Bandgirl64

Is maladaptive eating slowing or sabotaging your weight loss? Let's take a look at how that happens and what we can do to change it.


WHAT IS MALADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR?
The term “adaptation” brings Charles Darwin to my mind. His theory of evolution is considered heresy where I live, but whatever your personal belief about the origin of the human species, you’ve probably observed many times that humans and other living things have an amazing ability to adapt their behavior, and even their forms, to better survive and thrive in its environment, and that as the environment changes, so do the creatures living in it.
Here in Tennessee, the weather is getting hot enough to send us into our closets to bring out the shorts and sandals and bathing suits we need to comfortably survive the summer. At the same time, our dogs and cats are shedding the extra fur they’d acquired to keep them warm during the winter. The humans are adapting their dressing behavior and the cats are adapting their forms to adjust to hot weather. This is adaptation in its positive sense, but adaptation also has a dark side.
Defining “maladaptation” requires us to assume that certain behaviors are normal, while others are abnormal. That does not necessarily mean that normal is healthy and abnormal is unhealthy. Someone (or something) is considered “normal” if they conform to a widely accepted standard or practice, and abnormal if they deviate from the norm.
A behavior can be identified as maladaptive or abnormal only in the context of an environment. It is not intrinsically wrong or evil, and its degree of deviance or abnormality depends on things like cultural and social rules and norms (cannibalism may be a normal behavior in one society, but not in another), systems of psychological and medical thought (a mentally ill person may be “abnormal”, but able to function despite that); as well as political beliefs and ideals (in a democracy, the practice of communist principles is considered “wrong”). I’m going to try to bypass all those interesting but knotty aspects and give you definitions and examples that don’t require a PhD in sociology or psychology to decipher them.
Some maladaptive behavior is disruptive to society because it interferes with group functioning. A child “acting out” at school in reaction to the stresses he experiences at home is an example of this. His frustration with his home life turns into anger that fuels temper tantrums in the classroom. His behavior is maladaptive because it doesn’t eliminate the stresses at home and creates a whole new spectrum of stresses and problems at school as his teachers and fellow students react to his aggression. He can’t learn lessons in school that he needs to learn because his “bad” behavior gets in the way.
Other maladaptive behavior is expressed in an inward fashion. A shy, anxious art student is horrified when her painting teacher publically critiques her painting and tells her and the rest of the students that her artwork is exactly what they should not be doing. The art student loses confidence in her talent and changes her major to another subject. Her behavior is maladaptive because it makes it much harder for her to achieve her original goal of becoming an art teacher.
My own definition of maladaptive behavior is this. It’s a nonproductive behavior that prevents you from adapting to situations, or changes in yourself or your environment, in a healthy way. It can begin as an attempt to deal with or avoid an unpleasant experience but it does not solve the original problem and eventually becomes dysfunctional. You adjust to a situation in a way that makes sense at the time but that eventually misdirects your energy and focus, and interferes with your personal and interpersonal functioning, your health, and your ability to achieve your goals. At the start, the behavior feels like a helpful, even positive response to abnormal, difficult, or negative circumstances.
As a bandster, I used both old and new maladaptive eating behaviors. My decades-old behaviors, like eating to deal with stress, did not disappear on the morning of my band surgery, and 5 years later, I’m still working on changing that. I also developed new behaviors in response to the experience of having an adjustable gastric band. The long-term result of these maladaptive behaviors is unintended and undesirable. The maladaptive eating tactic may seem to solve a current problem while it's actually creating future problems: slowed or stopped weight loss, weight gain, band slippage, band erosion, and so on.
SOFT CALORIE SYNDROME & OTHER DANGERS
A classic example of bandster maladaptive eating behavior is known as Soft Calorie Syndrome. I discovered the perils of this syndrome for myself when I traveled to New York City to attend a trade show when I was about 8 months post-op. I had gotten a fill the day before I left, and by the time I got to New York I had realized that my band was too tight for me to tolerate. I couldn’t eat any solid food, so I spent the next 3 days eating soft, high-calorie, low-satiety foods like Soup, milkshakes, and ice cream. I was just trying to survive long enough to go home and get an unfill. My eating behavior achieved a temporary goal (comfortable survival) while sabotaging my long term goal of losing weight. In fact, I gained weight during that trip and ended up feeling disappointed in myself.
A frustrating aspect of maladaptive behavior is that it’s often easier to see in others than it is in yourself, but even someone who’s fully aware that her or his behavior is counterproductive may feel helpless to change it. If I had a dollar for every time a bandster has confessed to eating to relieve stress or boredom, I’d be a wealthy woman now. Emotional eating tends to be so longstanding and deep-rooted that it takes on a life of its town, like a devil lurking inside us who seductively whispers, “Chocolate! chocolate will make you feel soooo much better!” when you’re too vulnerable, tired, or upset to make a different or healthier choice.
When I was being treated for PTSD years ago, a counselor asked me to make a list of behaviors and activities that I could choose to do instead of engaging in self-destructive ones. At first the exercise seemed contrived and silly, but eventually I realized its usefulness. I was not able to think clearly and make good choices when in severe emotional distress. All I could think of was razor blades. My index card of alternate behaviors reminded me that I could telephone a friend, go for a walk, take a bath, listen to music, pet a dog, and the like instead of playing with sharp objects.
Now, I very much hope that you’re not dealing with severe emotional distress (which I would wish only on my worst enemy), but I do believe you can benefit by making your own list of alternatives to emotional eating. Carry a copy of that list with you everywhere you go and keep a copy in an easily-accessible spot at home (I tacked mine to my bulletin board).
TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES
In the 1960’s and 70’s, contestants on the “Truth or Consequences” game show would try to answer ridiculously obscure trivia questions and be forced to perform silly stunts in punishment for getting the answers wrong. The host ended each episode by saying, “Bob Barker saying goodbye, and hoping all your consequences are happy ones!"
The relief or pleasure or other immediate consequences of a maladaptive behavior may seem like happy ones, but they generally short-lived, so the behavior must be repeated over and over for the benefit to be felt. As with an addiction, it takes more and more of the behavior or substance to cause relief or pleasure. An anxious person, whose mother lost a leg to gangrene (death of flesh) from bacterial infection in an untreated injury, naturally fears germs. She washes her hands thoroughly and often, especially after touching anything that might harbor germs. At the start, her own home is clean and safe, but because her hand washing doesn’t remove her basic fear, eventually she must practice it all day, every day, over and over, even in her own home, until her skin is scrubbed raw. She sees the abrasions her scrubbing has caused as more vulnerable to germs and increases the hand washing. Soon the hand washing excludes all other activities and she dares not leave her home. The salutary practice of hand washing has become a maladaptive and destructive behavior.
Unlike the hand washing or other compulsive, fear-based, abnormal and ritualistic behavior, maladaptive eating is rarely perceived as strange. Eating is socially acceptable as long as the meat on your plate belongs to a different species. It’s also something that’s easy to do in secret, while you’re alone in your car or your bathroom or wherever you go to escape other people. But when you do it over and over again, your repetition of the behavior cements it into a wall around you, keeping you locked inside instead venturing forth to find relief elsewhere. And should you confess to this maladaptive eating behavior, people who don’t use food in this way simply cannot fathom why you would do it. They say impatiently, “Put the fork down! Step away from the table! Just say no to chocolate!” Ah, if only it were that simple, that easy…
SMALL-TIME CRIMINALS
Some maladaptive behavior arises from ignorance, misconceptions or misunderstanding. Take the case of Martin. He received minimal pre-op education, so when he found himself PB’ing (regurgitating) on a daily basis after his 3rd fill, he assumed that this was simply a fact of life for bandsters. His problem is ignorance. The same thing happened to Annie, who assumed she was doing something wrong but was too shy, ashamed and embarrassed to ask her surgeon about it. Her problem is misconception. And when PB’ing intruded into Carol’s daily life, she believed it was like vomiting, caused by “a stomach bug”, so it never even occurred to her that her eating behavior might be causing it. Her problem is misunderstanding.
All too often, a maladaptive behavior seems like such a small “crime” – it was just one ice cream cone – that the bandster minimizes its importance without realizing that the cumulative effect of a series of small crimes can be just as destructive as a single big one. It’s kind of like ignoring the posted speed limit when you’re driving your car. You shudder at the news of a fatal car accident when an acquaintance driving at 70 mph in a 35 mph zone loses control of his vehicle and crashes into a telephone pole. In that instance, ignoring the speed limit is clearly a bad choice. But when you’re late for work (again), run a few yellow or even red lights (again), and drive at 70 mph in a 35 mph zone (again) in your eagerness to get to work on time, and nothing bad happens, speeding doesn’t seem like such a terrible crime…until the day you can’t stop in time to avoid the car turning into your path and end up as a bleeding mess choking on dust from your car’s air bag while an ambulance carries off the person you killed because of your maladaptive behavior.
IS THIS BEHAVIOR GETTING YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO?
A bandster once confessed, “I eat pretty good all week and then I allow myself a junk food day...a bad mistake on the weekend since that usually means a junk food weekend...once I start, it’s so hard to stop and of course weight gain is the result and I end up beating myself up. I'm never going to be where I want to be if I continue this behavior.”
I want to repeat that all-important last sentence: “I'm never going to be where I want to be if I continue this behavior.” That, my friends, is the take-home message of this article. Take it to heart, take it home, and take it out and study it often. Ask for help in identifying and dealing with your maladaptive eating behaviors. Take them seriously, but don’t build them into mountains right in the middle of your path to success. Sometimes the solution or treatment for a big maladaptive behavior can be a small piece of common sense. One of my favorites is: Don’t keep trigger foods in the house. If chocolate is your bête-noir (the black beast that’s the bane of your existence), you’re not going to be able to gorge yourself with it the next time you’re feeling weak if there is no chocolate in your house. Yes, I know you can hop in your car, ignore the posted speed limits, and pull up in front of the Chocoholic Market in a matter of minutes. That’s why we have to be vigilant, honest and aware.
And remember this, from page 299 of Bandwagon: It takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days of daily repetition to make a new behavior automatic….so, practice, practice, practice!

Hello, congrats. I am fairly new here also, had surgery 2/27/13. I dont get my first fill till 5/28 talk about crazy, i have not lost anything since the intial 20 i lost after surgery. It freaks me out. I try to have string cheese for a snack, but i am not always sucessful. I have been looking for a weight loss buddy to share these types of thoughts etc with.
Connie

Hello, congrats. I am fairly new here also, had surgery 2/27/13. I dont get my first fill till 5/28 talk about crazy, i have not lost anything since the intial 20 i lost after surgery. It freaks me out. I try to have string cheese for a snack, but i am not always sucessful. I have been looking for a weight loss buddy to share these types of thoughts etc with.
Connie

I'm 3.5 weeks post surgery and do great during the day with food and choices, but I'm having trouble at night. I get hungry around 8pm and it's like a snack just doesn't do it. I'm overeating and end up feeling stuffed/sick right before bed.
I don't get my first fill until June 7 so right now I don't really have restrictions. I'm afraid I'm going to start gaining and know this is key to getting under control if I am going to succeed with this lapband.
I should also mention I'm a type 2diabetic so a pre-bed snack s recommended right now for my blood sugars...
Any suggestions? Tricks? Motivation?

I’m seeing a disturbing proliferation of victimhood these days. Every day the media broadcast reports about victims of crime – of scams, fraud, theft, murder – and victims of acts of God, like weather, fire, and floods. My heart goes out to those victims because I feel a kinship to them. I too have experienced violence, loss, trauma, and pain. But I am not a victim. Are you?


VICTIMHOOD
Before we get into the meat of this article, I want to ask you a question: are you a victim?
Don’t tell me the answer yet, but keep it in your mind while you read the rest of this article.
Victimhood can be alluring. It garners attention, assistance and pity that you can milk for the rest of your life if you play the role well. You don’t have to be responsible for rebuilding your life or restoring what you lost. That doesn’t appeal to me, though. It sounds boring and tiresome, and it discourages laughter, which I find even more healing than tears, so why does victimhood continue and even proliferate? Let’s take a closer look at how obese people like us become victims.
WHO ARE THE VILLAINS?
Every victim needs at least one villain. Who or what are your villains?
Me – I got a lousy genetic legacy. I inherited every strand of obesity DNA my mother’s gene pool had to offer (plus the ones for thin hair and crooked teeth). We won’t discuss the humor genes I also got from her, though. Humor doesn’t enhance my victimhood. But that’s okay, because I’m actually not a victim.
While we’re blaming obesity on our ancestors, we need to look at the flip side of the nature versus nurture coin. I got a raw deal there, too. Neither of my parents encouraged exercise or sports. In fact, they ridiculed physical fitness programs and encourage scholarship and mental fitness instead, so I ended up being a very smart, very fat intellectual. And that’s fine, because I have a college degree and an impressive resume as a result. And anyway, I’m not a victim.
Another popular villain nowadays is addiction. Addicts will do anything to support a drug or other destructive habit. We need ever-increasing amounts of our substance just to prevent withdrawal, never mind to get high. For my brother, the substance is methadone. For me, it’s food, especially sweet or salty or fatty or otherwise nutritionally evil food, and it’s even easier (and cheaper) for me to score a hit of my substance than it is for my brother to score some of his. Baskin Robbins, McDonald’s, Lays and Duncan Hines are just a few of the virtually inescapable pushers I know. It’s sad but true, but I can overcome it, because I am not a victim.
Let’s not forget our celebrity-worshipping society and the flood of images of skinny women that wash over us every single day. The media and the likes of Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss and Angelina Jolie constitute a vast and powerful band of villains. The siren song of “Thin Is In” sounds all around me, but it doesn’t matter because I can shut my eyes, turn down my hearing aids, and remember something important: that I am not a victim.
In addition to obesity, I suffer from another incurable, chronic, debilitating disease that’s scientifically been linked to obesity. The pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome haunt me every day, with villainy that threatens to suck all the joy out of my life. But I’m not going to let pain get the better of me, because I am not a victim.
IN CONCLUSION
Now let’s go back to the beginning of this article, where I asked if you’re a victim. I want to hear your answer to that question now, after you’ve read the article. Think carefully before you speak.
Okay, here goes. Are you a victim? Really, truly, a victim?
No?
That’s great! Neither am I. Like you, I’ve chosen to win the weight loss battle, conquer the villains, and emerge the victor. I’m not going to settle for anything less than that, and neither should you. So grab your swords, my friends, and fight back now!

Are you afraid of an unhappy outcome of your weight loss surgery? You're not alone. Use your fear to conquer obstacles rather than letting it conquer you


For most of us starting a WLS journey, bariatric surgery is vast, uncharted territory, full of unknowns. We long for a happy outcome – maximum weight loss with minimum problems. We listen to stories told by other patients with a combination of hope (to be as successful as they’ve been) and fear (that we won’t experience the side effects or complications they talk about).
No one wants to be haunted by the specter of anxiety and dread, but I think a little bit of fear is a good thing. I don’t want fear to dominate my life, but without it, I’m likely to become complacent about my weight loss success and/or revert to the old, all-too-comfortable ways that made me obese in the first place. In small doses, fear keeps me on my toes.
Like pain tolerance, fear tolerance varies from one person to the next. Perhaps I’m able to tolerate and use fear because my childhood and adolescence were so full of fear-provoking experiences. By the time I was in my late 20’s, I actually got a little thrill out of fear, possibly because it stimulates adrenalin production. There’s nothing quite like a knife coming at you to activate your fight-or-flight system, causing a perverse fear “rush”.
At the same time, prolonged exposure to fear has also taught me to respect it. I don’t play with fear the way daredevils like Evel Knievel did, risking life and limb for the brief thrill of jumping 14 buses at a time with his motorcycle. But I do like the way fear can clear my mental field, forcing me to draw a line between important and unimportant. When the choice is survival or surrender, I’d rather choose survival. I’m not a quitter. When challenged, I’m going to fight back, especially if something precious like my health is at stake.
If fear tends to paralyze rather than mobilize you, you may have to use your own compass to navigate a problem, or play follow-the-leader (provided you have a trustworthy leader) instead. Whatever you do, don’t give in. Giving in turns you into a victim (click here to read an article about victim mentality: http://www.lapbandta...-of-obesity-r79), which is not a position of strength in any battle worth fighting. And your health is worth fighting for, isn’t it?
So, how can you make fear a working partner in your WLS journey? Let’s take a closer look at two of the more common faces of fear.
FEAR OF FAILURE
Somewhere between my first, mandatory pre-op educational seminar and my pre-op liver shrink diet, I became uncomfortably aware of a shadow that followed me everywhere. It was dark and scary, and even bigger than I was. It was my fear of failure. After decades of struggle – diets, weight loss, weight gain – I felt that WLS was my absolute last chance to be healthy. And after slogging through all those pre-op tests, evaluations, consults and procedures, I danged well was not going to fail this time.
Since I had to admit that my weight management skills were sadly lacking back then (as amply proven by the number on the scale and the numbers in my medical files), the only option available to me was to become the most compliant patient my surgeon ever had (click here to read an article about patient compliance: http://www.lapbandta...g-deal-abo-r112). I had to believe that he and his staff knew what they were doing and would guide me well. I’m a very curious and often mouthy person, so I asked a lot of questions and did my best to understand what was going on in me and around me, but I spent very little time trying to second-guess the instructions I was given. That approach freed up a lot of time and energy that I was then able to devote to changing my eating and other behaviors in ways that helped my weight loss.
FEAR OF COMPLICATIONS
Compliance served me well I this area also. I can’t claim that I was never tempted to cheat on my pre or post-op diets or to test my band’s limits. I can’t claim that I believed I’d be forever exempt from the side effects and complications I heard about from other WLS patients. But when my dietitian told me (for example) that I’d be mighty sorry if I accidentally swallowed a wad of chewing gum and had to have it scraped out of my stoma, I quickly lost my interest in chewing gum. When I observed that many bandsters experienced certain types of side effects and complications after engaging in certain types of risky behaviors, I resolved not to follow them down the road of no return.
Eventually I discovered that life after WLS can deliver some unpleasant surprises, just as in every other aspect of life. I had to learn some things the hard way, like: If you swallow a large antibiotic capsule that can’t pass through your stoma and slowly dissolves into a corrosive mess, you will end up in the ER thinking you’re having a heart attack (and end up with a big unfill). And no, liquid antibiotics don’t taste good, but they taste a lot better than the weight I regained after that unfill.
Most of the mistakes I made were the result of impatience or carelessness, but I did my best to learn from those mistakes and keep moving on. A handful of mistakes was about all it took for me to decide not to challenge the validity of my surgeon’s and dietitian’s instructions, and that kept me trudging along the bandwagon trail, getting ever closer to my weight goal. And once I reached that wonderful place, I was determined to stay there!

Hello, pray and give what ever thats got you down to God he will take care of it. You are an inspiration to me everyday, I think how incredible your journey has been and the fact that you have not even had a fill yet amazez me. I am not even 3 months post op and struggle everyday, but instead of taking my own advise I eat the garbage. So take a look down at where your feet are and stay in the day, the moment, the minute and trust that God has got your back.
Connie

So my paperwork was submitted Monday, and my dr just called and it was approved!!!! I'm so excited, and happy and anxious! I'm def surprised they approved so fast! My surgery is the 30th! This def has made my day, my weekend, and the rest of my life!

Hello, pray and give what ever thats got you down to God he will take care of it. You are an inspiration to me everyday, I think how incredible your journey has been and the fact that you have not even had a fill yet amazez me. I am not even 3 months post op and struggle everyday, but instead of taking my own advise I eat the garbage. So take a look down at where your feet are and stay in the day, the moment, the minute and trust that God has got your back.
Connie

I Know I am Not At My Goal, But I Really Do Appreciate All The Weight That I Have Lost,
And Today I Wore My Size Medium Mini Skirt, Legs Out, Spanex On, 6" Inch Heals and I am Gonna Work That Thing!!! I Look Soooooooo Sexy!!!!!!

Ok. I'm a little confused and I just need a little clarity. I'm not sure if I'm at my sweet spot. 6.3cc in a 10.cc band. I eat less but can still eat more then a cup (I was told by my Dr I should only be eating a cup). Question 1: If I can still eat more then a cup of food before I feel satisfied, then is the reason food is getting stuck because I'm not chewing good enough and taking too big of bites? Question 2: was question 1 a dumb question? I would like to know what you veterans are eating morning to night. I am really trying hard to work this lapband and I'm not doing it right. I've researched tons but I work better with first hand information from someone who's been there.
I'm feeling full longer but still get hungry frequently. Question 3: If lapband is more for suppressing hunger and not restriction then I'm probably not at my sweet spot am I? For you, how did you know when you hit your sweet spot?
Question 4: what foods should I avoid (sliders) and what should I eat more of.
I was banded 1-25-13.
I'm 5'7
Beginning weight 264
Current weight 255
I would love any and all input! I used to love my first chin so much that I went and got me another one, but now I'm ready for these chins to leave. I need to free this skinny girl inside me. Thank you!

Hello, I got my band of 2/27 did great in the beginning, now I want to throw my self and the scale out the window, I dont get my fill until May 27, and it is making me crazy, I feel like I eat alot also, so i feel your pain.
Connie

the band (to my understanding) wont make you full.....it will help you eat less so its up to you to choose what foods to eat....but def drink alot and fill up on Protein (to help you) feel full longer until you get that fill..but dont just think the fill will help you lose weight.....(i dont have one and i am losing) because i am making sure i am eating my allotted amount and careful of my cal intake...(if you eat more cals then you burn off, you will gain)....band or no band..

At the hospital gown on. It's my day!!!!!!

Sorry about your issues but glad you have another chance. I started my second chance October of last year. I had my band checked gotta small fill and a copy of my doctor's guidelines. Found this site and I havent looked back. 100.02 lbs gone now 58.8 since October. I only see the nurses at my office and they never made me feel bad never looked at me bad only have encouraged me and helped me find my way back. I dont know your surgeon and I want to punch him in the face!! First step is letting go of any guilt or any sense that you are a failure and never ever look back. Change what you can change and dont focus or worry about things you can not. Please join my recipe group in Facebook. You can friend me at hely lb. We have games and challanges. People share recipes and ideas and post pictures of what they eat. Best of luck!! Dig down deep and find that "want power" and you can do it!! If I can do it I promise you anyone can!!

My story begins in 2009. I received the lap band b\c my doctor told me that I was too big for the hysterectomy surgery that I needed or my cysts could, and probably would become cancerous. Believe it or not, I received the my lap band w\in 4months. I did lose just enough weight to have the surgery, but complications came about, and the doctors could not finish removing my cervix. After the surgery depression hit HARD, and now I am heavier then when I first started. My surgeon did not have support groups, nor did I adventure out to find one. I thought I was strong, and did not need one. Boy was I WRONG!
I now have a second chance. Yesterday, April 27, 2013, I made a HUGE mistake by eating a piece of steak,and it got logged in my lap band. I am admitting I need help and support. I'm so glad I found this site. To see the disappointing look on my surgeon's face, and the pain I am still going through pains me. It's about time I get my act together, lose weight, and become healthy!
Day 1: sips of Water throughout the day.

Greek yogurt with granola and string cheese are my go-to Snacks almost everyday at work. For lunch I almost always have Progresso Light Soup or Weight Watchers Smart Ones or salad.
I would be a cheap date!

Just called True Results and got a "tentative" surgery date of May 17, 2013! It's starting to get real!

even though I'm not done.
It's been an exciting adventure, LBT!
Just thought I'd check in and tell everyone that you can do it! Just keep the goal in mind and keep fighting for it.

Hello, my name is Connie I had the band (over my 13yrs ago bypass) on 2/27/13, I would really like to have someone to talk to on a daily basis if you are interested. I live in New Jersey. What are your questions?
Connie

Hello, I am Connie I was banded 2/27/13 and I feel the same way you do, I wont have a fill until end of May.
I find I dont eat as much, but I eat more then I thought I could, not happy with that, but it did make me recognize the importance of excersising and eating when I am hungry not just because.
I am looking to find someone to connect with to share experience etc on this journey.
Connie

"THOU SHALT NOT?"
Somewhere in the dark mists of my distance past, the term “reverse psychology” entered my awareness, especially as applied to child-rearing. The idea was that if you told your child “Please slam the door when you leave the house,” the defiant devil in that child would shut the door quietly in opposition to your instruction. I don’t have human children and never observed reverse psychology work magic in my childhood home. No matter how firmly you told my brother not to brush his teeth, his teeth went unbrushed. Telling him to jump on the bed would trigger a marathon jumping session (causing the box spring to violently part company with the bed frame) instead of a peaceful bedtime story. And I was no angel – I rewarded my mom’s laissez-faire attitude towards teen dating by involving myself with the worst losers I could find.
Despite all that, I know there’s a kernel of truth in the concept of reverse psychology. If you told me I must never, ever eat chocolate again, I’d get started on a chocolate binge before you even finished your sentence. And if you told me, “Thou shalt not even think about potato chips, ” my every waking and dreaming moment would be filled with potato chips.
Unfortunately, this principle doesn’t work in both directions, at least not for me. If you told me, “You must eat nothing but ice cream this week,” I’d be happy to comply. I’d grab my car keys and ice cream scoop and race to the frozen foods section of the nearest supermarket (after a quick stop at Baskin Robbins).
Author and eating disorder expert Geneen Roth tells a story about a mother who worried about her daughter’s weight. Even when the mom locked sweets up in a cabinet, the daughter managed to smuggle sweets into the house and hide in her bedroom to gorge on them. When the mom took Roth’s advice to give the child free access to sweets, the girl tired of them and began to make healthier food choices within a few days. This was a clear case of what I call Forbidden Food Syndrome, in which forced abstinence increases the person’s desire for the “bad” food.
I don’t doubt that Roth’s advice in that case was sound, but in my personal experience, food rules aren’t the only cause of secretive food hoarding and gorging. My mom’s food rules had more to do with good manners than with nutrition. I had to take at least one bite of each food on my plate, chew with my mouth shut, ask for permission to leave the table, and dirty no dishes after supper. Other than that, I could eat whatever I wanted, in any quantity. Even with that much freedom, I would hoard and binge on sweets, alone in my room, at every opportunity. I wasn’t eating out of defiance, but neither was I eating for “good” or healthy reasons. Even at age nine, I was eating for emotional reasons – comfort, numbing, entertainment, you name it.
As an adult, I have a better handle on my emotional eating than I did at age nine. I’m well aware of the food-obsessed Jeannie who will run without hesitation right into rush-hour traffic if a brownie might be waiting for me on the other side of the road. I know intimately the defiant Jeannie who insists on eating a piece of garlic bread even though she knows that the third or fourth bite could easily get stuck in her esophagus or stoma and cause a lot of discomfort. I have to monitor myself every day in order to maintain the delicate balance between choosing not to eat a piece of birthday cake because eating it doesn’t serve my weight management goals and choosing to go ahead and eat the entire cake simply because I know it doesn’t serve my weight management goals.
Sometimes I feel like a freak because I have to deal with issues like this. I watch “normal” people making carefree eating choices and enjoying complete eating freedom with no awful consequences (or at least, that’s the way it looks to me), and deep down inside, I hate those normal people. They’re not yoked to this heavy burden of disordered eating like I am. It’s just not fair. But I’m gradually relaxing about my eating issues enough to be able to listen better and to hear more messages from my normal friends and acquaintances, and to realize that they too struggle with things like Forbidden Food Syndrome from time to time.
I have a disgustingly healthy co-worker who told me once that she can’t eat chocolate because it gives her bad Migraine headaches. She avoids chocolate, but she confessed that she wants it all the more because she can’t have it, and when she tells herself it’s OK to eat one small piece, she finds that she can’t stop – she eats three, five, seven pieces even though she knows she’ll pay for it sooner or later. She doesn’t pay with obesity, she pays with pain. She doesn’t know the pain of obesity as I do, but she and I struggled with the same basic problem. Little does she know how valuable her chocolate story is to me. It reminds me that I’m really not a freak – I just have a more intense and widespread eating problem than hers. It’s a matter of degrees. She’s five degrees off-center while I’m 45 degrees off. Neither of us is perfect. We both have to work at making good choices – not just in our eating behavior, but in every piece of behavior that could have good or bad consequences for us or for our family and friends. To my mind, this is just part of human existence, part of the responsibility that adult humans bear for maintaining a civilized and (we hope) peaceful co-existence with each other and ourselves.
All this may be too philosophical for you, but I’m telling you about it because thinking about my eating problems this way has helped to put them in perspective, and putting them in perspective makes them a lot more manageable. Perspective is the art of seeing things in correct relationship to each other. As I wrote in Bandwagon, without perspective, my computer’s monitor looks ten times bigger than my neighbor’s barn across the road. In fact, my computer monitor is tiny compared to that barn. Without perspective, my weight management challenges seem enormous. I lost all that weight in just one year, but my maintenance job goes on forever. But consider the alternative. I could go back to obesity. I could have a stroke and become a human vegetable, reliant on others for everything from speech to toileting. I could lose my limbs to diabetes, reliant then on others for everything from tooth-brushing to transportation. I could suffer cardiac arrest and die at age 60. Or I can work at maintaining my weight and my health, with a huge payoff of mobility, independence, and longevity.
So…back to Forbidden Food Syndrome. Although I’ve said that reverse psychology doesn’t always work with me, I must also say that one of the reasons I chose the band was that living with it would allow me to choose from a wide variety of foods I like. My nutritionist told me I might have problems eating certain foods, like celery or Pasta, and I was willing to take the chance because life without celery or pasta still looked pretty good to me. But when my surgeon, speaking at the bariatric surgery informational seminar I attended, said that gastric bypass patients need to avoid all foods that are high in sugar, fat, or simple carbs because of the possibility of dumping, I mentally walked into a barbed wire fence and backed right off. At the time, I had one gastric bypass friend who didn’t dump, but the bypass patient who spoke at the seminar reported that he does dump, and when he described a typical day’s eating, I thought, “That’s not for me.” That guy was justifiably proud of his weight loss and didn’t mind a limited list of food choices, but I knew that limited food choices would send me running straight for the junk food if only out of sheer boredom. The night of that seminar, I hadn’t eaten a chocolate chip cookie for several months, but just the idea of giving up Cookies forever made me want to stop at a bakery on the way home.
I chose the adjustable gastric band, and the breadth and flexibility of my “OK Foods” list is one of the things that makes my post-op life enjoyable. I do overeat from time to time, but not because of Forbidden Food Syndrome. Taking foods off the Forbidden list has robbed them of some of their power over me. As a pre-op, I would attend a co-worker’s birthday party and eat two pieces of cake (Forbidden) because I’d been avoiding cake and missing it so much. As a post-op, I recently walked through the break room at work and saw a birthday cake on the table. I briefly wondered what flavor it was (impossible to tell from the decorative frosting, whose neon colors can’t be found in nature) and told myself I could try a little piece of it later, on my official break. Lo and behold, come break time I was quite hungry and not in the mood for cake. I wanted my chicken salad, and when I was done with that, I had no room for cake, so I went back to work without another thought about birthday cake. Now, that’s freedom!