Q&A 27 – Overeating: Why are diets a different kind of suffering?

Why do we fail so often at diets? The answer may surprise you: it has to do with what and how much you’re thinking and how diets exacerbate that thinking problem, rather than relieve it. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes* The thinking that we have about our overeating habit * How dieting layers more thinking on, which doesn’t help * Therefore diets are not the answer * Looking at what our feelings are telling us about our innate wisdom * How this is what creates peace with foodTranscript of the episodeHello, explorers, and welcome to Q&A episode 27 of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor, and I’m so happy to be here with you today. The question we have today has to do with dieting and how dieting is actually creating a different kind of suffering than, let’s say, an overeating habit, but it’s still suffering. I’m going to talk about why that is and where that comes from, and how we can do things differently. If we think about an unwanted habit like overeating, or binge eating, or whatever it is – smoking – we know that we have a lot of thinking about that situation, right? It’s a thing that feels like it shouldn’t be happening. And we can have all kinds of stirred up thinking about why that is. I know for me, it was always about why does it seem like it’s so not an issue for other people? And yet, it feels like such a huge issue for me. In other words, why have I spent all this time and energy and effort trying to fix this situation, and I’ve completely failed for 10, 20, 30 years. All kinds of thinking about being a failure and being someone without discipline or someone without willpower. Lots of thinking about, of course, in this day and age, with all the visually focused social media accounts and all the messages that we get from the media, I would have lots of thinking about how my body wasn’t “right” and how I didn’t measure up. I’m sure you can relate to all of this and how I wasn’t perfect. And that until I changed that, that I wasn’t really acceptable. Just lots of suffering going on, because of my thinking. What we see then, very often, is that diets and I certainly was someone who experienced this, diets and self-help programs that teach us how to eat, and apply rules and structure and whatever kind of program you want to call it, that would help us to change our eating habits seems like a solution, right? Of course it does. If we’ve got a situation where we’re overeating, and then someone proposes something where we would be eating less, and we would be changing the situation that feels like it’s a problem, then, of course that looks like a solution. And absolutely it did for me as well, all those years ago, and up until just a few years ago, actually. What I see now, that’s very different when we’re exploring this inside out understanding, is that diets actually just create a slightly different kind of suffering. What I mean by that is, we’ve got all this thinking about our overeating habit already that I just talked about. And then when we come along with a diet or a new eating plan, what we end up doing is layering a whole bunch more thinking onto the thinking that’s already there. And so it becomes like, the metaphor I want to use is a snowball rolling downhill. The original snowball is all our thinking about ourselves and our overeating habit. And then we start to diet or we find a new eating plan. And we think it’s a solution. And we may even feel some relief for the first few days.