Archive for the ‘Eating disorders’ Category

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Raising Children to Resist Eating Problems

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

We now know that almost a fourth of all children in the United States are overweight. The unfortunate prediction is that in most cases these children will grow up to become overweight adults, who will have overweight children, who will have overweight — even obses — offspring.

What causes this inappropriate friendship with food?

Of course, the media share some responsibility for the way food and beauty are dealt with in commercials and regular programming. But we also see that overeating tends to run in families. So, what can parents do to help their children avoid the trap of using food as a friend?

Here are five things a child needs to grow up with a healthy attitude toward herself or food:

1) Honesty. When you make promises, keep them. Be a person of your word so that your child is not constantly dealing with disappointments.

2) Affection. Every child needs affection, including hugs, verbal statements of love, and unrushed attention. Children who know they are valued are less likely to turn to food for comfort.

3) Safety. Teach your child to seek out people who are safe — emotionally, physically, and sexually. Shout this message loud and clear to your children. Protect your child from emotional and physical harm and help him learn to protect himself as he grows older.

4) Boundaries. Let your child know how important boundaries are for you. It’s okay to draw a line in the emotional sand. As your child grows, she will also learn where the boundaries are and how to keep them. This will give her resilience and make her unlikely to be a victim.

Structure. Children need structure. One child, playing on the school playground, was heard complaining to his teacher, “Do we really have to do what we want to today?” I continue to hear adults cry out for the same kind of direction. We all need structure, appropriate traditions, and a sense that some things are going to be the same day after day.

What you learned as a child may not have prepared you to live a happy, effective life. You can change that for your own children, however, if you help them learn how to make their own happiness. The following is a list of platitudes that many children hear and end up following. But they are not healthy directions for living.

Try to avoid giving your children these messages:

  • Always look as if you have it all together.
  • Be brave (and hide your true feelings).
  • Always put others first and yourself last.
  • Do not cry, even when you are crying inside.
  • Clean your plate becuase there are starving people in China…Africa…India, etc.
  • Never let anyone see you make a mistake.
  • Never make a mess.
  • Help others but ignore your own needs.

If you are pawning these ideas off on yourself or your children, please take a good look at the message you are conveying. As you learn to take the risk of appreciating who you are, help your child do the same. The greatest gift you can give your child is the encouragement to become the person God intended him or her to be.

SOURCE: Appendix Three in Losing Weight Permanently by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD., founder of The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc.

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Families of Those With Eating Disorders: 12 Characteristics

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

We often think we cannot live without the ingrained patterns of our past — whether they be good or bad, positive or negative. But people who lose weight permanently know that if they are to grow in every area of their lives they must look at every area 0f their lives.

The following are characteristics of families of those with food-related problems:

1. Perfectionistic, including high expectations from the father, either verbal or nonverbal. This most often applies to the first-born.

2. Mother frequently dieted, accompanied by an over-emphasis on weight and appearance, compulsive dieting and fasting, diarrhetic use or laxative use.

3. Father distant, fueling an intense desire to to please the father who is typically emotionally unavailable.

4. Parent (0ften the mother) is co-dependent, often denying her own needs and assuming responsibility for everyone else.

5. Rigid discipline with severe punishment, including guilt and shame used as motivation, and perhaps humiliating or hurtful punishment.

6. Sexuality ignored or considered “dirty,” neglecting to give children basic information about sex or no opportunity to discuss sexual issues.

7. Daughters used as confidantes, perhaps with the father complaining to the daughter about the mother, and in fact the child may be used as the parent’s primary form of emotional support.

8. Children forced to be adults, especially daughters who “raised” siblings and children who are not allowed to be children themselves.

9. Children victimized in any way, which may include fondling, incest, neglect or verbal abuse.

10. Parent (often the father) addicted to prescription drugs, alcohol or street drugs.

11. Family members tend to ignore or deny negative emotions, often resulting in explosive anger, or anger and sadness never addressed, even to the point of covering up negative emotions just to please others.

12. Overuse of food for pleasure or reward, with food serving as the primary focus for pleasure and emphasis placed on sweets and rich desserts.

For your ongoing emotional growth and your permanent weight loss, it is important that you look at whether you have avoided — and may still be avoiding — intimacy on some level. Intimacy issues have interfered in your life and sabotaged your success at weight loss.

Now is the time to say, “I need help.”

There’s no point in blaming your past, your family, or even a former abuser, if any. You have simply had numerous unmet needs that you attempted to address through intimacy with food. Now you are moving away from such erroneous thinking and are moving toward joining the two percent of people who lose weight permanently.

SOURCE: Chapter 7, “Developing Intimacy With People,” in Losing Weight Permanently by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD., founder of The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc.

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Food Quiz: Are You Obsessed?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Everything you have tried up to this point has not worked when it comes to losing weight permanently. Diets have not worked, powders have not worked, diet pills have not worked, and obsessively exercising has not worked. Every method of weight loss has been flawed. Each has promised you something it could not deliver. That’s why it’s time to ask yourself some personal questions.

RATING THE ROLE OF FOOD IN YOUR LIFE

On the following quiz, grade each statement on a score of 0 through 5. If it’s true for you almost all the time, give yourself a 5. If you usually do it, score a 4. If you seldom do it, score a 1. If you never do it, record a 0.

1. I have to be on a diet all the time.

2. I feel guilty when I eat a dessert.

3. I wake up thinking about food.

4. I dream about my weight and/or food.

5. At parties, I hang around the snack table.

6. I am ashamed of my body.

7. I feel it’s wasteful if I don’t clean my plate.

8. I seldom sit down to eat.

9. At buffets, I feel I must try a bit of everything.

10. I skip breakfast.

11. I often eat the leftovers after a party at my home.

12. I am afraid of losing control with food.

13. I eat most of the cookies I bake while they are still warm.

14. I buy popcorn at the movies even if I’ve just eaten.

15. There are only a few safe foods I feel I can eat.

16. When I’m bored, I get out the snack food.

17. I can gain weight overnight.

How did you rate yourself? Do you see a pattern?

If you had a total score of 65 or more, I am especially glad you are reading this blog, because there is hope for you. If your score was around 50, then you may or may not need to take action. If your total score was under 25, congratulations. I can only assume you are reading this so that you can refer this as a resource to a friend.

DISSECTING THE OBSESSION WITH FOOD

Sometimes I think the reason we eat by candlelight is because we have elevated food to a cathedral-like religious experience. Our “places of worship” are the open-all-night pavilions dedicated to the sale of fat, calories, and cholesterol, and all-you-can-eat troughs of food consumed by people for whom three full plates are never enough.

Those with food obsessions believe that:

  • Food is relief from stress
  • Food is reward for pain
  • Food is the epitome of success
  • Food is the wafer and wine for the religion of the obese
  • ‘Food is comfort in a time of storm
  • Food is life!

When people with eating disorders come to see me I ask them how much time they think about food. They often say “about 110 percent of the time.” That’s one of the most honest statements they’ll ever make during treatment. They do spend the majority of the time thinking about food: about when they are or are not going to eat, what they are or aren’t going to eat, and where they are or are not going to eat. But the feelings of control these individuals think they have are nothing but a fraud. In fact, the eating disorder is controlling them, consuming their relationships, ruining their self-esteem, destroying their health, and wasting their time. Ultimately, attempts to control food are failing to control pain, anger and fear.

SOURCE: Chapter 3, “Eating as an Art, in Losing Weight Permanently: Secrets of the 2 Percent Club by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD., founder of The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc.

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Talking Body Image on The Miracle Channel This Week

Monday, March 8th, 2010

This Tuesday and Thursday, Canada’s Miracle Channel is airing two shows I taped for The Bridge television series, during which I draw from two of my books on the subject of body image:

  1. Tuesday, March 9: The Body God Designed: How to love the body you’ve got while you get the body you want
  2. Thursday, March 11: Hope, Help and Healing for Eating Disorders: : A new approach to treating anorexia, bulimia, and overeating

In Canada you can watch on:

And in the U.S. you can watch on SkyAngel, channel 137.

For times, please check your local listings.

“Have faith in yourself. Have faith in this book. Have faith in a God who holds your future in his hands.” ~Hope, Help and Healing for Eating Disorders

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You are Not a Disease: Emotional Challenges Plus Obsessive Behavior Equals Obesity

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

You may have been victimized by the medical model which says: If you keep sabotaging yourself and can’t lose weight on your own, then you must have a disease. As in, “Your obesity is a disease. Your eating is a disease, so we’d better give you some pills or suggest surgery. How about some staples in your stomach? That hopefully will do the trick. After all, it’s not your fault you have this disease, but we assure you that some medication or invasive treatment will cure it.”

EMOTIONAL CHALLENGES + OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR = EXCESSIVE WEIGHT

You are not a disease. Do not allow any well-intentioned medically-trained person persuade you that you are. You are a person with emotional challenges that have taken the form of obsessive-compulsive behavior that has translated into excessive weight. That is where you must start, because form this honest premise you can move into a personal, self-corrective program where you can join the two percent who lose weight permanently.

We’re not going to talk about steps — twelve, fifteen, twenty, or one hundred. For weight loss, there is but one step in the right direction. People who lose weight permanently do not attend groups that treat them like victims, where they sit in a circle and talk about their powerlessness. What a disservice to say that we have no power!

Of course we have power, and plenty of it. (The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous make it clear — we have power through our Higher Power.) That’s what it’s vital to treat the whole person, not just a single part. Why does this work? Because rather than wallowing in a mire of powerlessness, people can learn to regain and reassert their power. They start to engage in a healthy self-focus, not narcissism. To become intimately acquainted with their deepest troubles and hurts means attaining a self-knowledge that allows them to look at their own souls with tender compassion, something they may not have done for some time. In the process, they learn that power has been given to them by their heavenly Father.

You become empowered when you provide yourself with four things:

  1. Discipline
  2. Freedom
  3. Acceptance of the truth that you are deeply loved
  4. Courage to face your fears

People who lose weight permanently move beyond blaming others for their weight. They take responsibility for their own actions because they know it’s the only way they will ever grow into the person God created them to be. People who lose weight permanently also learn to take full responsibility for their own emotional state of being. Blaming family is the easy way out, and it’s a dead-end street.

Perhaps the theme song of those who lose weight permanently should be the great spiritual that reminds us, “Not my brother, nor my sister, but it’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.”  Yes, Lord it’s me … and it’s you.

ENCOURAGEMENT FROM GOD’S WORD

“Therefore, my dear brothers [and sisters], stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.” ~1 Corinthians 15:58

SOURCE: Chapter 2, Losing Weight Permanently: Secrets of the 2 Percent Club by Gregory L. Jantz, PhD., founder of The Center for Counseling and Health Resources Inc.

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Affirming Action for Eating Disorders: Are You Ready to Give Your Body to God?

Friday, February 26th, 2010

As National Eating Disorder Awareness Week comes to a close, I would like to share with you the end-of-chapter Affirming Action from Chapter 10, “Reclaiming the Gift of Health,” in my book, Hope, Help and Healing for Eating Disorders: A Whole-Person Approach to Anorexia, Bulimia and Overeating:

Consider these verses: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him: for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple” (1 Corinthians 3:16-17).

How long has it been since you considered your body a temple? Have you ever thought of yourself that way? God does. He considers your body as sacred. So sacred, he considers it an appropriate place for his Spirit to dwell.

In this world, you are also God’s hands and his feet. You are part of the body of Christ.

Up to now, you have considered your body your own. You have decided that you can treat, or mistreat, your body however you choose. You may have given God your heart, your mind, your soul, and your strength — but you have withheld his sovereignty over your body. You have chosen to continue to conduct your eating disorder on a body that does not truly belong to you any longer.

Are you ready to give your body to God? Are you ready to submit to his will concerning your body? And what is his will? For you to recognize your body as his temple, sacred to him.

I am learning to trust my body to function and heal as God designed it to. I am learning to accept and love all of me … my body included.

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Loving Yourself from the Inside Out: Karen’s Story

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

With the following excerpt from my book, Hope, Help and Healing for Eating Disorders: A Whole-Person Approach to Anorexia, Bulimia and Overeating, I share the story of a woman who struggled with an eating disorder for years. It is my hope that, in support of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, Karen’s story will inspire you to love yourself from the inside out. Though protecting the health of your body is critical, so is protecting the health of your spirit.

“After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church,” the pastor said, quoting Ephesians 5:29.

At this point in the sermon, Karen stopped listening. The lesson continued, but she traveled off into a swirling eddy of memories and thought triggered by that passage.

After all, no one ever hated his own body …

Not hating your body was stated as a simple aside, as if the concept itself were a given. But it wasn’t a given to Karen. Even now, she fought to remember that God expected her to love her body.

Her body. She was expected to love her body. This verse wasn’t talking about her mind or her soul or her intellect. It specifically said “body” — her flesh, her bones, her hair and teeth. Her legs and arms. Even her breasts, her hips, her thighs.

KAREN’S STORY

There was a time in her life when the thought of loving her body had been as foreign to her as grace. For years, Karen hated her body with an active, punishing hate accompanied by action. She hated how she looked. She hated who she was. She hated who others wanted her to be. That hatred fueled the need to deprive her body of any sort of compassion.

After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it …

For several years, Karen had chosen not to feed or care for her body. Instead, she starved it into submission. With an iron will she resisted its attempts at self-preservation. The more she hungered, the less she ate. When she subjugated hunger, she took on thirst. Every bite, every sip, was done with elaborate calculation and extreme prejudice. She resented her body and its needs. It felt unclean to her. Starvation was pristine — no consumption, no elimination.

In Karen’s mid-twenties, her anorexia turned into bulimia. No longer able to beat her hunger and thirst into submission, she indulged it beyond measure. Oh, Karen fed her body — but only for a little while. Until she purged and felt clean again.

All through this time, Karen had loved God. But often she also feared him and felt distant from him. Yet she clung to the promise of his love, even as she struggled with loving herself. Slowly she was awakening to the thought of actually caring for herself, instead of only caring about herself.

Karen was striving to know God and to trust his expectations.

A CHANGE IN FOCUS

Up to this point, your eating disorder has centered your focus on your outside appearance. You have focused on your desire to be thin. As such, your life has revolved around diets and weight. But inside is where you really live. The body is just a shell — a perishable one, at that — which God full intends to replace.

It is your inside, your spirit, that lasts forever. And this obsession with controlling the body is imprisoning your spirit.

The terrible irony of an eating disorder is that damage being done to the inside, in the name of the outside, will eventually migrate to the outside. Healing comes when you decide to refocus your efforts from diets and weight (the outside) to nutrition and support for your body (the inside). You need to mentally go from food as friend, or food as fat, to food as nutrition. It can be extremely difficult to make this mental jump on your own. You may need to start with a spiritual refocusing.

Self-hate argues against the truth of God’s love for you and the great value you have. It blinds you to an awareness of the beauty of God’s creation that lies uniquely in you. The negative inner message of self-hate deafens your ability to hear God’s voice singing over you as a precious, valued human being. You can decide to stop listening to your self-hate and decide to hear the truth of God’s love for you.

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Validating the Pain Behind Your Eating Disorder: Accept the Past, Heal Today

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

Instead of denying the pain behind your eating disorder, you can learn to accept it. And what better time than now, during National Eating Disorder Awareness Week when I am blogging excerpts from my book, Hope, Help and Healing for Eating Disorders: A Whole-Person Approach to Anorexia, Bulimia and Overeating:

It is possible to replace your faulty coping mechanism with healthy skills for withstanding the stress of life.

It is possible to feel anger without feeling rage.

Through counseling, you can learn to understand and accept your childhood and its pain. If you can weather the storm of finally learning the truth and giving up your ideal image of the “perfect” family, your pain and hurt can become like parts of a puzzle, fitting into place and giving you greater understanding of why your parents do what they do. Once you understand the way, you can begin the process of filling in the void in your life with healthy choices: with laughter and love, with family and friends, with good things, and with God.

Verbal and/or emotional abuse leaves no visible scars, so the tendency to deny that these events happened can be very great.

Often the parent will remember the circumstances from a very different perspective than the child. Your child-self recalls one version of events, and your parent another. Which is right? They may both be. When you were a child, you remembered things from the perspective of a child, often unaware of the larger picture. Your parents may never have considered how their actions looked from the other side. Take that into consideration when examining the past. You will need to accept their vision of what happened, and they must accept yours.

Finding the truth and working with your family will not be easy, but it can be extremely illuminating and rewarding. It can mean the reconciliation of relationships. Or you can gain an understanding of the type of relationship you can realistically have with your family as an adult. Much will depend upon the hurtful behavior and that person’s willingness to accept your pain.

Egregious physical or sexual abuse, by its very nature, may lead to outright denial by the abuser.

The more valid the memory, the more vehement the denial. Because societal and religious condemnation of such acts is so great, the person who abused you may never truly admit what he or she has done. The abuser may believe that if the abuse is denied outright, you may begin to doubt that it occurred at all. In spite of this, you need to realize you were hurt. Sometimes it really doesn’t matter if memories are totally clear or recalled; you still felt hurt.

The next point is so important, I want to put it in bold type to make sure you don’t overlook it:

Your self-destructive behavior did not come about for no reason. Most people who develop a severe eating disorder have had some history of abuse, and I encourage you to believe in what your past reveals. You must be determined to examine your past and accept the truth that is revealed. You must take the truth of your past and put it into perspective as an adult.

Don’t allow denial, your own or others, to halt your journey toward healing and recovery  from your eating disorder.

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The Detour of Denial: Burying the Pain Behind Anorexia, Bulimia and Overeating

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

In support of National Eating Disorder Awareness Week, below is an excerpt from Chapter 6, “The Detour of Denial,” from my book, Hope, Help and Healing: A New Approach to Treating Anorexia, Bulimia and Overeating:

Individuals with an eating disorder – be it anorexia, bulimia or overeating – are often unaware of the source of their pain. I believe this is God’s way of protecting us. In order to survive as children, we block our abusive behavior. But somewhere along the line, the adult must discover the wellspring of pain from the past. Denial is a significant detour in that quest.

TWO TYPES OF DENIAL

The first is your own denial of what has happened to you. This may take the form of doubting that what you remember ever took place. Because the abuse has been denied, it may take on an unreal quality when remembered, almost as if it happened to someone else. If the abuse is remembered, it is often seen through a prism that “explains” why the abuse wasn’t really abuse at all.

Denial enters through self-talk. These are the messages we repeat over and over to ourselves as we try to deal with the pain and the eating disorder. Thoughts of “nobody’s home is perfect” or “it could have been worse” or “it wasn’t that bad” or “there’s nothing I can do about it now” allow you to minimize the damage. “I should be strong enough to deal with this on my own” or “everyone turns to food when they’re down” increases frustration at the inability to bring the eating disorder under control. But denial, this minimization of the pain, is merely a coping mechanism to keep the pain at bay.

Denial is the ticket that allows you to transform life-altering pain into that limbo state of “not that bad.” If it’s “not that bad,” you believe you can find the strength to go on.

The other form of denial comes from the person or people who hurt you. They may deny that the abuse ever took place or that there was anything wrong with what they did. He or she may accept that the event or events happened but deny responsibility or minimize the damage. This can happen regardless of the nature of the abuse. Whether the abuse ws a single, specific event or a pattern of hurtful behavior carried out over a number of years, this person may refuse to accept the ramifications of his or her actions.

This person may even attempt to make you feel responsible for the abuse itself or responsible for your “version” of the events. They may deny the damage by calling into question your natural response to the damage. It is to his or her benefit if denial goes both ways — their denial of the event andyour denial of the damage done. They may resist acknowledging your eating disorder, because acknowledgement means recognizing the abuse or pattern of hurtful behavior behind it. So the responsiblity for the abuse itself and the resulting eating disorder could be shoved back at you, increasing the stress surrounding your eating disorder, escalating its progression. As your eating disorder escalates, it becomes easier to focus your attention solely on its progress, diverting your attention from the root cause.

Tomorrow: Accepting the pain of your past.

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National Eating Disorder Awareness Week: Hope, Help and Healing

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

To raise awareness and encourage healthier habits, the National Eating Disorder Association named this National Eating Disorder Awareness Week — 7 days every February when this country turns its attention to eating habits that negatively impact the lives of millions of Americans each year in the form of the following eating disorders:

  • Anorexia
  • Bulimia
  • Compulsive overeating
  • Binge eating

In support of this movement to raise awareness, I will devote every blog post this week to the subject of eating disorders, starting today with an excerpt from my blog for PBS’ series This Emotional Life. It includes an excerpt from my book, Hope, Help and Healing: A New Approach to Treating Anorexia, Bulimia, and Overeating, from which I will be pulling material all week long.

“The key to an eating disorder lies in relationships, usually the closest of them all – relationships within the family. As noted in my book Hope, Help & Healing for Eating Disorders: A new approach to treating anorexia, bulimia and overeating:

”The behaviors surrounding an eating disorder are the result of a relationship – perhaps several relationships – tilting off the mark. You may be able to pinpoint immediately where and when your life diverged from what you wanted it to be. Or maybe you can trace a slow slide from the ideal to the real.’ [Read more, including Emily's story...]

For more information, click here to learn what you can do to support National Eating Disorder Awareness Week.

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