1,000 lb. Sisters

If you've ever found yourself  engaging in behaviors that you didn't want to whether it's
- eating more than you wanted to
- drinking more than you wanted to
- spending more $ than you wanted to
- texting your ex every time you get lonely, etc.

This episode will give you a technique to disrupt that and stop those unwanted behaviors. 

Find out more about my work: www.melindagerdungcoaching.com

Book a session with me: https://calendly.com/gerdungmelinda/coaching-session


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Transcript

0:53

Hey my friends. I had oral surery this week and my mouth is so puffy and painful. So hopefully y'all can understand me and I'm not slurring too much. I've started in my post surgery invalid state watching this show on Hulu called 1000 lb sisters. There's only seasons two and three on Hulu. And so spoiler alert if you haven't seen those seasons. So one of the sisters weighs like 650 pounds and her doctor has told her that she has to get her weight under control or she has an 80% chance of dying in the next five years. And so he'll give her like a short term weight loss goal to achieve before he'll like approve her for the gastric bypass surgery. And she's been trying to do this for over a year. She already had like one doctor give up on her because she always says that she wants it and that she's gonna do what she got to do, but she never actually does. She doesn't follow the diet that she's supposed to be on. She doesn't do the daily steps the doctor asked her to do. She basically just sits around at home and eats and drinks and talks to dudes online. And the doctor is just so frustrated with her and her whole family is so pissed with her. They're all like, what is going on with her like why can't she get her shit together? Like she's literally going to die if she doesn't change and if that's not a kick in the pants, then what is? They're all just like dumb founded. They don't know what to do. They don't know how to help her. She finally does decide to actually get her shit together and she realizes that her actual issue is her mental health. And so she does end up seeing a therapist along with the rehab facility she ends up going into. I'm sure there were a lot of mental health issues that she talked about with them off camera. But the one that she kept mentioning on camera was that she was an emotional eater. Like when she gets in her feelings, she just starts eating. And I want to talk about that because that is actually so universal. We all do this even if we don't do it with food necessarily. We feel something. We don't like it. And then we do something to try and make it go away. Whether that's eating, or drinking, or shopping, or texting our ex. It comes down to not having built the emotional muscle to be able to tolerate the feelings that we don't like and relying instead on getting a hit of dopamine to manage it. And this is really common. Most of us aren't taught as children how to feel our feelings. We're taught how to try to make our feelings go away. Which is how we can end up in trouble. So instead of feeling our feelings, we eat or drink or doom scroll for hours just to try to make ourselves feel better. But it's the part where we have the urge to make ourselves feel better that is actually the problem. The unwillingness to feel feelings we don't necessarily like is what makes us overeat or over drink or spend too much money or spend hours scrolling social media and making decisions that don't serve our best purpose or that we end up regretting. I call this resisting our emotions. We feel something. We don't like it. We feel the urge to get rid of it. And then we do some kind of dopamine seeking activity. I've done this so many times in my life, because for most of my life, I didn't know any different. I thought what I was doing was feeling my feelings because I felt something and I didn't like it. I didn't realize I was heaping on a layer of misery on top of the feelings by resisting them. That drive to fix it is its own kind of miserable feeling on top of what we're already feeling. Plus, I have found when you use a dopamine seeking activity to try to get rid of your feelings, you end up needing more and more of it to get the same effect. Like it's almost like you become sort of immune and you have to like up your dosage to get the same dopamine. Do you know what I mean? Like if you if you eat a piece of chocolate to make yourself feel better. At some point that one piece stops cutting it and you need more pieces to feel better. It ends up being like this bottomless pit that you can't really satisfy. I think that's where this dopamine trap can get really dangerous. That's how you end up 600 pounds or not being able to sleep or socialize without alcohol or going into consumer debt for shopping sprees. Right? What seemed like an innocent way to make yourself feel better can get out of hand really quickly when you're using it to try to feel better. Because the effects don't last. You have to keep repeating the dopamine seeking activity to keep, you know, making yourself feel better because it's not really addressing what's underneath it. It's not addressing the root cause. It's just trying to slap a bandaid on it. And it can spiral out of control very quickly. It can become way more damaging than the feeling itself that you are trying so hard to avoid in the first place. When I start teaching clients how to actually allow their feelings instead of resisting them, I have them start by describing the sensations in their body. Emotions are just a vibration in our body. They aren't dangerous. We might not like them, but they won't hurt us. So I have them notice and describe the sensations that they feel. Like where do you feel it in your body? Where do you feel this feeling in your body and be really specific. Lots of clients will try to tell me that they feel it everywhere. And I'm like really you feel it in your ear lobes? Be specific! Where do you feel the sensations in your body? And what do those sensations feel like? Describe it like you are describing it to an alien who has no idea what emotions are; who won't understand grief or anxiety or whatever. Describe the sensations and what they feel like. Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? A shape? A color? Does it move? How does it move? Describe everything about it and name it if you can. And if you feel the urge to make it go away, notice that too. Remind yourself that that won't help. Nothing has gone wrong. There is nothing to fix. And at some point the feeling will pass, much quicker than you expect it to. When we don't resist the sensations, they actually flow through us much quicker. Resisting our emotions actually has the effect where it prolongs them because we don't address it; we don't pay attention. Our feelings are signals that there's something that needs our attention. There's something we need to pay attention to. There's something we need to address. And when we use a dopamine seeking activity to kind of ignore it and shove it away, that emotion has to keep cropping up and trying to get our attention. Whereas when we actually spend the time to attend to it and feel it and notice it, it tends to pass much more quickly than when we were trying to ignore it. So I would invite you to give it a try my friends. It takes a little practice before you actually start doing this consistently and naturally. It tends to feel awkward at first like most things do. But try it out. Give it a few test runs and let me know how it goes. Alright my friends until next time, be well