When I give my lectures on this topic, almost immediately I begin to hear the excuses— I can’t lose weight because I am menopausal, I can’t lose weight because I have a thyroid problem, I can’t lose weight because I am older and my metabolism is slower or I hardly eat anything and I still cannot lose weight. I do not want to hear any of these excuses because this is all that they are, Excuses! As Dr. Phil always says, “You cannot change what you do not acknowledge!” I lost 125 pounds under all of these conditions! There is one excuse that I will accept— “It is just too hard and I do not think I am ready to lose the weight at this time.” It is hard and we are not always ready to make those massive life style changes that support a smaller body size. To lose weight and function at a normal size requires the greatest courage, the courage to face life unprotected, unprotected by the layers of fat. In a past life, you could have put on your chain mael suit of armor. Today, we must resort to the physiological layers of fat for protection.
Why is it difficult to make the decision to lose weight? Because to lose weight and to keep it off is the most monumental decision that you can ever make— that decision to totally change yourself and to never go back to being the Old Familiar Self, familiar to you as well as others— the passive self, the care-taking self, the angry, enraged and embittered self, the wounded self, the fearful self, all unhappy yet comfortable patterns of being with the old eating and the old behavioral patterns. Another major hurtle to surmount if you make that monumental decision— the alienation and the sabotaging tactics of friends and family who do not want you to change. This means that you may very well be fighting this battle alone. You are worth it! These destructive relationships are not.
Have I ever advised anyone not to lose the weight? Ironically, I have. When someone’s current life situation and its responsibilities would not support a normal weight, an unprotected weight, I advise the individual not to think about losing weight but rather to simply eat healthy— just make healthy food choices without considering the number of calories consumed.
There is no shame in knowing little or nothing about a subject
but it is a crime if that subject is you!
There is no single signature of obesity. After all, 64.5% of Americans are over-weight! I have been over-weight my entire life and the weight gain started when I began to go to school at the age of 6. My mother held on to me, she did not want to let me go so I never went to nursery school or kindergarten, pre-schooling that assists in social adaptation. I was an only child who grew up on a farm, totally isolated and insulated from the real world. My mother did not want to let me go in other ways— she needed an eating buddy. And, it was easier for her to complain about my weight issues than address her own. When I was very young, my mother took me to the doctor about my weight. He gave me a diet program— I was 8 years old— and my mother would tell me to follow it, while she prepared mashed potatoes and gravy and ate ice cream at night.
The food addiction signs are CANCER and VIRGO. These signs seek food as a release from perfectionist demands that the individual feels that he or she cannot possibly fulfill— setting up a boundary of fat for protection and distancing— and as a release from ever feeling one’s buried emotions. These signs are more inclined to turn to some “substance” when stressful feelings are not addressed, to bury them or to drown them. The individual develops the “Sara Lee Surrogate Mother Syndrome”— Sara always nurtures and loves us and she never, ever criticizes.
The culprit for addiction is Neptune with its boundary issues, a lack of psychological boundaries between self and others, between self and the parents initially. Later, the individual creates the physical boundaries of fat. While at the hairdressers, I read an article stating that research had been conducted on over-weight adults with a lifetime pattern of obesity. The most common pattern was a parent who invaded boundaries by going through the child’s belongings, by reading the child’s diary and listening in on telephone conversations. Bingo! This is exactly what my childhood was like— from the age of 14, when my mother encouraged me to start keeping a diary, she read every page until I moved away. Even then, I could not get away from her. She left my father and moved in with me! Finally, after 3 months, my parents went for pastoral counseling and she moved out. For years, she never forgave me for not wanting her to stay with me.
While I never experienced sexual abuse, this too is a boundary issue. That parent who inappropriately touches or caresses a child has invaded that child’s boundaries and trust. The weight acquired serves to keep a distance from others who may invade, hurt or betray.
Neptune acts as a culprit through its sabotaging effect. It constantly sabotages our energies and independence. With strong Neptune aspects, especially the Mars-Neptune aspect (and I use very wide orbs), the individual often had a parent who did not want them to grow up or grow away, sabotaging their initiative at every turn, talking them out of doing and, as an adult, they talk themselves out of doing, doing what they want for themselves. A parent who “sacrifices so much” for the child is in reality siphoning off that child’s energies. Later on, you will attract people into your life who sabotage your efforts, keeping you busy with their problems and talking you out of doing something that would take you away from their needs, talking you out of doing, doing for yourself and not them.
Neptune sabotages through Ambivalence. It is through ambivalence that we talk ourselves out of doing what we need to do for ourselves— “Oh well, I can diet tomorrow” and tomorrow never comes; “I can buy these cookies and I will eat just one” but we can never just eat one. It is the procrastination that puts off dieting and exercising until it is too late in the day and then we can just do it tomorrow… but tomorrow never comes.
Neptune sabotages through Denial and Excuses! This first manifests through denying how inappropriate the parent’s behavior is— a parent who was wonderful, who sacrificed, who worked so hard for the family— how can I possibly be angry at them. Neptune provides an opportunity to tune out and deny anything unpleasant in the life. In this way, Mars becomes suppressed, another issue with food addiction. In my lectures, the first defense of the compulsive over-eater to hearing my message is to feel compelled to tell me their excuses. You cannot change what you do not acknowledge and what you refuse to acknowledge will be the ‘shadow self’ that always controls you. You will always be in the grips of the addiction-– until you stop making excuses. This pattern of denial distorts our conception of how much food we eat and the reasons for our obesity. Healing our addiction can only occur when we replace delusion with truth!
Neptune sabotages by crippling our ability to say NO— to define boundaries for others and ourselves. How can you possibly say NO to Sara Lee if you cannot say NO to a parent, a child or your friends? At this point, unable to establish effective boundaries for yourself and others, you need to protect yourself with another layer of fat and comfort your depression with something soothing to eat.
THE BODY AS A COMPUTER:
I started to observe the very thin people that I knew. I observed them to see why they are thin and I am not. I saw that, whenever they feel anything-– anger, fear, frustration, and enthusiasm— they immediately act upon these feelings. They have to DO SOMETHING, take immediate action, speak up but definitely not run to the refrigerator! Our bodies are really like a computer. With the thin people, their “computer” only has RAM with no hard drive for storing. Mars is often strong, encouraging them to act rather than to store. They have the ability to utilize their Mars on their own behalf; the compulsive over-eater cannot.
The compulsive over-eater develops a huge hard drive onto which they store most of their feelings, specifically the unpleasant emotions of stress, boredom, loneliness, fear and filling a void. Ideally, we can store our feelings but we eventually need to review these stored emotions. The compulsive over-eater never does… until that day when they begin to lose weight. These stored emotions will come off in layers, like peeling the layers of an onion.
Removing the layers of stored emotions should be done gradually or, as I have observed many times, the individual will panic and binge. As these repressed and stored emotions begin to surface, we must slowly allow ourselves to honor these feelings, seeing them for what they are, and then release them. This can really only be done when we lose weight slowly.
These layers are often in this order:
1) Sexual Energy— this is a very powerful energy that seems to ‘steam’ off of the individual losing weight. There is no controlling it. This newly released energy is very magnetic, regardless of the body size. When a compulsive over-eater has a lot of fears around sexuality, this fear, unprocessed, can drive him or her back to eating.
2) Anger— there can be anger from childhood experiences and there can be anger connected to having been treated differently when over-weight. I felt very angry when I knew that I was being treated very differently as a normal sized person. If the anger is not addressed, old eating patterns will return.
3) Vulnerability— at this point, the individual no longer has the protection of the body fat and, in order to succeed in the transformational process, strength must come from within. The individual must learn to protect self in other ways besides eating.
To get in touch with the layers of fear, ask this question: “What was happening in my life the last time I was thin?” This may provide insight into the repressed fear. The goal of the Transformational Process is to become whole and integrated, to be your own person, regardless of what others expect, not absorbing their criticism, learning to trust others and, most important, learning to trust yourself.
By : John Berryman
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