Your normal 
appetite awaits!

I need to talk about this before I completely forget how awful it is to live with an uncontrollable appetite. How awful it is to believe you are personally to blame for overeating, that you have some weakness of character or that you are flawed in some way. How even when you are putting in 100% willpower into controlling your eating, eventually it all comes crashing down once more. How ashamed you feel when your body tells people you are clearly not in control which makes you think you are worthless as a human being. How it hurts when people make jokes about “how you love your food” and how you hate yourself for not being able to control your appetite. I was what you might call “an overeater” all my life until about the age of 45. Having sad that, now I wouldn’t call anyone “an overeater”, because this implies that the whole person is an overeater, which isn’t true because there are many more valuable aspects to a person than their eating. I have been learning this kind of stuff for the past 20 years. You will also agree that the eating doesn’t maketh the person, wen you’ve heard what I have to say because overeating isn’t what people do and could stop it if they only had more self-control. You will learn that having a larger appetite is something that happens to people that they can’t do anything about. In fact, the when they try, it gets a whole lot worse. My appetite was off the charts. Every decade of my life I would be putting more and more effort into trying to control it but, I didn’t realise at the time, this had become impossible task many years ago. All the effort I was putting into trying to control me eating was sapping my energy and attention I needed for other things like work, relationships and leisure. I realise now, the main reason I chose not to have children was because of my appetite. How could I teach a child not to overeat when I could not do it myself? I definitely didn’t want my child to suffer in the way I had all their lives. This is one of the many sad aspects that happen when you are preoccupied with your eating and trying to control it. Being depressed is another. Avoiding relationships or settling for poor relationships because of low self-worth. Being totally exhausted by the constant food chatter in your brain is another. The list could go on and on and my clients remind me them all the time when they describe how impossible life is living like this. My business before eating therapy was involved in health and fitness. I was a “personal fitness trainer” and what I didn’t know about nutrition wasn’t worth knowing. I even got qualified in “motivational techniques” which is designed to help people to increase their motivation to do something. However, I could not have wanted to stop myself from overeating any more than I did. I had a million reasons, as do my clients when they come to me, why not overeating would be advantageous but was the one thing that would solve all my problems. If there had been weight loss injections, in those days, would I have taken it? No, probably not, I was too health conscious and very wary of the side-effect, but I would have been very tempted. I can totally understand why people today would take this option. I even know people who have gained weight intentionally so they can get a prescription for a weight loss injection! People are desperate. I was desperate but because of my background as a scientist I decided to look at the science and not products in the weight-loss market. I learned more about the psychology of eating and was amazed to learn that if you restrict your eating, you will end up eating more in the end. There is so much science on undereating leads to overeating and binging and more and more comes to light every year. “Restricting” the eating isn’t just severely restricting by eating very small amounts per day, but it's any level of restricting which is eating even slightly less than your appetite wants you to eat. Seeing as my appetite was H-U-G-E, this would mean I could be actually still eating more than my body needed but even if I ate just less than my appetite needed, this would backfire on me and increase my appetite in the end. This is called “rebound eating” so you can be still eating a large amount and your body still perceiving this as restriction and your appetite exploding even more. When you are at this stage where you are technically overeating but you are still by definition restricting your appetite, this is traumatic. The harder to try, the worse it gets. Trauma affects the brain in many ways but one is leave it in a state of fight-or-flight. A brain stuck in fight-or-flight makes it harder to think, remember and learn. It makes you more fearful and have difficulty regulating your emotions. You can feel like you are constantly on high-alert which leads to chronic stress, mental health difficulties like depression, social withdrawal and physical health issues. Getting into such a mess was due to making so much effort to control the uncontrollable. You see, willpower - motivation, goals, knowledge etc - do not work with eating. Willpower is meant for changing behaviours. A health “behaviour” is something like smoking. Smoking is something you do, yet you get addicted to the nicotine but when you want to give up, you can use willpower to give up. Eating isn’t a behaviour, it’s an INSTINCT.  We are born with eating functioning as an instinct inside our bodies and there are many millions of people who retained eating as an instinct. You might know someone who isn’t interested in eating until the very second that they become hungry and then eating is the only thing on their mind, until they aren’t hungry anymore and you couldn’t make them eat any more even if you tried. They aren’t using willpower to turn their mind off from eating, their body is instinctively making this happen. These people never got into the habit of using willpower with their eating. They never tried to change the way they ate. However, those people, like me who, somewhere along the line, started to treat eating as a behaviour to be controlled lost this natural instinctive control of the eating. For me, willpower came in the form of my mum dieting to lose weight and I learnt that it was important to mot eat “too much.” This was my trigger down the slippery slope of restriction turning into overeating. What actually was happening to me was, I’d lost the instinctive control of my eating. My body stopped making me disinterested in food when I wasn’t hungry and so I was dependent on willpower to stop me eating when I wasn’t hunger. What I thought was an addiction to food, turned out to be an addiction to willpower and the more I used, the more I needed to use. I have been fully off willpower for about 15 years now. I can’t be exactly sure how long because when you come off it slowly because it’s a scary prospect, facing what your appetite has become. I cant say exactly when my eating instinct fully took over the control of my eating, but I would guess about 5 years ago. That means that it took about 20 years start to finish, which I hear you is a lot, but compared to the alternative of All that stress accumulating in my body and mind causing me untold physical and mental aggrevation, to now where I have none of this. When I am stressed about something we are meant to get stressed about, like making a good job of writing a script for this course, I think “at least I haven’t got to control my eating as well.” Getting instinctive control back over my eating, even though it has taken 20 years, I can honestly say it’s the one best thing I have ever done for my health. I have a normal appetite now, whereas if I had left trying to control my eating as a behaviour my appetite would be unimaginable and I would be suffering with all sorts of mental and physical ailments, I’m sure. At the time I started my switch I was suffering with depression, low self-worth, anxiety, digestive issues and I could not relax to save my life. I now know how other people feel about food – indifferent unless they are hungry. If you feel you are having to make a bit of any effort with your eating but aren’t in the pickle I was in then you have some instinct left protecting you from overeating. This course is meant to those who, like me were totally void of eating instinct and fully dependent on willpower, but those who need to use some willpower because some of their instinctive control has can also benefit from getting fully back to instinct and prevent losing even more. When you are indifferent (although it’s more like an aversion) to eating unless you are hungry, you can use your energy, attention and resources to deal with – and enjoy - life. The difference between the two states is unimaginable and one of the most poiniant aspects to it is the realisation that all those people who told you to just try a little harder were either making very little or no effort themselves. When you realise none of this is your fault you feel a huge weight lifted from your shoulders - reborn into the easy life of the instinctive eater where you can focus on the things willpower is meant for which is everything but eating. One funny thing to happen is my exercise also went instinctive, as I was no longer will powering myself to do it to “counter” my eating or because I thought I “should” for my health, exercise now no longer takes any effort because my body makes me want to do it.