Skinny Thinking: Five Revolutionary Steps to Permanently Heal Your Relationship With Food, Weight, and Your Body
200
Skinny Thinking: Five Revolutionary Steps to Permanently Heal Your Relationship With Food, Weight, and Your Body
200Paperback
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Overview
If you are constantly battling against your weight, it’s time to stop yo-yo dieting and start developing a healthy relationship with food. In Skinny Thinking you will learn how to rethink your food choices, eating habits, lifestyle, and more. Author Laura Katleman-Prue has helped numerous people—including herself—with her simple, five-step Skinny Thinking approach.
“Skinny Living is a remarkable compendium of tools and information that guide readers to a healthy body weight not by providing a new fad diet, but by challenging them to permanently change their relationship with food, their thinking, and their bodies. . . . If you devote yourself to implementing these powerful tools, you will heal your body, mind, and spirit and reap the rewards of an infinitely happier and healthier life” (Alan Gass, MD, FACC, from the foreword).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781600377495 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morgan James Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2010 |
| Pages: | 200 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.08(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.52(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Freedom Is Possible
Yes, it is possible to be free from your obsession with food and body weight! It is possible to live without worrying about what you will eat next and whether it will make you fat, or if you'll have the willpower to eat in a way that keeps you from busting out of your jeans. It is possible to free yourself from troubles with food that cause a myriad of health problems, including weight gain. It is possible to live without measuring your self-worth by the vicissitudes of the bathroom scale. It is possible to leave this seemingly insurmountable source of suffering behind.
Not only is this possible — you're already halfway there! By reading this book, you've taken the single most important step, without which no healing is possible: You've decided that you don't want to suffer anymore. In effect, you've said, "Enough already!" You're ready to find a way out.
Your suffering has led you to want freedom more than you want your old habits. You're ready to end your romantic relationship with food, to stop seeing it primarily as a source of pleasure and entertainment rather than as nice-tasting nutrition, and to finally be free. And this is indeed a freedom book, not just the usual diet book that's focused solely on losing weight. It will help you create new habits, which will allow you to lose weight and keep it off this time. Although the information in this book may not necessarily be what you want to hear, if you really want to be free, and not just continue to yo-yo, you have to change your relationship to food fundamentally and permanently. If you do that, you'll be free from torment and have the healthy body that you want.
The purpose of this book is to help you see the whole truth about food and what's been going on in your relationship with it. No matter how long you've been struggling with food, you don't have to take this issue to your grave. You can free yourself of it for good. All you have to do is follow the Five Steps.
In the upcoming pages, you'll see how your thinking has led to an overblown relationship with food and that this relationship is the root of your weight issues. You will discover that romanticizing food leads to being overweight, and that looking in the mirror from your ego's perspective reinforces body identification and causes suffering. Thankfully, there is another way: moving out of ego-based thinking and into the Wise Witness. This way of being sets you free and leaves worries about weight in the distant past.
Freedom Exercise
This exercise will help you imagine the life you would have if you took back your power over food:
Close your eyes and get in touch with the impact of food and weight issues in your life. What have they cost you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? How have they impacted your self-esteem and your relationships? Have they kept you from following your heart and going after what you've wanted?
Now imagine how your life would be if you felt free and relaxed around food. Imagine that it no longer absorbs your mental energy. You no longer feel powerless or afraid, but aligned, balanced, centered, and confident. How would you live? How would you treat yourself and others? Imagine all of the energy that you used to devote to worrying and thinking about food flowing into creative and fulfilling endeavors in your life. How does your body feel? Notice any emotions or sensations that arise.
Use this exercise as often as you can, even once a day, to support the permanent change you're making in your relationship to food.
This exercise shows you the cost of your romantic relationship with food and what would be possible if thoughts about food no longer dominated your life. I promise you, there is life after your love affair with food! A rich life replete with the benefits that come from living in a healthy body and in alignment with a fulfilling life purpose, a life in which food thoughts no longer take center stage. From now on, when a pesky food thought is on the scene and you're tempted to follow it, ask yourself, "Is it worth it? Is it worth giving up my freedom to follow this thought? What is my freedom really worth?"
Why Are Food and Weight Issues So Tough?
Why are food, weight, and body-image issues so intransigent? The quick-and-dirty answer is: We're programmed to listen to and believe our thoughts. In the case of food and weight, our egoic mind pits two stubborn, mutually exclusive desires against each other: the desire to experience taste pleasure from food and the desire to look good. No wonder we're in a pickle! On the one hand, our bodies need food to survive and we're programmed to adore food. On the other hand, we're bombarded with media images of young, thin, attractive people and brainwashed into thinking that we should look that way, too.
We're like pendulums swinging from one end of the desire-fulfillment scale to the other. First, we indulge our desire to eat for pleasure, which causes us to gain weight. Then, we feel miserable because we've failed to satisfy our desire for thinness. Next, we diet, lose weight, and feel deprived of the foods we love. Our deprivation causes us to desire pleasure foods (foods with little or no nutrition that are ultimately not fulfilling), and eventually, we give in, overeat, and gain weight again. Our weight gain brings us full circle, causing the desire to be thin to kick in again, and on and on it goes.
Living between these two competing desires is quite a conundrum — for everyone but the ego. As long as we have a problem, the ego has a job. It's in the problem-creation-and-solution business. For those of us who have food and weight issues, it's a full-time job. Once we're hooked, the ego can just kick back and sip a piña colada, having achieved its goal of ensnaring us in constant problems in order to keep itself employed.
The good news is that the food and weight issues that have been the bane of your existence are also your custom-designed ticket to freedom. The question is: Will you use it? Are you ready to be done with this issue once and for all? Are you willing to try something new? Are you ready to have a healthy relationship with food and your body? If your answer is yes, the principles presented here can free you. All you have to do is let go of any preconceptions and memories of past failures, and open your heart and mind to receiving new information through both these pages and your own intuition.
Is This Another Diet?
Whenever I utter the word "diet," people fidget in their seats, their faces harden, and they say, "Oh no — not me. I'm not going there." But before your shutters slam shut, please let me explain.
Skinny Thinking is not a diet; it's about creating a new relationship to food that automatically results in greater health and a healthier weight. Diets are temporary. People are willing to stick to them for a while in order to lose weight, but then they stop and go back to their old habits.
The goal of Skinny Thinking is to change your fundamental relationship to food by changing how you habitually think about it. If you don't do that, you might as well hang it up right now. No diet, no matter how vigilant you are, is going to work long term without that component.
Relax. I'm not asking you to go on yet another diet. Instead, I'm encouraging you to:
1. Permanently change your diet and
2. Change your relationship to food.
Let's take these one at a time. Changing your diet means changing what you're eating habitually so that most of your calories come from healthy, nutritious, whole foods, and eating those foods in reasonable portions.
The second component is changing your relationship to food. Bad eating habits in part stem from the way you've been thinking about food. Hence, the diet I advocate is a "thought diet," questioning and debunking the fantasies that have been mediating between you and food.
When it comes right down to it, skinny thinking is a truth-telling exercise to bust through your illusions and beliefs about food. Ultimately, you must begin to let go of deluded, misguided beliefs and your romanticized relationship with food in order to stop suffering and yo-yoing. In my experience, the best tool to achieve this is inquiry.
To recap, neither component can work without the other. Merely changing the foods you eat and your portion sizes isn't enough. Neither is changing your relationship to food if you're still getting the bulk of your calories from junk and eating unreasonably large portions. A bird needs both of its wings to fly, and healing your food issues requires both components to be complete and lasting — a shift in your diet and a change in your relationship with food.
The truth can't be changed, because the truth is always the truth. You can't continue to eat the way you've been eating and have the healthy body you want. It's simple and unambiguous. Yet many of us have been in denial, pretending that it isn't so. We want to look good, feel good, and keep eating all the junk we want. C'est impossible!
It's natural to look for a way to somehow have your cake and eat it, too, to somehow maintain your bad habits and still enjoy a healthy, slim body. It seems like other people can do it, right? Why not you? But do you really know what other people are doing to maintain thin bodies while they scarf down massive slabs of chocolate fudge cake?
Very few people can eat whatever they want and stay thin. Even if they manage to stay thin, what are the health consequences of eating all that junk? Once again, the truth is still the truth: You have to change your old habits if you want to heal this issue. Only then will you start to reap the rewards.
If you trade your old eating and thinking habits for healthy ones, over time you will naturally settle into a healthy weight. Rather than focusing on a goal weight, as you might have done when you were dieting, focus on not going back to your old habits.
You might as well just bite the bullet. Look yourself squarely in the eyes and tell yourself the truth: "________, you can never go back to your old habits and stay thin." This is the truth that most people don't want to face.
To be really free, you have to transform your relationship to food forever. You have to be willing to change the way you eat and think about food and never go back. That's the simple, kind truth of it. Now go forth and heal! You can do this!
My Story
From the age of 16, when I went on my first real diet, until I was 49, I succumbed to the cultural imperative to "be the best I could be" by dieting, and my life traced the self-worth-negating arc of the overeating-dieting pendulum. Like the rising and setting sun, my eating cycles were so predictable, you could set a clock by them. This inevitable oscillation was a safe haven that allowed me to postpone my life until I had the right body size to create a successful life.
Dieting led to overeating, and overeating led to yet another diet. This is the cycle of desperation, hope, elation, deprivation, indulgence, and self-flagellation you sign on for when you listen to the ego's perspective about food and life. When you decide for the umpteenth time to go on another diet without permanently changing your relationship with food, you delude yourself into believing, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that this will be the one that works.
One of the reasons it was so hard to maintain my weight, in spite of all my dieting, was that the intensity of my love affair with chocolate equaled my desire to have a thin body. In my early 20s, this love had its business advantages. Because I couldn't think of anything I loved more than chocolate, it was easy to follow the advice laid out in entrepreneurship books: Sell a product you're excited about. It was a no-brainer. Brownies, the richest, chocolatiest dessert I could think of, would be my product — and voila! The Boston Brownie Company was born.
For a certified chocoholic, my new business was heaven, a dream come true. Like an addict suddenly finding herself with an unending supply of her drug of choice, my cup runneth over. I filled my days sampling gourmet chocolates, swirling them into rich batters, and baking them to sinful, gooey perfection, all in the noble service of offering the public the most perfect brownies. Who says that being an adult is no fun?
Having spent my childhood using food as a source of comfort and pleasure, it was natural for me to parlay this food focus into a business. Unknowingly, I'd developed an addictive relationship with sugar and chocolate, and now my new business gave me an excuse to keep my fridge stocked with a delicious combination of both — brownies.
To other people, starting a business like this was not only adaptive, it was laudable. I was a 20-century woman, exemplifying the pioneering spirit that made our country great. Certainly, that spin sounded a heck of a lot better than "I am an addict getting my daily fix!"
Eating Is a Messy Business
After a less than stellar performance at my college dance recital, my best friend, Lisa, tried to reassure me that I had done fine. But I knew better. Lisa was in best-friend mode, doing what friends are supposed to do — help their buddies feel better by sugarcoating the truth. Whether I'd blown it or not, what mattered was that I was upset with my performance. Convinced that I'd humiliated myself, the experience reinforced my core belief that I couldn't do anything right.
Lisa, partner in crime and eating buddy extraordinaire, and I decided that there was only one thing to do: help me escape my perceived public humiliation by eating up one side of the town and down the other. Like a lover planning a secret tryst, we excitedly choreographed our plan for procuring the forbidden object of our lust — pleasure food. Starting at the local coffee shop, we crammed down grilled cheese sandwiches (of all things!) at warp speed. After the sandwiches, I felt full, but stopping was not an option. No, by gosh, we were on a mission — a mission of avoidance, and central to that mission was eating ourselves senseless. That evening, we would stuff ourselves with large quantities of the naughty foods we denied ourselves the rest of the time.
For a few short hours, I believed that bingeing would help me avoid feeling like a failure. I hoped that if I ate massive quantities of food, I would numb or avoid the powerful, messy emotions that left me feeling helpless, hopeless, and most of all, out of control.
After the grilled cheese sandwiches, we sped off to our signature bingeing destination: Foster's, an all-night donut shop. Salivating as we peered through the window, our eyes met a confectionary vision of perfectly shaped cruller soldiers, nobly sacrificing themselves into an enormous vat of boiling oil. The flimsy sticks emerged seconds later, metamorphosed by the baptism, inflated to twice their original size. Then, for the pièce de résistance, a pudgy, apron-clad man cavalierly scooped them up and deposited them onto sugar-encrusted racks.
Although we were charmed by the array of beguiling donuts and crullers before us, Lisa and I remained loyal to our favorite treat: apple fritters. They weren't pretty. Infract, if you didn't know any better, you might take fritters for defective outcasts, the unfortunate result of a donut mishap. These misshapen, brown blobs looked more like weapons than donuts — crusty points jutting out in all directions. Only the sheen of their sugar glazing gave them away as purposefully designed treats.
Fritters were not for the faint of heart — only a truly intrepid binger dared indulge in these enigmas. When pierced, their strange outer crust revealed a soft, breadlike interior delicately veined with syrup-drenched chunks of apple. Somewhere, a donut genius had conceived the perfect taste and textural complement to a fritter's crusty outer shell. Suffice it to say that no Foster's run was complete without a box of fritters, and as a matter of principle, sort of a binger's code of ethics, fritters never made it home.
Pretending to be throwing a party, Lisa also ordered boxes of warm, gooey donuts, casually tossing in comments like "Bobby loves this one. Tony wants that one. Let's get three of those ..." in order to divert attention from the embarrassing truth — that our party was actually a party of two.
Visits to Foster's were never casual. There was a frenzied hyperactivity to our trips there, and this night was no different. Laden with donut boxes, we headed off to buy pizza and ice cream. Two hours after we began our eating rampage, we triumphantly sped back to the dorm.
At school, we went into stealth mode, transferring our booty from the car to Lisa's room undetected. After lining up our feast picnic-style on the floor, we ate ourselves into oblivion. Rhythmically stuffing ourselves with a practiced precision, we entered a food-numbed trance, anesthetizing ourselves from painful thoughts and feelings, pretending that we could escape life's disappointments — and there was some truth to this because for some part of those few hours, we did escape. We did control our lives by exchanging emotional pain for physical pain, at least for the moment, until we had to face the triple whammy: the painful emotions that precipitated the binge, the guilt over the loss of willpower evidenced by the binge, and our imminent weight gain.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Skinny Thinking"
by .
Copyright © 2010 Laura Katleman-Prue.
Excerpted by permission of Morgan James Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
FOREWORD,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
1: FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE,
2: THE FIRST STEP: WISE THINKING,
3: THE SECOND STEP: WISE FOOD CHOICES,
4: THE THIRD STEP: WISE EATING,
5: THE FOURTH STEP: WISE LIVING,
6: THE FIFTH STEP: WISE RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR BODY,
RESOURCES,
RECOMMENDED READING,