Stop Eating Your Heart Out

 

The 21-Day Program to Free Yourself from Emotional Eating

 

Hi Everyone,
I appreciate Jeanne’s giving me this opportunity to connect with you. I live in Tucson and have visited Mirasol and seen firsthand the love and excellence she has put into the facility.
I know about eating disorders, both personally and professionally. For the first half of my life I was a closet eater -- I knew I was a sneak eater, and I knew I ate to the point of physical distress, but I didn’t know until recently that I had a binge eating disorder. The mental health description of “binge eating disorder” includes the following, with my personal confession in brackets:

• Eating a large amount of food in a short period of time [Yes, I could pack it away.]
• Lack of control over eating during the binge episode [In the midst of a binge, I would demand my hand to stop shoving cookies into my mouth, but it wouldn’t stop.]
• Eating until uncomfortably full [I would eat so much that my stomach ached intensely … chew a few Pepto-Bismols … curl up in a fetal position until the pain subsided … then I’d get up and feast on more.]
• Eating large amounts of food when not physically hungry [I know I ate because of emotional, not physical, hunger.]
• Eating much more rapidly than normal [I inhaled my food.]
• Eating alone because you are embarrassed by how much you're eating [I always preferred eating alone because I was the supreme dieter in public but in private I could pack it away without others’ having the slightest notion of the vast quantity of food I could consume.]
• Feeling disgusted, depressed, or guilty after overeating [Yes, yes, yes!  I was often all three. That’s why I became a closet eater in the first place.]

When I was twenty-nine, my friend told me she had attended a 12 Step Recovery meeting for people with weight issues. “There really is a place like that?” I asked incredulously. Many years earlier, I had seen the teleplay Days of Wine and Roses, which depicts the total devastation of an alcoholic’s life, before he achieves sobriety with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. At that time, as a sixth grader, I thought, Wow, I wish there was a place like that for me – I’m a foodaholic. That’s what I called myself at age twelve. I knew that whenever I started to eat, I didn’t want to stop. I had to contain myself or get scolded for eating too much. I knew I had an emptiness no amount of food would fill. Actually, I didn’t know that then. But I know it now.

A year ago I participated in a writing intensive in Sedona and in five days time I wrote my first book! However, it took many, many more than five days to edit it, a process that is now coming to completion. STOP EATING YOUR HEART OUT: The 21-Day Program to Free Yourself from Emotional Eating tells my story of out of control eating and my recovery that began with 12 Step Recovery meetings. I also have used (and share in the book) a myriad of effective tools such as inner child work, meditation, journaling, energy techniques, forgiveness work, and lots more.

The book is for anyone with emotional eating challenges. It is written for my slim friend who sometimes pigs out on junk food and is eager to discover tools that will help her eliminate the compulsive eating, as well as the person who is totally immersed in the agony of repeated, uncontrollable bingeing. It is intended to help not only the emotional eater, but also the family members and health providers working with this population.

Writing the book was a cathartic experience as I relived some of the past pain. But, even more so, it was thrilling to get my story down on paper, and it felt like the book wrote itself. Editing it was much more of a challenge for me, and the first few months working on it was tedious. Once I had the book set up in the form I liked, the editing became enjoyable too as I played with the words and tightened up the sentences. 

One of my author friends gave me advice that I took to heart when she told me to not focus on the end product of a published book, but instead, savor each of the steps it takes to get there. I am, in fact, relishing each moment spent on crafting this book and working with the publisher, Conari Press.

Our very own Jeanne Rust has written the foreword! Although the book won’t be out until March 2012, you can learn more about it on my facebook page: www.facebook.com/StopEatingYourHeartOut.
~Meryl Hershey Beck, M.A., M.Ed., Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor

Healing Your Hungry Heart

 

Stories, Meditations, and Excercises for Health and Freedom

 

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist, author, lecturer

Eating disorder pain affects individuals suffering from an eating disorder and many others as well. As people write to me about Healing Your Hungry Heart I discover it is helping more people than I thought possible.

I wrote HHH envisioning adult women living their complex lives while struggling with eating disorders. I remembered stories I’ve heard over three decades of working in the field as well as my own memories of living with bulimia.  I wrote as if I were in personal conversation with individual readers. I spoke of work, marriage, children, family, career, secret dips into anguish, frustration at failing to end their eating disorder and frustration at being interrupted in their eating disorder. I spoke of the reality of recovery at any age and what you can do on a regular basis to find solid freedom.

I didn’t know that crowds of others were on my perimeter, eavesdropping attentively: parents, spouses, clinicians, adult children, employers, nurses, teachers, brothers and sisters, friends.  They write to me now along with the women who use HHH as a pathway and guide to healing.  I’m moved to tears at the gratitude they express and the stories they share.

I’m finding that HHH is a guide and friendly companion to the woman in isolation as she follows the suggestions and develops strength and resilience to cope with specific eating disorder triggers. As she learns specific tools for creating a nourishing and peaceful relationship with food she discovers joy in competence, nourishing relationships and pleasure in being alive.

A critical chapter is where HHH shows her how to understand and develop a self protective stance in sexually exploitative situations and learn to recognize early stages to prevent them from occurring.

Now I discover that HHH helps parents, spouses, adult children to understand the eating disordered experience of their loved one and how they can support recovery.

 

I’m discovering more surprises.

HHH supplies an opportunity for shared recovery work:  Mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, fathers and brothers can do the recovery exercises together and support each other.

After recovery is established HHH is a reliable recovery check to use every six months or once a year to keep on your recovery path.  It’s also powerful support for people graduating from an in-patient treatment center before their after care is established or during their after care

I hope recovery groups evolve based on following the healing exercises in each chapter and using the recovery stories as group discussion prompts.

And I hope HHH helps clinicians understand the profound and pervasive experience of living with an eating disorder and what exercises and activities work to help their clients develop internal strength and courage so the disorder is no longer necessary.

Here’s your chance to receive a free copy of Healing Your Hungry Heart. Below is the table of contents for HHH. Let me know which three areas are most appealing to you in an e-mail to me at: mirasol@eatingdisorderrecovery.com.  Entries will be accepted through December 1st. I will select five e-mails at random. Those selected win a free copy of Healing Your Hungry Heart.

Healing Your Hungry Heart: recovering from your eating disorder

“Dedicated to the spirit of life, joy, and wisdom in all women.”

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: Unreal to Real: Snapshots of My Story

“Self-observation is an instrument of self-change, a means of awakening.”
– George Burdjieff

Chapter 2:  Beginning to Free Yourself

“In the truest sense, freedom cannot be bestowed; it must be achieved.”
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Chapter 3:  Early Warning Signs
“Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.”
- Albert Schweitzer

Chapter 4:  How Do I Begin Recovery?

            “What will open the door is daily awareness and attention.”
- Krishnamurti

Chapter 5:  Boundaries: A Challenge in Early Recovery

            “We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.”
-- Aristotle

Chapter 6:  Secrets

            “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare? …. That became for me more and more the real measure of value.”
-- Friedrich Nietzche

Chapter 7:  Challenges to Eating Well

“The only devils in this world are those running around inside our own hearts, and that is where all our battles should be fought.” 
--Gandhi

Chapter 8:  Contemplation on Eating a Meal

            “Well, said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think.  Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were but he didn’t know what it was called.”
-- A. A. Milne, The House on Pooh Corner

Chapter 9:  Spiritual Depth

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  
-- Marcel Proust

Chapter 10:  The Great Terror
“In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning…”
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Chapter 11:  Recovery Check-In

            “I do not understand the mystery of grace…only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” 
-- Anne Lamott

Chapter 12:  Sex, Stalking and Exploitation

            “As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.”
-- Ram Dass

Chapter 13:  Family

            “The last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 
-- Victor Frankl

Chapter 14: Triggers as Teachers: Staying on Your Recovery Path

            “Commitment is what you stand on to breathe, attend to your body sensations, and courageously make your mindful decisions.” 
-- Joanna Poppink

Appendix

A:        Affirmations

B:        Additional Exercises and Activities for All Chapters

C:        Facts about Eating Disorders and the Search for Solutions

D:        Recovery Journal Prompts

E:         How to Find More Help

Recommended Readings and References

            Fiction; fairy tales, myths and legends; human development; consciousness; memoir; poetry; audiotapes and CDs.

About the Author

Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist, author, lecturer; great friend of Mirasol and Jeanne Rust, http://www.eatingdisorderrecovery.com