Aaron was a year old and sitting in a high chair as my husband and I ate lunch in a small restaurant somewhere between Anaheim and Santa Ana, California. Aaron had dark hair, beautiful long, dark eyelashes, a dimple in each cheek and a ready smile. He’d already charmed all the waitresses with his personality, his sparkling eyes and his contagious excitement over food; then sent the entire room into an explosion of laughter over the shocked look on his face from the acid taste of the beautiful, red tomato on my plate that he just had to try.

      Aaron loved food. He loved eating it. He loved watching the preparation of it, the excitement of seeing it coming, the pleasure of putting it in his mouth and the joy of chewing and tasting. The ecstasy showed all over him; his face dancing with joy, his mouth open with anticipation, his eyes shining with excitement, his legs and arms waving in the air aiming for my hands to help it come faster, his body leaning forward to hurry up the process and the gurgling sounds of pleading to stimulate speed. This ritual took place at every feeding from the beginning of his life.

      The waitresses were enthralled. The joy of watching Aaron anticipating and eating food was irresistible and he communicated his pleasure to everyone around him. He had never before been in a restaurant and the bounty was pure heaven to him. He wanted everything!

      The hilarity at the face he made over the acid in the tomato swept the room. The taste did not turn out to be what he expected, but he wanted to taste my tomato so badly, I couldn’t refuse him.

      This event being over, we went on as quietly as possible with the rest of our lunch. Then came the coup de grass. Since my husband was Korean, he didn’t normally eat dessert; and, since I was large with our next child, I didn’t really want dessert either. The waitress couldn’t help herself. She looked at Aaron and said, “And what would you like for dessert?”

      Let me explain. We knew very few people in Southern California because we had only recently moved there from Boston. The majority of our food was oriental with a few American dishes. Aaron’s diet had only recently changed from Junior foods; cereal, vegetables, fruit, tofu, fish and ground meat with small bites of things from our plates. We had not eaten at anyone else’s house nor yet had any visitors to ours.

      Aaron turned, smiled at the waitress and clearly said, “Apple pie and ice cream.”

      Aaron talked early.

      Kwangjai and I sat there, stunned, with our mouths hanging open for about six seconds before almost falling off our chairs and joining the rest of the room which was rolling in laughter. They just thought he was cute, having no idea of the significance of his request. Of course we let him have it, how could we not?

      This experience is relevant to this book. Where did Aaron, a baby with very little contact with the outside world and coming from a home with mostly oriental food, pick up the notion of apple pie and ice cream? Watching someone receive it in the restaurant wouldn’t have given him the words, although he could have heard it; but how would he know what it was? He’d never even seen pie or ice cream, although he did know what apples were. I have never made a pie in my life!

      This incident happened many years ago; but it’s a perfect example of how suggestion, pictures and concepts of food dominate our culture. We are continuously inundated with the idea of food…everywhere you look...thousands of times a day.

      How many of you took Psychology 101? What is one of the first things they teach you? The story of Pavlov’s dog. Do you remember it?

      Pavlov fed his dog regularly; but, before each meal, he rang a bell. After many times, all he had to do was ring the bell with no food in sight and the dog salivated as if he was already eating.

      Programming.

      What do you suppose all those thousands of pictures of food you see every day are doing to your brain? And what are they doing to the brains of your children? Is this what you want? And we wonder why Americans and their children are getting more and more obese.

      Where are the American Medical Association, the dentists, psychiatrists and psychologists when we need them? And why don’t they speak up? Three guesses.

      So who’s left to take care of you?

      Tag. You’re it!    

CHAPTER ONE

"LET’S TALK ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY "

      Why eat? It’s such a bother; cooking, money, looks, health and nutrition have become such a pain; it would be lots easier if we could just get rid of eating altogether. If we didn’t have to eat, we could just work, run around and make babies; think of the time and money we could save not to mention the constant hassle of kitchens, cleaning, stoves, refrigerators, washing, drying, putting away dishes and then five minutes later taking them out again. It would eliminate peeling, grinding, cutting, mixing, cooking, garbage, chewing, dentists, swallowing, digestion, diapers, toilets and sewage disposal. We wouldn’t have to spend time plowing through grocery stores trying to read the labels, having to worry if we’re feeding ourselves and our kids right, arguing about which restaurant to eat in or having indigestion and loss of sleep because we ate too much. We wouldn’t have to witness the horrible spectacle of mothers dragging their screaming kids by one arm out of the supermarket and everyone glaring at them because they’re bad mothers with bratty kids. If you ask me, it would be the greatest relief in the world! We could all play games, watch television and forget the whole damned thing. 

      Unfortunately, the huge food conglomerates and drug corporations are making far too much money off us to contemplate such a solution, but it’s worth thinking about. Actually, we’ve allowed this monster to be created in the same way we’ve gotten ourselves stuck with our dependency on oil.

      Eating, diets, nutrition, grocery stores, endless pictures of food, restaurants, medicine, health, illness and advertisers pushing their products have become such a national obsession. I’m actually sick of hearing about it. What do you think?

      Then there’s the endless programs to stop eating, drinking, smoking, drugging, gambling, conserve energy and on and on and on. They push all this stuff on us to buy and then create more programs for us to stop. What kind of culture have we wrought? And, yes, I know there are many solutions in addition to overeaters anonymous, but what if you don’t overeat? Besides there are lots more eating problems than just being overweight. Actually, being overweight is not a disease, it’s a symptom!

      Our contemporary culture has developed the unfortunate pattern of looking at all problems from a superficial, one-minute, sound-bite perspective. We want solutions and answers to everything in one sentence, one second, one survey and one pill. We have no patience with thought or logic or depth, even when it comes to our own lives! And, unfortunately, because fast answers make more money for the big corporations with television sound bites, most of them are more than happy to cater to that approach.

      As a response, the medical and psychological professionals (along with most politicians) have developed the unfortunate tendency to also look at most problems from a superficial perspective; that is, they (along with the politicians) are trained to eliminate symptoms, not to discover and heal causes. Almost all of our health problems are treated with the intention of getting rid of the problem as fast and as easy as possible and not to change the underlining cause. So the general population ends up eating, drinking, smoking, snacking, dieting, watching TV, chatting on the internet, popping pills and even taking legal and/or illegal drugs to mask all the real problems of life.

.. The reason for this is obvious: Americans now demand instantaneous solutions to all problems regardless of whether or not that is even desirable, much less possible. So the industry is giving us what we want; instant food, instant health, instant medicine, instant news. And we’re all suffering the consequences.

.. Life is not an instantaneous experience. Some things are worth taking the time and energy to understand. Like your body and how it functions.

    If you are overweight, they say you have an eating problem. But being overweight is not a disease, it’s a consequence of something else that’s underneath the eating. The modern approach to physical and mental problems is by fighting it with a pill or cutting it out. But you can’t cut out a symptom, you can only mask it, like the war on drugs. Medicine is not a war. The solution to an illness is to discover the cause and assist the body in healing it. There’s an old custom in science and philosophy that to eliminate the effect, you first have to find the cause. The reason being, that you can’t make a change in the effect until you change the cause.

      Unfortunately, the fields of medicine and psychology have succumbed to the same three distortions that are permeating the American culture. 1. looking for fast, simplistic answers instead of depth of thought, 2. acting as if all problems are wars to annihilate the enemy, and, 3. everything based on profit instead of caring. The culture of the United States has its people in a grip of steel that’s so fierce, it’s frightening! The fight to control the massive amount of popularity, fame and money of the American consumer is, literally, driving men and a few women, mad. Crazy!

      The fact that weight and food are a problem isn’t actually just the fault of the people, it’s the insanity of the culture we live in. We have already gone over the edge and the result is a whole lot of people who are sick in their heads, a whole lot of people who are sick in their bodies and another whole lot of people who are sick in their souls.

      But this chapter isn’t about philosophy and this book isn’t about morality; it’s about food.

      Eating isn’t just an out-of-control habit like drinking liquor, smoking cigarettes or taking drugs, legal or illegal. People are doing all of these self-destructive things for thousands of different reasons, most of them are psychological. And, it’s a mistake to place most compulsive eating in the same category as smoking cigarettes, taking drugs and drinking alcohol because we have to eat in order to live; in order to exist. 

      Notice, I didn’t say that we eat because it brings us pleasure, or tastes good, or for entertainment, or joy, to feel better, or to have something to do, to keep our hands busy, or feel loved, or to replace sex and belonging, to cure depression, or to show off and all the other psychological reasons most of us use as an excuse. The fact is that Americans spend more time fixated with their mouths than is normal; whatever that means. Americans spend all day yapping on phones, watching other people yapping on TV and stuffing their mouths with everything as if their very lives depended on it which, in most cases, it doesn’t. Americans have an unbalanced obsession with their mouths.

      In addition to the continuous barrage of hypnotic suggestion to want to eat; we have, inside of our bodies, an internal clock. You hear people talk about this clock all the time; a clock that tells you when to go to sleep, when to wake up, when to go to the bathroom, when to rest, when to eat. This is not idle gossip, made-up stuff, or foolishness. Any mother who watches her children can tell you that every child has a clock inside of them telling them when to eat, when to sleep and when to go to the bathroom. If they don’t know, they’re not paying attention.

      At the beginning of life, the infant knows what to do and when…like breathing! In fact, it’s LIFE depends upon it’s knowing what to do and when. What parents and the system can, and too often do, is mess up the clock! Then, the commercials take over.

      When I finally brought Aaron home from the hospital, he wanted to drink milk every 1 ½ hours, day and night. That’s because they deliberately messed up his clock in the hospital because they didn’t want me to breast feed. Aaron was born in a Boston hospital at a time before breast feeding became acceptable. I was the only mother of 200 women in the maternity ward attempting such disgusting behavior, so they refused to bring him to me when he cried and then they gave him a bottle on their regular schedules. They were completely successful. I was not able to breast feed him when I brought him home; he refused. A different doctor suggested holding out against his fear, thus forcing him to breast feed; but I was not about to go into a power struggle with a tiny baby over his terror of not getting fed.

      We were both a wreck by the time they released us from the hospital; and I am deliberately using the word, released, because they forced us to stay there for five days even though both of us were fine. At home, Aaron was so hysterical he could hardly suck from a bottle. He screamed and sucked his way through two, and then four ounces of formula during every feeding while I held him, constantly trying to assure him that he was safe. Then he’d fall asleep from exhaustion for 1 ½ hours and then wake up, again, screaming…and I mean, screaming! I could hear the terror in his voice. This went on day and night for weeks. It was so difficult, knowing what to do, how to help him, and I was becoming exhausted.

      I decided I had to make a plan. My plan was to get the bottle in his mouth before he started screaming. When an hour and fifteen minutes was up, I began to warm the bottle on the stove, took it into his room and, while he was still lying in his crib, sleeping, I stood there, bent over with the bottle poised for action. As soon as he opened his mouth, while he was still lying down, before he could scream, I shoved the nipple with the free-flowing milk into his tiny mouth. I did this day and night, feeding him, walking with him, singing to him, cradling him until he finally began to realize that he wasn’t going to starve and began to calm down. Finally, thankfully, after about a month or so, he went into a normal four-hour schedule all by himself.

      The point is, if someone doesn’t mess up our clocks, our bodies know when to eat. My second child’s schedule immediately went into either four or six hours. The third was consistently every 3 ½ hours right from the beginning.

      Our body knows when it needs food and when it doesn’t whether we are a child or an adult. All these external Pavlovian triggers we give to our brain just messes up our clock while our bodies scream for regularity. Our bodies LIKE regularity!

      That’s why diets don’t work. Well, they work in the sense that they make barrels full of money for a huge amount of people; but the bottom line is that all the money that’s made talking about food, thinking about food, looking at pictures about food, buying food, cooking food, eating food and dieting from food rings Pavlov’s bell and keeps your mind focused on food. That’s the salient point.

      Focus on food!

      Keep remembering Pavlov’s dog. That’s you!

      Let’s begin by counting how many times a day you see pictures of food. I dare you to keep count of how many pictures you see in one day in your newspaper, magazines, television and your computer. And each ad counts as one. Where else? Movies, street signs, restaurants, recipes; and, let’s not forget the main culprit…diet books! Now, what’s your count?

      Diet clubs, diet gyms, diet recipes, diet liquids, diet websites, diet everything!

      Just don’t go into any grocery store! I dare you to try one visit without buying anything. I dare you to go into any grocery and come out with nothing! I’m willing to bet nobody can but it’s terrific idea. Let’s have a contest.

      Remember Pavlov - keep focusing on food!

      Diets keep you focused on thinking about food, seeing pictures of food and wanting to eat. Your unconscious works this way: Whatever you focus on is what you get!

      After I got divorced and was going to back to school to finish my degree in music and taking care of three children, I became more aware of what I was thinking. While I drove around town doing one errand after the other, I noticed signs inviting me to have chocolate doughnuts and various places offering espresso coffee. I am a coffee addict. I love the bitter taste of coffee and I started drinking it at my mother’s table when I was fifteen. Coffee has become important in the American diet because we eat way too much sweet food, according to the Ayurvedic food system. They say we need sweet, bitter, sour, salt, pungent and astringent tastes. There’s more about that in Chapter 22.

      As I drove the car past the signs, I became aware of pictures of chocolate doughnuts in my head. I could smell the chocolate, taste the doughnuts and feel the texture in my mouth; and I could sense the warm, hot steam, the smell and the taste of coffee. My mouth watered, my saliva flowed, my stomach growled, my intestines contracted. I must have them and as soon as possible! Sometimes I actually stopped, but mostly I was too busy. I wondered at the time, why I was having those reactions. I’d forgotten Psychology 101. I also didn’t need to focus on my health or weight; I had far more pressing problems in my life to hold my attention. At the time, I thought the sensations were amusing.

      It wasn’t until after I got my Master’s Degree in Sociology and Counseling that I began to put it together; the signs, the commercials, the pictures in my head, my digestive response and Pavlov. In fact, while typing this sentence, the pictures began to appear in my head of chocolate doughnuts and steaming, bitter, black coffee and my entire digestive apparatus clicked into wanting them. Fortunately, there’s no Dunkin’ Doughnuts in this town and I haven’t had coffee since I broke myself of the habit by going cold turkey.

      Those pictures came from my unconscious; the one that’s programmed just like yours by past pleasures, signs, commercials, pictures, smells, tastes, recipes, diet books etc., etc., etc. Your unconscious is also programmed by your childhood eating habits, your family dinners, religious rituals, family celebrations, your mother’s spoiling, manipulating, rewarding or punishing you by using food as a weapon; your lack of breakfast as you raced to high school and then to work as you got older. Everything has been recorded. Some of your eating today is based on habit, some is based on commercials and some is based on getting even with those who made eating a substitute for love, a weapon, or a war instead of teaching you the true purpose of eating.

      You’re all aware of how children react in the grocery stores to pictures and packages along the aisles and at the check-out stands. Some children go nuts, their mothers trapped in the position of playing old-lady-witch and saying no to a screaming child or giving in because of total humiliation in front of a collective of angry adults blaming her because she’s a bad mother! Who really is responsible? The child? The mother? The grocery store? The food industry? The child is the ultimate victim. The mother’s caught in the middle. No matter what she does, she’s wrong. It’s a totally unfair situation.

      Think of your unconscious as a two-year old child with a huge amount of power over your life and you’re the mother (no matter what gender you happen to be). The problem is that this `child within’ acts like an enemy just like the child in the grocery store. It’s this `child’ in you that demands to have its way; to have the chocolate, the donuts, the beer, the coffee, the coke, the ice cream, the hamburgers and fries. This is why we need to talk about psychology.

      Let me tell you something else about this `child’ inside of you. You, the you that’s reading this book, is caught in the middle. You, the adult you, is always going to lose. Your unconscious, this `child’ that lives within in you is always going to win. This is why it’s called an addiction. The more you fight with it, the more you lose.

      There are two kinds of addictions; one is a physiological, chemical necessity; that is, your physical body has developed an essential requirement for the substance, like cigarettes, alcohol, opium or heroin, and can go into an immediate, life-threatening crisis if it is deprived. Sometimes, these chemical addictions can be taken care of by will power, diets, cold turkey, anonymous groups and many chemical solutions controlled by the medical and psychological doctors. The second type of addiction is  psychological; for example, you have an emotional need to be with or see certain people or routines, or television programs or religious beliefs; your child-like emotions need certain situations, people or food to feel better, to have comfort. This is the Pavlov part.

      Although an eating problem is treated  by most people as if it were a physiological problem, eating is essential to staying alive; therefore most eating disorders are also a psychological problem because the disorder is a symptom, not a disease. If you stopped eating and went on a fast, your body would have an initial response of ecstasy and spiritual rejuvenation. It would take weeks before it began to get ill from a lack of food. Then is when it would become a real physiological problem.

      Before, the American Medical Association and American Psychological Association blast me for this latter paragraph, let me state that I do believe that there can be, and often is, a chemical component in an eating disorder. However, I am a psychologist and concerned only with the second type of addiction; the unconscious needs of the child within.

      It is essential that you understand the importance of your unconscious in your life. This inner child appears to act like a spoiled brat. In actual reality, real life, if a spoiled brat pits their will against an adult, a power struggle will occur which will result in one of you becoming a winner and one of you a loser. It’s not good for either parent or child to get into that position. In a battle of wills nobody ever wins; and you’re teaching your child that life is a war to be won or lost and to be willful with his/her own children, business associates and chosen partner in life. She or he may get what they want but they’ll make everyone around them miserable.

      However, the inner child in you isn’t a spoiled brat; it’s a child that’s been unloved, abused, disrespected, neglected, manipulated, traumatized or abandoned. It’s your childhood trying to make up for what you didn’t get that you should have gotten when you were little; the respect you deserved for being born or even for messing up your inner clock. The reasons for these lacks in your childhood are not relevant to this book. What you need to understand is that you as a child is now negotiating with you as an adult.

      This is not, and never will be a power struggle. You will never win. Your inner child will always win. And you, as an adult, need to honor, respect and love you as a child. You need to make it up to you for what you didn’t, and couldn’t get when you were little…even if none of it was your fault.

      It is a negotiation process; a compromise between the two of you. So, what does she/he want? A chocolate ice cream cone and a hamburger and french fries. If you are overweight, the adult you knows that all of these are not good for you; so what you do is say to your little child, `which do you want today, the ice cream cone or the hamburger and french fries?’ What you don’t say is, ‘you can’t have any of them’ or ‘you’re bad because you want them.’ The child chooses which she wants, giving her a sense of power; she’s placated and your body has improved. And both of you enjoy the choice! You keep on this negotiation indefinitely, giving unconditional love without criticism, without judgment, without scowling, without thinking bad thoughts; enjoying the good stuff completely while slowly and gradually changing and eliminating the conditioned reflexes.

      It is imperative that you are kind and patient with your unconscious. Nagging, shame, guilt, criticism, punishment, deprivation or humiliation only serve to make it more resolute. If you or anyone around you employs any of these attitudes toward your child and his/her requests for food, you are in for a lot of trouble. The most effective way to change your eating habits is to do it with love, respect, tenderness, kindness, generosity and continuous support and compromise. 

FLASH #1: If you have to cheat, enjoy it! 

      It does absolutely no good to condemn yourself for your vulnerability. If your life had been perfect up until now, you wouldn’t be having a problem. Your unconscious knows exactly why you have any problem and so it is critical that you enlist its cooperation in solving it. Any type of nagging or self-recrimination by you or anyone else only exacerbates the problem, it does not help you get better!

      Your only job is to support yourself continuously while you learn a different (not better) way of eating. It’s like not talking about wanting sex. The more you pretend you don’t want it, the more you want it.  

FLASH #2: Marketing is the biggest budget in most corporations.  

      Why do you suppose that is? Because it doesn’t work? Why does it work? Because it plants seeds into your unconscious and you buy on impulse. You think you’re making an intelligent decision based on the information that the commercials give to you, and you may be doing just that. But that’s not the point. The point is that your unconscious is dictating what you buy through what you see; what’s been planted in your brain for you to want...whether you need it or not. Why do you suppose that industry pays so much money for commercials. And why are sexually desirable women pictured with so many ads? Would they do that if it didn’t work?

      I live in California. We pump our own gas in California. When I lived in Oregon, we voted not to pump our own gas. In California, the drivers are forced to get out of their cars. The majority of people go inside the store to pay for their gas. Guess what they see when they enter the store? You got it! FOOD! Do you suppose that everyone who enters the store DOES NOT BUY AN ITEM OF FOOD? Do you think that, if they don’t buy food in the gas station store that they might go to another store and buy food there? To make it worse, most of the items sold in gasoline stations are junk, it’s not even food.

      The focus on brainwashing children to be consumers is fierce. The earlier they can implant suggestions, the more effective it is and the harder to change. Once it’s in there, in a gullible, innocent mind, the more difficult it is to disprove. One can reason with most adult minds, but it’s very hard to reason with a child as most parents can testify. It’s there forever.

      If you don’t care whether you or your children are manipulated and are overweight and destined for an early and miserable death, then there’s no point in your reading this book. You are a hopeless case and have my deepest sympathy. But your children deserve better parents.

      There is a psychological program called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. It explains how human beings receive information:

      1. Through their eyes
      2. Through their ears
      3. Through their emotions (called kinesthetic)

      Television, video games and the movies use all three avenues. This is the basis for hypnosis and all children as well as adults are susceptible to hypnotic suggestion. This is why commercials work. This is why grocery stores are probably the most dangerous places in the country, next to your television set.

      In order to resist hypnotic programming, you have to be strong…independent…not allow your peer group or some outside influence tell you what you should and should not eat. An independent person makes their own decisions based upon investigating many different ideas before coming to a decision about what’s best for them. They don’t take some authority figure’s word for what’s best without thinking about it by themselves. Not doing this gets a lot of people into a lot of trouble.

Right?

 

 © - 2005 M. C. Sherman

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