Gina has been dieting nearly all her life. When she was a little girl, she was shown love through food. Food was a reward and it was comfort. But by the time she reached the sixth grade, she was overweight, and began to diet. Thus began her struggle for the balance of love and thinness.

Gina suffers from compulsive overeating. She considers herself to be an emotional eater. She eats in response to stress. She has never been able to stop the roller coaster, and she believes herself to be a failure in everything because, regardless of her successes in life, they don't seem to count since she is not the woman she thinks she should be. After all, she is overweight.

What is diet addiction?

Addiction is hard to pin down and define because it can mean many things. Certainly we're not talking about the life-threatening kind of addiction suffered by a heroine addict. But perhaps what all addictions have in common is that they are preoccupations which interfere with our lives. In that sense, Gina is a diet addict. Let's look at Gina a little more closely.

Gina exhibits some traits, thoughts and behaviors that perhaps you can identify with:

What is causing Gina's diet addiction?

Gina suffers from some faulty beliefs about herself, her weight and dieting. Here are some of her beliefs, spoken in the first person.

How can Gina recover from diet addiction?

Gina needs to change her self-talk. Here are some new ideas and beliefs that she needs to meditate on.

What else does Gina need to do?

Gina exhibits typical traits of an addict's thinking. She thinks in "black and white," "either or," "good or bad." She could benefit from some focus on the world as a "shades of grey" kind of place. This requires diligent, daily work. She needs to understand that she has spent years reinforcing this "black-and-white thinking," so it will take some work to undo.

She might want to read a book about cognitive therapy. She can find one by conducting a web search, or checking her local bookstore. These books will help her identify her self-talk that often contains words such as "never," "can't," and "must." She will learn, for example, to replace her "musts" with "would really like to." Read our review of Three Minute Therapy.

She needs to apply her wealth of willpower and discipline in a new way. She needs to apply it to creating "contemplation time" for herself. Perhaps for the rest of her life, she'll need a fifteen minute to half hour session every day, in which she journals, meditates, prays, reads, or studies. Any of these activities will help her make the needed changes in her self-talk and thinking.

Most important, Gina needs to start to believe that she possesses nearly all the wisdom and judgment she needs to live her life the way she pictures it. But she'll need to do the work to pull all this wisdom out of herself. Once she begins to realize this, then she can benefit from the wisdom of a few chosen others as well, but it isn't necessary.

Can Gina really achieve her ideal weight?

Permanent weight loss will be the inevitable result of all this adaptive work. It might be through a diet, or it might happen without any diet focus at all. But Gina will be so busy being the person she was meant to be that she will hardly notice.

Where can diet addicts go for more information?

Click to join dietsurvivors

Gina needs to find her autonomy more than anything else. She needs to stop seeking answers in the diet world, and start seeking them within herself. She needs to find her own judgment and wisdom. Plenty of self-help books exist on this subject, and if she likes to read, they will help her.

In addition, Gina might be interested in subscribing to the free e-mail newsletter, Diet Survivors™ (View a sample without subscribing.) This newsletter is written for people who are sick and tired of their dieting lives. Its purpose is to help folks like Gina find their own wisdom, judgment, and autonomy about food and diets.

Subscribe to the Diet Survivors newsletter.

Gina might also like to buy the book How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever by Linda Moran. This book will help her with her thoughts and self-talk as they are directly related to her diet addiction. Learn more.

Stop the diet addiction, lose weight and find your happiness within yourself.

Order How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever today!

The author is a recovered dysfunctional eater and an enthusiast of cognitive therapy. Curl up to a book by someone who's been there! This warm, fun, engaging book could change your life. You will never think about food issues the same way again.

Tired of dieting?

How to Survive Your Diet and Conquer Your Food Issues Forever

  from
  Betterway
  Press

Click on the book cover
for more information

Or order from Amazon.com today

What about other diet problems?

To read more about how to solve diet problems, click on Solve your dieting problems. Diet problems are also addressed in How to Survive Your Diet and its companion newsletter, Diet Survivors™.

To learn more about normal eating, read what is normal eating?

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