, but to also moderate your own hyper-vigalence of survival. Once life is not about survival any longer food obsession will disappear. Once food obsession is no longer a driving force and the emotions are now controlled, the goal becomes learning to accept yourself regardless of any negative aspects. You will be able to recognize your own worthiness, even when everything is not perfect, and will also help you to stop overly scrutinizing yourself and your physical symptoms. You will be able to learn how to maintain control of your eating habits because when you feel your body you will no longer be controlled by your anxiety. As the mind clears the physical symptoms of hunger or tummy gurgling or cravings they will be just those sensations, manageable and tolerable. You will be able to tolerate whatever the feelings are, and therefore will be able to manage the pain.


The Emotionally Focussed Eating Program aims to heal the damage which has been inflicted in the past, yet continues to reverberate and therefore is a driving force in the present. Sigmond Freud believed that the only way to forget is to remember and sometimes it is not so much about the physiological memory, as it is to do with emotional memory. By taking aim at these memories the goal is to help resolve the emotional issues that have arisen from past events by revisiting them, and healing the power of those emotional wounds. Sometimes the emotional wounding is not necessarily to do with a specific past event from childhood or relationships, surgeries or car accidents, but has to do with failed attempts at weight loss. Failed attempts can also be emotionally damaging and start to become self-fulfilling prophecies of continued non-success.


Once the weight loss becomes true, then what also has a tendency to happen is that the body starts to feel different. This difference in feeling state can also cause anxiety as the body starts to change. The changing body also changes how people begin to look at you, which again can trigger situations from the past and/ or self-image issues. Normal human behaviour is that we have images in our mind of how we see ourselves and how we see others and when changes happen, we don’t like change, and we start to say to ourselves and to others “change back”. This too can be an anxiety laden hidden driving force. 


My experience with being uncomfortable with change is the physical differences I noticed in my body. When I now sit down on hard surfaces I could feel my ass bones, sometimes I would feel colder than normal because I didn’t have as much fluff to keep me warm, and I found people touched me more (not in a creepy way, but when I was bigger I found people went out of their way not to touch me. Now I get a lot of people putting their hand on my elbow to notify me that they are there or guiding me by placing their hand on my upper back.) It is so strange, because before, what I was huge people would say to me if I touched them “your disgusting, don’e touch me’, so I associate that in my mind, and flinch. More to work on!