I have a client who has lost a lot of weight but hovers around 250 pounds. She’s healthy, exercises a lot and regularly. No crises. But she would like to take off more weight. She has the normal “I’ve had enough” signals, but she overrides them.
We’re trying to figure out what magic she’s endowed food with. We found the usual: food offered consolation, safety, and a sense of autonomy (rebellion against parents who were trying to help her not get fat as a teen). She had a relationship with food when she was lonely, and, by god, she owned her life.
I suggested food was like a placebo, and it did reassure her (because she believed in it), but we should try to find the real medicine, so she wouldn’t have to seek soothing carbs every day.
She mentioned offhand food (or eating) made her “real.” Well, that’s important. Everyone needs to feel real to herself. Maybe we could find a way for her to feel real that didn’t involve extra food, or the act of eating.
Then she added quickly, she didn’t want to blame anyone. Like her parents? who made her throw away the candy she’d been hoarding, or shamed her about the candy wrappers they’d found hidden under the bed.
Those incidents coincided with puberty, her parents fighting toward a divorce, and her being bullied at school — all at once. Where else could she turn? Food was easy to get, cheap, delicious, and consoling. Good solution, with unfortunate side effects.
Was she blaming her parents for their inadequacy, blindness, or whatever you want to call it. No. Becoming real to herself — acknowledging and feeling her experience of those years — wasn’t blaming anyone.
They loved her and had done their best. They were good people, with limitations. There were no bad guys here. They just didn’t know how to say, “Wait a minute. She’s eating a lot of candy. What is she really needing? And can we help her get it?” They didn’t recognize that the eating was a symptom. They had no medicine for the disease causing the symptom of her sugar-seeking.
But she did. If she could acknowledge how things had “really” been for her — and realize she wasn’t blaming her parents — maybe she could stop running, protecting them (and her relationship with them). She could take care of herself with no morality attached. Normal. Not against anyone. That’s how it had been (for her): she’d been scared, lonely, confused, feeling helpless. Things happen. Those were the facts of those moments in her life. No one’s fault, and not happening now.