Food -- Sustenance or Self-Sabatoge

I had a life coaching client recently whose presenting problem was that she didn't have the willpower not to overeat.  This client, who agreed to my telling her story as long as she remained anonymous, was not even near obese.  But she was, in middle age, finding it harder and harder to fit into the clothes she'd bought just a year earlier.  At first she had herself convinced that it was a medication side effect, but after months of struggling, she'd had to admit to herself that it was her own overeating and sedentary lifestyle that was making it impossible for her to lose weight.

Susan, we'll call my client, said it was the same story, day after day.  She'd start off in the morning with good intentions, setting in her mind a limit to how much she would eat that day (usually based on how "bad" she'd been the day before) and planning to do some sort of exercise.  By evening Susan was exhausted from her day -- even though (or rather, because) she hadn't gotten to exercise at all -- and she'd finally allow herself to plop down in front of the television.  Well now, somehow watching TV just wasn't the same without a bowl of ice cream.  And then, since she'd already "blown it," Susan moved on to cookies, chips, and whatever goodies she'd meant to deny herself.

Susan's great frustration stemmed from her feeling of powerlessness and helplessness -- her sense of being out of control when it came to her eating.  But as we dug deeper into what was really going on, we discovered that what Susan was actually doing with food was punishing herself.  Indeed, half the time she was gulping down fattening snacks she wasn't even hungry -- she was full!  And uncomfortable!  But she was using food as a tool to punish herself, day after day.  Because each time it happened, she just felt worse about herself, and often canceled plans for the next day for fear of what she'd look like.

Then we had to ask, but why?  Why was Susan punishing herself?  What was it that was so "bad" about her that she needed to hurt herself?  A bit more digging, and we found the root of the problem.  Susan was a perfectionist who had gotten into the habit, over the years, of expecting everything single task she did -- little or big -- to be perfect.  She also expected herself to accomplish an impossible number of tasks every day.  This was true both at work and at home.  When she inevitably failed to measure up to these self-imposed expectations, Susan sabatoged all her efforts to achieve... by overeating.

There was something else, too, at the root of the problem.  Fear.  Fear of both failure and success.  On the one hand, Susan feared that she wouldn't be able to accomplish her short- or long-term goals, and her overeating was a way of unconsciously proving herself right... that she was, what she considered, a "failure."  On the other hand, what she considered her unattractiveness shielded Susan from feeling any "outer success" was truly possible.  And to her mind, such success would necessarily force her to live up to yet higher and more impossible standards... something she dreaded.

When Susan finally figured out that food wasn't the real problem, she was able to gain a new perspective and create realistic goals for herself -- both in what she expected to achieve, work-wise, and vis-a-vis how to take better care of herself both emotionally and physically.  

Today she fits in a good many of her small-sized clothes.  But she no longer relies on her size to determine her happiness.