Poor Body Image Makes You Unhealthy

People who are happy with their weight experience fewer physically unhealthy or mentally healthy days, than those that want to lose weight.

Researchers at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health have concluded that there is a direct correlation between people’s weight loss goals and the number of days they report being unhealthy. They suggest this indicates that pressure to lose weight and low body-esteem is a bigger contributing to mental and physical well-being than body mass index.

Apparently if you’re overweight but don’t give a toss, your health is better than that of people that want to lose even a small amount of weight. For example, if you weigh 180lb (81.8kg) and want to lose 1% of this weight i.e. 1.8lb or 818grams, you will be marginally less healthily than those who are happy with their weight.

However, if you set your sights on losing 10% of your current weight (18lb or 8.2kg) then over a period of a month you’re likely to report almost one extra day of feeling unhealthy compared to your body satisfied counterparts. Over a year it amounts to nearly 11 extra ‘unhealthy’ days.

Ramp it up to a goal to lose 20% of your current weight and the figures jump to an extra 4.3 days per month of reported feelings of being physically or mentally unwell. Extrapolate this over a year and you’re talking about feeling unhealthy on a whopping 51.6 days.

This all points to the need to making changes from the inside out, and to get away from measuring your self-worth as a function of your weight.

Too often I see people going through the emotional roller coaster of battling with the scales. Periods of restraint and feeling pleased with themselves, followed by periods of overindulgence and dealing with the resulting guilt and disappointment. This research suggests that the route to good health comes from loving your body now, rather than making that self-love conditional upon attaining your desired jeans size or weight goal.

“Our data suggest that some of the obesity epidemic may be partially attributable to social constructs that surround ideal body types,” said Peter Muennig, MD, MPH, Mailman School of Public Health assistant professor of Health Policy and Management. “Younger persons, Whites, and women are disproportionately affected by negative body image concerns, and these groups unduly suffer from BMI-associated morbidity and mortality.”

Approximately 66% of the more than 150,000 U.S. adults studied wanted to lose weight, and about 26% were satisfied with their current weight. With respect to BMI, 41% of normal weight people, 20% of overweight people, and 5% of obese people were happy with their weight. Older persons were also more likely to feel positively about their weight than were younger persons. However, in all models, perceived difference was a stronger predictor than was BMI of mentally and physically unhealthy days.

Researchers now conclude that the additional stress that people experience from negative body image is affecting their health. Body image (measured as desired weight loss) was a stronger predictor of poor health than body mass index (BMI). Or, put in simple terms it’s not how much you weigh that matters, it’s how you feel about your weight that influences your physical and emotional health. Not surprisingly, this was found to be more predictive of health in women than men, and in Whites than among African-Americans or Hispanics.

The paper, I Think Therefore I Am: Perceived Ideal Weight as a Determinant of Health, will be published in the March issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

Why Diets Don't Work

Anyone who battles with periodic bingeing, emotional eating or overeating knows how difficult it is to lose weight and keep it off.

Diets often work well in the short-term, but the majority of people regain their lost weight within the next five years, and some end up weighing more than they did before they started. But why does this happen?

I think there are several reasons why people diets don’t work long-term including:

• underlying thinking errors
• unhelpful beliefs
• feelings of deprivation and restriction
• poor body esteem
• expecting instant results
• lack of motivation
• not finding new coping mechanisms to deal with stressful situations

If you want to hear the full list of issues that could be sabotaging your goals and get tips on creating a healthy relationship with food you can call in to my free teleseminar to find out Why Diets Don’t Work.

I’ll also be discussing the different types of overeating and I’ll be taking questions at the end of the call.

There’s no charge for the tele-training seminar, except for your usual long distance calling charges.

Updated: I'm running another seminar in February, so if you missed out on the last one you can sign up now.

Decreasing Food increases "Pleasure" Chemical

New research provides evidence that the brain's "reward" chemical, dopamine, is linked with obesity, and that restricting food can increase dopamine levels - known as a reward or pleasure chemical.

At this stage the brain-imaging study has only tested rats, but scientists are confident that the findings will also apply to people. The researchers found:

• Genetically obese rats had lower levels of dopamine D2 receptors than lean rats
• Restricting food intake can increase the number of D2 receptors, partially attenuating a normal decline associated with aging.

According to Brookhaven neuroscientist Panayotis (Peter) Thanos, lead author of the current study, published online in the journal Synapse on October 25, 2007

This research corroborates brain-imaging studies conducted at Brookhaven that found decreased levels of dopamine D2 receptors in obese people compared with normal-weight people.

Because food intake can have such a dramatic effect on dopamine receptor levels, this study also provides further evidence for the interplay of genetic factors with the environment in the development of obesity in our society.

What isn't yet clear, is whether the lower levels of dopamine are a cause of obesity, or occur as a result of overeating. Thanos hopes that further research will determine whether obesity is a result of biology or bad dietary choices. Thanos also raises the possibility that adjusting dopamine levels through medication or diet may aid weight loss efforts.

Emotional Eating Carnival October 2007

In this month's Emotional Eating Carnival we have some great submissions on the links between food and mood and how our beliefs can sabotage our eating habits!

Curtis Penner presents How I Used Food To Beat Depression saying, "Sitting in the waiting room of my family doctor - waiting for a routine check-up, a poster on the wall scared me half to death." Curtis found out he had depression and didn't want to take antidepressants so he decided to eat more healthily and exercise.

FitBuff presents What Do Chocolate Cravings Say About You? saying, "Do you find yourself craving certain foods during times of anger or depression, particularly chocolate? Scientists in
this study think they know why..." Of course everyone has their theories on chocolate craving - the most obvious being that it tastes good! Yesterday we posted a different theory on chocolate cravings. The bottom line is that at this stage we have some good leads but not the full story on chocolate cravings.

Isabella Mori presents addiction, shame and secrets which includes a therapists thoughts on the shame that often accompanies emotional eating.

Becky Gillaspy presents Common Thought Traps which explains typical thinking errors or cognitive distortions that can interfere with weight loss. Becky also asks Do Weekends Mean Overeating? and suggests you explore your thinking patterns and beliefs around weekend eating. Finally she addresses the age-old question Is Food Addictive? One theory suggests that dopamine may play a role in food craving and possibly lead to addiction.

Marie Drennan presents Bad Buddhist vs. The Sixth Precept posted at Diary of a Bad Buddhist, where she discusses her efforts to eat better using Buddhist concepts and mindfulness.

Sara Grace presents Wellness Tip #191: Recognize Patterns. This is a quick list of tips for recognising emotional eating - possibly a little too brief!

S Palmer presents Overweight? Go on a mental diet

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of carnival of emotional eating using our carnival submission form.

Why you want that chocolate

Have you ever wondered why some people like chocolate, and others can take it or leave it? According to a new study chocolate lovers have a different metabolic profile.

Scientists working on a project funded by chocolate giant, Nestlé, think they have discovered chemical reactions in people’s bodies that correlate to a strong desire for chocolate. Nestlé scientists developed a new methodology called nutrimetabonomics to make associations between individual metabolic phenotypes and nutritional preferences.

Researchers discovered that people who like chocolate, have lower levels of the ‘bad’ cholesterol LDL, higher levels of a beneficial protein, albumin, and also have different activities of the gut microbes involved in digestion. This occurs, even when they are not consuming chocolate suggesting a strong link between our metabolic profile and the foods we desire.

"Our study shows that food preferences, including chocolate, might be programmed or imprinted into our metabolic system in such a way that the body becomes attuned to a particular diet," says Sunil Kochhar of the Nestlé Research Centre.

"We know that some people can eat a diet that is high in steak and carbs and generally remain healthy, while the same food in others is unhealthy," he explains.

The study was conducted on men, as the researchers were concerned that metabolic changes during women’s menstrual cycle may influence the results. I guess they had visions of PMS women suddenly discovering a hankering for chocolate!

Healthy Restaurants Trigger Overeating

Think that you're eating healthily? Think again.

The "health halos" of healthy restaurants often prompt consumers to treat themselves to higher-calorie side dishes, drinks or desserts than when they eat at fast-food restaurants that make no health claims, according to a series of new Cornell studies.

The research, published in the October online version of the Journal of Consumer Research, found that many people also tend to underestimate by 35 percent just how many calories those so-called healthy restaurant foods contain.

The example that the authors give is the Subway restaurant, where the advertised subs are healthy, but exclude the mayonnaise and other calorie-laden extras that most people add to their order. I remember hearing something similar once on an Oprah show where a heart disease prevention expert commented that many women order salads thinking they're healthy and then end up with a higher fat content and calorie count by the time they've ladled their full-fat dressing over the lettuce leaves.

"We found that when people go to restaurants claiming to be healthy, such as Subway, they choose additional side items containing up to 131 percent more calories than when they go to restaurants like McDonald's, that don't make this claim,"

says Brian Wansink, author of Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think and the John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab.

Wansink and co-author Pierre Chandon, a marketing professor at INSEAD, an international business school in France, also report that by simply asking people to reconsider restaurants' health claims prompts them to better estimate calories and not to order as many side dishes.

"In estimating a 1,000 calorie meal, I've found that people on average underestimate by 159 calories if the meal was bought at Subway than at McDonald's," says Wansink. Since it takes an energy imbalance of 3,500 calories to put on one pound, that extra 159 calories could lead to almost a 5-pound weight gain over a year for people eating at Subway twice a week compared with choosing a comparable meal at McDonald's with the same frequency, he says.

These studies, he says, help explain why lower-calorie menus at fast-food restaurants have not led to the expected reduction in total calorie intake and in obesity rates.

Urge Surfing to beat addictions and cravings

A technique known as "urge surfing" which harnesses mindfulness can be helpful for people who are experiencing cravings. Originally developed as a tool to help people struggling to battle alcohol and drug addiction, urge surfing is now being used to help people with overeating, gambling, compulsive shopping, smoking and other compulsive urges.


The idea behind urge surfing is that cravings come in cycles, like waves. They grow in intensity, before crashing and losing their power. By delaying gratification, and taking time to identify your thoughts, feelings and physical sensations at the time, coupled with learning to sit comfortably with your urges you can learn to let them go, and not act on them.

I often find that people confuse urge surfing with simply sitting on their hands and waiting for the cravings to pass. While delaying action can help some people, urge surfing is a more proactive approach that involves listening to your mind, heart and body. For example, where do you notice the craving on a physical level? Are you feeling tension in your shoulders or a gnawing feeling in your stomach? How does your mouth feel? What thoughts are you experiencing? Notice those thoughts and observe them calmly. Keep breathing calmly and steadily and let the thoughts pass through your mind like a video or audio reel.

Instead of battling the urge (or wave) ride it out and wait for it to crash and for cravings to disappear. When you give in to the urge, and give yourself the "fix" you crave, it only increases future cravings. By learning to ride the wave and let it go, over time you will notice cravings are less frequent.

This is a technique that takes time and patience, but if you're prepared to invest the time, it can pay big dividends. The catch is that most people find that the urge to smoke, drink, eat or gamble is so strong, that they forget that this tool is available to them. One good way to get in the habit of using mindfulness to combat cravings is to practise meditation or mindfulness daily, even if only for 30 seconds.

Any time I mention meditation or mindfulness in my workshops, the majority of the students get a glazed look in their eyes, and start fidgeting and complaining that they can't sit still for that long, let alone keep their thoughts focused on candles, mantras or clearing obsessive thoughts. My solution is to start with small achievable goals.

Most practitioners recommend spending 20 minutes a day in meditation. However, for the purposes of beating cravings 30 seconds may be all you need to stop your thought process and reorient your thinking into a more healthy pursuit. Urge surfing can also be adapted to help people with panic attacks or any form of obsessive thoughts. When you have compulsions or cravings, you need a way to interrupt your thoughts before you take action. Mindfulness, or urge surfing, can achieve exactly that.

Recommended Books
Stress Management, Mindfulness and Relaxation

Can you be addicted to food or eating?

Today's Washington Post raises some interesting questions on the issue of eating. There has long been argument over the question of compulsive eating. Is the compulsion to overeat a bad habit, an addiction, emotional or comfort eating, or a response to biological factors such as hormones?

At Brookhaven National Laboratory, psychiatrist Nora D. Volkow and her colleagues map receptors on brain cells for dopamine. This powerful neurotransmitter plays a key role in addiction. Dopamine systems in the brain are disrupted by addictive drugs, from alcohol to methamphetamine, which hijack the control of volition and the brain's quest for rewards.

It turns out that food also affects the brain's dopamine systems. When Volkow, who is also director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and her colleagues compared brain images of methamphetamine users with obese people, they found both groups had significantly fewer dopamine receptors than healthy people. Even more interesting: The higher the body mass index, the fewer the dopamine receptors -- a finding that may open the door to a better understanding of why it is so difficult for some people to lose weight and keep it off.

What role dopamine may play in obesity -- and how eating affects it -- is still to be determined. No one knows when the obese people in the study lost their dopamine receptors in the brain or if that loss could be reversed with weight loss. Are some people more susceptible to the effects of eating sugary, high-fat fare because they start out with lower levels of dopamine receptors in the brain? Or could eating those foods decrease dopamine receptors?

The article also refers to the challenges that individuals who feel "addicted" to food face compared with other addictions, such as smoking, drugs and alcohol, which can be eliminated from the diet. Abstinence from addictive substances is a philosophy espoused by Overeaters' Anonymous, which recommends eliminating all sugar and white flour from the diet, to reduce food cravings. In my discussions with people who have been abstinent from sugar and white flour, most have found that this successfully curbs their food cravings, with the proviso, that a life without sugar and flour isn't always practical or desirable.

Emotional Eating Carnival September 2007

Welcome to this edition of the Emotional Eating Carnival.

JoLynn Braley presents Overeating - Is It Emotional or Physical? posted at The Fit Shack, saying, "I've experienced a great reduction in the desire to eat over emotions when I've eliminated processed, sugared, foods from my diet. This leads to the question of whether emotional eating is purely emotional, or fueled by physical cravings (food addiction)."

The Career Counselor presents A Weighty Question posted at ask the CareerCounselor, which discusses how people perceive overweight job applicants.

Karen Halls presents Weight Loss Without Cravings And No Diet posted at Addiction Recovery Blog, saying, "This article discusses something most people never heard of - Emotional Freedom Techniques."

The post doesn't tell you how to use EFT for weight loss or emotional eating. If you're looking for information on EFT for comfort or stress eating, I recommend Paul McKenna's book I Can Make You Thin. McKenna uses EFT together with self-hypnosis, visualisation and neurolinguistic programming (NLP). The book comes with a CD and instructions to practise the EFT technique at home.

Chad Sutton presents How to keep a food diary posted at TalkPsych. Sadly the article doesn't provide detailed information on keeping a food diary but it does give you some helpful ideas about keeping a note of your mood at the time of eating.

What's the difference between overeating and bingeing?

Most of us have experienced that feeling of uncomfortable fullness that comes after overindulging. For many of us it is an annual ritual at Christmas, Thanksgiving or other special occasions, but some people overeat on a daily or weekly basis, and for a small number of people this behaviour is such a frequent occurrence that it can become an eating disorder. Occasional overeating does no harm, but frequent overeating and bingeing can be a physical and emotional health risk. So, where do you draw the line?

While some people know that they are bingers, others aren’t sure whether they are simply overeating or stepping across the line into bingeing. I’m often asked to define a binge in terms of the quantity or calories consumed, but it isn’t that simple. Bingeing is a subjective experience, and relies on the individual’s own descriptions of their experiences and feelings.

According to the DSM-IV, a diagnostic manual for assessing mental health disorders, the criteria for bingeing is eating a large amount of food in a short period of time (about two hours), and feeling unable to control your eating or feeling that once you start eating, you are unable to stop.

Simply overeating is not enough to qualify for a binge. I’ve talked to dieting teens on very strict diets who are worried that a muesli bar and an apple constitute a binge, because they’ve broken their diet. However, eating more than you plan isn’t necessarily a binge. The exact amount will depend from person to person. This means that for one person a binge may be eating an entire packet of chocolate macaroons, but for another it could be a jumbo pizza, and a tub of ice cream with a beer chaser.

Other indications of bingeing are three or more of the following:

1. Eating faster than normal
2. Eating until feeling uncomfortably full
3. Eating large amounts of food when you are not physically hungry
4. Eating alone or hiding eating to avoid embarrassment
5. Feeling ashamed, disgusted, depressed, distressed or guilty about overeating.

You may have a binge eating disorder if you binge frequently – an average of two or more days per week for a period of six months. According to Carolyn Costin in The Eating Disorder Sourcebook binges which form part of an eating disorder can last not just for a few hours but for several days.

Although the research is scarce, it suggests that approximately 20-33% of people who present for treatment of obesity meet the criteria for binge eating disorder.

The key to assessing whether your eating is a binge, is to notice whether you ate past the point of fullness, and felt powerless to stop yourself from eating. The out of control feeling, or compulsion to eat, followed by feelings of shame or distress, is what separates a special occasion overindulgence from a serious problem that requires attention.

Additional resources:
The Eating Disorder Sourcebook by Carolyn Costin
100 Q&A about Eating Disorders by Carolyn Costin
Breaking Free from Emotional Eating by Geneen Roth
Something Fishy Eating Disorders Website

Your Friends are Making You Fat (or Thin)

Researchers have discovered that your social network has a significant impact on your weight. In short if your friends gain or lose weight, you are highly likely to do the same. This is especially true if they are same sex friends, and applies to friends that live in other countries, or friends of friends that are part of your larger circle of acquaintances.

You might imagine that birds of a feather flock together, and that finding networks of obese friends is a matter of self-selection i.e. people choosing to befriend others of similar size. However the latest research shows that there is a direct causal link between changes in your weight and that of your friends.

Appearing in the July 26 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a study coauthored by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School and James Fowler of UC San Diego suggests that obesity is "socially contagious," spreading from person to person in a social network.

The study -- the first to examine this phenomenon -- finds that if one person becomes obese, those closely connected to them have a greater chance of becoming obese themselves. Surprisingly, the greatest effect is seen not among people sharing the same genes or the same household but among friends.

If a person you consider a friend becomes obese, the researchers found, your own chances of becoming obese go up 57 percent. Among mutual friends, the effect is even stronger, with chances increasing 171 percent.

Christakis and Fowler also looked at the influence of siblings, spouses and neighbors. Among siblings, if one becomes obese, the likelihood for the other to become obese increases 40 percent; among spouses, 37 percent. There was no effect among neighbors, unless they were also friends.


The researchers analyzed data over a period of 32 years for 12,067 adults, who underwent repeated medical assessments as part of the Framingham Heart Study. They were able to map a densely interconnected social network of the study's subjects by using the tracking sheets (which had previously been archived in a basement) that recorded not only the subjects' family members but also unrelated friends who could be expected to find them in a few years.

The network map took two years to assemble and includes information on the participants' body-mass index. Among the first things the researchers noticed was that, consistent with other studies finding an obesity epidemic in the U.S., the whole network grew heavier over time.

Also immediately apparent were distinct clusters of thin and heavy individuals. Statistical analysis revealed that this clustering could not be attributed solely to the selective formation of ties among people of comparable weights.

"It's not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with," said Christakis, a physician and a professor in Harvard Medical School's department of health care policy. "Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship."

Further analysis also suggested that people's influence on each other's obesity status could not be put down just to similarities in lifestyle and environment, to, for example, people eating the same foods together or engaging in the same physical activities. Not only do siblings and spouses have less influence than friends, but also geography doesn't play a role. The striking impact of friends seems to be independent of whether or not the friends live in the same region.

"When we looked at the effect of distance, we found that your friend who's 500 miles away has just as much impact on your obesity as [one] next door," said Fowler, an associate professor of political science at UC San Diego and an expert in social networks.

In part because the study also identifies a larger effect among people of the same sex, the researchers believe that people affect not only each other's behaviors but also, more subtly, norms.

"What appears to be happening is that a person becoming obese most likely causes a change of norms about what counts as an appropriate body size. People come to think that it is okay to be bigger since those around them are bigger, and this sensibility spreads," said Christakis.

"This is about people's ideas about their bodies and their health," Fowler said. "Consciously or unconsciously, people look to others when they are deciding how much to eat, how much to exercise and how much weight is too much."

"Social effects, I think, are much stronger than people before realized. There's been an intensive effort to find genes that are responsible for obesity and physical processes that are responsible for obesity and what our paper suggests is that you really should spend time looking at the social side of life as well," said Fowler.

This has intriguing implications for weight loss support groups such as Weight Watchers, and for online support forums. What happens if you befriend people in your support group, either online or in real life, who fail to lose weight? Could this undermine your own weight loss efforts?

Check out the study for an animated graphic showing the effects of social networks on obesity and other background information and graphs.

Comfort eating really does make people happier

As anyone who has dived into a chocolate cake or pizza in moments of stress will tell you, emotional eating is comforting and can cheer people up. Now researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia have confirmed that comfort eating:

• makes rats happier (Yeah, I know, you'd think they'd have had plenty of human volunteers for an experiment of this sort. There surely can't be any shortage of people who are prepared to munch on high fat chippies and pies in the name of science!)
• affects brain chemicals in rats and other animals, and is therefore a biologically driven process not a psychological one
  

The scientists believe these findings also apply to humans. According to the researchers ‘comfort eating’ is not a socially contrived phenomenon – but rather one based in biology.

This must be a relief for people who find themselves feeling out of control when faced with temptation at times of stress. Unfortunately, it can also be a good excuse to indulge! Evidence to date is that comfort or emotional eating is a combination of biology, learned behaviour, cognitions (what you tell yourself about the situation) and coping skills.

Professor of Pharmacology, Margaret Morris, says she was surprised by findings linking a high-fat diet and pleasure in animals that had experienced stress early in life.

“What this might be telling us is that there is something going on in the brain circuits that regulate feeding if you are stressed while very young - but if you are given nice things to eat, you are more able to experience pleasure,” said Professor Morris, from the School of Medical Sciences.

“You choose that behaviour because it makes you feel good,” she said.

Professor Morris’s other findings are that:

• Brain chemicals that regulate feeding can be changed early on in life
• Animals over-fed while young are usually heavier as adults, with poorer cardiovascular outcomes

“While we know there are strong genetic and environmental components in obesity, there is also a strong nexus between hormones produced in your fat and what happens to your brain appetite circuits, your hunger and your drive for food,” she said.

Through the eyes of an emotional eater

Today, I thought I would do something a little bit different. I'm working with a client at the moment who has life-long problems with eating disorders including binge eating, emotional or comfort eating and compulsive eating. With her permission, I'm going to be sharing some of Jennifer's story and the process we're going through to help her gain some control over her eating.

Jennifer has tried just about everything. She's been to Overeaters' Anonymous, Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers and counsellors to try and help her beat her food cravings. She has even tried fasting for long periods to attempt to break the hold food has over her.

While she has experienced periods of control, she is dissatisfied at the feelings of deprivation that she experiences when she goes to Overeaters' Anonymous, which encourages abstinence from trigger foods. For Jennifer this would mean a life without the whites - white sugar, white flour and salt. For her, this is a life without pleasure.

In our first session we talked about her perceptions about herself. My goal in this first session was to help Jennifer understand what she tells herself about her role in life. For most of us our identity is wrapped up in the 'labels' we give ourselves. These labels can be anything from the job we do, to our relationships with others, our goals, our passions, our strengths or our weaknesses.

Dr Phil in his book Self Matters: Creating Your Life from the Inside Out, which is a pretty good book if you can get past his corny way of talking, describes labels as:

Labels are incredibly powerful influences in your life. You may not be consciously aware of even a fraction of your labels, whether they come from the outside world or from within yourself. Either way, you must acknowledge the existence of labels, challenge the "fit," and confront the impact these labels have on your concept of self.

Are you a career woman, a mom, an accountant, a politician? Are you a failure or a winner? Are you a "fat girl" or a "pretty girl?" Write down all the labels you attach to yourself, going back as far as you can remember.

With Jennifer, it soon became clear that her identity is wrapped up in her opinion of herself as a wife and mother. Any time that she perceives problems in this area, she reaches for food. For Jennifer the state of her house is a barometer of her internal health. She judges herself by the cleanliness, order and tidiness of her home. When her house is spic and span she feels confident and in control of her life. When dirty dishes accumulate on the bench and washing piles up in the bath she feels like a failure as a wife, a mother and a person.

The result? She eats. She decides that she is a bad mother and a bad wife and wallows in chippies, chocolate, pasta, pizza and greasy foods.

If my house is a mess and I can’t keep up with the housework or I can’t get motivated to get it done I feel like I’m not coping in life.

If my house is tidy I feel like I’m coping.

For me cleaning my bench is a big deal. Some days I look at it and I have no idea where to start. Yet my daughter can come along and in less than five minutes she sorts everything out, wipes down the bench and it’s done.

I don’t know why I can’t be like that. So then I start telling myself that I’m lazy, or that I just didn’t get taught right by my mother. She did everything for me as a kid, and I find it hard to do all this stuff. I don’t enjoy it so I put it off.

I start feeling dumb and inadequate and then I need food to make me feel better.

Even when I do clean the bench I feel like I should treat myself because it’s such an effort. I feel exhausted, so I sit down with a big plate of unhealthy food or a packet of biscuits and scoff the lot.

That’s only part of the story. Jennifer has very distorted ideas about her role as a perfect parent. Logically she knows that cleaning the kitchen can be done in a few minutes, but it is such a big psychological mountain for her to climb, that she feels as if it is taking away hours that should be spent with her children. And once again she feels the need to reward herself with food.

By the time I’ve forced myself to do the cleaning, and got my head around working out what needs to be done the whole job seems to take an eternity. And then I might put off doing things with the kids. I have plans to teach them things or do crafts with them or take them for a walk and instead I eat. Then I call myself a bad parent again.

Jennifer's homework is to examine her distorted perceptions.

We started at the beginning, by challenging her assumption that an overindulgent parent who did everything for her has created a lazy monster who is incapable of doing housework. Jennifer is still having trouble convincing herself that her upbringing is irrelevant. She is very attached to her family and is having trouble separating today's Jennifer from the Jennifer of her childhood. She accepts logically that she's not the same woman, and that the way she is now is a combination of nature and nurture and that she can change her habits, but emotionally she's still letting go.

She's also promised as part of her homework to not immediately dismiss positive feedback. When her husband and friends tell her she is a good wife, a good parent and a good person, she's too quick to find fault with herself. She admits that she tests people and keeps rejecting their encouragement because she doesn't believe it herself.

Finally, she's working on understanding that the state of her house is not a reflection on her as a person. We know this is going to take some time but Jennifer feels that knowing that people "get" her and understand where she is coming from will help.

Can limiting flavours stop overeating?

The premise of The Flavour Point Diet: Use Great Flavours to Control Your Appetite and Reduce your Weight – Permanently is that you can tame your appetite and quell cravings by selecting foods according to their taste or flavour.

The authors, husband and wife team, David and Catherine Katz describe the six taste categories as sweet, sour, savoury (umami), salty, bitter and astringent and devise their diets around these. In particular, they note that sweet and salty foods are most likely to stimulate the appetite. Also, according to the authors, calorie for calorie, protein is the most filling, and is therefore the best source of food.

Their formula? A balanced diet comprising:

• 55% complex carbohydrates
• 20% lean protein
• 25% healthy fats

With each day devoted to a particular flavour.

By using these flavours, you will feel satisfied sooner, and eat less. The authors speculate that fast food manufacturers add hidden flavours into their foods to stimulate overeating. Instead, they believe you need to minimise the flavours each day to reduce your appetite.

The book includes a six week eating plan and recipes, with each day focused around a flavour, such as tomato, capsicum, dill, orange and onion days. Naturally, I jumped ahead to the chocolate day, which is described as a ‘special indulgence day’. Any time after week two of the pla