Your Effort to Control Your Weight is Directly Related to How Securely Supported You Feel - 3 Tips How to Ease the Process

My Dad used to call me ''a Buchenwald mannequin''. By 25 I was 1.53 m tall and weighed 46 kg (including my clothes and shoes).

My family did not like me, so I did not like myself. They thought that being thin was bad and ugly, so I thought I was bad and ugly…

…Until people started noticing me at 21 and told me I was beautiful. After giving it a little thought, I decided I did not believe it. Nobody I liked noticed me anyway.

Then I moved to another country. I left behind the following:

- a controlling, oppressive, strangling, choking home atmosphere

- relatives, whose abuse had been proven to drive their victims to suicide

- hypocritical 'friends' with manipulative tendencies

- a country where everybody pushed you around

- a feeling of 'lost-ness' and inability to detect how the world works and inability to find my place in it....

In my new homeland I found:

- supportive affirming friends

- the freedom to grow emotionally (excuse the cliché)

- the chance to work out who I was and pursue that(excuse another cliché)

- the sense of power from the access to much good food

What remained with me from the past:

- depression

- insomnia

- nightmares about past trauma

- multiple defensive mechanisms

- dissatisfaction with myself

In my new country I was told that I was lovable, so I should love myself.

One way to love myself was through food. I indulged. I started putting on weight.

I first noticed my waist filling up the following year, when I found that I did not fit in my size 8 (UK) dresses any more. The shock was considerable - I had found myself with a new kind of problem.

Suddenly I found myself doing the unthinkable…

… Dieting.

In my past I had been occupied with defending myself from the abuse, which had been sucking all my energy. I had had no chance to just rest and eat, so I'd been underweight.

Now I was using food to embalm the damage from past abuse. I was also experiencing a new emotion - anger - why had trauma had to happen to me?

I discovered for myself what science had long been investigating - the complex reciprocity between food and emotions, with habits of food intake or losing weight stemming from deep emotional consequences.

The external/internal theory of obesity hypothesises that emotionally traumatised people do not experience the same signals of hunger/satiety as people of mental wellness - because of 'faulty learning' (Canetti, Bachar&Berry, 2002). Studies show that people of normal weight would increase or decrease their food intake when stressed, while people already obese, will eat, regardless of their psychological state. And even though food-emotion relationships could not be generalised, due to the differences in the genetic and other characteristics of each individual, it cannot be denied that emotions have an influence on dieting and constitute the roots of many eating disorders.

Steve Grant suggests that appetite often changes in relation to stress, as stress hormones interact with appetite hormones. Whether appetite would increase or decrease in response to stress, depends on the individual characteristics of each person, but generally emotional eaters are in greater risk of overeating.

I found that I was an emotional eater. Food bottled my frustrations down. It suppressed anger, kept it buried down, sweetened it with creaminess and enveloped me with dreamed, un-experienced hugs. Like with post-traumatic stress disorder, the pain inside screamed to come outside, so I fantasized of self-harming or attempting suicide. I did not follow these impulses - I compensated with 4–5 square meals a day instead.

I ate when I was angry…

....with myself (I was punishing myself).

....with my past (I was punishing all people who had hurt me).

....with my future (I thought I had no hope for the future and my past was to blame for this).

I ate when I needed…

....comfort (food came instead of hugs).

....warmth (food came instead of a cosy hot water bottle in bed).

....rest (excessive food kept my energy levels up when all I needed was a good long sleep).

....human companionship (the UK is a pretty lonely country - people in general do not like socialising).

According to a mental health organisation, 'comfort foods' containing sugar, as well as carbonated drinks, stimulate the 'happy hormones' - serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin - so obese patients switching from a high-fat/sugar to a regular diet, have been known to develop increased signs of depression and anxiety. Increased understanding, support and just unconditional human love have been known to greatly improve their sense of emotional well-being, therefore reducing the need to substitute these with food.

According to Harvard Health, there is a very close link between the brain and the gut, so stress can affect digestion and eating habits, while occasionally bad diet has been known to trigger depression.

I have been dieting for 20 years already.

I lost about 20 kg within 3 months, 10 years ago, after a frenzy fear that no man would find me attractive if I looked like a well-rounded teapot. For this purpose I denied myself sugar (my panacea and life-line), combining this with frequent exercise. When I finally allowed myself sugar again, I reacted so strongly against the deprivation, that I binged on sugary goods and put some weight back on again, though never to my worst state. This taught me not to go to extremes, especially with denying myself something I have found I could not live without. Allowing myself sugar 1–2 times a week has been a much more realistic means of keeping my weight down.

I am still lonely, overtired and overworked, so I am still eating - and dieting- eating - and dieting. I lose the odd 3–4 kilos, then something happens - a problem at work, a worry about my son, or even something positive - like Christmas, or the autumn-winter spurt of birthdays in my family - and I binge on cake and cream again. Then I become disgusted with myself, start exercising and lose the excess kilos again.

I am not at my highest weight, thankfully, and men still like me and show interest in me. I guess, if I ''found the one'', I would have enough positive emotions not to rely on food to such an extent, to keep me happy.

Some tips I have learned, that help:

- do not keep high-calorie food in the house

In my obsession with chocolate and cake I tend to buy these whenever I see them luring me from a shop window or a supermarket counter. I can even purposefully go into a shop to find them, especially after a hard day's work, or a stressful situation. They are my treat, my reward for a rubbish day, my more-than-pleasant way to blast the c***out of stress. If I buy 5 chocolate bars, I am sure to eat a whole one, even before I have reached the house, and then hate myself for that. The rest I put in the kitchen cupboards, with the best intention to forget about them till Saturday, and then to spoil myself after a long week's abstinence. It usually does not go according to plan.

I have learned that there is no use to punish yourself after you have committed the crime of copulating with the irresistible allure of the glossy cocoa smoothness. You simply do not keep that smoothness anywhere in the house - the temptation is too great. I live with my mum, who believes that spoiling my son with 'granny treats' in the shape of daily homemade delicacies of millions of calories would result in the child's secure belief that he is loved and cared for. Perhaps - for him. In me, though, this equates with the worst crime of deliberately tempting a weak individual - the sweet wafting from the kitchen is enough to send me cruising there, opening the oven door and devouring a reasonable quantity of the comfort and pleasure even before it has found its way into my son's room. To my protestations against this, my mother answers with the adamant: 'I make them for James, not for you'. As if! How can you shove a large slice of hot heaven under an addict's nose and shout to them: 'Abstain!' The same with tempting an alcoholic with a bottle. A food addict, a drug addict, an alcohol addict - keep the stuff away from them and them - away from the stuff.

- do not 'beat yourself on the head' if you transgress, because transgressions are going to happen all the time.

As I said in the title, life is hard, so abstaining from food is also hard. I believe that for people to eat completely non-emotionally and continuously for the right reasons, life has to be going really well - these people need to have had healthy childhoods, sufficient unconditional support from family, good-ish friends at school and a supportive partner later in life, let alone a job they do not hate. There are such people, though the ones I have met are a minority. I once asked a friend of mine, who wakes up every morning to a day of pleasant emotions and adoration from everyone around her, how she manages to stay so slim, despite the fact that she eats desserts, 4pm cake with her tea, etc. Her answer was: 'I eat for the sake of nutrition and enjoying my food. I do not use food as an emotional cushion, or to satisfy emotional shortages within me'. For me this just about sums it up. Until I am leading a life like hers, I will not punish myself with resentment each time I binge after an exhausting emotional upheaval (at the moment - a regular occasion). I will look forward to the next day as free of mistakes, in which to try again.

- find emotional support, or support someone yourself, and see how they reciprocate

Humans (well, most of them, at least) cannot do without other humans. To feel good about ourselves and life in general, we need a circle of friends, who accept us unconditionally. We need a group to belong to. If our family is not good enough, we need to find other friends, neighbours, colleagues. For me these have been some colleagues from work (the non-judgemental ones), and church. I visited many churches before I found the one with people who would be always happy to see me, even if I decide not to darken the door more than twice a year. Usually it takes me 1–2 visits to a church, to judge if its attenders are there to accept and support me, or to 'tickle' their own egos by finding a stage to appear cool. If it is the latter, you will not see me in that church again. I find that when I feel supported by people's warm interests and kind words (be it even a common genuine question like 'How have you been?'), I find the strength to survive the week, and vice versa. I, of course, try to reciprocate with the same. When kindness overflows with kindness, emotional healing occurs. You feel better, stronger, ready to take over the world - till the next blow. And then again.

Life is one constant struggle, and often stays difficult for a very long time. Still, understanding the links between weight and emotions can bring change in a motivated individual with support around them. I have found loneliness to be the worst enemy to motivation, so if you have support, use it to motivate yourself to better health through normal weight.