![]() My prayer changed: "Jesus, thank you for helping me maintain this weight. I was learning a kinder voice-one that spoke truth with love. You can love your overweight self, just as you are, because Jesus does. Anyone who feels inadequate feels anxious. When the thought that Jesus was saying no didn't leave, I began to face the facts: You're learning to perform a professional job for which you feel inadequate. I didn't want to label myself a food addict, yet I certainly used food to numb anxiety. An endless cycle-unless the shame is broken and the original pain is healed. It was the classic addiction cycle: feeling pain, using a substance to numb the pain, feeling shame about using the substance, and then using the substance to numb the pain from the shame. Cookies calmed that fear, but I ate too many. I knew I was overreacting, but I liked my inner voice sticking up for me, even if I was being too sensitive.Īs a therapist, I knew my self-talk reflected the fact that deep down I really believed I was "too big for my britches." I felt inadequate. I don't need to be reminded of my weaknesses. As he recorded his notes for my chart with his back turned to me, I heard him say, "Patient is overweight." In March of 1990, I went to my physician for a physical. But even the word overweight provoked my anger. Over the next month, the thought stayed with me that God was saying no. Why should clients listen to me now? My problems stuck out like my fat hips. My anxiety about therapy won't subside overnight-and I know that's why I'm eating so much.īut I didn't want to weigh 172 pounds! When I'd started graduate school eight years earlier, I weighed 135. ![]() I was drifting off when the thought popped into my mind: Maybe the answer to my prayer about losing weight is no. Sighing, I washed the cookie sheet and went to bed. Up to size 16-172 pounds on my 5'4" frame-I hadn't weighed this much since I was nine months pregnant with our daughter 15 years ago. Just that morning I'd asked God for self-control-like every other morning for the past two years. And it was always available.īut the self-punishing voices were always there too: When you're seeing your clients, you act like you have everything under control, but your eating is out of control. But nothing calmed my anxiety like chocolate. I often sought reassurance from my husband and my colleagues. While I believed I was living God's dream for me, shaming statements I heard as a child came back to me: Aren't you getting too big for your britches? I felt inadequate whenever I read articles about counseling was I doing therapy right?Ĭhocolate chip cookies took the edge off my feelings of inadequacy and fear. I came from a working-class family, not a professional one. A client couple I'd counseled for months was getting a divorce, and as a beginning psychotherapist, I felt I'd failed them. Shame over my lack of control filled me, adding to my growing sense of failure. Was that my sixth or my seventh one? Holding my stomach, queasy from too many sweets, I sat down at my kitchen table that cold January evening in 1990 and thought, I've got to stop eating so much. The warm chocolate chip cookie melted in my mouth.
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