The book “Intuitive Eating” by Svetlana Bronnikova burst into my life on the recommendation of Natasha Rostovtseva. In general, I have long given up on my desire to lose “those 5 kg”, because I have not been able to do this for a year and a half, exactly from the moment of giving birth.

“Well, there it is,” I thought. “Someday I’ll go on that hellish diet for diabetics and then I’ll definitely lose everything in a month. In the meantime, I don’t have the moral strength to do this.”

And Natasha recommended the book to me not at all because I dreamed of losing weight, but because for a blog article I needed expert information about how “shushing” and making children “comfortable” affects them in adulthood.

Then I started studying it, aaaand...

It's been 3 months since I read the book and completed about half of the exercises. And somehow those 5 kg went away imperceptibly and without strain. I don't even remember exactly when they left. But there are none. And I don’t really weigh myself, I really eat whatever I want, I like my figure. And most importantly, I stopped feeling guilty about food. Basically. And my mood improved :)

Result:

I recommend reading the book “Intuitive Eating” by Svetlana Bronnikova to anyone who has been trying for a long time and unsuccessfully to lose “those XX kg” and/or is not very happy with their weight.

So, 5 smart revolutionary thoughts from the book “Intuitive Eating” by Svetlana Bronnikova

1) If you are not happy with your weight, then it is most likely a psychological problem

Svetlana describes modern beauty standards and the manic desire for slimness very interestingly, citing scientific studies in which “so thin” people end up statistically inferior in terms of survival to their fuller counterparts. Well, in general, he talks interestingly about such topics as “the horror of being fat,” “fat and character,” “who is bothered by excess weight.”

Svetlana captivatingly describes ladies who, in the general human eye, are slender and even thin, who are still “tormented by excess weight” and who have been on diets and “nutrition systems” for years.

She describes in even more detail the types of personalities who are prone to gaining excess weight. And even the types of families where such individuals are raised, what family attitudes contribute to this. What psychotypes are there among people who have problems with food?

And many, many, many more interesting psychological moments related to weight gain and one’s own perception of the world.

“If you have stable or, on the contrary, EXCESS WEIGHT that constantly disappears and returns as a result of acute attacks of a healthy lifestyle, then - dammit! – you have no problems with excess weight. You have problems in your relationship with food, which, in turn, hide problems in your relationship with yourself and the world around you.”

2) No diet or nutrition system helps you lose excess weight forever

An amazingly simple and incredibly revolutionary idea. Yeah, everything that is now called a proud phrase “healthy lifestyle”, all diets, all nutrition systems actually work. Temporarily. 😃

“Any dietary restriction causes us to have completely natural resistance, both physiological - the body strives to suck in any available calories and put them aside for a rainy day - and psychological. A person on a diet is irritable, sad, dissatisfied. He constantly struggles with temptations, he constantly resists the devilish voices that ask for “that cookie over there.”

In general, about a third of the book is devoted to this. To help us understand that the dietary type of thinking of a modern person makes him unhappy and fat, that is, exactly what a person does not want to be. To do this, Svetlana provides links to studies, describes a huge number of nutrition experiments with large groups of people, and talks about her experience working with patients. For me, very convincing. And the main thing is that the result works, at least for me.

3) There are no good or bad products

This is probably the most difficult thought for me to perceive and accept. I resisted for a very long time and did not understand how it was. In essence, Svetlana says that, in general, the body does not care where it gets energy from: French fries or quinoa. Because the stomach equally breaks down this whole thing into energy that feeds the body. Haha.

Therefore, you should only eat what you want. But exactly what you really want at the moment! Not because everyone is eating, or not because eating celery is healthy, or not because “they won’t offer such a delicious thing tomorrow, so I’ll gobble it all up.”

“If you want a marzipan cake, and you start spreading sugar-free jam on a dry cracker, you end up eating a pack of crackers and a jar of jam, overeating, feeling bad both physically and emotionally, but the “taste hunger” doesn’t go away - you’re fine -I still want marzipan cake. And he will definitely “lie in wait” for you - visiting friends, at a birthday party, in a cafe, in a store with a discount at the checkout - and then you will not miss yours, and, instead of one piece that you would have eaten then, it will all be yours - in vain, perhaps, you endured and suffered. This says nothing about your control - the force of unsatisfied need and salmon forces you to go against the current to spawn. If you eat a marzipan cake at the moment when you want it, voila! - problem solved. The need is satisfied, it curls up comfortably and peacefully inside until next time, and no catastrophe happens.”

4) The feeling of hunger, like the feeling of fullness, varies

It's no secret that the feeling of hunger varies in strength. Being a little hungry or “now I’m going to eat a crocodile” are two big differences or four small ones, as they say in Odessa. However, from the same Odessa, more precisely from my husband’s grandmother, who lived most of her life in Odessa, I heard the following phrase: “Why are you hungry?” That is, in other words, What would you most like to eat right now?

And I never thought that this phrase is the key to being at your ideal weight and in a good mood.

When you give up diet food, it is very important to eat not what they give/eat at home/the nutritionist said, but what you really want at the moment. How can we understand this? But you just need to ask yourself what I REALLY want right now: scalding hot or cool? Juicy-crispy or creamy? Or maybe elastic and dense? Baked, fried or raw? Is it really steamed?)) And, of course, salty, spicy or bitter?

That is, the feeling of hunger for food can be divided into taste, temperature, texture and method of preparation!

Similar to the feeling of hunger, the feeling of satiety also varies. You can eat the delicious, desired food until you squeal like a pig, right down to your throat, so that you never want to eat at all again :)

But it turns out that it is possible, and this was just a discovery for me, to eat delicious food like this, so that in a couple of hours you can eat some other food that is very tasty for you at the moment. Any food, I repeat, even chocolate or some mille-feuille. Just because it’s possible, no one forbids it! Therefore, you always leave a place for dessert, or if there is no place, then you know that if after a couple of hours or the next day you suddenly really want an eclair, then eat as much of it as you want. At least two, at least three, as many as you like. And in general, eat at least only eclairs. Nobody forbids it.

Gradually you get used to the idea that you don’t need to eat like the last time. You can always eat something else delicious later. And your mood improves :) And you end up eating less, although you didn’t seem to want to.

5) “Responsibility” does not equal “control”

Svetlana more than once mentions in the book the fact that for some reason we trust our body to breathe and beat our heart rate, but we don’t trust it to nourish ourselves with the necessary nutrients. It’s as if the body is deliberately trying to eat some nasty stuff and harm itself, which means you must definitely monitor your diet! I laughed out loud with delight for a couple of minutes when I read this phrase: “So, we stop “monitoring” our nutrition - because we don’t suspect it of anything.”

And here in the book one must not miss a very important idea, as it seems to me. That in order to stop monitoring, you need to switch the switch in your head from the “control” position to the “responsibility” position.

“Having taken responsibility, I do not necessarily try to predict the desired result - I simply wait with interest for its occurrence, knowing that I will definitely deal with the consequences. Having taken responsibility, I am not afraid to experiment, try new things, make mistakes - the responsibility is still mine, this gives me complete freedom of action. By taking on “responsibility, I believe in my strength and trust myself. Including your body.
Control is just one way to relieve yourself of responsibility. The “controller” shifts responsibility to others - doctors, British scientists, nutritionists, and is constantly looking for someone who knows better what I, my health, my body need.”

It seems to me that this thought can actually help in life. And in relationships with yourself, and in relationships with your partner, and in raising children. Stop controlling the child, and instead give him responsibility for his life...

But this is a topic for a separate post (:

These are my thoughts after reading the book “Intuitive Eating” by Svetlana Bronnikova.

Sometimes relationships with the body and food become so tense that without a quick solution to them, a happy life seems impossible. This book provides practical tools for identifying the specific cause of food addiction and overcoming it. By completing the tasks on the pages of the book step by step, you can be guaranteed to get rid of your weight and problems. You will gain an understanding of how to: learn to hear the signals of hunger and satiety give yourself permission to eat whatever you want allow your body to regulate what, when and how to eat lose weight and not gain any more weight Implement a specific plan proposed for you by a qualified specialist in the field nutrition by Svetlana Bronnikova: stop exhausting yourself mentally and physically, become slim and calm.

A series: Proper nutrition without rules

* * *

by liters company.

Who am I writing this for?

Modern beauty standards are ruthless: “beautiful” means “thin”.

Trying to meet these standards, millions of men and women chronically torture themselves with diets and work out in the gym. This method of losing weight has a beginning, but no end: to stay in shape, you need to increasingly limit yourself in food and increase physical activity. You can't stop - you'll gain weight. The price of this lifestyle is food “breakdowns,” when a huge amount of “forbidden” foods are eaten overnight, and the “yo-yo effect,” when weight is gained and then lost again. The “accompanying group” includes unstable self-esteem, especially physical self-esteem, depression, and anxiety disorders. Food, instead of one of the pleasures of life, becomes a source of constant and enormous stress.

One should not think that only young girls exhausted by anorexia or “clinical gluttons” suffering from extreme forms of obesity suffer from eating disorders. Slender men and women painfully cannot sleep because they could not restrain themselves and overeat or, on the contrary, they have just gone on another diet and are terribly hungry. They suffer in exactly the same way in store fitting rooms and in front of the mirror, because they “feel fat.”

Modern culture very strictly dictates that people should be thin and at the same time offers a huge amount of cheap, accessible, intrusively advertised and “tasty” food. Slimness, as it is understood in modern culture (i.e., in fact, being underweight), contradicts the physiological foundations of health. A deficiency of body fat and an excess of protein in food (and you can effectively maintain weight below your own physiological norm only with an excess of protein in the diet due to carbohydrates and fats) is associated with premature aging, breast cancer, the development of diabetes, osteoporosis in women, infertility...

For a woman to be capable of reproduction, she must be at least a little “in the body.” Studies of the African Bushmen tribe have shown that women of the tribe become pregnant exclusively during the rainy season and immediately after it, when the tribe easily provides itself with food. During the dry season, women fast, lose weight, and naturally become temporarily infertile. Extremely reasonable, because during this period it would be difficult to feed a born child and feed a nursing mother to the full.

Food is the very first metaphor of love, the very first relationship that a born person builds.

A child, falling to the breast, immediately receives food, warmth, protection, and love. That is why disturbances in the relationship with food always force one to look at other relationships in a person’s life - with a partner, friends, children, parents, but most importantly - at the relationship with oneself. To put it very harshly, we can say: the root of eating disorders is a violation of the relationship with oneself, the inability to love and accept oneself.

For many of us, food becomes a psychotherapist, a comforter, a universal solution to problems. Food becomes punishment and salvation. Gradually, food, just like drugs and alcohol do, takes control over human behavior and subordinates its existence to itself.

To overcome this problem there is no need for violence and eternal self-control: you just need to learn to trust yourself. People who are prone to overeating and excess weight have a special personality profile, similar character traits that force them to “push inside” their own emotions through food. You can and should get rid of this, its name is compulsive overeating, but hatred of your “fat” body and “weak” will, coupled with dietary pressures, is a dead-end path.

The intuitive (non-diet) approach to nutrition has been popular in Europe and the USA for several decades. Modern research shows its exceptional effectiveness in stabilizing weight at the physiological norm and in the ability to maintain weight at this stable level for many years. It is based on the removal of prohibitions and fears in connection with food, the complete rejection of any diets not prescribed by doctors in connection with certain diseases, and allows the body to take its own initiative in choosing food. Our body has its own wisdom, which allows it to accurately choose the food that is most suitable for it at the moment, corresponding to its needs. The body knows very well how much food to eat at a given moment and when to start eating again. Unfortunately, from birth we are taught to ignore these signals, replacing them with external forms of control - calorie tables, food pyramids, ideas about what healthy food and proper nutrition are, which change regularly.

The question that always arises in people who are introduced to this approach is: can I lose weight by giving up diets and switching to intuitive eating? What we can say with certainty is that your body will return to its normal physiological weight and remain at this level. For many people this weight is lower than their current weight, but not always. To predict how events will develop for you personally, try answering the following questions (quoted from Evelyne Tribole, Elyse Reisch. Intuitive eating. 2012, St. Martin Press, New York):

1. Do you often continue to eat after you feel comfortably full?

2. Do you often overeat before starting a new diet (knowing that on a diet you will not be able to afford to eat all this for a long time)?

3. Do you find yourself eating to cope with emotions or to overcome boredom?

4. Are you one of those who consistently dislike physical activity?

5. Do you only exercise when you're on a diet?

6. Do you often skip meals or only eat when you are literally starving and end up overeating?

7. Do you feel guilty if you overeat or eat “junk food”, which ultimately leads to even more overeating (it’s all gone anyway)?

If you answered “yes” to all or some of these questions, your current weight may be higher than your physiological weight, which your body is programmed to maintain on its own from birth, without any additional effort on your part. It is very likely that you are able to return to this weight as a result of switching to intuitive eating. The most important thing to remember is that losing weight SHOULD NOT be an end in itself, because switching to intuitive eating for the sake of losing weight will greatly interfere with the development of your ability to listen to your body's internal signals.

* * *

The given introductory fragment of the book Intuitive eating. How to stop worrying about food and lose weight (Svetlana Bronnikova, 2015) provided by our book partner -

Svetlana Bronnikova – clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, has many years of experience in helping people lose excess weight. For several years she headed a branch of the largest obesity treatment clinic in the Netherlands.

Scientific editor: Nikolskaya N.V., psychotherapist, chief practitioner at the Scientific and Practical Center for Modern Personality Adaptation.

Photo used in binding: Dubova / Shutterstock.com Used under license from Shutterstock.com

This book is an attempt to write a manual intended for independent work on oneself, and therefore it consists of two parts: a theoretical one, in which I talk about what eating disorders look like, what compulsive and emotional overeating is, and how we got to such a life , when with the help of a diet we are trying to solve a problem that appears thanks to the diet, and practical, in which I will consistently, step by step, help you adjust your own nutrition without any restrictions. Each chapter ends with an “Experimentarium” section - it contains exercises and psychotechniques that will help you understand what and how affects your eating behavior, explore how you experience hunger and satiety, analyze why you overeat and cope with strong emotions without the help of food . You can: jump from the beginning of the book to the end or middle, read in separate pieces, read first everything on a certain topic, then on another, or, conversely, read strictly according to the table of contents, from one chapter to another. We all assimilate information differently, and the associative connections that we form at the same time are also different. You need to: underline in the book, write in the margins, do exercises directly in the text. When you finish working with the book, it will become your personal guide and map of your eating behavior. Important: perform all the exercises in a row, without skipping or changing their order. Performing exercises without reading the materials in the chapter preceding them is pointless, and may even be harmful. All exercises are arranged in a logical sequence, which should not be violated: this greatly reduces the effect.

I am a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist. For several years I headed one of the branches of the largest obesity clinic in the Netherlands. The treatment is psychotherapeutic, because it is impossible to get rid of excess weight without changing your behavior, lifestyle, and way of thinking. It is impossible to stay thin while being emotionally unstable if you are used to solving your own psychological problems with the help of food. I was responsible for the development and implementation of treatment programs, for innovative approaches with proven effectiveness, but at the same time I continued (which cost me quite a lot of effort, since management work tends to take up all my time) to remain a psychotherapist dealing with the problems of overweight people. During this time, I accumulated many observations, comparisons, small but important discoveries. I have long wanted to make them accessible to everyone who reads Russian, so I wrote this book.

Modern beauty standards are ruthless: “beautiful” means “thin”.

Trying to meet these standards, millions of men and women chronically torture themselves with diets and work out in the gym. This method of losing weight has a beginning, but no end: to stay in shape, you need to increasingly limit yourself in food and increase physical activity. You can't stop - you'll gain weight. The price of this lifestyle is food “breakdowns,” when a huge amount of “forbidden” foods are eaten overnight, and the “yo-yo effect,” when weight is gained and then lost again. The “accompanying group” includes unstable self-esteem, especially physical self-esteem, depression, and anxiety disorders. Food, instead of one of the pleasures of life, becomes a source of constant and enormous stress.

One should not think that only young girls exhausted by anorexia or “clinical gluttons” suffering from extreme forms of obesity suffer from eating disorders. Slender men and women painfully cannot sleep because they could not restrain themselves and overeat or, on the contrary, they have just gone on another diet and are terribly hungry. They suffer in exactly the same way in store fitting rooms and in front of the mirror, because they “feel fat.”

Modern culture very strictly dictates that people should be thin and at the same time offers a huge amount of cheap, accessible, intrusively advertised and “tasty” food. Slimness, as it is understood in modern culture (i.e., in fact, being underweight), contradicts the physiological foundations of health. A deficiency of body fat and an excess of protein in food (and you can effectively maintain weight below your own physiological norm only with an excess of protein in the diet due to carbohydrates and fats) is associated with premature aging, breast cancer, the development of diabetes, osteoporosis in women, infertility...

For a woman to be capable of reproduction, she must be at least a little “in the body.” Studies of the African Bushmen tribe have shown that women of the tribe become pregnant exclusively during the rainy season and immediately after it, when the tribe easily provides itself with food. During the dry season, women fast, lose weight, and naturally become temporarily infertile. Extremely reasonable, because during this period it would be difficult to feed a born child and feed a nursing mother to the full.

Food is the very first metaphor of love, the very first relationship that a born person builds.

A child, falling to the breast, immediately receives food, warmth, protection, and love. That is why disturbances in the relationship with food always force one to look at other relationships in a person’s life - with a partner, friends, children, parents, but most importantly - at the relationship with oneself. To put it very harshly, we can say: the root of eating disorders is a violation of the relationship with oneself, the inability to love and accept oneself.

For many of us, food becomes a psychotherapist, a comforter, a universal solution to problems. Food becomes punishment and salvation. Gradually, food, just like drugs and alcohol do, takes control over human behavior and subordinates its existence to itself.

To overcome this problem there is no need for violence and eternal self-control: you just need to learn to trust yourself. People who are prone to overeating and excess weight have a special personality profile, similar character traits that force them to “push inside” their own emotions through food. You can and should get rid of this, its name is compulsive overeating, but hatred of your “fat” body and “weak” will, coupled with dietary pressures, is a dead-end path.

The intuitive (non-diet) approach to nutrition has been popular in Europe and the USA for several decades. Modern research shows its exceptional effectiveness in stabilizing weight at the physiological norm and in the ability to maintain weight at this stable level for many years. It is based on the removal of prohibitions and fears in connection with food, the complete rejection of any diets not prescribed by doctors in connection with certain diseases, and allows the body to take its own initiative in choosing food. Our body has its own wisdom, which allows it to accurately choose the food that is most suitable for it at the moment, corresponding to its needs. The body knows very well how much food to eat at a given moment and when to start eating again. Unfortunately, from birth we are taught to ignore these signals, replacing them with external forms of control - calorie tables, food pyramids, ideas about what healthy food and proper nutrition are, which change regularly.

ANXIETY

If you conduct a survey to find out which emotions most often cause eating, then I am sure that anxiety will win by a wide margin. This is not surprising; we worry more often than we experience any other emotions.

It is no exaggeration to say that modern society is in a state of constant anxiety. Anxiety and depression are the most common reasons for visiting psychiatrists, psychologists and local therapists. Anxiety is considered a norm of life, part of culture, a necessary condition for survival.

In relationships between partners, the creepy maxim “hitting means he loves,” thank God, is gradually becoming obsolete. But another one grows and heads: “if he doesn’t worry, it means he doesn’t love.” A loving partner of any gender must not only worry whether you got home safely at a late hour, he must constantly be afraid of losing you - only this condition can motivate this lazy
an animal to do something useful for you. Only this way and no other way - open any glamor magazine, everything is written about it there.

A child must learn to worry from a young age. A big problem lies in children who do not care what grade their work will receive at the competition, what mark they will give on the test. How to teach them to worry? - in fact, numerous concerned parents ask on numerous forums dedicated to raising children.

It's even worse for adults who happen to grow up unambitious. They don’t really want to make a career, they are comfortable where they already are - until the time when friends, acquaintances and relatives begin to evaluate their life as “meaningless”, and themselves as “not having achieved anything”. And all this under the motto "After all, we are worried about you!".

For those who want to make a career, not a little easier. Yes, they are "well done" (c). But how to win the favor of a nasty boss? Should I look for a new, better job or stay where I am? How to take the next career step? When the hell are they going to get a pay rise?

The venerable mothers of families acquire the greatest scope for concern. My experience as a psychotherapist allowed me to collect multiple reasons for concern, otherwise I would have died in ignorance. Will my husband go to another? (it’s amazing how many women with high levels of anxiety have been tormented by this question for years, without asking themselves symmetrically - should they leave for another me?). Which kindergarten and school should I send my children to? Where to get the best healthcare services? Is the food we buy safe? Does your husband have a mistress? How not to lose attraction? What to do if attractiveness has already been lost - go to the gym or straight away plastic surgery, or both? Will my husband be fired from his job, and if so, what will we all eat? By the way, why does Lucy have it, but I don’t? And won’t my husband go to Lucy?

The only consolation is the fact that Lucy is no less worried.

Anxiety is a product of living in an environment of constant competition and a high need to get the best.

The more I compare - myself, my job, my partner, my children, my apartment - with what others have, the more reason I have to worry. But the development of anxiety as a personal characteristic is influenced by many other factors.

John Bowlby, the founder of attachment theory, according to which it has become so fashionable to raise children (attachment parenting style), determined that the first attachment - attachment to parents - can be safe and unsafe. If the child receives timely responses to signals for help and support, if the parent behaves empathically, that is, responsively, the child is convinced that his connection with the parent is stable. A secure attachment is formed. In all other cases, an insecure attachment is formed, and the anxious form of attachment is one of them.

The anxious type of attachment is characterized by a paradoxical form of relationships, expressed in its extreme form in the title of one of the best books on the psychology of borderline personality disorder: “I hate you, don’t leave me!” (“I hate you, don’t leave me!”) The Anxiously Attached will endlessly cling and cling to the attachment figure, but at key moments will reject caring and the very idea of ​​asking for help. Being the attachment figure of someone with this pattern of behavior is very difficult: you must be able to read minds, guess what exactly is happening with your partner right now and anticipate his desires. Sometimes it seems that the experience of anxiety gives the anxious one special, unique rights to the personal, intimate space of the object of love. You cannot come home later than a certain hour , if you don’t put on a hat in the cold, if you don’t call on time, they will worry. Another’s worries about me allow me to replace my own needs with the needs of others.

- Petya, go home!
- I'm frozen?
No, you want to eat! (With)

Anxiety paves the shortest path to intrafamily violence. Worried about the child’s health, the mother forcibly shoves food into him, listening to cartoons, songs and dances with a tambourine, and puts excessively warm clothes on him. There is no reason to try to understand what the child needs - after all, the mother is worried. We are not trying to solve the child’s problem, but the mother’s problem. The big guy who slaps his wife in the face is also worried about the possibility of losing control, for example. So what can we blame him for - he was just worried?!

At the physiological level, anxiety and fear are absolutely necessary behaviors. They provide the opportunity for survival and timely reaction to danger. It is not difficult to guess that in wild, pristine nature only a very large and very predatory animal can afford to be fearless. Anyone else necessarily experiences both anxiety and fear.

The difference between anxiety and fear is that anxiety is a state of worry without an object of worry, diffuse, while fear has a specific object.

In our brain there is a tiny but extremely important paired formation - the amygdala, or amygdala, which is responsible for the regulation of anxiety and fear (as well as a number of other basic behavior patterns, for example, aggression). People who experience destruction of the amygdala due to diseases (for example, the very rare Urbach-Witte disease) lose the ability to experience anxiety and fear. The fearless lose the ability to critically evaluate dangerous situations, and the risk of injury and death increases significantly. If the amygdala functions normally, then in situations that are assessed by the brain as dangerous, unfavorable or uncertain, the latter uses it to send a command to the sympathetic nervous system, which regulates the activity of organs and systems. Stress hormones are released - adrenaline and norepinephrine. The pulse quickens, the pupils dilate, and the eyes themselves open wider to better see the surroundings (“fear has big eyes”), blood pressure rises, and muscle tone increases.

All this is done in order to carry out one of three possible reactions of the body to danger - flight (run), freeze (freeze), fight (fight).

It is useful to know that at these moments the blood drains as much as possible from the gastrointestinal tract in order to supply the muscles that need support. This is precisely what is associated with the reaction familiar to many; “I can’t eat when I’m stressed.” If the level of anxiety is not too critical, the need to “put something in your mouth” may be associated with an attempt, using gastric activity, to interrupt the sequence of sympatho-adrenal reactions and restore the normal course of events.

The cultural coordinates of anxiety in the modern world are even more confused than before. Because, on the one hand, you owe it to Re to rest, otherwise you are an indifferent, uncaring, uncouth blockhead. On the other hand, you should never worry! Don't worry, be happy! In other words, you must worry, but so that no one notices. Children should not know. They should not see at work. It is better not to tell friends. No matter how worried you are, the normal course of life will not under no circumstances should it be violated.

And by accepting these rules of the game, I immediately fall into a trap.

People with eating disorders often experience extreme, uncontrollable anxiety. The role of anxiety in the origin of eating disorders is not entirely clear. According to statistics, the more obese you are, the more likely you are to be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.

What to do with all this?

1. Separate and realize

To reach a normal weight, you need to stop hating your body - we have already agreed on this. To stop eating anxiety, you first need to stop forbidding yourself... to eat anxiety or punish yourself for it.

It is important that you are able to separate satiation of hunger from eating for other reasons. It's important that you are able to note - in your journal, in your head, tell yourself in the mirror - I eat because I worry. Food helps me cope with anxiety and relax. Even if this is a hundred thousand times wrong, this is still the only effective way that I know. I won't beat myself up about it. Now it’s important for me to calm down my anxiety and think about what to do next.

2. Take it for granted

One thing that common mental health complaints like anxiety, insomnia and depression have in common is that we struggle to cope with them. Stop worrying when you are restless, “distract yourself” from sadness, fall asleep where and when you can’t fall asleep at any time. We fight with ourselves with all our might, get annoyed at failures and, finally, go for pills - precisely in these cases most often.

It is much wiser to accept and understand your own condition. Today is sad. Until then, don’t fall asleep. Now it’s restless. Oddly enough, this is one of the most effective recommendations - by allowing themselves to worry, ceasing to suppress anxiety, people suddenly discover that for some reason they worry less...

By focusing on your anxiety (instead of trying to suppress it), you can notice a lot of important things: What happens to your body when you worry? How do you experience this state, in what parts of the body does it “settle”? How would you describe your feeling of anxiety right now, this anxiety today - what color is it, what texture is it, maybe what taste does it have?

3. Postpone

This is the most subtle moment. It is fundamentally important not to show any violence. Imagine that you are tuning a complex, delicate instrument, the operation of which you do not fully understand. Will you forcefully turn the toggle switch or press the button endlessly, trying to achieve an effect? There’s no need to put pressure, we’re exploring our own capabilities.”

Having allowed yourself to eat away your anxiety, perhaps even having already figured out what and how exactly, ask yourself only one key question: “Can I put this off a little?” “Don’t be disingenuous with yourself, you’re not in a group where ten people are looking at you. a pair of watchful eyes. If you can’t wait, eat and finish reading later. Please remember - it is much healthier not to writhe in a fit of intense anxiety, praising yourself for heroism and restraint, but to take the edge off it - albeit in the healthiest of ways - and calmly continue to master and understand your own body. Let me remind you that it is not the result right now that is important, but the process.

So, can you postpone “eating”, does your condition allow it?
If you can, then for how long?
If even for half an hour, then this is already a lot, because, as is known from the classics, if necessary, you can get to the Canadian border in ten minutes. In half an hour you will have time to try to implement one of the following strategies.

4. Move

Animals, having experienced the state of flight, fight, freeze, are sure to start moving. Movement is the easiest way to use up stress hormones and bring your sympathetic nervous system into the sympathetic state it should be in a calm state. Just don't count on that ballet you signed up for next Friday - you need to move right now.

If you are determined to put off cake therapy, grab a rag and your hands and try to tear down the kitchen cabinets. Give it a good scrub, with frenzy. In a house with more than one person, kitchen cabinets are always in need of some extra work (you should see the state of the kitchen cabinets in a house with boys, dogs and cats with an active lifestyle and unhindered access to the garden without shoes!). Clear out bookshelves or children's toy boxes. Remove and wash curtains. Clean the floors under all cabinets and sofas in the house. Hate cleaning? Well, me too. Then just turn on the music and dance. It’s great if children join you - they will definitely be delighted. It’s even easier with children - you can start racing with them on all fours (be careful, then your knees hurt terribly, and the little brats will still overtake you). Even if you live in close proximity to an old grandmother, a one-legged grandfather and a distant relative from Rostov with three young nephews, hide from them in the toilet and jump high.

Set a timer - at least 15 minutes. There’s no need anymore, we don’t have the Olympics. The main thing is not to remain motionless. 15 minutes of intense movement - and you can stop and start eating those same cakes. Just remember, according to all the rules, to ask yourself first - what exactly do you want.

It may happen that you will need a glass of milk or a juicy apple, or it may turn out that the cake, without losing its attractiveness, will fill you up after just a couple of bites. Yes, if not, it’s not scary.

You don’t have a goal of “not eating this cake right now,” you have a goal of learning to manage yourself
in a state of anxiety.

5. Fix

If you were moving around and realized that there was an opportunity to put off the “stuck” for a little while longer (that is, for 15-30 minutes), great. The next task is to document your current anxiety attack in any way possible. Describe it in words in a diary, draw it, mold it from plasticine. During the group we definitely make an installation from these images. Often there are balls made of various materials, studded with toothpicks or pins, and one of the most original images was a transparent bowl filled with muddy water with some kind of unpleasant-looking oil floating on the surface. This image evoked a lot of emotional responses from the participants - many recognized their anxiety in it.

Recorded - ask yourself again how the anxiety is doing and whether you still want to eat it. And if you can spend another 15 minutes on this, move on to the final stage.

Useful point. The anxiety attack that is happening to you right now - what is it about? What is he trying to tell you? Why is it needed? This can be difficult to understand, but sometimes this technique helps: imagine that you are a roe deer or other wild animal in the forest. And everyone who surrounds you, and everything that surrounds you, also lives in this forest. Why do you need this anxiety attack, how does it serve your survival function, what does it protect you from, save you, protect you from?

6. Make plans

I ask you to spend the last 15 minutes of this exercise making plans for the future. Any. For example, I really love plans like “What could I do if there was no anxiety in my life.”
“If I didn’t waste time worrying, I would...” - write 10 times in a row and then finish each sentence. I started riding horses, I would take a sommelier course, I would read more books, I would see my friends more often... You wrote it - now think and mark a couple of points that you can do now. As my scientific advisor at the university, Professor Sokolova, said, not thanks to, but in spite of.

It is not necessary to repeat this five-step script in detail every time. Only the first four points are mandatory, the rest can be varied and combined. It is important to attempt self-exploration with each attack of “anxious hunger.” At first, you will be able to put off eating only the mildest attacks - this is completely normal. But, based on the experience gained as a result, you will soon be able to better understand and manage more significant attacks. In the “program” of your own work with anxiety, you can include a lot of auxiliary forms of self-knowledge - mindfulness practices, meditation or a contrast shower (they always ask me if it’s possible to do this...). It is important that any tools you use do not serve to “distract” you from eating, but to explore your condition in more depth. This is the only condition under which anxious eating can be stopped.

GUILT

Another champion in a world where chocolate is a cure for the senses. Guilt may not manifest itself as clearly on a bodily level as anxiety or anger - you don’t wring your hands or turn red in the face, but it’s as if something is gnawing at you from the inside all the time. Guilt is certainly a difficult experience, but nevertheless it has great psychological meaning. We often think that others provoke guilt in us (and yes, they do this), but the source of guilt is always within us. Guilt marks our behavior that does not meet our internal standards and makes us aware of situations where we failed to live up to our ideals. Guilt grows from that secret place of our soul in which we are perfect or at least close to perfection - from our Ideal Self.

We need guilt to set boundaries in our interactions with each other. A life completely without feelings of guilt would not be safe - much like driving a car on roads without a traffic light. Guilt helps us monitor our behavior and learn to treat others the way we would like to be treated.

The problem is that people who are prone to overeating usually tend to “stick” to the experience of guilt, to feel guilty for any reason and too often. Being people who are insecure and have unstable self-esteem, compulsive eaters often perceive any neutral information as a reason to feel guilty. Did a colleague absentmindedly say hello this morning? He is probably angry with me... Then we begin to frantically think about why the colleague could be angry, and of course, the reason is found. Perhaps a co-worker's child had a fever all night, their car was scratched on the way to work, or their pet goldfish died - compulsive eaters simply don't consider the possibility that absent-mindedness 1) may not be related to them personally, and 2) does not mean anything bad. The boss still hasn't said anything about the report? This means he didn’t like it, and it’s true that I didn’t write it well enough... And again, it doesn’t even occur to the poor guy that the boss probably didn’t even have time to read the report. Your friend didn't call? A friend didn't invite you to your birthday? Did your son’s teacher talk dryly? There can be many reasons for feelings of guilt; a cocktail of guilt and anxiety creates the basis for constant vibration, constant thinking - I did the wrong thing, didn’t do that, didn’t have time, wasn’t like that...

Over time, these “guilty thoughts” become an automatic process; you don’t even have to strain at all to believe or imagine that you are to blame for everything that happens around you. And here again there is a lot of hidden, invisible to the world, internal need for control. Yes, yes, you can control the world with the help of guilt. Because if a colleague is distracted because of you, and the boss is angry with you, and a friend has found something to be offended about, and an acquaintance for a reason forgot to invite you to his birthday, it means, as the famous St. Petersburg musician Leonid Fedorov sang, “I am in charge of everything.” and it’s all because of me.” In fact, you implicitly control the world of these people - or rather, your guilt helps you create the illusion that you are doing this.

How to get rid of excessive feelings of guilt? There are no wonderful recipes. Cognitive behavioral therapy teaches us that if “wrong” thoughts that lead to a pathological result—mental discord—have become automatic, then we can consistently unlearn how to think them.
So, we will unlearn how.

Remember, no one can make you feel guilty. Agreeing to feel guilty about a particular event is your personal choice, although people will try to impose this feeling on you - this is one of the oldest, most reliable ways of managing human behavior. The closer you are to the status of a perfectionist, the higher and more unattainable your ideal, the stronger your feeling of guilt will be, the more often you will experience it. At the same time, believe me, you absolutely do not want to be a person who does not feel guilty at all. These include people with narcissistic and psychopathic personality traits - people who are capable of cynically using others and lack the ability to empathize. Such people can be successful, popular, even loved - remember Hitler, Stalin, Fidel Castro - but they usually fail to be happy and build stable relationships with loved ones and children. We need the feeling of guilt to learn to distinguish good from bad. The discomfort that we experience in childhood, realizing that we have done something completely wrong, allows us to learn from the experience of our own mistakes to distinguish good from evil. It is unlikely that you will want to get rid of the feeling of guilt and become a person who has ceased to distinguish between these two concepts.

How to distinguish healthy feelings of guilt from unhealthy ones?

The most important thing is the ability to reflect. When you feel guilty, you look back, analyze what happened, and try to understand are you really to blame for something?. If it turns out that yes, then you - no, you don’t commit hara-kiri in the main square of the city - you apologize, try to correct your own mistakes, but most importantly, you understand what not to do next time. After you have done everything possible to correct the mistake and learned the lesson, it is time to forgive yourself and let go of the guilt. That's all.

Unhealthy feelings of guilt appear at any time, regardless of whether you have done anything wrong or not. For example, it may appear when you allow yourself to take care of yourself and not others, say “No” in response to the request or demands of another, allow yourself not to go to work sick. However, taking care of your own needs is completely normal and right. Please note that healthy guilt is a reason for reflection: “What did I do wrong? How to fix it?". Unhealthy guilt makes you suffer—that's all it does. The purpose of unhealthy guilt is to not leave you alone, and as a result, you don't learn anything, you just suffer. Food is a great defense against needless suffering, but what else can you do about unhealthy guilt?

Exercise “Guilty Thought Counter”

The best remedy against unhealthy guilt is the same well-known awareness. In fact, awareness is a bright spotlight that allows you to examine and find out how adequate this or that experience is and how much it is generated by past traumas, early painful experiences of loss and resentment. In this merciless light, unhealthy guilt begins to wriggle, turn pale and show its true essence - which is not very attractive for it, something like an intestinal worm. It sucks strength without giving anything in return. Of course, who likes to see their own worms, but why put up with them?

SHAME

Shame and guilt are often confused, yet these emotions are not even close relatives. If guilt is focused on one's own actions, the fact that I cannot meet the given standards of the “Ideal Self”, that is, guilt is behavior-oriented, That shame is person-centered. When experiencing shame, the most painful of experiences, we feel not our behavior as wrong, but ourselves as deeply wrong, a spoiled person, who would have been better off not being born at all, better off disappearing from the face of the Earth. There is a good definition that guilt is the feeling that I made a mistake, and shame is the feeling that I myself am a mistake. Why is shame more painful and painful to experience? Because if I make a mistake, if my behavior is wrong, this can be corrected, if my existence is a mistake, then this can only be corrected by very destructive methods. No matter what you do, it is no longer possible to correct what you are ashamed of.

This is the difference between guilt and shame: guilt is a feeling focused on the Other, who can forgive, understand, not pay attention, finally - and this nullifies guilt. Guilt, with all the painful feeling of one’s own inadequacy, contains the proverbial “three pennies of hope.” Shame does not imply forgiveness, shame is focused on oneself, it is a deeply intimate, intrapersonal experience.
According to the Greek legend, which gave Freud the names of the most significant conflict in childhood development, Oedipus, discovering that, despite all his efforts, he had killed his father and married his mother, in grief he scratches out his eyes and leaves Thebes for the desert. From the point of view of one of the excellent psychoanalysts of our time, Ben Killborn, Oedipus does this not out of grief, but out of shame - he no longer has the strength to see himself in the mirror. Oedipus symbolically destroys himself, at the same time punishing, because he cannot come to terms with the feeling of his own wrongness and depravity. For those interested in the topic of shame, I refer you to Ben Killborn’s brilliant book “Disappearing People: Shame and Appearance,” which was published in Russian.

Here we need to dwell on a phenomenon that is often found among those who find themselves overweight. Its name is body shame, a specific shame not for what a bad, unworthy person I am, but for what my body looks like. When working with people who want to lose weight, I often find that their only motivation for losing weight is body shame, the feeling of unbearability of being in a body that causes ridicule or hostility in other people. In this case, food turns out to be just an intermediary between the real, disgusting, ridiculous, ugly self, and the ideal self - with a magnificent, sculpted, muscular body.

And this is another pitfall of shame: it creates a huge gap between the real me, the one who doesn’t even have the right to exist, and the ideal me - Superman and Batman at the same time. Because shame is a very, very early childhood experience, it knows no undertones, it does not recognize any “I am good enough, I am acceptable.” Until the ideal is achieved, I have no right to be. Need I say how destructive such an attitude is and how quickly it leads to the appearance of food designed to heal the unbearable narcissistic wound from the unattainability of the ideal?

Shame is often “hereditary”. Parents who experience intense shame inevitably project it onto their own child. Parents experiencing guilt may feel like bad parents and try to correct this, but parents infected with a toxic sense of shame and unable to recognize and reflect on this (especially for people who are respected and authoritative in a certain group - school directors and chief doctors of hospitals for example), they “place” their shame on the child. The child catches this feeling and understands that something is wrong with him. Long-term experience of this kind traumatizes a person and often makes him really “become bad” - hence, for example, the phenomenon of the prevalence of drug addiction among high-ranking officials and businessmen. Successful people cannot allow themselves to experience their own shame, and then the child becomes the “carrier” of family shame. And since shame is a very uncomfortable experience, drug use brings both the desired relaxation, a feeling of freedom, and the feeling that there are rational reasons for feeling “bad”.

Getting rid of excessive, imposed, toxic shame, including bodily shame, can take a long time and require long-term psychotherapy. But we can start this path now, with the help of a simple exercise.

Exercise "Spotlight"

Let's imagine that all those events, actions or words for which you were ashamed before or are ashamed now, can be brought under the beam of a powerful spotlight and properly examined. When a child is small, it is difficult for him to understand what is bad and what is good, and the parents are the measure of good and bad for him.

Let's remember and write down what you were reproached for, what you were accused of, after what habitual words did you experience a burning surge of shame? Perhaps they called you a slob, predicted your fate as a janitor, suspected you of lying?

Write down all these episodes, one by one, on a piece of paper.
Now try to understand whose shame you experience in each of these episodes - your own or your parent’s?
How embarrassing is it really to fall and tear your tights at the age of 5 while running in the yard? Or was the problem in parental shame and fear of what the neighbors would say - the child walks around in torn clothes, where the mother is looking? !

How fair was it to call you fat if, looking at your own childhood photographs, you see a completely ordinary child, perhaps devoid of aristocratic fragility, but usually built? Or is the problem that the parents were afraid of accusations from the local pediatrician - where did you feed the child, and were ashamed of it in advance? |

Did your parents really expect you to do your homework on your own at the age of 8 - and without a single mistake? Or is it that your school failures again cast a shadow on their methods of education - they failed, they overlooked, they did not cope?

In other words, were you ashamed of these moments - or your loved ones?

Should you be ashamed of this?

Highlight with one color those episodes in which the shame was your own, deserved, and those where it was imposed on you from the outside.

As a result of this exercise, you may find that you lived in the same family with very vulnerable people who were terrified of their own shame and passed it on to you at outstretched arms. like a hot pot. “It’s not us who are inexperienced and overworked parents—it’s our child who is dirty, stupid, and a glutton!” Perhaps you are also used to believing this. Now is the time to separate what you might feel real shame about - childhood lies or theft, for example, committed with the understanding that it was bad, and the shame that was injected into you like a slow-acting poison.

I wouldn’t dare to say that the shame will go away immediately. But, as I said, this path is long and difficult.

I will say right away that I am a fan of both intuitive eating and Svetlana Bronnikova, so my enthusiastic look at this book is inevitable. The whole concept can be summed up in one phrase: “Eat if you’re hungry, stop if you’re full.” What could be more natural than processes associated with food? But from my own experience and observations, I can say that the most difficult thing about the concept of intuitive eating is believing in it. Because you have to believe in yourself, give yourself time and be patient. You will have to learn to distinguish between physiological hunger and emotional hunger, when “I want a cake” is just a reaction to sadness and is not about food at all. You have to believe that allowing yourself to hear your body will not end in a lifetime of eating fast food around the clock, even if for some time after the “permission” this may be the case. And the book “Intuitive Eating” is a great help on this path. I know many stories of people whose relationship with food changed for the better after they took off their diet “corset” and allowed themselves to breathe freely.

The concept of “intuitive eating” arose in America in the 1970s as a reaction to the abundance of diets - primarily to their catastrophic ineffectiveness. Because a fact has long been proven, which most have experienced for themselves: 95% of people who lose weight on a diet gain it back within three years, and most often more than what they started with. But despite these statistics, the multi-billion dollar diet industry continues to thrive and, even sadder, is actively supported by many doctors. Although this logically does not fit into your head - you are recommended a medicine that helps only in 5% of cases, the survival rate for lung cancer is even higher. And the question logically arose: maybe there is something wrong with the diet system itself? Perhaps diets have also contributed to the obesity epidemic? And they certainly contribute a lot to the epidemic of eating disorders. But if not diets, then what? And you will find the answer to these questions by becoming familiar with intuitive eating.

“How to deal with this? How to capture more subtle sensations? Listen to your body over the course of a day or two and try to catch when your stomach feels empty or begins to growl - these are more or less accurate signs that you are hungry. At the same time, on an emotional level, and this is important to note, anything can happen to you. We are hungry no matter what happens in our mental life. Any change in the feeling of hunger in response to events in mental life (not only gluttony, but also anorexia, the inability to eat in response to stress) may be signs of a breakdown in this system.”

Svetlana Bronnikova’s book has already become a bestseller in Russia and was the first book in Russian about intuitive eating. The most important thing, in my opinion, that the author succeeded in was the adaptation of the intuitive nutrition system to the Russian mentality. In the post-Soviet space, as always, we are going our own way, and the book perfectly describes how Soviet stereotypes about thinness and fatness are intricately intertwined with glossy Western standards. About how family interaction shapes our eating habits and relationships with our bodies. It also brilliantly debunks dietary myths that arise every day from all possible media. And of course, a lot of attention in the book is paid to the cult of thinness and women’s fears of being fat.

Dietary behavior in the long term leads to weight gain rather than weight loss.

The first part of the book discusses the question “Who is to blame?”, and the second discusses “What to do?” And the author generously shares tools for setting up intuitive nutrition. I would like to note one interesting effect that sometimes occurs among readers of the book.

“I read everything, understood everything, but intuitive eating doesn’t work for me.”

— What specific task is causing you difficulty?

- None, I understood them all.

— What were the difficulties during execution?

“To be honest, I didn’t do them.”

It’s difficult to say what exactly leads to this effect – a school allergy to the phrase “homework” or their apparent simplicity, but the fact is that intuitive eating, like any new skill, requires training. The first time is very painstaking and not without difficulties, but believe me, it is worth it. It's like learning to swim or ride a bike: first you teach your body, and then it magically handles it.

“The main, most fundamental rule of intuitive eating: you can always eat, you can eat everywhere. The only thing that determines the need to start eating is the feeling of hunger that we experience.

The time of day, life schedule, “I need to eat because I’ll get hungry later,” “I’ll eat for company,” and other considerations cannot determine the need to eat.

Often completely unrelated sensations are mistaken for hunger - “hunger in the mouth” or “hunger in the head.”

Hunger as a physiological “event” of the body is regulated by the hypothalamus, a tiny part of the brain located deep in the brain, and is localized mainly in the stomach. This means that “hungry in the head”, “bored in the mouth” and “grandmother will be offended if I don’t eat this cutlet” are by no means physiological events and have nothing to do with hunger. Now, while reading these lines, put your hand on the place where you feel hungry. Where did your hand go?

Today, diets, unfortunately, are taken for granted, but the book allows you to take a step aside and think about whether this is so. Once upon a time, people believed that the Earth was flat (What else could it be?), and desperately fought against those who put forward hypotheses that it was round; this seemed incredible nonsense (How is it possible, why then don’t people fall from it? ?). Maybe the day will come when the story that you can eat normally without dieting will become as obvious a fact for people as the fact that you can walk on a round Earth and not fall off it.

“If a person suffering from a broken relationship with food can learn to recognize his own feeling of hunger, nuance it, eat exactly what his hunger requires at the moment, and stop at the moment of satiety, then the result will be physical and mental satisfaction, the end of dieting cycles -gluttony and normalization of relationships with food.”