You will write your Morning Pages daily, but you will write far more often than in the mornings. Throughout your day, you will write every single time you eat—and every single time you feel like eating. This tool is not about judgment. It is about accuracy. Many of us do not know exactly what we eat on a given day. We become discouraged because we gain weight despite our best efforts to the contrary. Keeping a food journal takes the guesswork and wishful thinking out of our lives. Instead, we have facts. We know what we ate, and as we become more skilled at using our journal, we know why we ate it. It is simple and straightforward. You will write down every morsel you eat. You will write down what you are feeling when you are tempted to eat. Very often you will find that you are eating instead of taking a creative action. The creative action does not have to be big. It may be something simple like cleaning up your room. It may be something harder like making a difficult phone call. Whatever the action is, you will often find that you eat to blur your clarity and avoid action. Stunned by a sugar high, who can say precisely what needs to be done next? How many times has a pint of Ben and Jerry’s replaced an action in your life?
Weight loss is a process. At its best, it is gradual and gentle—so gentle, it is almost imperceptible. One day, “suddenly,” we are thinner. Our clothes fit more loosely. We have more energy. We feel more ourselves. We have lost weight and we have often done it after repeated, unsuccessful attempts to do it. We have finally found the right something or somethings that help us to chisel off the pounds.
The something that works for me and my students is words. We put language between us and a binge. We put language on our turbulent emotions. We name our inner landscape, and that process of accurate self-definition is exciting. To do this, we keep a journal, although it records far more than our eating—or our battle not to eat. At the first whisper of a Snack Attack, we take to the page. Pen in hand, we explore our troubling cravings. “I want to eat something,” we write. And then we keep on writing. Revelations tumble to the page.
Whenever and whatever we are tempted to eat, we record.
“I want to eat something” soon translates into something far more specific. For example, “I just thought of John, and that made me want to stuff my feelings of loss. I still miss John.” Or “This new job is exciting but so public that I find it a little threatening.”
As we admit the shadows that fall across our inner terrain, those shadows lose their power to scare and to sabotage us. We can live with missing John, we can live with the stress of the new job—and we can do it without a pint of ice cream.
Not all of the feelings that drive us to the cookie cabinet are negative. Sometimes good news sends us spinning. Working with pages and journaling, Andrew lost ten pounds and was so elated by the news from his scale that he went on an eating binge to celebrate—and sabotage—his loss. “I had to laugh,” he says, “although it wasn’t funny. Using the tools, I managed to nip myself mid-binge. I told myself it was progress, not perfection.”
Stress triggers self-defensive eating and stress can come from new positives in our lives as well as from old negatives. We may “still” miss John, but it is equally likely that our new, higher-profile job makes us nervous and that those nerves also give us a Snack Attack.
“I had a best-selling book and suddenly everyone wanted my picture,” one author relates ruefully. “I was finally in a position to ‘show them’ and what I showed them was that I’d packed on fifteen pounds on a book tour. My new designer suits were too tight and my ‘cute little face’ looked pudgy. I wanted to scream.”
Faced with self-sabotage, we all want to scream, but we can do something far more productive. We can write. First thing in the morning, we can do our Morning Pages. At midday, instead of reaching for an oversize lunch, we can reach for our journal and in it we can record the facts and feelings of the day. “I am at the hairdresser’s. They are sending out for Chinese. I am tempted, but I think I’ll skip it,” Marjorie wrote. She asked for—and got—a Starbucks coffee and a salad instead.
Although, at first, journaling may feel foreign and intrusive, it soon becomes a natural and indispensable source of companionship and courage.
Caitlin found she used her journal to say the unsayable. A teacher of gifted students, she frequently found their parents to be obnoxious and spoiled—unlike their offspring, whom she thoroughly enjoyed. And so, faced with a parent-teacher meeting, she scrawled in her journal, “I hate and resent these meetings. These parents treat me like the downstairs maid. I can’t stand it!” Venting her pent-up negativity, Caitlin found herself able to skip the high-calorie buffet laid out for the parents’ visit. No Brie and crackers for her. No gorgonzola with apple. No chocolate chip cookies. No New York cheesecake. Nothing but clarity.
“I felt so good, facing my true feelings. I also found that venting my feelings gave me room for other feelings, more positive feelings. As I wrote in my journal after the meeting was over, ‘That wasn’t so bad.’”
Speaking for myself, my journal became a constant companion, a best friend to whom I confided my innermost thoughts—especially when I was on the road working. Reaching for my journal instead of for food, I found that I had a whole range of feelings that I had previously not acknowledged.
I discovered that I overate at lunch on book tours because I was often bored by yet another hotel room, and the day seemed “too long” to me. As I was writing my feelings in my journal, it occurred to me that a really good book might be the antidote to my lunchtime blues. I decided to make my room service lunch secondary to the adventure of what I was reading. I would read something delicious instead of eating. I chose a romantic novel by Tim Farrington, The Monk Downstairs. I couldn’t wait to get at it every day. I found I had a larger appetite for Farrington’s words than I did for an overinflated lunch. Journaling taught me that I was using food out of boredom and that when I wasn’t bored, I wasn’t hungry.
Writing in his journal, Ned discovered he was genuinely hungry every afternoon at four. “That’s when I would grab a bag of chips or a handful of cookies,” he relates. “It occurred to me while writing about it that I could bring fruit with me for a snack. Now I pack some delicious little plums, and when I get a Snack Attack, I eat them.”
For Alec, midnight was truly the witching hour. “Every night I would go on an eleventh-hour run,” he remembers. “I would race to a fast food chain that closed at midnight. I’d stuff myself with a fast food burger and fries.” Writing in his journal, Alec discovered that he became discouraged late at night. No matter how well he had done during the day, as darkness settled in, it settled into his psyche as well.
“Pray,” I suggested to Alec. “Pray on the page. Write a prayer.”
Dubious at first, Alec began writing out a late-night prayer instead of going on an eating binge. He discovered a whole range of hidden emotions—it was at night that his dreams would come stalking him, urging him to live differently than he was. A successful therapist, Alec had buried his own dreams beneath the dreams of his clients. Artistic by temperament if not career, he had given up piano playing and he had given up writing. At the urging of his journal, he began to take baby steps in each pursuit. He bought a Casio keyboard with earphones that allowed him to play the piano late at night without disturbing his neighbors. Carrying his journal with him at all times, he began to “get” short poems, the first since his college days. Late-night bingeing became a thing of his past.
“I didn’t think I’d have the discipline to keep a journal,” Brenda reports. “I tried it with a great deal of resistance. What I found out quickly was that keeping a journal made me feel far less lonely. Suddenly I had a witness to my days. It sounds corny, but the journal became my friend.”
“The first journal I bought had horses on the cover,” Karen laughs. “Horses made me think of a younger and happier me, one who had a sense of adventure. I quickly found out that journaling also gave me a sense of adventure. ‘Someone’—the journal—wanted to know where I went and what I thought. I found myself writing about much more than food.”
For many users the journal is a first step toward adventure. Recording our thoughts and perceptions, we find that we are actually far more interesting than we may have thought. Far from boring, our daily lives are fraught with many small dramas. When we put these on the page, a transformation occurs. “Boring old me” becomes “fascinating me.” Our largely uneventful lives may unfold like Jane Austen novels, and we are, after all, the heroines and heroes. What we think and feel does matter. As we see that each day is filled with many tiny choice points where we can act and react differently, we begin to respond to life more as we wish to respond to it and less as hapless victims.
“Journaling made me start to see myself as a character—and a character I liked,” reports Gillian. “I began to ask myself, ‘Would Gillian do that?’ when something came up that felt out of sync. I learned that I had a definite style and that this style was something I could further cultivate. Journaling helped me to do that.”
“I don’t call it a journal. That’s too feminine for me,” says Matthew. “I call what I write ‘field reports,’ and I think of them as letters home from the front line. As you might guess, I think of life as an adversarial situation. Part of that is my job as a salesman, which is dog-eat-dog. I discovered from one field report that I ate to cover my feelings of vulnerability. I wanted to be ‘big enough’ to handle the competition. No wonder I overate.”
To Matthew’s surprise, his field reports quickly gave him a feeling of inner security. Secure and well grounded thanks to his writing, he no longer found life quite so adversarial. He no longer needed to overeat just to feel right-size.
Liza, too, found that journaling brought her welcome stability. A manic-depressive in her mid-fifties, she was resigned to ping-ponging moods and weight to match. When she was manic, she was too hyper to eat. When she was depressive, she overate. A look at her scale could often tell her accurately where she was in her cycle. As she wrote out her actions and reactions, Liza found herself feeling compassion for herself. So many ups! So many downs! For the first time, she sought the help of a psychopharmacologist. After several tries, they found a medication that gave her access to her emotions yet tempered her erratic mood swings. Her life stabilized, and with it, her weight.
“Journaling makes me smarter,” Bob claims. “At the very least it allows me to capture my good ideas before they fade away.” An advertising copywriter, Bob uses his journal to brainstorm. “I started out writing about my weight. I would reach for my journal whenever I had a Snack Attack. What I soon discovered was that snacks had been blocking a lot of ideas. When I gave up my Oreo habit, it felt like my IQ jumped up a few points. Instead of munching a cookie, I’d chew over a new idea. I got some of my best campaigns that way.”
If journaling can make us thinner and smarter, why don’t more people try it?
“I thought journaling was for writers,” Patsy says. “And no way was I a writer.”
“It seemed so permanent,” jokes Carl. “There on the page in black and white. I think I had a fear of commitment. Make that I know I had a fear of commitment.”
Journaling is not for writers only. A lawyer recently told me, “Journaling has made me a hell of a lot better in the courtroom.” Journaling does not require a major commitment—as Carl feared. The only commitment necessary is the commitment to try it. And then try it again the next day.
TASK
Buy Yourself a Journal and Carry It with You Always
For many of us, this task is an exercise in boosting our self-worth. We are willing to journal, but we go about it in a ragtag fashion, writing on whatever scraps of paper we have at hand. The idea of having a dedicated journal strikes us as spendthrift, too big—and too costly—a commitment. It is not too big a commitment. It is far less costly than the extra pounds you are carrying. Ask yourself, what kind of journal would I like and would I use? Some favor spiral-bound journals that remind them of their schooldays. Others like hardcover journals small enough to fit into their purse. Pick a journal that pleases you and do not be stingy with yourself about the price. Weight loss is worth the cash outlay—and the self-awareness you will gain is beyond price. Carry your journal with you everywhere. Use it whenever you eat—and whenever you want to eat.