WIN Wyoming

Thought Bullets
for
April 1999

Thought bullets for this month come from the book by entitled When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies by Jane Hirschmann and Carol Munter.

• Could the cure for compulsive eating be eating?  The theory is this: compulsive and binge eating often result from denial of food for long periods of time and then consumption of large quantities of food in a very short time period. It is time to return to the internal body cues of hunger and satiety. Every time you feel hungry, eat something, and stop when you are satisfied and no longer hungry.

• Nutritional advice over more than three decades seems to often leave us more confused than enlightened. Think of the different advice given for sugar, sodium, caffeine, eggs, cholesterol, and fat and sugar substitutes.

• The chains that bind us to negative self-thoughts about body image are not easily broken. Some of us have perfected "body bashing" through years and even decades of practice. Breaking the chains takes practice.

• Something to ponder: if during your life time, women never talked about diets, fat, and faults of their bodies......what conversations would have taken place?

• The beauty myth—people's right to judge someone else's beauty, while remaining unjudged themselves.

• Every single body has its own unique size and shape. Give up the societal pressures that stamp out individual differences and attempt to squeeze everyone into a single mold. Before you rule out embracing your current body's size and shape (I don't want to spend my whole life this big!) consider this: how much of your current "body-bashing" results in over-eating?

Source:  Hirschmann JR, Munter CH.  When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies: Freeing Yourself from Food and Weight Obsession.  Fawcett Books; 1997.

Compiled by Betty Holmes, MS, RD

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