Is Food your new Sex? What’s stopping you from reaching your goals

Have you ever noticed how at the beginning of a relationship, when you are falling in love, you just don’t eat as much?  There seems to be an inverse ratio between the amount of sex had and the amount of food eaten.   The marvel of it all is that you don’t even feel deprived, you simply don’t think about food as often.

Compare that to your eating habits whilst nursing a broken heart.  Unless you are one of those rare people who just can’t eat when they are heart-broken, you have probably indulged in comfort eating on such occasions.

This came to my mind when I was remembering working with a client who had been struggling to get her weight down to an acceptable and healthy level.   She used to have an enviably athletic yet feminine physique and at that time, felt very confident about herself and thoroughly enjoyed an active sex life.   Fast forward a few years via marriage and motherhood, and she found herself in the common position of carrying more weight and having less sex.

More importantly, she didn’t feel sexy.  This was something she very much wanted to change, yet time after time, she made a sincere and determined resolution to alter her eating habits only to find that in a matter of days, she fell off the wagon and compulsively consumed what I like to refer to as “consolation calories”.

What’s the pay off?

Clearly this was way more complicated than needing a new diet plan, since at that point in her life with her level of experience, she could probably have written one.  Sound familiar?  So if it wasn’t about needing to learn how to do it, we needed to investigate what was getting in the way of being able to put into practice what she knew.

Behind every act of self-sabotage is a hidden benefit that keeps you hooked in to the status quo.    There is always a reason you resist desired change and that reason is to do with what you are getting out of leaving things as they are.  In order to make any progress, you need to discover what pay-off you’re getting from not changing.

In order to start investigating your subconscious blocks and motivations behind your behavior,  grab a pen and paper and start to write down the messages you give to yourself.   Externalizing the beliefs that are hiding inside your head is the first step to being able to become conscious about why you are doing what you do, which is the prerequisite to being able to change.

What’s the risk?

Often, the thing that stops us from being able to get out of an unwanted situation is a subconscious fear about the unknown alternative that could result.   Sometimes, as Marianne Williamson said, it’s a fear of just how powerful we might be if we gave up a limiting behavior that can keep us from moving forwards.    If we actually did lose that ten pounds, quit the job we hate, start to exercise,- fill in the blank – things might have to change and change is scary.

Or it can be a protective mechanism based on a bad experience in the past, (the subconscious is always forgetting that now is not then).  The message that “it’s better not let your creative side out again in case you get devastated by criticism” – may be based on the time your kindergarten teacher said you couldn’t draw.

In the case in question, we came up with a couple of factors that were causing her to eat excessive amounts of things she should avoid whilst really wanting to lose weight.     Number one was the  subconscious belief that losing weight would mean becoming attractive to men again which would invite intimacy which carries a risk of getting hurt emotionally.   Rather than being a self-destructive urge, this impulse came from a misguided sense of self-protection.

The vicious cycle

But the heart of the matter came to light when, looking at where she used to be and where she is now, I felt compelled to ask “Is Food your new Sex?”   What we discovered was that she was in the grip of a vicious cycle revolving around a rebellious reaction to a lack of pleasure in her life.

This big picture involved a cumulative effect of feeling overly burdened with responsibilities, dealing with a lot of stress, having a punishing schedule of doing too much at a relentless pace, always giving and having self-care at the bottom of her priorities.  It’s really tough to feel sexy in survival mode, which is how she had been leading her life.

No wonder she saw the chocolate (but it could have been the cigarette) as the only fun she got and was determined to hold on to it for dear life.   And so she reacted out of a sense of deprivation.  She comfort ate to fill the void of pleasure,  which in turn created the weight issue which made her feel cut off from her sexuality (which could have provide a healthy, non-fattening source of pleasure) and so feeling deprived, she used food as an outlet for her need to experience pleasure – which started the whole cycle once again.

A new approach

Rather than beating herself up, I encouraged her to recognize that there was a positive side to this revelation.    She agreed to consider appreciating the fact that there was some part of her that longed for a better quality of life.    In making peace with this aspect, she could understand why this part of herself would be so mad that there wasn’t enough joy and pleasure going around and would insist on hanging on to whatever she could cling to.    That part of her needed reassurance that there would be some other, better, more healthy alternatives to choose from in order to begin to let go.

Once it was clear what the motivation was, it was easy to come up with a whole new approach to the issue, which involved a conscious campaign to reduce her stress and to create a lot more opportunities to experience pleasure in her life.

In the beginning it was even hard for her to come up with a list of what might constitute alternate sources of joy and pleasure in her life.  So I gave her the assignment to investigate the matter.   She scheduled a series of Saturday afternoon play-dates for herself, to explore, either alone or with friends what might please her.

Daily pleasure practice

The resulting list, ‘Making time to take a bath by candlelight, buying flowers, touching fabrics that pleased her, singing, dancing, working out’ – became the basis of a new daily pleasure practice.   And it was from this change in lifestyle, that gradually she found herself able to make better eating choices without even having to try that hard.

So, next time you find yourself beating lamenting your unmet goals and beating yourself up unmercilessly, might I suggest that instead you try an alternate approach?   Take the time to get to know your demons and you may discover that, in fact, all they really want to do is to help you.   Once you figure this out, it’s a whole lot easier to thank them, let them know you will no longer be needing their services and either retire them or reassign them to another duty somewhere else in your life that will actually serve you.