Five ways written exercises are essential to healing your overeating
Journaling, rewriting the story I was telling myself about my life, and guided pencil-and-paper exercises were an integral part of my experience of overcoming my binge eating, overeating and bulimia in my teens.
Writing is a powerful self-development tool… and you don’t even need to make sense or write in sentences. Here’s why.
1. Anything that’s not written down is just a wish.
So often, when we’re trying to solve our overeating, we make little promises to ourselves (‘I’ll be good tomorrow’) that then we break, plans in our heads (‘I’ll have a salad for lunch’) that we get sidetracked from (the lasagna just looked good), and we tell ourselves strict things (‘From now on, I’m just not having any more lattes’).
But these are just sentences in our minds, and it’s so easy to tell ourselves that they didn’t count when the urges in the moment arise. Nothing was in writing, nothing was ‘official’, nobody heard you say you were gonna do it but the walls of your own skull. So all these rules, goals and intentions set us up for failure. Here’s the process:
- We have weak, strict-sounding, bossy yet unspoken intentions for ourselves, which we don’t follow through on.
- Then we give ourselves a hard time.
- The worse we feel, the more likely we are to seek solace in food.
- We feel remorse, shame, self-hate. We try to punish ourselves into being really really strong in our intentions the next time we set them…
That’s the binge/restrict cycle right there — often without even having officially embarked on any diet at all. All just circling inside our own heads.
We need to stop wishing things were different, and get curious. Through structured, written exercises, we can find out why things are as they are. And use our creativity to imagine something happier.
2. Our intellect is usually the way we have solved problems at work or in education. Written food psychology exercises and journaling give our diligent side a more useful job than just throat-punching our spirit with punishing food regimes.
Some people do try to solve their overeating with a lot of writing things down, which is not the same as the kind of writing I’m talking about. I’m talking about writing in a journal, or doing guided food psychology exercises. The kind of writing I’m NOT talking about is all the jotting and note-taking of self-monitoring and self-accountability— charting calories and daily steps, keeping food diaries, writing goals on sticky notes.
All that has its place, and there’s an evidence-base that proves writing down goals improves our ability to stick to things. But I’m not suggesting you write down a bunch of goals, because if you’re suffering with guilt right now, it’s not the best use of your intellect.
Goals are scarily similar to rules: they don’t allow us to get curious.
All those numbers and objectives just daunt you and make you feel like YOU don’t measure up.
Whatever you believe, you are not an overeater simply because you can’t stick to things. So collecting data on your failures might not lead you to a solution. You’re overeating because you’re having thoughts that fuel your overeating.
In fact, I wouldn’t recommend you let your intellect try to ‘manage’ your eating in such an emotionless intellectual way any more. Your brain shouldn’t be the boss of your body and the boss of your life. As Lisa and Franco Esile depict so beautifully in their book Whose Mind Is It Anyway, you want your brain, your heart, your wisdom all working together.
Limiting your eating to meet a calorie-target, counting points, or trying to eyeball the ratios of your high-fat, low-carb Keto plan, can help you strategise short-term success. But it doesn’t allow you to really get to grips with your psychology. It doesn’t solve who you have become as an eater after a lifetime of food struggle and feeling miserable about it.
You never listen to your own desires that way — never let the thoughts that enable you to overeat to surface; never even see the harsh judgment that you lash yourself with and are so accustomed to; never even tune into your body wisdom and rediscover your natural ability to sense hunger and fullness.
But I know you’re smart, and your brain is bright. Your intellect is keen, and it wants to work. It’ll pace around like a traffic warden looking for something to slap a ticket onto if we don’t give it a job.
So give it some food psychology exercises to get to work on.
3. When we think thoughts, we don’t notice them. But when we write them down, we see them, in plain sight.
And if you want to change your eating, you have got to change your thinking.
When I was overcoming binge eating, I’d spend hours with my journal, answering questions about what enthusiasm meant to me, what I believed about my body, understanding the part of me that wanted to compete and become superior to others through shaping a supermodel body for myself, and the part of me that was abject and thought I was unworthy of love and not good enough as I was.
When I explore what’s in my mind through writing, in a non-judgmental way, I find a load of stuff that runs through my head, beneath the radar of my awareness, and ordinarily I don’t even want to admit I think it.
It’s like Netflix declutterer Mari Kondo. First thing she does is make her client take all their clothes, and put them in a pile where they can see it all at once. Then they sort through, and decide what they keep, and what to sling.
The results of that kind of writing are juicy, brimming with insight and self-awareness and embodied aliveness.
If you need a pep talk to stop reading articles on the internet and start actually putting your pencil onto a worksheet, here’s one from me:
4. Writing new thoughts down helps us practise them, so they spring up when we need them.
When I wrote, I also discovered, amongst other things, that in general I wasn’t being very assertive about my feelings. I saw that I harboured resentment about the way my upbringing had left me with shame and feeling criticised over my appearance. I also put my binge eating into words on the page — and it didn’t look so awful when I wrote that I was already changing.
These were sentences that found their way to the tip of my tongue when I needed to get things off my chest with my mum, explain to my friends what had changed for me, or tell my story to the world now in a bid to un-shame and de-stigmatise overeating.
That’s the stuff I needed, to change my identity as an eater, and to let go of all the things driving me to overeat.
Writing it down was like learning lines for a performance, without knowing when I’d be called upon to speak it out loud.
When I think about it, writing things down over and over was how I revised for exams too. Repetition, as well as seeing how concepts link together, is part of the process of transferring learning from your short-term to your long-term memory.
And that’s what you want to do with new beliefs. You want to:
- invent a new sentence to think (a thought is just a sentence)…
- that’s going to provoke a better feeling…
- and spark you to take new action…
- Then you want to repeat the hell out of it until it’s absorbed into your unconscious mind, it becomes your mental habit to think it.
That’s the fundaments of Think, Feel, Do cycle from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, in a nutshell. But without practising your new thought, by writing it down repeatedly or any other method (self-hypnosis, speaking it out loud or whatever), the new thoughts never really take hold and replace the old.
5. We don’t ask ourselves the right questions, but guided worksheets and exercises do.
Warning: what you don’t want to do, is to sit down with a journal, stare at a blank page, and wonder if it’s time for a snack.
Or worse, fill your journal with free-flowing, self-pitying thoughts that only reinforce your negative headspace and sense of being a victim of your perceived weakness around food. That won’t move you forwards.
You can journal yourself, but if you’re trying to overcome overeating or binge eating, I recommend that you go through a guided series of exercises that pose you pertinent questions.
(You can try one such worksheet exercise, which I talk you through with a video, on my free ‘Discover, Recover’ at lauralloyd.co/gift. )
