Overcoming Overeating by Jane R. Hirschmann

Author:Jane R. Hirschmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus

The Ledger

If you were to create a ledger with two columns, one labeled MOUTH HUNGER and the other STOMACH HUNGER, and observe your eating habits over the course of the next few days, the chances are that, if you’re a compulsive eater, you’d have many checks in the mouth hunger column and very few in the one labeled stomach hunger.

You might want to make such a ledger to keep track of when you’re eating from stomach hunger and when from mouth hunger in order to become acquainted with your present eating patterns. It’s important to understand, however, that this ledger will be helpful to you only if you can keep track of your manner of eating without judging it, in much the same way as we recommended you learn to look at your body in a mirror.

It sometimes helps in creating a healthy, nonjudgmental stance to regard yourself as an anthropologist observing the eating habits of someone in a foreign culture. The eating you observe, of course, will be your own. Each time you eat or think about food, ask yourself, “Why do I want to eat right now? Am I hungry? Or is something else prompting my desire for food?” You’ll need to remind yourself over and over again that it is your job to notice and collect data, not to judge or intervene. If you discover that keeping a ledger promotes the old diet mentality, if you castigate yourself and try to stop yourself from eating every time you put a check in the mouth hunger column, abandon the ledger in favor of mental notes.

Once you have developed an overview of your eating, you are in a position to do something about it. First, you’ll need to define the problem. If you’re a compulsive eater, and if you’ve been able to maintain distance while keeping a ledger, you can, quite literally, see your problem on the page before you. You can look at your ledger and see that the vast majority of your checks fall under the heading of mouth hunger.

The checks in that column reflect the reality that, more often than not, feelings other than stomach hunger take you to food. You reach for food rather than attempt to name your problem and think it through when you feel anxious or uneasy. You use food as first aid. You fall down, scrape your knee, and run to the freezer for a dish of ice cream.

There are, of course, many reasons why you attempt to heal yourself with food, and we’ll address those later. What’s most important now, however, is that after years of using food to heal your wounds, you have forgotten that it has another function. You have forgotten what stomach hunger is all about.

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