Co-dependency and Overeating

stop binge eating

If you are tired of spinning in the same spot in the mouse wheel I have just described, now is the time to say unequivocally STOP.  According to Professor Gould, co-dependent individuals are more likely to overeating.  Co-dependent individuals give till they hurt and have the tendency to remain in harmful situations or relationships way too long; significantly compromising the quality of their lives.

Nurture Yourself

When was the last time you thought about your own needs and went out of your way to fulfil them?  Do you feel guilty and selfish when you think about your own needs?  If you do, I urge you to think again.  Being selfish is not the same as being self-caring.  You have a responsibility to yourself to be self-nurturing.

If you keep giving without looking after yourself, you may become resentful, revengeful, self-righteous, frustrated and even depressed.  You feel taken for granted, abused and burnt out physically and mentally.  Negative emotions like these invariably lead to turning to food for comfort. Unfortunately, no amount of food can take away the pain and anguish you experience.  Food is not a replacement for other ways of nurturing yourself.

Kindness and Compassion

Therefore, the best way to stop binge eating is to develop a new level of kindness and compassion for yourself.  In other words, be especially gentle and forgiving with yourself.  Below is a list of self-nurturing activities you can do to ensure your “cup is totally full or overflowing”:

1. Do nothing, learn to be still
2. Pursue a hobby you absolutely love
3. Rest and take a nap
4. Laugh often
5. Relax – meditate, sit in a bubble bath
6. Go on mini-vacations
7. Listen to music
8. Love unconditionally with all your heart (negative emotions lead to destructive hostile actions like bingeing!)

Walk Down a Different Street

Lastly, have a look at this video – it’s fun and so true!

A friend sent this to me, and I signed up for the program myself. I am now at day 11 and loving it! Yeah, I do not have a problem with binge eating, but I am still human with plenty of other problems! And I can tell you, this program is full of positive, empowering messages that truly propel you each day to live a life you love! (Even my kids are now into it.) Create your own breakthroughs, go for your dreams – and walk down a different street!

Our immune system is like a dormant volcano, when it is quiet, it is all lush, green and peaceful.  But when it is active, it ruptures and wreaks great havoc carving a path of wonton destruction everywhere.  An over-active immune system may present in any of the following ways e.g. asthma, multiple sclerosis, arthritis, diabetes, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, allergies, lupus, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, Graves disease, fibromyalgia and Crohn’s disease just to name a few. 

Note that all these illnesses are characterised by one thing – over-active immune systems attacking our very own healthy tissues giving rise to sometimes fatal disease states, causing premature aging.  Remarkably, it is almost like we “try to kill ourselves and implode”!

So, why do our immune systems specifically produce antibodies to actively seek out and destroy the tissues they were supposed to protect?  If you can answer this question you have the key to reversing the aging process!

Reversing the Aging Process

According to Dr. Mark Liponis, all the latest scientific research seem to point to the fact that soothing your immune system or living in harmony with it provides the best answer to reversing the aging process.  And the way to do that is to ensure that you practice the pillars for healthy living every single day of your life:

1. Maintain a healthy weight
2. Maintain healthy teeth and gums, floss, rinse and brush your teeth thoroughly everyday
3. Remove all potential allergens from the environment and your diet as they induce inflammation
4. Eliminate inflammatory processed foods that are nutrient-poor and energy-rich
5. Have a generous serve of anti-inflammatory foods and probiotics (good bacteria from foods like yoghurt) 3 times a day, consider taking an antioxidant supplement to boost your circulating antioxidants
6. Take 1 hour out to relax (meditation, tai chi, yoga, deep breathing exercise)
7. Laugh often (laughter is the best medicine)
8. Get sufficient sleep and preferably be in harmony with the circadian rhythm
9. Exercise (resistance training, stretching and endurance)
10. Love with all your heart (negative emotions lead to hostile immune systems)

I attribute this to the power of planning and staying focused.  Regular inputs in your journal make an enormous difference to your weight management outcome.  Commit 5 minutes each day to making an entry and reap your rewards in 6 months to a year.

Creating a working structure is your cornerstone for staying on task.  This journal provides a structure for your physical activity and eating plan.  Your entries help you stick to your goals, monitor your progress, keep your actions consistent, steer you away from your sporadic vices and identify some destructive patterns that might be consistently sabotaging you. For instance, finding the link between drinking coffee after dinner and poor sleep quality and excessive tiredness the next day, could be a powerful pattern that is zapping you of your energy to stay focused on self-care. If this regularly undermines your exercise regime and food choices, you might want to sit up and take notice and make some changes.  Do not underestimate the power of small changes in making big differences.  In this instance, cutting out the coffee after dinner could change a whole series of events for the next 24 hours.  Picture these events recurring for a whole year, how could that not cost you dearly in terms of effectiveness and generating results?  But before you can tweek your lifestyle in this manner, you must first make regular entries and then identify the problem areas before you can make the necessary changes. You cannot change what you do not know.   As you make these entries, you will find your self progressing in your stamina and food choices.  Success begets succeess.

For a free copy of Australian Food and Heart Week Exercise Record go to:

http://www.healthyweightweek.com.au/files/Food%20and%20Exercsie%20Chart%20FINAL.pdf

Action:

• Increase uptake of glucose from the blood (taken with meal or after meal)
• Reducing glucose production by liver
• Mild appetite suppressant

Side effects:

• Nausea
• Diarrhoea
• Upset stomach
• Metallic taste in mouth

Action:

• Stimulate pancreas to release insulin and lower blood glucose levels

Side effects:

• Weight gain
• Skin rashes
• Gastric upsets
• Jaundice

Action:

• Slow down digestion of carbohydrates (taken just before meal)

Side effects:

• Flatulence
• Bloating
• Diarrhoea

Action:

• Increase effect of insulin (taken any time; slow onset, may take 1 to 2 months)

Side effects:

• Weight gain
• Fluid retention

Action:

• Stimulate pancreas to release insulin (taken before meal)

Side effects:

• Blurred vision
• Gastrointestinal upset
• Constipation
• Diarrhoea
• Nausea

Action:

• Slows stomach emptying (injectable 1 hour before morning or evening meals; may be used with metformin, sulfonylurea, TZDs)
• Slow down release of glucose from the liver
• Increase insulin release

Side effects:

• Nausea
• Vomiting
• Diarrhoea
• Dizziness
• Headache
• Feeling jittery
• Acid stomach

Action:

• Slows down release of glucose from liver (taken orally any time; may be prescribed with sulfohylureas)
• Increase insulin released

Side effects:

• Respiratory tract infection
• Stuffy or runny nose
• Sore throat
• Headache

Always use your medications as directed.  If you miss a dose or accidentally take two doses, monitor your blood sugar level closely.  These medications are rarely prescribed for pregnant women with gestational diabetes.  Insulin treatment is recommended when these medications cease to be effective.

If you are like the millions of sedentary people out there who are going to begin an exercise program after New Year’s Day, here’s the bad news for you.  It may be worse to have started and stopped than never have begun at all!

Occasional exercisers, who push themselves to the limits of endurance, get bored and chuck in the towel may be putting their health in unnecessary jeopardy.  A study by Professor Judith Stern at the University of California, Davis, showed that exercised rats taken off their regime soon overate and gained weight like the sedentary rats.  Not a surprising outcome you might say but this bit of the study might make you sit up and take notice.  The blood test results of the exercised rats showed much poorer biochemical profile than the sedentary rats with much higher percentage body fat!

Therefore if you are gearing up for your New Year’s Fitness Resolution only to give it all up by February, my advice is don’t bother.  Some weight gain may be the least of your concerns!

Reference

Animals on an exercise program:  J.S. Stern and E. A. Applegate, “Exercise Termination Effects on Food Intake, Plasma Insulin and Adipose Tissue Lipoprotein Lipase Activity in the Osborne-Mendel Rat,” Metabolism, 1987, 36, pp. 709-714.

P. Lowney, V. M. Lee, R.J. Hansen, et al., “The Effects of Exercise,  Detraining, Starvation and Refeeding on the Lipogenic Capacity of the Osborne-Mendel Rat,” American Journal of Physiology, 1988, 254, pp. 648-654.

“Concept Nutrition wishes all subscribers a joyful Christmas;

And happiness and health in 2010!”

Interviews with women who have undergone bariatric surgery and full body makeovers surprisingly reveal that they do not feel better after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars creating themselves by putting themselves under the knife.  This begs the question, “Why?”  This is because they inevitably feel like frauds.  High maintenance women who work hard to look good feel like frauds because they know the process involves enormous effort, money and deception.  Deep down in their hearts they know the product they have co-created with their surgeons is not them. Feeling like a fraud engenders chronic destructive stress and anxiety.  These feelings are all pervasive and keep you trapped because you feel vulnerable about being exposed as an imposter.  This sets up a vicious cycle where you “cannot rest on your laurels”.  Your anxiety and stress further exacerbate your obsessive need to improve yet another imperfection on your body thus setting you up for a series of never-ending procedures.  You have put yourself in a “no-win” situation.

The only way out is to learn to value and accept yourself and treat your body with a great deal of respect.  After all, it is the “temple of your soul”.  Give your body what it really needs and stop torturing it.  Remember, those who mind how you look do not matter and those who matter do not mind how you look!  Cutting yourself to look beautiful certainly does not cut it!

Have a look at this video for some common outcomes of  ’celebrity cosmetic surgery’ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZtcW6MKNz4

According to Dr. Brian Wansink, a large plate or a large serving bowl can cause you to eat 20 – 40% more. Most of this food is eaten unconsciously causing us to put on up to 6 – 7kg extra without our realisation. When eating occurs in a trans-like state where you are mindless and out of control, the satisfaction you derive from your meal is not likely to be high. If you can control mindless eating, you will naturally eat less and have more satisfaction. What is even more amazing is that you will not even miss this food if you don’t eat it!
One way to do this is to engineer your environment in such a way that you eat less. First of all, clear the fridge, pantry and all other areas of your house of junk foods and if you definitely must have them, make sure they are in opaque containers, on shelves that are out of reach. Out of sight, out of mind.
This Christmas, you may like to experiment with smaller plates and serving dishes for a change and discourage serving food at the table instead get everyone to fill up their plates in the kitchen.  Sounds outrageous, but you will be pleasantly surprised how a lot less food gets mindlessly eaten simply by tweaking an eating ritual and slightly changing the environment!

Rules for Being Human

You will receive a body.

You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.

You will learn lessons.

You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called ‘life’.  Each day in this school you will learn lessons.  You may like the lesson or think them irrelevant or stupid.

There are no mistakes, only lessons.

Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation.  The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “”works”.

A lesson is repeated until it is learned.

A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it.  Then you can go on to the next lesson.

Learning lessons does not end.

There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons.  If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

There is no better than here.

When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that again looks better than “here”.

Others are only mere mirrors of you.

You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

What you make of your life is up to you.

You have all the tools and resources you need; what you do with them is up to you.  The choice is yours.

The answers lie inside you.

The answers to life’s questions lie inside you.  All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

Author – anonymous (source unknown)