PrologueSeated at a long oval table in a nondescript room on the ninth floor of an outpatient medical office building in Manhattan, a group of self-conscious adults are introducing themselves.
Fern describes herself in clipped tones as an attorney who is a partner in a small firm that specializes in real estate law. She is a graduate of Ivy League schools and has lived alone in the fifteen years since getting her first job. Unsurprisingly, the most intimate information Fern provides about herself concerns the reason she is here: "I have lost and gained more than five hundred pounds since my teens," she says, pain radiating from eyes that have receded into a fleshy face. "I have taken all kinds of diet pills and have been on six separate liquid diets. I have lost count of the number of weight-loss programs I've 'successfully' attended. I've come to think of dieting as my real profession. And although I realize that the vicious cycle of losing weight, then putting it back on plus some more, happens to more than ninety percent of dieters, that's hardly a consolation. I've never weighed as much as I weigh now, and I feel like I'm caught in a nightmarish maze with no exit."
Knowing nods from three or four women are punctured by a throaty male laugh. "Yeah, tell me about it," chortles Brendan, a mid-fortyish Falstaffian figure who, in every sense, seems larger than life. "If I only had a hundred bucks for every pound I've gained since I gave up drinking ten years ago, I could have invested it in this bull market and retired early." A stockbroker himself, Brendan leans back and tweaks his fireman's suspenders in obvious pleasure at the laughter he has elicited. One's first impressions are that he is a man of insatiable if not unquenchable appetites, who is gifted at lowering his own and others' anxieties through comic self-mockery. Indeed, in the next couple of minutes, Brendan reels off his unsuccessful battles in the pasta wars, his medical woes, his doctor's warnings, in so entertaining a fashion that we are all reduced to giggles and guffaws by someone who is telling us he could keel over any day now.
Brendan would be a hard act to follow for anyone, but perhaps more so for Mary, the homemaker turned nurse after the last of her four children left for college. Hidden inside a drab dress purchased joylessly from a catalogue that specializes in euphemistic names for obesity, Mary looks as if she'd give anything for a place to hide. When she speaks, it is in the hushed voice of a penitent making confession. She lists the years of eating "sins" that have turned her into the "fatty," as she puts it, that we see today. She mentions that most of her overeating has occurred at night, after taking care of her kids and husband, and more recently, of the patients on her hospital shift. She says that food has been her reward, but that her "just desserts" are causing her, among other things, sore joints. Wistfully, she notes that she is no longer able to join her husband in hiking and other outdoor activities they used to enjoy together.
Others share their own short stories, all of which revolve around food and their problematic relationship with it. For all their differences, these people share much more in common than excess pounds. They are all bright. They don't need to be told that a cup of broccoli has fewer calories than a cup of Häagen-Dazs.
They may talk about the temptations of leftovers, about jobs that require lots of dining out, of sweet tooths or problems around the holidays, but on some level they also know it's about none of these things. Fern will understandably make no reference today to her mother's expectations, Brendan to his father's beatings, or Mary to the woman's name and phone number she found last week scribbled on a piece of paper in her husband's trousers. They will talk only about food. Some will actually identify themselves as compulsive eaters.
Perhaps most important, the people sitting around this table today, like the hundreds who have come before them, are fellow travelers on the dieting roller coaster, people whose losing battles have filled them not only with excess pounds but with shame, inadequacy, and self-loathing. They, like you, may not be able to articulate it, but religious or not, they are here in a desperate attempt to save their souls.
If you've picked up this book and have read this far, chances are you know all too well that for most people, including yourself, diets don't work! You have tried different programs. You have read through what seem like a zillion books and magazines about weight, and have ended up at best confused and discouraged, at worst resigned. One magazine tells you to count fat grams and avoid carbohydrates. Another tells you to eat all the chocolate you want. A miracle drug promises to help you drop ten pounds in a week. The latest gastronomical guru says the whole secret is combining Food A with Food B.
And none of it works! None of it works because, for compulsive eaters, nutritional information, good, bad, or indifferent, is irrelevant. You already know that if you take in more calories than you expend, you will gain weight, and vice versa. You know how to count calories when you want to count calories. Not only do you know that exercise is good for you, but you could probably determine without too much difficulty how walking a mile at a twenty-minute pace compares calorically with fifteen minutes on a Stairmaster at Level 3.
All this information is, I repeat, irrelevant. For compulsive eaters, the problem is not lack of information about food or exercise. Food is not the issue. The issue, as you are all too well aware, is the repetitive nature of your compulsive behavior, or what I call your life script, when it comes to the interplay of food and feelings.
What you don't understand is why or how. Why you are stuck in compulsive behaviors that make you unable to eat the way you imagine "normal" people do. How to get out of this emotional quagmire.
In a world filled with psychobabble, it's easy for the meaning of words to be lost. So let me be clear from the outset about what I mean when I refer to compulsive eating. When I use that term, I am talking about any kind of non-hunger-related eating acted out in a repetitive fashion that leads to negative physical and emotional consequences.
Compulsive eating has been compared with sharks on a feeding frenzy. Just listen to the words I've heard my workshop participants use to describe their binges:
"I shoveled the gallon of ice cream into my mouth so quickly that I barely gave myself a chance to breathe. When it was over, I retreated into my bedroom, overwhelmed with feelings of shame."
"I stared at the television set, transfixed like a zombie. It was like I was in a trance. I was completely unaware of what my hands were doing or of the mounting pile of candy wrappers at my feet."
"From the time I entered the supermarket--actually from some point earlier than that--it was as though I had entered, or was pulled, into this strange zone. It felt almost like a gravitational force was drawing me into its orbit and that I was heading for oblivion."
Recognize yourself?
When a compulsive eater enters the "trance state" that precedes and accompanies an eating binge, an encyclopedia of nutritional information will turn to instant mush. Telling a compulsive eater that finishing off the key lime pie in the refrigerator will result in so many calories is like telling someone in the middle of a sex act that without percautions, pregnancy or disease might result. Chances are the person has not gotten to this point because of an educational deficiency. How many of you reading this, for example, are thinking, "If only someone had told me that the five slices of pizza with sausages I devoured last night had more calories than what I used up during the half hour it took me to eat them while watching that rerun of Mary Tyler Moore?"
It's knowing the answers and not acting on them that makes you feel so desperate!
It doesn't have to be that way.
If the tone of this book is confident, it is because I have witnessed success with people who have struggled most of their lives with food, eating, and weight issues. When they come to my workshop, they finally feel they have found something that is taking them in the right direction. I am also confident because the journey you are about to embark upon is guided by some of the most contemporary research and thinking in the treatment of compulsive eating. But before we set out, a friendly word of warning: If your focus is simply on quick weight loss, this is not the book for you. There are, as I've said, tons of programs and printed material giving you new diets every year.
On the other hand, although this book will not spell out a diet plan for you or treat the symptom that is your excess weight, your body invariably will begin to normalize as you begin to make the emotional changes that lie at the heart of The Hunger Within.
Most important, this is not simply a book. It's an interactive workbook designed exclusively for compulsive eaters. It is filled with exercises and information that will help you explore and subdue the forces driving your eating patterns. This workbook will serve as a road map, an encouraging companion you can turn to again and again. By following the steps laid out in the pages ahead, you will learn what your life script is all about. You will come to understand how the initial messages you received in your formative years and the way you interpreted them came to shape the major themes of your life drama.
Together, we can rewrite the script so that compulsive eating recedes from center stage to an occasional cameo appearance at most.
Ready? I hope so, because we're about to set out together on an exhilarating journey. It is a journey you will not be traveling alone. Fern, Brendan, Mary, and I will be walking each step with you. We will share each other's laughter, tears, excitement, and revelations as we meet each task head on, in search of The Hunger Within.
Introduction
If you were to go on a photo safari in Africa, you would probably experience firsthand the drama of the hunter and the prey. You might see a pride of lionesses giving chase to a zebra or a pack of hyenas hard on the heels of a young warthog. As you watched this primal scene, you would understand implicitly that a story was being written based on a genetic script. The lions, for example, are doing what lions do. The possibility that one day a lioness may pause, contemplate her navel, and suggest to her fellow felines that "maybe this carnivore thing isn't all it's cracked up to be" is about as likely as the zebra announcing that he has a sudden craving for a water-buffalo burger.
When it comes to food choices, other species operate out of a genetic mandate, which, I might note, does not include compulsive eating. With us, it's different. We are the only living creatures who can step out of the river of life, look at ourselves, come to conclusions, and make choices. Choices which, in turn, create change. And although "change" may be the scariest word in the English language, it is something we yearn for when we are stuck in a cycle of self-destructive behavior.
I understand that for the compulsive eater, the trance state during a binge may be so powerful that it may seem as inevitable as the lioness tearing into a fresh kill. I'm here to tell you it's not.
When we eat compulsively, we are not playing out a genetic role, but enacting what I call an emotional script. The script is unconscious. It was invariably written during our early, developmental years. Other players were involved. And the collaboration determined the relationship we would have with food in the years to come.
Of course, you already know this! You know that when you eat compulsively, there is some intense relationship going on between food and feelings. You probably don't know a whole lot about this intimate experience, but you are familiar with it in every sense of the word.
You also believe, I'm sure, that the unconscious plays an important part in our daily lives, and not just in negative ways. You might, for example, find yourself reading a book and listening to some music and suddenly something comes on that has you on your feet and dancing. Perhaps at the moment you're not sure why this particular song has had this effect, but you know it's about more than music. And perhaps only later will you remember that evening oh so many years ago, when you were sitting in a café during a romantic evening and this was the song that was being played. So this experience you're having seems to be about music, but is really about something very different.
And so it is when it comes to our relationship with food. When compulsive eaters talk about their loss of connection to themselves and their environment during a feeding frenzy, it is because they have been reconnected to a whole set of unconscious links between feelings and food. The problem is, while the music may open up feelings that take you back to some lovely time and place, the unconscious feelings/food relationship that is regularly triggered leads you down the path of despair.
The Hunger Within is going to help you change the script. During the twelve weeks or more we're going to spend together, we'll write a new one that will enable you to take control of your eating. Along with Fern, Brendan, and Mary, you will find out how the old script was generated. Using a series of simple, experiential daily exercises, you will bring the unconscious to the surface. If you are willing to put in a little effort, you can discover the key to permanently unlocking the self-imprisoning features of your life script.
The exercises in this book are easy to follow, and many who have participated in my program say they are actually enjoyable in the unique way self-discovery can be liberating. You may even want to form your own group so that the feedback and reinforcement you get from me and the workshop participants I describe can be enhanced by a live, shared experience.
The program has three stages. Each has four parts.
Week One marks the beginning of the Exploration Stage. You will start to get up close and personal with compulsive eating, not as an abstract concept or a national statistic, but through Fern, Brendan, and Mary. Through them, you will begin to discover how food, dieting, and eating come into play in one's life script. A questionnaire and exercises will help you make some connections for yourself.
Then in Week Two, along with Fern, Brendan, and Mary, you will begin to explore the origins of compulsive eating. You will learn how psychological hunger forms the foundation on which disordered eating builds. Exercises will help you identify the emotional climate that dictates the direction of your script.
In Week Three, our growing awareness of the psychological hunger we experienced early in our lives allows us now to begin to i