Before Dieting - When chocolate was a solution
Listen to Melissa’s story.
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She has spent years trying every diet and approach out there. At 49, the mother of two teenagers, Melissa believed chocolate was her problem.
If she could just quit chocolate, she could lose weight and keep it off. And sure enough, when she cut it out, the weight would drop, for a while.
But every strict regime ended in a rebound, with old patterns returning and her hard-won progress lost.
Podcast Transcript
[00:00]
Hi and welcome to Before Dieting. This is the podcast where we use systems thinking to help women answer why they can't lose weight or keep it off.
I'm your host, Bronwyn Fletcher.
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[00:15]
In today's episode, you'll hear about Melissa and the insight she gained when we unpacked her long-term weight struggle using an iceberg model. Yes, I know it sounds a bit random, but icebergs are often used to illustrate different ideas. And in systems thinking, they help us clearly see and understand the hidden layers involved in gaining and losing weight.
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[00:38]
Because our brains like to conserve energy, they love to solve problems with quick, easy answers. So when you give it a problem like, how do I lose weight? The brain automatic response is going to be a diet. No deep thinking needed.
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[00:55]
So we need to have ways to help the brain move past these quick fixes and be able to dig into complex problems like weight regain. And for that, we can use these visual aids like an iceberg to make the problem easier to see and explore.
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[01:12]
Most people think the tip of the iceberg makes up 10% with the other 90% hidden out of sight below the waterline. Whether that's factually correct is yet to be seen, but it's very useful to us in how it relates to weight loss.
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[01:28]
Because if we start at the tip, that's the visible problem, the thing we want to get rid of, the actual weight itself. But sitting just below the waterline are the food choices and eating patterns that have resulted in that weight.
[01:41]
Then if we go deeper, we can actually find the eating systems, and these contain all the eating rules that control the food choices and eating patterns. And then if we get to the very base of the iceberg, we find root causes. These can be the mental models, the life experiences, all of the things that set the whole weight outcome in motion.
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[02:00]
So let's see how this applies to Melissa's story. But first, let me give you a bit of background about her. She's 49 and has two teenagers who keep her on her toes. She works in tech support, solving computer network issues. She tells me she's good at fixing things, but the one problem she hasn't been able to fix is her body weight.
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[02:23]
She tells me that she's been trying to lose this weight since the birth of her second child, who's now 17. When we talk about her dieting history, she names a lot of diets that you'd be familiar with.
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[02:34]
Her last dieting effort though, was about a year ago, and in a feat of iron will, she lost 10 kilos by living on 500 calories a day. But since then, she has regained those 10 kilos and added another two.
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[02:50]
Melissa really wants to lose weight, and she believes that it's chocolate that is stopping her.
So if we look at the tip of the iceberg, what she's focused on is losing those extra kilos, and she's got an obvious reason that she's got those kilos, and so if she's able to cut out chocolate, clearly the problem would be fixed.
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[03:08]
Sounds simple, but does it work? Well, we could say that if she did stop eating chocolate, she probably would reduce her calorie intake and probably lose some weight. The only problem is every time she's tried to go cold turkey with chocolate, she ends up eating even more than she does normally, and she regains any weight that was lost.
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[03:30]
So if we take Melissa's situation as we know it at the moment, and we look below the waterline, we look at those food choices and eating patterns, we know chocolate is a major contributor to her weight gain. We also know she reaches for chocolate in many situations, but most often when she's stressed.
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[03:46]
Now, some would call this emotional eating or comfort eating, but if we stop there, it wouldn't uncover the deeper reasons that are crucial to Melissa understanding why she's never been able to stop overeating chocolate.
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[04:00]
So we want to go deeper, and we get down to the root cause level by tracing the history of chocolate in her life. Because it's here that Melissa realizes that the way she eats chocolate today is identical to how she ate chocolate as a child.
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[04:15]
She grew up in a family where violence happened frequently. She remembers regularly stealing chocolate from a variety of places. And then hiding under the bed covers, she would eat her stolen comfort food to block out the violence that was happening to her mother.
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[04:32]
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that chocolate helped Melissa survive.
But the key point here is chocolate wasn't and isn't her problem. It is her solution.
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[04:45]
As a child, it was the only comfort in a home that was never safe. And now as an adult, that solution sits beneath the waterline, hardwired in to give relief in times of fear or overwhelm.
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[04:57]
It goes far beyond liking the taste of chocolate. What we're talking about here is self-preservation where chocolate equals safety. And like most of us, Melissa knows it's obvious that she needs to quit chocolate and eat less and move more.
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[05:12]
But if chocolate helped her survive family violence, then no amount of calorie cutting or shaming herself to lose weight is going to change that.
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[05:18]
The reality is Melissa's chocolate eating can always provide some temporary relief, but it has a side effect that she doesn't want, and that's the excess body weight.
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[05:26]
For her to lose weight and keep it off, before starting any diet, she needs to find alternate ways to feel safe, ways that last longer than the fleeting comfort that chocolate brings.
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[05:36]
So as part of this podcast and the Waiting for Happiness project, we always want to look at how can we make weight loss permanent? And if weight loss that's permanent is our goal, then we need to invert that iceberg. By turning it on its head and starting at the level of root cause, it leads to different actions than beginning another round of dieting.
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[05:55]
In essence, Melissa's struggle to lose weight is one that she shares with millions of women.
But the root cause of her weight is unique to her life.
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[06:05]
The real work of weight loss is not in counting calories or garnering more willpower, it's tracing the threads back to the origin of your eating system and understanding what it was built to fix. Once you understand that, then a solution can be found that is an exact match for the problem.
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[06:17]
When Melissa was trying to solve her weight problem at the tip of the iceberg, she thought she had a chocolate addiction. But going deep beneath that waterline, she discovered a complex system she'd built for survival.
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[06:27]
If you're ready to uncover the root cause of your weight, the Waiting for Happiness project has the roadmap and guidance to get you there. Head on over to our website to start your own discovery. It will change your life.
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[06:38]
Thanks for listening.
I'll talk with you next week.
Bronwyn