Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat (12 page)

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Authors: Mike Dow,Antonia Blyth

BOOK: Diet Rehab: 28 Days to Finally Stop Craving the Foods That Make You Fat
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Does the problem start with anxious thoughts or lowered brain chemistry? No doctor can pinpoint exactly how it started for you—and it doesn’t really matter. Once you start on that downward spiral, you’ll keep going unless you do something deliberate to interrupt it. You need to either change your thoughts or boost your serotonin levels—or both.
Serotonin booster foods can increase your serotonin levels, so if you’d like to start adding some to your diet right now, turn to page 204. As you’ll see in Part IV, your 28-day Diet Rehab plan will add serotonin boosters to your diet in a more systematic way.
But there is also quite a bit you can do to replace pitfall thoughts, which generate anxiety, pessimism, and low self-confidence with booster thoughts, which generate peace, optimism, and confidence. We already saw in Chapter 3 that there are seven pitfall thought patterns and seven booster attributes that can dramatically affect your brain chemistry. There’s an even more personal way to apply these insights to yourself, and that is by working with one of the most powerful thought-transforming tools I know: your
mantra.
Your mantra is a brief but powerful statement of your core belief about yourself and the world. Booster mantras improve our brain chemistry by creating a positive, joyous, and confident approach to life. Pitfall mantras, which are negative, make us more likely to turn to addictive foods, alcohol, or drugs, thereby keeping us anxious, pessimistic, and discouraged. The more you avoid the pitfall styles of thinking you learned about in Chapter 3, and the more you add the booster attributes to your life, the easier it will be to move from a pitfall mantra to a booster one. Likewise, the more you work on transforming your mantra, the easier it will be to avoid pitfall thinking and bring booster attributes into your life.
As you saw in the Introduction, my mantra growing up was “I’ll never be a good enough son to keep my family safe, but I can’t stop trying”—a pitfall mantra born out of watching my family collapse in the wake of my brother’s illness. This mantra drove me to self-medicate with sweet, starchy foods that I hoped would silence the feelings of inadequacy. It also compelled me to constantly seek out how other people were feeling, what they thought of me, and what I could do to make them happy or win them over.
The problem with my mantra was that it set me up for an unease that could never be silenced and therefore a hunger that could never be satisfied. Certainly I could never do enough to make my family feel okay if they were worried about my brother’s life-threatening illness and his long, slow, uncertain recovery. Nor could I ever figure out how every person in my life was feeling and then do the perfect thing to make them feel good about themselves and about me. If what I needed to feel okay was for the world to become a perfectly safe place and for every person in my life to be completely happy, I was doomed to continual feelings of insecurity and inadequacy.
Self-medicating with food only makes a pitfall mantra worse and can lead to a downward spiral if the “medicine” you’re choosing is an addictive pitfall food. As we’ve discussed, the “sugar high” is inevitably followed by a “sugar low,” just as the temporary calm of noodles and white bread gives way to an anxiety and hunger that are even more intense than before. You
can
lift your mood with booster foods—whole grains, plain yogurt, berries, and other serotonin-rich foods that feed your brain in healthy, stable ways—and later on in this book we’ll find out how. But I’d also like to help you get at the thoughts and feelings that exacerbate your anxiety in the first place.
The key to this is understanding your pitfall mantra and then replacing it with a more positive message. This will interrupt the cycle of anxious thoughts and free you from its downward spiral. A positive booster mantra will allow you to feel better about yourself, your life, and your future even before you’ve reached your healthy weight.
Sound good? Then let’s get started. The first step is to identify your mantra.
Identifying Your Mantra
 
If you’re struggling with low serotonin, your current mantra is likely to reflect anxiety, pessimism, and a lack of confidence. Here are some common “hungry for serotonin” mantras:
• Something bad is going to happen.
• If that could happen, then anything could happen.
• I’m not okay.
• If I don’t do something in one exact way, something bad will happen.
• If I’m not a complete success, I’m a complete failure.
• If I don’t weigh myself frequently, my weight might balloon.
• If I don’t control my feelings, I’ll fall apart completely.
• If I ever let anyone down, I’m a complete failure as a person.
• If others get close to me, they’ll hurt me.
Do any of these sound familiar? If one of these statements perfectly describes the way you think about yourself and the world, look no further. You have found your pitfall mantra. Go right ahead to the next section to find out how to this mantra affects your weight.
But if none of these statements quite hits the nail on the head, take a few moments to articulate your own personal pitfall mantra. It’s worth spending a little time on this because I want you to be able to recognize this way of thinking the moment it rears its ugly head. And believe me, it will. One thing I’ve learned from both my own growth and that of my patients is that as soon as we start making positive changes, all the old pitfall thoughts and feelings from the past rush up to try to pull us off track. If you can recognize your pitfall mantra, you’ll be far more effective at transforming it into your new booster mantra.
So grab a notebook and a pen, or sit for a moment at your computer, and write down your own personal pitfall mantra. What words do you keep hearing that make you feel anxious, unworthy, or pessimistic? Write them down, look at them for a moment, and then move on to the next section.
How Your Mantra Affects Your Weight
 
Your pitfall mantra might be different from mine, but they definitely share one thing in common: Each time we repeat our pitfall mantras, our serotonin levels drop.
When you’re hungry for serotonin, pitfall mantras lead to anxious pitfall behaviors—and those pitfall behaviors cause serotonin levels to drop, too. Whenever we behave in a fearful, anxious way—obsessing over every bite of food or extra ounce of weight or refusing dates until we’ve lost those last ten pounds—we reinforce our fearful attitudes and lower our serotonin.
This interaction between brain chemistry and experience goes back to our childhoods. Say you come from a stormy, argumentative family with a father who was always exploding in rage and a mother who was known for her frequent criticisms. As a child, you may often have felt fearful and anxious, afraid that your slightest error might provoke your parents. This state of fear would have helped to “set” your serotonin at a chronically low level. These same low serotonin levels would contribute to your anxious state.
But it doesn’t stop there. Your anxious feelings might then drive you to choose fearful actions such as hanging back from the other kids at school or not wanting to leave the house until your outfit is perfect. These fearful actions in turn reinforce the idea that the world is dangerous (the kids will mock you, your outfit will make you look bad)—leading you to become still more cautious. The combination of anxious thoughts and fearful behavior continue to drive down your serotonin levels. And now we have all the elements of a vicious cycle, in which attitudes, behavior, and brain chemistry all work together to keep you anxious and miserable.
 
No wonder serotonin deficiency creates food addictions and weight gain! When you’re feeling anxious and fearful, you’re more likely to reach for the sweet, starchy foods that will ease your mind by boosting your serotonin levels. You’re starving for anything that will make you feel better, and food may feel like the only comfort you can rely on.
Transforming Your Mantra
 
Now that you’ve identified your old pitfall mantra and seen how it affects your life and your weight, let’s change it into a new, more positive statement about yourself and the world. For example, if your core belief is
I’m not safe
, I’m going to give you the tools to change it to a more optimistic message such as
everything is fine.
Here are some of the booster mantras you might choose:
• I’m a resourceful person and can handle the things that come up.
• Things will turn out okay . . . they usually have before.
• I’m good at many things, and if a few things aren’t perfect, that’s okay.
• I do what I can . . . and I’m okay with that.
• I’ve done my best . . . and my best is pretty good.
• Even when things are hard, I can imagine that they will get better.
Look over these improved mantras and see if one of them works for you. If so, write it down. We’ll be coming back to it again later. If none of these is perfect for you, take a few moments and create your own. You deserve a booster mantra that expresses exactly the attitude and core beliefs by which you choose to shape your life.
 
How Diet Rehab Will Transform Your Mantra
Maya was a teenage girl who had been to three psychotherapists before me. Her parents were both attorneys who had never had a problem with their weight. Maya, on the other hand, weighed close to two hundred pounds. Her parents’ high standards and fit bodies made Maya feel like a failure, as did their well-intentioned efforts to stock their kitchen with Maya’s “special diet food.” So when her parents weren’t home, Maya would medicate her loneliness by eating boxes of cookies in the middle of the night.
Maya was a junior at a prestigious private school, where she had good friends—but no dates. She compensated for her weight by buying expensive clothes. In fact, I never saw her wear the same thing twice, and her sense of fashion was astonishing. She was also sweet, charming, funny, and incredibly smart. I knew she could have all the dates she wanted, at any weight, if she would only believe in herself and let others see her as I saw her. But I saw, too, that her mantra, “No one will ever truly love me for me,” was preventing her from allowing any guy to get close. And covering up who she really was with all these accoutrements was exactly what prevented her from being seen, known, and loved.
Together we labeled all of her pitfall styles of thinking. But no amount of logical discussion was going to change the fact that no boy had ever asked her to a high school dance. Nothing we said was enough to make Maya feel pretty or love her body. And until she did feel good about herself, she would never have the stores of serotonin she needed to give up the sweets and starches that she used to medicate her misery.
“I know that logically I
should
feel good enough,” Maya told me once. “That doesn’t change the fact that I still
feel
sad and just awful about myself. I know I’m smart, but I keep comparing my life with other people’s. Being at the top of my class doesn’t really feel like it’s worth very much. Honestly, if I could trade my intelligence to be sixty pounds lighter, I would. Do you know that all of my friends have kissed guys, and I actually made up this story about hooking up with a guy at camp last year? How pathetic is that? I have friends that love me, but I’ve never had a boyfriend. And every time I try on clothes I
feel
terrible about myself—and then nothing else that’s good in my life seems to matter. My friends invite me places, but I usually just end up staying at home. I actually have been looking at colleges on the East Coast, because I just want to get away, and the idea of cold weather where I can wear heavy jackets and long sleeves all year would be such a relief to me.”
What Maya was saying to me—and what perhaps you are now saying to yourself—is that words and logic aren’t enough to change our feelings. In order to create a new mantra, you must give yourself new experiences. You must try out some new actions and pay attention to the consequences, and allow those consequences to affect you.

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