Last week, I sent an email to the Nurturing Hope email list with a link to a survey with questions related to our thoughts about clutter and emotional eating. I was amazed at how many people took the time to respond — thank you!

One question asked, “What is the single most challenging issue you face in relation to clutter and/or emotional eating?” Over 80 people answered this question. As I read through the answers, a strong theme stood out:

I just get so overwhelmed with it all, not knowing where to start or where to put things.

I was feeling overwhelmed.

The clutter overwhelms me. I do not know where to begin.

I get overwhelmed.

It is so overwhelming to look at the big picture.

I get overwhelmed with what to do with everything.

Overwhelmed: To be rendered powerless especially by an excessive amount or profusion of something.

“Overwhelmed.” What a perfect word to describe the paralysis that we feel when clutter and emotional eating seem to be controlling our lives. The clutter and the excess weight seem to literally drag us down and immobilize us.

I felt this way for years. Paper, garbage, junk, clothes and stuff piled up higher and higher as if they had a life of their own. And the excess body fat piled on in much the same way. I was literally drowning and yet I felt powerless against the tide of clutter and emotional eating. I felt overwhelmed in every sense of the word.

But then something shifted — not suddenly but gradually. Back then I felt overwhelmed. Now I feel empowered.

How did this happen? I took back control of my life in tiny baby steps. First one little tweak, then another, then another. Sometimes I would backslide — and sometimes I still do — but even when I backslid I was still further ahead than where I started. Three steps forward, one step back — or even three steps forward and two steps back. The sum of the little tweaks was always positive change.

Even now, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by life. What works for me when I recognize that feeling of powerlessness is to take back my power starting with the easiest thing first. I make our bed or I clear my desk or I start a load of laundry. I take a walk in the sunshine. I find some small and do-able way to exert power over my life that I know will make me feel better. I know I don’t have to deal with everything all at once.

“Small and do-able” varies from person to person and situation to situation. If you are feeling overwhelmed, what can you do, right now, to exert just a little power over your life or your home?

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Our Wedding - 2005

This is really a Friday Fun post, but it’s a day late )

In my early adulthood I didn’t have a clue about men or love.  I made a lot of bad decisions.  And then, shortly after I turned 30 I began adding Tweaks or positive habits to my life.  Gradually, I began to realize that I am a worthy, precious person and I slowly started to treat myself accordingly.

Magic started to happen.  I got happier and it showed.  Men started to notice me.  It dawned on me in a blinding realization that fat does not mean unattractive.  I was an attractive, vibrant woman even though I was still very heavy.
Once I realized that there were in fact PLENTY of men who found me attractive, a funny thing happened.   I got picky about men.  In fact, I got super picky.  I stopped considering men I would have dated out of desperation before.  I stopped considering men who seemed “okay.”  I was holding out for just the right one and I knew I’d find him.

And now the truly magical part:  I did.  One day I got a  response at an online personals site that got my attention right away.  An attractive man with a sweet, sensitive face who spoke to me in a way that made me think that he really read my profile and got it.  We talked, and we talked and we talked some more.  The sense of “this man really understands how I think and what I value” was overwhelming.  I still wasn’t sure because we hadn’t met, so I was holding my heart safe.  But then we met and he was everything he seemed to be, and he smelled good too!  (Never fall in love with a man you haven’t smelled yet LOL — chemistry is critical.)

This man is Martin, my husband, and we have been life partners for over six years.  Every day I have to pinch myself because I cannot believe how fortunate I was to find such a tender, generous and passionate man.  I know for certain that I found him because I waited until the right guy came along.

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Jimmy Moore

I have been a fan of Jimmy Moore for years now.  Jimmy and I have something in common.  Like me, he too was once super morbidly obese and he has lost an amazing 170 pounds.  His life’s work is to show others how to achieve the weight loss success he has had with low carb eating, and he shares his message at the popular Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Blog.

What I love most about Jimmy is that everything he does is an illustration of his enthusiastic, joyful approach to life.

This week, Jimmy interviewed Karly Pitman about Valentine’s Day and how to show love to others and, even more importantly, ourselves.  Jimmy calls this interview “a soothing, hot bubble bath” and I could not have said it better.  I hope you take some time today or this weekend to immerse yourself in this comforting and empowering message.  Click here to listen to Jimmy’s interview with Karly.

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It’s like a gift when I have a flash of insight that turns my perception of reality upsidedown.  Most of the time, I love those moments of sudden clarity and today I had one of them.

It’s been just over a year since I walked away from diets and eating plans.  A year of eating whatever I want.  And I’ve still been slowly and steadily burning off the extra fat my body carries.  Some people call this intuitive eating; my goal is to eat what I really want when I’m hungry and stop eating when I’m full.  It sounds easy, but of course it isn’t.

Learning to eat intuitively is a process and I’ve had lots of ups and downs.  I don’t always honor myself by taking the time to think about what I really want to eat and then making sure that I feed myself what I want.  I don’t always stop eating when I’m satisfied.  And fairly often I still eat when I’m not hungry.  I sometimes eat out of boredom, eat when I’m frustrated, eat when I’m fearful or angry or sad.

I know it’s not helpful to beat myself up when I fall short of the ideals of intuitive eating.  But of course I feel disappointed and guilty sometimes when I know I have just eaten emotionally instead of out of hunger.  Today I was pondering this and that is when the flash of insight struck.

Before I set out the goal of eating when hungry, I ate without any consideration whatsoever of whether I was hungry or not.  I ate whenever I had the urge to eat, physical or emotional.  (I was able to lose a substantial amount of weight eating whether I was hungry or not because I alternated between a plan that cut carbs and a low-fat, low GI plan.  Neither plan restricted portions.  However, eventually I reached a plateau at about 260 lbs and could not seem to go lower.)

So back to the insight!  Today I realized that while, yes, I do still eat for emotional reasons sometimes, I am always conscious of doing so.  I know when I’m eating to satisfy hunger and I know when I’m eating to try to stuff an emotion.  And so of course I do far less emotional eating than I have ever done before in my life.  I realized that I have a level of consciousness about my emotional eating that I have never, ever had before and that this consciousness has become a truly ingrained habit.

That’s progress!  Instead of feeling disappointed that I do sometimes still emotionally eat, I can feel proud that I am so aware of my body’s hunger cues and my urges to eat for emotional reasons.

Can you turn your perceptions around to see if there are any victories hiding behind your disappointments?  What are they?

Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/furryscalyman/

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• Christmas and Emotional Eating

“I am enough and I have enough,” immediately resonated with me.  Many times in my life I had found myself trying to make up for a sense of inadequacy by putting other people’s needs before my own.  In the workplace,  I worked long hours and took on unreasonable responsibilities.  I got into relationships with people whose addiction issues ensured that I’d be called upon to rescue them.  Instead of taking the time to truly nurture myself and put my needs first, I ate as a shortcut way to comfort myself.  I ate when I was tired, I ate when I was angry and I ate when I was sad or lonely.  I tried to make up for my perceived inadequacy by spending money and buying stuff.

And I always worried that I didn’t have enough or, worse, that I could not trust that I would have enough to survive in the future.  If I could afford the food I craved now, I should buy a lot of it and eat as much as I could.  Who knows when I would be able to buy it again!  I bought my son piles of toys at Christmas because what if next year we were too poor to enjoy Christmas?  And of course, when you don’t trust that you’ll have what you need in the future it’s natural to hang on to possessions as much as possible and as long as possible.

I have come to believe that emotional eating and clutter/hoarding both stem from a scarcity mindset.  We fear that there isn’t enough love, approval, money, or comfort in the world, and we try to protect ourselves against this scarcity by eating and hoarding.

Where did this scarcity mindset come from?  Many of us who struggle with emotional eating and clutter/hoarding didn’t get what we needed as kids or teens.  This deprivation takes many forms:  abuse or neglect or abandonment from a parent or parent figure, poverty or periods of financial insecurity, trauma or grief to name a few.  We gather our piles of possessions around us and eat when we’re not hungry to try to eliminate the fear of not being enough or not having enough.

It’s natural and good to want to keep oneself safe and protect yourself from deprivation, but in the case of emotional eating and clutter, this normal and positive instinct to protect ourselves backfires.  The result is a cluttered home and a body weighed down with fat.

What I’m asking you to do when you begin the Tweaks system is to start to trust.  Trust yourself and trust the universe to give you what you need when you need it.  I know this is scary, but I promise you that offering this trust is a critical part of transforming your life so that you can experience true abundance.  When you trust, you can learn to nurture yourself in positive ways and gradually release the stuff that crowds your life and the extra weight that pulls you down.

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• Christmas and Emotional Eating

This is a short documentary (a little more than 20 minutes) that you can watch in its entirety. Four people in the UK with hoarding issues talk about their lives and their problems with stuff.

Two moments that really struck me:

• A book hoarder expresses his guilt about the idea of parting with some of his books, “It’s almost as though you’re betraying them.”
• A woman who feels unable to throw her garbage away says, “It might be a lot of rubbish but nobody is allowed to touch it.”

What were your reactions to the documentary?

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• Anti-Hoarding Strategies from a Hoarding Therapist

Have you heard of the fat acceptance movement? It is a loose affiliation of individuals and organizations uniting around the idea that fat people are unfairly targeted for discrimination and hatred in our society. Of course, any of us who are or who have been fat know the truth of this like we know our own names. The revolutionary idea, to me at the time at least, is that this is not okay. Being reviled, discriminated against and treated poorly simply because we are fat is not okay. And, conversely, it’s okay to be fat.

In 1998 I was in my late 20s. It’s sometimes hard to remember exactly how I thought back then, because my worldview has changed so much in the past 10 years. But I recall feeling like my weight was the only thing about me that really mattered, and that because I was so fat I was really just an unacceptable failure as a human. The fat acceptance community helped me to see the irrationality of this belief, and I started to truly understand that I had intrinsic worth as a person and that I had a right to respect from others and, more importantly, some self respect.

There are many people who are active in the fat acceptance community and there are many points of view. There are strong disagreements about certain things within the community. Some people within the fat acceptance community feel that to even want to lose weight is a betrayal of yourself and other fat people. I have to disagree with this perspective. I have seen too many people, myself and others, whose health, mobility and quality of life have been severely compromised by obesity. I have had the experience of losing weight and keeping it off through healthy lifestyles changes, not “dieting.”

But the fact remains that the heart of fat acceptance, the idea that fat people have just as much of a right to stand tall in this world as thinner people, is fundamentally true. And I was able to take on this belief in my own worth because of fat acceptance. And maybe this is what helped me to start loving myself enough to begin to make the changes that have taken me where I am today.

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• What Does it Mean to Offer Ourselves Radical Acceptance?

My first thought? Wow, maybe Oprah has unresolved anger issues. What does anger have to do with potato chips and corn chips? Well, people who work in the field of emotional eating have long known that we crave different flavors and textures depending on the emotional needs we’re trying to “fix” with the food.

Recently I found a very good article on intuitive eating that described this phenomenon very clearly:

Ask yourself: “When I’m feeling the urge to eat, what part of my body actually wants the food?” For example, if you’re craving chips, it may be that the crunching relieves stress in your jaw, which may be related to anger and frustration. If your lips and tongue crave food’s feeling and flavor, you may need nurturing. Or if it’s your throat that’s “hungry”—your gullet wants to feel movement—you may need to speak your mind on something. “Feeling hunger in your throat may also signal that your life feels chaotic or out of control,” says Kratina.

Now, when I’m not hungry and I start dreaming about pretzels or ice cream, I’ve got a head start on trying to figure out what’s really going on

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/penguincakes/

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There is a critical, self-loathing voice inside my head, and it seems like it has always been there for as long as I can remember. Perhaps you have one too. It tells me that I’m just not good enough, that maybe I don’t really have my life under control, that maybe I’m just a misstep or two away from living in squalor and filth again, that maybe my eating is already out of control and I’m back on the road to morbid obesity. It tells me that I can’t trust myself, that I have to be self-critical and hard on myself or my life will fall apart again. The voice both creates and expresses a sense of fear and anxiety that can be paralyzing at times.

A month or two ago I was discussing this self-critical voice with Bill. He asked me a question that boggled my mind: “Catherine, what would it take to accept the part of you that does not accept yourself?” At first this question seemed so paradoxical that I could not even comprehend it. My self-loathing voice is like an enemy who is determined to make me miserable, an enemy whom I cannot escape. I desperately wanted to eliminate this part of me, not accept it!

And then I stumbled across Radical Acceptance, a book by Tara Brach. Brach is a psychologist and a meditation instructor who has woven her own life experience, her clinical experience with clients and her Buddhist beliefs and practices into an approach to dealing with the crippling inadequacy so many of us feel. Brach tells her readers that they can offer every feeling and thought friendly acceptance — even feelings of inadequacy and our most self-criticizing thoughts.

In an interview posted on Beliefnet.com, Brach says:

When some people talk about accepting themselves they have this fear that they’re condoning some bad behavior, or that if they accept themselves, that means they’ll never improve. But the truth is, we’re not saying, “It’s OK that you did that bad thing.” All we’re accepting is the actuality of our experience in the moment: I’m accepting this shame is here, I’m accepting this fear is here, I’m accepting this anger, I’m accepting that there’s craving, I’m accepting the truth just now, that I acted out of that craving and I ate too much. I’m accepting how bad I feel about that. But in the moment of accepting, we’re not condoning. We’re just acknowledging the truth of what’s here with kindness. The reality is, if we can do that, it actually begins to free us so we can in the next moment, be a lot more wise.

Reading Radical Acceptance has opened a window for me into the possibility of a powerful sense of acceptance of all the thoughts and feelings I have, even those that I would prefer to be without. I feel like I’m just starting to get an inkling of how profound the practice of radical acceptance really can be.

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• Did Fat Acceptance Help Me Lose Weight?

I have struggled with emotional eating since childhood. However, I was able to achieve much of my weight loss so far without directly taking on the issue of emotional eating. By gradually changing my lifestyle and building healthier eating habits I lost weight and maintained the loss even though I was still eating for reasons other than hunger.

This is the power of what I’ve dubbed the “tweaks system” — over time, with gentle and gradual lifestyle change, those of us who grapple with the twin issues of compulsive eating and hoarding can almost effortlessly change our lives for the better. Tweak by tweak, small positive changes incrementally become transformational.

Once upon a time, just the idea of trying to get to the emotional root of my issues with food caused me insurmountable anxiety. However, over the past year I’ve discovered that I’m finally ready to start to examine why I choose to eat for reasons other than hunger.

Today I was feeling raw and edgy and could not put my finger on exactly why that was. Novembers have always been tough for me. A number of times over the years the month of November has marked the beginning of a winter depression, and so I now make a point of getting as much sunshine as possible during the late fall and winter. (I’m blessed to be able to live in a warmer, sunnier climate than my native Canada!)

As I was sitting down to work today, I had a strong urge to eat even though I was not hungry. And I didn’t want to eat just anything — I wanted fruitcake. Ordinarily, I keep Christmas sweets out of the house until a few days before Christmas. Out of sight, out of mind. But this year is our first Christmas as expats here in Tunisia and I decided to make our family’s two Christmas favorites, mincemeat and fruitcake, from scratch to make sure that we’d have some traditional Christmas goodies in this Muslim country. The conventional wisdom is that mincemeat and fruitcake must be aged for at least a few weeks, so I got the preparation out of the way early.

This year was the first time I have made fruitcake as an adult. My mother made fruitcake several years in a row when I was a preschooler and it shocked me how vividly I recalled those times as I started in on the multi-day fruitcake process this year. I remembered standing on a kitchen chair as a three and four-year-old, stirring the fruit mixture with a huge spoon — my Mom made such a big batch that she had to soak the fruit in a laundry tub! The taste of the batter, the smell of the spices, the little baking rituals all came back in waves.

My father moved out when I was six. As I recall them, the Christmasses before he left were magical, and much of the magic was food: the fruitcake ritual, a huge box of my grandmother’s Christmas cookies arriving in the mail, tins of smoked oysters and Terry’s chocolate oranges in the stockings my mother stuffed for me and for Dad.

Kids of divorce know that holidays are never the same afterwards. My mother did her best but Christmas after Dad left meant an intensification of sadness, rejection and anxiety.

So today I thought about what that slice of fruitcake I wanted so much represented to me. Geneen Roth, a woman who has spent her life writing and leading workshops about emotional eating with tremendous insight, encourages us to try to think about the feelings we want those craved foods to give us. How do we want the food to make us feel?

What did I want from the fruitcake? Warmth, comfort, love, security, acceptance. A tall order for a slice of cake. But naming those desires is powerful. I want warmth. I want comfort. I want love. I want security. I want acceptance.

I’m not going to tell you that I didn’t eat a slice of fruitcake — I did. Change is as much about awareness and acceptance of our needs and feelings as it is about actually changing how and why we eat. I ate a slice of fruitcake and when I found that I was still raw, edgy and sad, I walked outside and sat in the sun.

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• Decoding Emotional Eating