The Fat Trap Is Making Waves

When it comes to eating and weight related issues I suspect that many of us think that Manager-led eating and focusing upon weight loss is the way to go.  This is the epitome of the Diet Mentality.  Absent here, is respect for and trust in the body.

 The January 1, 2012 cover story on the NY Times Magazine, by Tara Parker-Pope, The Fat Trap   made big waves. 

The upshot of her article is that the body’s biology prevents it from maintaining weight loss after a diet, unless one is vigilantly restricting, monitoring and exercising in excessive managerial mode for the rest of one’s life.  She helped many lifetime dieters consider that their repeated failures are not about lack of willpower or blame, but what actually happens, when by restriction and intense exercise, a person loses significant weight in a short amount of time. …. That’s what diets are about. 

As someone who admittedly struggles with weight, her conclusion was not to lose hope in diets, but to increase her intense daily exercise to 90 minutes!  Oy!  I call this METABOLIC MANIPULATION DISORDER.

 In the 1970’s some started challenging the diet mentality, saying that diets do not work.  From Don Gerrard, One Bowl, 1974, and Suzie Orbach, Fat is a Feminist Issue, 1978, on up to Geneen Roth, and Ellyn Satter, the message is that one can be at peace with food, listen to and trust the body’s signals, and in doing so, the body will gradually come to homeostasis.  It can be called conscious eating, mindful eating, intuitive eating, or attuned eating.  We are all born with this ability.  

I have been teaching this approach for 32 years, helping people to redirect their attention to the quality of their relationship with food and to how they eat.

I am still amazed at how revolutionary it is, and how much impatience and resistance there is to practicing this respectful and gradual way of responding to the body’s signals. 

Certainly the Diet Mentality keeps many people in business.  It feeds the economy.  Many are highly invested in maintaining the myth that our bodies are not good enough and need to be controlled by external dictates. Naomi Wolfe said, “Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history.”

Until I studied Internal Family Systems, however, it was a challenge to explore this resistance.  Self-led Eating is the marriage of mindful/attuned eating and IFS. 

The IFS model is an elegant process of getting to know firefighters and of understanding why they have us eat impulsively.  It is a way to get to know the good intentions of the managers, what they are protecting, and then to go about addressing and healing exiled parts. 

It is a respectful, organic, very individual process and not a quick fix.  SELF provide safety for the exiled BODY to come back to the table.  Self-led Eating, by definition, offers hope to be at home in one’s body and to be at peace and at ease with food… something that dieting can never deliver.

I INVITE YOU TO JOIN ME AT MY NEXT SELF-LED EATING INTENSIVE  for professionals        

 JANUARY 27 -29, 2012.     16 CEU’S

Enhance your work with individuals who suffer from emotional eating.

Internalize the essentials of a healthy relationship with food.

Using IFS, we will gain access to parts that “resist” responding to bodily cues of hunger and satiety. This workshop continues to evolve since I started incorporating IFS into my work. Now parts work is fully integrated into all days of the workshop.  

 www.TheConsciousCafe.org  for more information