Stinkin’ Thinkin’
Every day clients walk through my office door in all shapes and sizes, ages and stages, colors and cultures, of both genders and all generations. Some are loud and talkative, others reticent and shy. Because food abuse has brought with it extra weight, these folks share common issues: obesity, self-loathing, poor body image. To a person, the thinking is the same: first blaming the body, then insulting the mind and spirit, the very self.
I’m fat.
I’m ugly.
I’m stupid.
I’m inadequate.
I will never feel, look, or be good enough.
I’m a mess, a mistake, a failure, a flop.
I’m not worthy.
The list goes on—a long train of negative thoughts, every weakness or flaw called out. Some true but most not. You know how it goes. You’ve probably said at least one of these things in any given day.
Clive did this when he set out to open his own accounting firm at age twenty-nine. He feared failing with his company just as he had with the food he’d abused since high school. His fears seemed to grow with his business, even though the firm was doing just fine. When he came to my office, he not only put himself down for being so fat and so afraid, he now added “being stupid” on an unwritten but very clear list of reasons for his self-loathing.
That’s the way it goes. One negative thought piles into another until there’s one big train wreck of a mind-set. The shame is so deep, so tangled and layered. One dig rolls into another, crashing into a pile so mangled you’re trapped there.
The negative thinking becomes a habit. You pick on yourself like this all day long. You find fault with how you look, what you do, what you say, what you believe others think of you, and on and on, your thoughts looping round the track again and again, leaving a trail of wreckage, a little more of your self-confidence and worth along the way.
Even when you begin recovery, you’re upset with how you ate last night and you worry about what you’ll eat today. You think you should be able to conquer more in a day than is humanly possible, and you feel bad when you don’t reach the outrageous expectations you’ve set for yourself. You think you should be a better friend, worker, husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter—human being. You wish you could be more organized like a coworker, or tend your yard and keep your garage as neat and nice as the neighbor’s. You look at your friends and think they have it all: great spouse, bright and beautiful kids, lovely home—and, in comparison, you’ve failed. You’re flawed. You’re a lost cause, damaged, no good.
You reason if you could just have a better body—be thin or at least more fit—you would be so much happier. If you had only finished school or gone for that guy, then you would be better off. If your parents had only loved you the way you needed, if you’d only been dealt a better hand, if you hadn’t got the short end of the stick, if only you’d had things better …
If, if, if only.
THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION
So much of recovery is about changing that stinkin’ thinking to healthy thinking. This is so important because your thoughts matter. Your every thought not only affects your mind, but your body and appearance too. How you carry and think of yourself, what you become in your own mind, becomes visible to others and can shape what they think of you too.
The Bible puts this well: as you think, so you are (Proverbs 23:7).
When you think you’re unattractive, you become unattractive. When you believe you’re a loser, you start acting like one. Notions of how no one would want to be around you begin to come true because the way you think affects how you feel, which affects how you act, which affects what you become.
See what I mean? The negative thoughts line up like cars on a long train—or, as physician and psychiatrist Daniel G. Amen sees it, like ants that crawl all over you and slip into every nook and cranny of your life.
In fact, it’s what Amen calls this kind of thinking: ANTs, or Automatic Negative Thoughts. Cynical, gloomy, and complaining thoughts that seem to keep coming all by themselves, one dispiriting notion following another.1 ANTs create a gray world full of anxiety and pessimism. If you could look into the thoughts of a depressed and fatalistic person, for instance, you would see ANTs all over the place. Regret and negativity—self-fulfilling prophecies such as “I know I won’t get the job” and “They won’t like me.”
On the other hand when you think hopefully and positively, you create more self-promoting thoughts to help you soar and achieve.
Amen found this isn’t just psychobabble. There is a mind-body connection. Thoughts have physical properties and are real, influencing every cell of your body. Every time you have a thought, your brain releases chemicals and an electrical transmission travels across your brain to its limbic center, where thoughts are signaled and registered and then corresponding moods and behavior are triggered.
When you have an angry, unkind, sad, or grumpy thought, for example, your brain releases negative chemicals that activate and heat up the deep limbic system and make your body feel bad. Muscles tense, the heart beats faster, hands start to sweat, and when the thoughts are intense you can feel dizzy and off-balance. You’re triggered to feel irritable, moody, depressed, angry, any manner of negative emotion. Which leads to more negative thoughts.
By the same token, every time you have a happy, good, hopeful, or kind thought, your brain releases chemicals to make your body feel good. The electrical transmission travels across your brain and cools your deep limbic system, bringing a sense of calm to the body. Your muscles relax, your heartbeat and breathing slow down, and your hands become dry.
I’ve seen the effects of good and bad thinking on the body with every client who walks through my door. The clients who haven’t yet confronted their addictive behaviors live in the ANT world. They shuffle in almost apologetically, ducking slightly, cringing as if trying to squeeze through a narrow doorway or tight turnstile. Behaving in ways that feed upon the self-loathing they confess with words and body language, they do everything they can to cover up and make their size, their very being, less noticeable. Even on warm days and in my well-heated office, they wear baggy sweaters or jackets because they’re ashamed of how their arms look or they want to hide their belly or love handles. They do their best to sink into the couch and cover their midsections with the throw pillows, a purse, a magazine, or newspaper. I’ve met some people, standing in a foyer, trying to hide behind a potted plant or tree—anything to hide the self they’ve come to hate.
TRIGGER TALK
What God Sees as Good
You’ve felt or seen the torture of struggling with food and the leftover self-loathing. But the mess you see is not the miracle God sees. He wants you to have His vision for how lovely and able He made you. He wants you to exchange negative thoughts for positive ones, what’s untrue for His truth, bad notions for His good. Change any view of yourself as unappealing to a reminder of how we are His treasure of great worth (Matthew 4:44–46).
The next time all your self-loathing makes you feel worthless, remember: Noah was a drunk; Abraham was too old; Isaac was a daydreamer; Jacob was a liar; Leah was ugly; Joseph was abused; Moses had a stuttering problem; Gideon was afraid; Rahab was a prostitute; Samson had long hair and was a womanizer; David had an affair and was a murderer; Elijah was suicidal; Jonah ran from God; Job went bankrupt; Martha worried about everything; the Samaritan woman was divorced more than once; Zacchaeus was too small; Paul was too religious; Timothy had an ulcer; John the Baptist ate bugs; Jeremiah and Timothy were too young; Isaiah preached naked; Naomi was a widow; Peter denied Christ; the disciples fell asleep while praying; and Lazarus was dead!
Above all else, remember you are God’s workmanship, created to do good works He has long-planned for you (Ephesians 2:10).
Make this message real and work on your God vision with some ANT killer this week. On a piece of paper make two columns, with a heading on the left, MY THOUGHTS, and on the right, HIS THOUGHTS. At the end of the day, write down every time you’ve thought something negative (I’m so fat, ugly, stupid) in the left-hand column. Now, in the right-hand column, write down truths from God (You are fearfully and wonderfully made). Use a Bible concordance or search online for “what God thinks about us.” Keep this chart in a place you can see and use to start internalizing the truth and getting rid of the ANTs.
What a difference between the person who walks in the door like that and the one who has gotten rid of the ANTs. How free and confident are the people who have learned to accept themselves as they are. This has nothing to do with their size or build. The confident, self-accepting person isn’t necessarily willowy, thin, and fit, with the perfect body. A person at peace with themselves and the world can be tall and large and carry their body with confidence and grace. The self-accepting person possesses a certain elegance that goes beyond size. Think singer/songwriter/actress Queen Latifah (Chicago, Last Holiday, The Secret Life of Bees) or late actor Michael Clarke Duncan (The Green Mile), whose friends called him Big Mike for his towering six-foot-four-inch stature and muscular build. They’ve given us pictures of how to carry even a towering frame with presence, grace, and positivity.
Whether you lose weight quickly or it takes a long while, you can learn to accept and love, not loathe, yourself as God loves you for who you are.
You can be like that too. Whether you lose weight quickly or it takes a long while, you can learn to accept and love, not loathe, yourself as God loves you for who you are, just as He made you in word, thought, deed, dress, and shape. This is one of the gifts recovery from food abuse will give you—not just to be able to manage your emotions and meals, but to escape the obsession over what you want to fix about your body.
TAKE NO PRISONERS
This ability begins with stopping the negative thinking, period. You must take your every thought captive, the Bible says (2 Corinthians 10:5). Think on whatever is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and of good repute (Philippians 4:8). Dwell on what’s worthy of praise.
In other words: squash the ANTs.
Negative thoughts are actually triggers. If you allow one, it can take you to another bad thought and another, and fairly quickly to places you don’t want to go. This completely distracts you from your purposes and leads to feelings that disable you and trigger that urge to soothe yourself with food and a binge.
It happens like this: You wake up in the morning determined to do things right with food today. You’ve got your plan set and feel you have it all under control. By afternoon, though, a few hours till dinner, you start thinking, “Maybe I should have a little snack because I’m feeling kind of hungry.” You begin worrying about it, fearing you should have eaten something else earlier so you don’t have a craving now. You start to fixate on the fact you want a snack, which makes you feel guilty (I should be stronger than this!). All this negativity leads to a desire to comfort yourself with food. You forget all the times before when a snack led to a full-blown binge. Instead, you think about what would taste good, and then you resort to food porn. You start looking at foods you think would bring pleasure to replace how rotten you feel. You stare at the advertisement on the side of the cookie carton and imagine the pleasure of taking just one taste. Then, boom, trigger, you’re not just looking at the outside of the container anymore. You’ve binged. You’re staring at the bottom of the empty carton, or you’re on your way to buy another one.
You could have changed everything by not dwelling on the idea of a snack. Notice I didn’t say “not thinking about the idea of a snack.” You can’t help it if the thought registers. You’re only human after all. It’s the play with the stinkin’ thinking that gets you into trouble, the dwelling upon it and spending time with it. You have to know you cannot entertain trigger thoughts. Period.
This works the same way when you go to a party where everyone else is raving about the dessert. You know dessert isn’t an option for you. If you take your thoughts captive, and squash ideas of one taste, you’ll be okay. But if you begin wondering about the dessert and how good it would taste, dwelling on it, telling yourself that reflecting on it isn’t as bad as eating it, you’re dangerously close to taking a taste, triggering a binge, and getting into trouble. Wonderings can turn to dabblings, and reflections to reaches: Maybe this doesn’t have too much sugar … maybe, if I have enough protein and veggies, I’ll balance out what I’ve eaten in sweets … maybe I can indulge just this once …
The “maybe” thoughts have a certain end: they will set you off and trigger another binge.
Think Free to Be Free
Squashing the ANTs, then, means inviting in positive thoughts and dwelling on the sweet taste of freedom.
Replace tempting thoughts of trigger foods with the reminder you have a food plan and it’s called a plan because it’s a course to follow, not an option. That course is a road to freedom, helping you walk away from disastrous food abuse and toward all your goals. Doesn’t it feel better than being shackled to the cycle of binges that keep you isolated and shamed, behind doors with doughnuts?
Thinking about freedom and how good it tastes is what drives away the ANTs. How good it is to wake up knowing in the hours ahead you don’t have to whirl around and around the decisions of what food to eat and when. You know exactly how you can manage food today, no confusion, no question, no uncertainties. How rewarding to spend time on fulfilling activities and relationships instead of obsessing over what to eat.
OBSESSION AND THE DANGER OF SWITCHING ADDICTIONS
The danger of obsessing over food is one of the most powerful parts of stinkin’ thinking. You can stop the obsession with food and turn the obsession to something equally harmful: shopping, more time in front of the computer, excessive dating and pursuing multiple love interests, preoccupation with how your body looks, or sex, or a long list of other things. Just as food in itself isn’t bad or good, neither are any of these pursuits—until you have a compulsion to do them—at the risk and detriment of your well-being and everything else in your life.
Switching addictions is common too, according to new studies ongoing at Harvard.2 A 2012 roundtable of neuroscientists, surgeons, and researchers saw a number of patients who had gastric bypass surgery turn to alcohol abuse within the first year after surgery. From the research on why, the consortium of scientists and doctors believe it’s because most of these people who abused food chose to work on their bodies—using a gastric band to keep them from being able to overeat—but never worked on their minds. They were food addicts, and when they could no longer physically abuse food, they turned to some other substance for the fix and obsession. There are other widely reported stories of personalities and celebrities who used gastric bypass surgery to slim down, then gained back all their weight for the same reason: the research shows it’s in the mind that addictive behaviors are triggered.
This is what I see in my practice too. Clients who don’t address their addictions and obsessions with one substance can stop abusing food, but will then obsess over and form an addiction to something else: shopping, alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, love interests, social media, television—anything that allows one to follow a compulsion for pleasure to cover some pain.
Whatever the fix is, the results are no different than switching seats on the Titanic. It doesn’t matter which chair you choose, first class or steerage, you’re going down. So when a person finds themselves obsessing over anything, secluding themselves with that fix, compulsively indulging in it at the cost of their time and schedule, relationships, pocketbook, self-worth, and very life, there is some serious stinkin’ thinking to address.
Paul, thirty-nine, is an example of this. As he began recovery from a life of food abuse and loneliness, he started to obsess over losing weight and rebuilding his body. He thought a new body and attractive build would automatically translate into relationships.
Paul was doing well keeping to his food plan. But the more weight he lost and more muscle he built, the more obsessed he became with using his body to attract women. Rather than developing healthy relationships with people, he spent more and more time viewing pornography on the Internet. He began to seclude himself with porn, like he used to do with pizzas, and to masturbate several times a day.
None of this was healthy. He had simply switched giving his body pleasure with food to getting pleasure from porn and sex without relationship. Neither fix addressed all the emotional and spiritual issues that drove him to act on his triggers.
Now, in the isolation of his new obsession, he felt even more angst and shame, and absolutely no peace. He needed to stop making excuses for his new obsession and stop the very first obsessive thought that led to his ANTs. He needed to work on his emotions by addressing the triggers in his mind, no ifs, ands, or buts.
EXCUSES ARE AS BAD A HABIT AS THE EXCESS
Paul’s story is only one of hundreds of powerful examples of how taking your thoughts captive—or not, as in his case—can be so powerful. The behaviors of addiction actually do begin in the brain. How you think, the choices you make, do indeed govern what you do.
The challenge, though, for anyone who has abused food or any other substance, is learning to care as much about getting the mind in shape as the body. So much of the time the myth is that recovery is about what you put in your mouth. But it’s also about what you put in your mind—what you allow your thoughts to feed upon. When you start taking bad and untrue thoughts captive, you begin to dwell on what’s good and right. You stop making excuses, which can be as dangerous in triggering a binge as a bunch of burgers and fries or cakes and cookies.
Check yourself here, if you’ve ever gone down these thought trails—each one is as much a trigger as a chocolate cream pie:
• I was sooo tired.
• Work was incredibly stressful.
• I couldn’t get my kids under control.
• It was snowing and there was nothing else to do.
• It was such a beautiful sunny day I couldn’t resist having some ice cream.
• I had a fight with my husband/wife.
• They brought these amazing cookies into work.
• I couldn’t say no to Aunt Millie who labored to make that cake.
• Dinner was served so late, I had to eat something.
• I was driving past Dunkin’ Donuts and it called my name.
• I didn’t have the food I needed. I forgot to bring my lunch. I brought my lunch, but the pizza everyone else was eating looked so much better.
• It was just a little.
• It was only a Milky Way Lite.
• I have to have it in the house for my kids.
• I can’t throw away the leftovers.
• I blew it earlier, so I might as well just keep on going.
• I just can’t imagine never eating sugar again.
• We were watching the game together. I didn’t want to be left out.
• I felt deprived.
• We were at a great restaurant.
• I paid a lot for the buffet and didn’t want to waste my money.
• I was with my in-laws for the whole day.
• My boyfriend broke up with me.
• Aunt Linda died.
• I was at a party/wedding/Bat-Mitzvah/on vacation.
• It was Christmas or New Year’s, Halloween, Easter, my daughter’s birthday, Saturday, Sunday.
• I was bored, sad, happy, lonely, angry, frustrated, anxious, or depressed.
• I’ll start tomorrow.
Most of us, at some point, have made these excuses more times than we care to admit. There’s always another excuse to lead you back down the track to losing control. Then every loss of control is another reason to feel guilty, ashamed, and stuck in the same old debilitating pattern.
We need a clear resolution to give up all addictive eating and avoid anything that leads down the wrong road. It doesn’t matter if Aunt Millie worked hard to make the cake, you’re on vacation, or it’s Christmas. You have to be clear about what’s going on here. You’ve made excuses. You’ve justified this one break from the plan, which leads to another; and every break leaves you more broken, shattered, and damaged and difficult to piece together.
If you had a life-threatening allergy to peanuts, you would never eat peanuts just because it’s Christmas.
You have to take a hard look at how every excuse kills you a little more. The excuses are killing you, after all. Excuses can be as deadly as a bullet or poison. Just as deadly. Think about it. If you had a life-threatening allergy to peanuts, you would never eat peanuts just because it’s Christmas. What kills you every other day will kill you on a special occasion. There are no exceptions.
If you really want to look and feel good and, better, be whole and full of life and joy, then you have to take the excuses captive in your thoughts just as you let go of excess food. Your situation has to become that apparent. You can’t even think about it or toy with ins and outs.