Love Hunger

By Frank Minirth, Paul Meier, Robert Hemfelt and 2 more

Based on the premise that overeating is linked to emotional and spiritual deprivations, Love Hunger begins with a relationship inventory that will help you understand how disappointments with your family, spouse, or self can result in obesity. It then provides a comprehensive program that helps identify whether or not you are using food as a substitute for love, career fulfillment, or friendship and shows you how to break that addiction. Once you begin dealing with the psychological basis for your eating problems, you'll be ready to lose weight healthfully, with a dietitian-designed food plan, that includes daily menus and recipes, as well as strategies for relapses, maintenance, motivation, and more. This is a complete plan for body, mind, and soul.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zondervan
• Release date: Nov 8, 2004
• ISBN: 9781418516307

Book preview

PART ONE

UNDERSTANDING

THE PROBLEM

CHAPTER 1

WHEN IS A BINGE A BINGE?

Barbara Jamison, a heavy-set woman of 185 pounds, had lofty childhood dreams of becoming a woman of confidence and sophistication. The dream sustained her through a difficult childhood. In fact, she even dreamed of becoming a teacher to troubled children. Certainly no one watching Barbara on this day some thirty years later would have thought her to be a picture of confidence and success. Barbara had made certain no one could see her that afternoon. If fact, even though she was alone in her apartment, she had locked her bedroom door. Plopping onto the middle of her bed, she began ripping the bags open and savoring their contents: chocolate creams, extra-crispy fried chicken, creamy crab salad, and a yet-unopened box of doughnuts.

She always had to have high-calorie snack foods when she binged. Barbara’s binges began in early adolescence as a means of coping with her harsh and demanding father, an ex-military man. When Barbara was ten years old, she lost her mother to cancer. During her teen years, Barbara not only lacked the nurturance of a mother, but also her father’s drill sergeant family tactics and periodic rages intensified as he searched in vain for comfort or solace for his loss. Inevitably, Barbara would return to binge eating after the numerous fad diets she embarked on in high school. The Kampus Korner drive-in in college became her source for quick, inexpensive binges—downed before she raced back to the dorm to stick her head over the lavatory and get rid of it all in the binge-purge cycle of her college years. Then came Tom and their troubled marriage . . . Well, 1 at least since he’d moved out, it was easier to hide her bingeing, even though the ravenous monster seemed to demand feeding more often when she was alone.

At last the monster seemed to be stilled, and with the carton still half full, Barbara was able to put the spoon down. She was too miserable for any more movement. With a sweep of her arm she brushed the leftovers from her bed and leaned back. Her last prayer before sinking into oblivion was, Dear God, where will it end?

Barbara is a compulsive overeater whose addiction to food became so intense that she sought our professional counseling in Dallas, Texas.

WHAT IS COMPULSIVE EATING?

But doesn’t everyone overeat sometimes? you may be wondering. I always eat until I’m uncomfortable at Christmas. I binged in college—before exams, when I broke up with my boyfriend, when my roommate got a care package. Sure I’ve gone on diets and then gained it back—plus a little. Does that mean I need counseling?

One of the difficulties in working with food issues is these gray areas. It’s much easier when dealing with alcohol or drug addictions—either you drink or you don’t, you’re either drug-free or you aren’t—but everyone has to eat something, and the lines of what’s too much are highly individualized.

Our definition of a compulsive overeater is not some fixed weight limit or percentage, such as someone who is thirty pounds over normal weight. We concentrate, instead, on the subconscious causes of this obsessive behavior.

We define compulsive overeaters as people who are eating to satisfy emotional hungers, hungers of which they may or may not be aware. The compulsive overeater may be a few pounds or a few hundred pounds overweight. The issue is not how much the person weighs, but rather his or her reasons for eating.

The compulsive overeater may be addicted to food just as the alcoholic is addicted to alcohol or the workaholic is addicted to work. This strong emotional reliance on something on the outside to make one feel good on the inside is called codependency, or addiction. Unless the causes of this behavior are identified, the person will never be free from an addictive relationship with food.

THREE EATING DISORDERS

Compulsive overeating, like that of Barbara, is just one type of eating disorder. Two other types are anorexia and bulimia.

Anorexia is chronic self-starvation to more than 20 percent below the ideal body weight. Anorexia is an eater’s attempt to control something in his or her environment—a rigid, authoritarian father, for example—by controlling food. Often anorexics are so hungry for love that they stop trying to fill their hunger. Their fasting anesthetizes the pain of love hunger. Bulimia is compulsive overeating to fill love hunger, then purging the food out in an attempt to purge out pain. The purging is one with self-induced vomiting, laxatives, or diet pills. Bulimics then feel empty, so they binge again; then they feel guilty, so they purge again.

Although the emotional dynamics of all three eating disorders and the principles of recovery are similar, this book is focused primarily on the compulsive overeater, and for the sake of simplicity, most of our references will be directed to this disorder. Anorexics and bulimics, however, share many emotional dynamics with compulsive overeaters, and we invite all who suffer from any eating disorder to walk our pathways to recovery. It is important to emphasize that anorexia and bulimia are serious, life-threatening problems, and if you identify yourself in one of these categories, you must seek medical help as well.

A SHORT QUIZ

If you’re trying to decide whether or not you’re a compulsive overeater, ask yourself the following questions:

Do you eat when you’re angry?

Do you eat to comfort yourself in times of crisis and tension?

Do you eat to stave off boredom?

Do you lie to yourself and others about how much you have eaten or when you ate?

Do you hide food away for yourself ?

Are you embarrassed by your physical appearance?

Are you 20 percent or more over your medically recommended weight?

Have significant people in your life expressed concern about your eating patterns?

Has your weight fluctuated by more than ten pounds in the past six months?

Do you fear your eating is out of control?

If you found yourself answering yes to several of these questions and identifying to some degree with Barbara, you are a compulsive overeater. This book is written by doctors with a passionate interest in treating eating disorders. Dr. Frank Minirth and Dr. Paul Meier are psychiatrists who also have theology degrees. They treat patients from a psychological, medical, and spiritual perspective. Dr. Robert Hemfelt is a psychologist who specializes in obsessive-compulsive behavior and maintains an active private practice in the Dallas area. Dr. Sharon Sneed is a practicing nutrition consultant who has helped thousands of patients with various health problems associated with improper diet. Dr. Don Hawkins has helped provide insight from his many years of pastoral counseling. Our collective expertise for compulsive overeaters brings together medical, psychological, spiritual, and diet components.

Whether you are a first-time-recovery patient like Barbara or a successful dieter at your goal weight, we invite you to come along on this journey with the doctors and our unique methods for dealing with eating disorders.

We do not offer easy answers—the problem is too complex for that. But there are answers. And there is comfort in understanding the complexity of the problem. If you, like a majority of Americans, have repeatedly gone on diets and fallen off, an understanding that this is not a single problem that just requires a little more willpower is a key to understanding why so many past attempts to conquer the problem have failed—and why a multifaceted approach can succeed.

CHAPTER 2

I KNOW I BINGE—

I WANT TO KNOW WHY

The doctor’s office with its gray carpet, oak furniture, and potted palm in the corner was obviously intended to be relaxing. But Barbara couldn’t relax. There was no way in the world she was going to tell the doctors about last night’s binge. It was bad enough knowing about it herself. Somehow saying it out loud would make it all real, something that actually happened—not just the bad dream she hoped it was. And at the back of her mind was the thought, If I don’t talk much, I can get out of here quicker, and then I can EAT.

For a while the conversation was easy and pleasant, just getting-acquainted stuff like you might exchange at a rather stiff, boring party. She readily admitted to her depression since Tom had moved out two years ago after eight years of marriage, and she talked a great deal about the boredom of her checking job at the discount store. I’ve wanted to be a teacher since my earliest memories. I majored in education in college and had a position as a student teacher for one semester. What I really wanted was to teach special needs children. In recent years I’ve been too embarrassed by my weight to apply to school districts or to imagine standing before an audience of giggling students. All that never worked out. . . . Her voice trailed off.

Then, right there in that quiet space, Dr. Hemfelt dropped the bomb with his soft, gentle voice. I understand you’re depressed and a lot of things aren’t working out the way you hoped. Has your weight been a factor in this, do you think?

Barbara shrugged and tried to keep the belligerent tone out of her voice. Well, obviously I need to lose a few pounds. Of course, I am 7 big boned. But if I had a happy marriage or an interesting job, I’m sure I’d slim down.

Dr. Hemfelt leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together. Unfair as it is, there are many myths and stereotypes about overweight people. I’m sure you’ve heard them. He ticked them off on his fingers: Overweight people are lazy; overweight people are nonsexual; overweight people are jolly; overweight people aren’t intelligent or efficient; overweight people are weak-willed. And overweight people themselves buy into a lot of the myths: Ultra-slim is both necessary and beautiful. My family is overweight, so I must be overweight. A diet has to be exotic and punishing to be effective. I can never keep weight off; I’ll always be heavy.

Barbara grimaced. Heard them all? She’d lived them all—even believed most of them.

You may have too. Perhaps you didn’t have to work through the checklist in Chapter 1 to decide you are a binge eater. Or perhaps after reading it, you now realize you are, but you don’t know why. What is that nameless monster that drives you to eat a whole package of cookies before you’re even home from the grocery store?

Overeaters need to understand the dynamics that cause their eating compulsion before they can begin to change this addiction. Let’s look at twelve common reasons for compulsive overeating so that you can identify the specific factors that are influencing you.

1. OVEREATERS MAY RESPOND

COMPULSIVELY TO CULTURAL PRESSURES

Some overeaters feel stress because they are constantly bombarded by cultural pressures to Eat, eat, eat or Get slim, slim, slim! Never before in history have so much time, money, and energy gone into urging people to eat and yet at the same time demanding that they be slim. Psychiatrists call these push/pull messages, double-bind messages, paradox messages, or best of all: crazy-making messages. And these crazy-making messages have led us to become the most food obsessed, obesity-plagued society in the world. In spite of the fact that Twiggy was English, the obsession with skinniness and the other side of the coin, the obsession with food, are peculiarly American diseases. In order to resist these lies, we need to understand the multifaceted nature of these pressures, so we discuss them with our patients during one of their initial visits, as we did with Barbara.

A CULTURAL ADDICTION

A traveler just returned from a month in Great Britain told us, I didn’t see any fat people. Oh, lots of people who need to lose ten pounds, but if they have really huge people over there, they’re home eating; they aren’t out on the streets. The only truly obese people you see on the streets are American tourists.

And a patient who has become aware of the role cultural pressures have played in her obsession with food said, I’ve been watching a lot of English TV shows. You know, their actresses look more real. Some of them are a little bit big around the middle. Some of them don’t have flawless complexions. I even saw one with short fingernails last night.

The next time you watch television, notice what you’re being bombarded with. Keep a note pad handy and jot down the images: full-screen sized hamburgers followed by french fries floating in the air, skinny people drinking diet sodas, ten ultrasvelte actresses, and one pudgy actress—she didn’t get the man.

As convenient as it is to point the finger at television and the American media, however, other cultural culprits are at work, also.

Dr. Sneed says, We have turned the horn of plenty into the barrel of excess. It’s very hard to live in the American culture where there’s a fast-food restaurant on every corner and to resist the temptation to overeat. We can go in and buy two thousand calories for two dollars, and it tastes good. Trying to control your weight under those circumstances comes down to consciously deciding to reject a lot of the values you see around you—probably a majority of them. And that’s not easy. It’s tough to say, I’m different. I don’t value what everyone else values. And it’s tough to make that decision stick when you are constantly bombarded with popular values.

The food system in the U.S. has changed so dramatically in the last fifty years that it’s difficult to eat normally. Dr. Sneed points to studies on how many meals are eaten outside the home. During the last fifty years this has gone from one or less per month, to at least one per day per family. If you want to make money, buy stock in a fast food chain. This has undoubtedly turned a lot of people who were not compulsive overeaters into obsessives because the food is so readily accessible. This cultural phenomenon has also produced a lot of secret eaters, especially people who eat in their cars.

When you think about it, it’s a miracle there’s anyone out there who isn’t a compulsive overeater. The list of things that don’t work seems endless: Fad diets don’t work; starvation doesn’t work; diet pills don’t work; wearing special clothing to melt off calories doesn’t work; reducing machines don’t work; laxatives don’t work. . . . People bring a lot of magical thinking to diet programs. If I can just find the right diet—the magic formula—my weight will just slip away.

Yes, Barbara could identify with all that. After a lifetime of living with those signals, anything could trigger her desire to eat. And with all the failure she’d experienced, anything could discourage her. She smiled and relaxed a bit as Dr. Hemfelt mentioned the second reason for compulsive overeating.

2. OVEREATERS MAY SUBCONSCIOUSLY DESIRE

ADDED POUNDS TO PROTECT THEMSELVES

FROM LOVE AND INTIMACY

We see people who subconsciously want a protective fat pad. This impulse frequently occurs after a traumatic event such as a broken engagement or after a mate has run off with another person, and the eater doesn’t want to have to deal with personal sexuality. Also, childhood fears of intimacy and adult ambivalence toward sexual intimacy can trigger the need for insulation.

Many compulsive overeaters make an effort to deny, repress, or obscure sexuality. The more one overeats, the less conspicuous become some of the body’s sexual areas. And if one is heavy enough, either due to aesthetics or to simple mechanics, sexual activity becomes unpleasant, if not impossible. As we will see later, this was part of the reason for Barbara’s compulsion.

An extension of using food as a denial of sexuality is using food for intimacy avoidance. This works in two ways. First of all, if our obsession with food demands emotional energy (either by our overeating or by our trying to fight a compulsion to eat), the amount of energy available to give to a relationship is limited. An extreme example of this was Mary, a bulimic we were treating in the hospital. Mary had only been married for two years, and she loved her husband in spite of problems in the marriage. But by the time she gorged herself and then immediately purged seven or eight times a day, she had no physical or emotional energy left to put into her marriage. Secondly, the overeater can get so fat he or she isn’t interested in sex and others are not tempted to initiate sexual intimacy.

Roller-coaster eaters, those who are forever losing and gaining twenty or thirty pounds, worry before every meal, What should I eat? What shouldn’t I eat? If they are cautious about what they eat, they may still be hungry afterward and obsessed with that. If they overeat, they may be obsessed with guilt. This endless obsession with food starts to crowd out other life issues, including other people, which may, in fact, be the eater’s subconscious goal.

3. OVEREATERS MAY USE FOOD TO SATISFY

THEIR NEED FOR IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION

We’re all born self-centered. We feel as if we’re the whole world until about eighteen months of age when we figure out we’re separated from our mothers. The older we get, the more we are drawn out of our self-centeredness by loving parents who discipline us and set an example. But if children aren’t disciplined and aren’t given good role models, they’ll continue to want instant gratification. So whenever they want food, they eat. They indulge themselves and become overweight.

Selfishness often leads to an exaggerated sense of competition. Even children who are otherwise nice siblings will compete for food. They yell, Hey! That’s my cookie! even if there are three more on the plate. The instinct for food is so basic that people will subconsciously compete for food by taking larger portions than they want. This would be especially true of those who grew up in a poor family, where the food supply was limited, but it’s not confined to them.

People reared in families that provided good nurturing and good role models outgrow this natural selfishness. But growing up in a dysfunctional family with a lack of adequate gratification in childhood will leave a person ungratified in adulthood. These people try for self-managed gratification and turn to food because it provides instant gratification. Anyone who grew up in a dysfunctional family will have double difficulties here because he or she will have great emotional hunger and also will lack good self-gratification skills. The person who doesn’t know how to provide self-gratification by building relationships or developing creative hobbies will repeatedly turn to the cookie jar for gratification.

We have found this cause of overeating to be particularly difficult to detect because people often cover selfishness with a veneer of unselfishness. Many overt people-pleasers who work all day helping people in hospitals, in schools, or at home will then binge in private for self-gratification.

4. OVEREATERS MAY USE FOOD

AS A TRANQUILIZER

Many people use food as a tranquilizer. When these people have anxiety, they eat; their blood sugar level rises, and they feel relaxed. The pituitary gland is sometimes called the master gland because it controls all the organs in the body. Yet there is another gland called the hypothalamus that controls the pituitary gland. Right in the middle of the hypothalamus (in the center of the brain) is the satiety center. The blood runs through that center. The satiety center picks up our blood sugar level and tells us if we are satisfied and comfortable or if we are hungry.

For most people this works fine. But there are also millions of nerves coming from all the other parts of the brain to and from the hypothalamus, and when some people get nervous, their satiety center says, You’re hungry. In reality, they may not actually be hungry, but if they eat and their blood sugar level gets higher, they relax. Of course, they feel guilty about overeating, and then the cycle starts all over again.

A second way that food acts as a tranquilizer is that each time a person eats, the brain stimulates some of the neurochemicals, the endorphins, which are natural painkillers, relaxants, and pleasure stimulators. Endorphins are somewhat similar to the narcotic drugs that produce these results. The difference is that they are a natural, God-given part of our mechanism, and certain activities stimulate them, such as laughter, sexual excitement, eating, and aerobic exercise. So after a person has eaten, there is a true state of anesthesia.

This tranquilized state is normal and healthy. But the compulsive overeater may have become dependent on his own endorphins and the state of food-induced pleasure. That is why a true food addict may go through six or eight meals a day, like a drug addict having to go out and get one more fix.

5. OVEREATERS MAY CONCENTRATE ON THEIR

DESIRE FOR FOOD TO AVOID FACING PROBLEMS

Many people in our eating disorder unit at the hospital suffer from anxiety. Now we aren’t talking here about specific fear—worry about the final exam next week, worry about the pay raise you’re going to ask for tomorrow and may not get. We’re talking about a persistent, vague anxiety: fear of the unknown. Anxiety is fear of finding out the truth about one’s own hidden thoughts, feelings, or motives. For example, overeaters might have rage toward a parent but refuse to acknowledge it because that would mean admitting that the parent isn’t perfect. If this person has based his self-worth on his parents’ acceptance (which one shouldn’t do, but most people do), the anger at a parent would mean lowering his own opinion of himself.

Joey was an example of one who ate to avoid insight. He grew up with a selfish father, who had his own business. The father used Joey as slave labor from early childhood on, making him work from after school until ten o’clock at night. Joey wanted to have a high opinion of his father and to think his father loved him so that he could feel a sense of self-worth. So Joey worked his heart out, telling himself that his father was really great and that Dad was doing this because he loved Joey and wanted to be with him. In reality his father was socio-pathically selfish and was using Joey.

Whenever Joey saw a TV show with a selfish father or witnessed an incident with a selfish father in public, he became overwhelmed with a desire to eat. But he never put two and two together. He would eat to stifle his own rage and to keep from having to look at the truth.

6. OVEREATERS MAY EAT TO

PUNISH THEMSELVES OR OTHERS

People also eat compulsively to punish themselves or others. A number of our patients are really angry at themselves for something they have done—cheating on a test, going too far sexually—and so they go through life bearing a load of false guilt and punishing themselves by overeating and being overweight. When they’re overweight, they can hate themselves for the weight, which may be less painful than getting in touch with their anger toward themselves because of their mistake. They get obese not only to punish themselves by being overweight, but in order to use the weight as a scapegoat. This is an extension of eating to avoid insight.

I don’t deserve to be pretty. As long as I keep this weight on, I can punish myself, Sherri, a formerly beautiful teenager, told Dr. Hemfelt. Sherri was polyaddicted—an alcoholic, a rageaholic, and a compulsive overeater. She was in recovery to some degree from all her addictions except her weight. She was sober and her temper was controlled. Her compulsion for food was the toughest of all. She had gained eighty-five pounds over the last two years.

I know I’m punishing myself for the bad feelings I had growing up, she said, recalling her childhood with parents who physically battered each other. Somehow I blamed myself for Mom and Dad being constantly angry. And I’m probably punishing myself for all the years I acted out the other addictions. It’s a way to pay a price for the guilt I carried. I look in my mirror and say, ‘You don’t deserve to be pretty. You need to be punished. You need to be blemished.’

Sherri was blaming herself for her parents’ discord and for her alcoholism. She was carrying some measure of authentic guilt for her own problems, but a far greater load of unnecessary shame for the dysfunction of her parents. We liken this attitude to making installment payments on a revolving charge account. The guilt-sufferer feels, If I just stay fat and unhappy the next ten years, then magically I’ll have paid the guilt debt. I’ll have paid off my revolving charge account.

Other people want to punish their mates. When most of us are dating and engaged we think, Boy what a good deal I’m getting. We think we’re getting somebody who’s better than ourselves. Once we get married and share the same small spaces and argue over which channel to watch or what restaurant to go to, we reverse our decision and think, I could have done better. I made a mistake. We all tend to deny our own faults and see faults in others. A mature person works though this natural tendency and decides, I’ve got faults; my mate’s got faults. We deserve each other. We can even bless and enrich each other.

People who don’t reach this conclusion may continue to think, I got a raw deal; he’s not as nice as I thought he was going to be. These people might decide to get even with their spouses by putting on weight.

7. OVEREATERS MAY EAT TO

RELIEVE DEPRESSION OR STRESS

EATING TO RELIEVE DEPRESSION

Eating to relieve depression can likewise cause obesity. Thousands of people suffer from debilitating depression. Some depressed persons suffer from repressed anger and their unconscious desire to get vengeance, frequently on themselves. Many of them are perfectionists, who inwardly resent themselves for not being better. Holding unresolved grudges against ourselves or others is toxic to human life. It’s an emotional and a spiritual problem. And it’s also a physical problem. When we hold resentment against God, others, or ourselves, serotonin and norepinephrine are depleted in our brain cells. These are the chemicals that we think with, move with. When these are depleted, people lose energy and motivation, and clinical depression manifests.

This depletion of brain chemicals can cause people to gain weight because they become inactive while continuing to eat at their former levels. Of the people who develop a serotonin or norepinephrine depletion, many will lose their appetites and some may even develop anorexia. But for the remainder, this biochemical change will produce the opposite: increased appetite, and they will overeat. Additionally, the brain chemistry changes associated with food satiation serve as a partial anesthesia against the emotional pain of depression.

In the case of repressed anger, we have both a chemical basis and an emotional basis for overeating. Many people literally stuff