Take Some Time With your Program

by Kathleen DesMaisons, PhD

The past few weeks have just knocked most of us flat with our programs. Even the most skilled found things like timing to be hard. Sometimes watching too much TV, sometimes the intensity of the feelings, and sometimes simple logistics added a new piece into the equation.

The week's article is one of my favorites. I am updating it some for today. I think it is comforting. Think about where you are in your process. Have you been rigorous, detailed and persistent? Have you dallied, played or poked with the steps? Are you being attentive to how you feel? Are you taking extra care? Have you kept up with your journal? As you go through this process, notice how you criticize or judge yourself. Do you ascribe "good" to rigor and "bad" to dabbling? Listen to your inner judge carefully and discover if she or he is an ally or a saboteur.

Work with the inner voices. They are crucial to your long-term success. This process may not work the way you might expect. Sometimes diligence is less useful than dalliance. For many, many years you have demanded that you be self-disciplined. You have pushed yourself and felt guilty when you couldn't do what you demanded of yourself. Perhaps there is a different way of doing this work. Perhaps we can change your relationship to your body and your way of making change.

When I first started doing my own plan, I thought that "getting" the program meant doing it fully, being diligent, following the instructions and not "poking around." I still held the belief that being disciplined and focused were the only ways to go. Now, I am not so sure that these are the criteria for succeeding with the program.

Now, I am convinced that something else is operating, something a little more subtle and unexpected. I believe that showing up and being in relationship to your body will help you more than being tough on yourself. Let me outline how I got to thinking this way.

I used to lead a ten-week guided imagery series called Finding Healing From Within. Each week, we would do a guided meditation. After the meditation, the participants would draw what they experienced and the group would share their feelings. Sometimes a group member would sleep through every single meditation and "make up" a drawing because they had no memory of anything in the meditation. This made me really uncomfortable. Was I failing these people? Were they failing the group? Were they in denial? How could they sleep through my wonderful imagery?

At the end of ten weeks, we reviewed the progress of everyone in the group. How had they changed? How did they feel? Surprisingly, time and time again, the "sleepers" would have as remarkable a change as the "doers." Not once, not twice, but every single time. Ten weeks of sleeping through and they would report a profound sense of inner healing. They didn't "work it." They slept through the meditations on a conscious level. But they were there. They showed up and they drew the pictures and they talked about their process.

This experience taught me something. The act of showing up creates change. It creates powerful change even if on the outside it may not seem so. Making a commitment to healing starts a process - a chain of events that is much deeper than we may think. When you say, "I will get better," when you begin to hold the idea of "Whatever it takes" something starts to shift.

Given this, I looked again at the effect dalliance and diligence might have on the 7 steps of healing sugar sensitivity. I started looking at my own process of doing the steps. What was happening when I was playing around? Could those times be like the sleeping times in my guided imagery class? Could change be happening in spite of what seemed to be inattention? I looked in my journal. I discovered something astounding. When I was there attending to the steps, listening to my body, writing in my journal, even if I wasn't doing it perfectly, change was happening. I was making progress even when I was being kinda sloppy.

Think of the sleepers. The sleepers were there in the room with the group. Every week. They woke up, colored with the group, and talked about sleeping. So when I showed up and kept the journal and wrote about sleeping through my food plan, I was still engaged with my body and working the steps. I was talking with myself about what was happening. I was not criticizing myself for food sleeping, I was simply watching. And I kept coming back to the journal. I kept coming back to my body and my healing.

The nature of the sugar sensitive person is to give up when things get difficult. Like the C57 mice, you crouch in the corner and think you can't stick to your plan. Your biochemistry supports learned helplessness. You feel inadequate, overwhelmed and unable to follow through the way you hoped. A thousand failed diets from the past reinforced these feelings. As soon as you "sleep", you say "Yah, see you did it again!" So you run away from the program, run away from yourself.

This time it will be different, because knowing your are sugar sensitive lets you finally, finally understand the nature of who you are. Knowing you are sugar sensitive lets you shift the perspective from worrying about a thousand "failed" diets to being open to a solution. Think of that. You are tenacious. You keep going, you search and continue. You may be impulsive and impatient, but you can be and are committed to finding a solution. This program helps you use your tenacity in a new way. Because you now finally understand why other diets haven't worked, you can start to make choices. You can change the voices that say, "I know this won't really work" into "hmmmm, let's sort this out." "Why am I bored?" "Why don't I like the journal?" "Why do I sabotage my efforts?" These questions become a part of our healing. They are not the old tapes of inadequacy. They may be the same questions, but they are asked from a different perspective.

Say to yourself, "I will do whatever it takes to heal this. I will give it time, money, energy, whatever it takes. Taking care of my food will be at the TOP of my list. Not after my job, or after my family or maybe when I get to it. But every day." You have made these affirmations a thousand times. But generally, you make them in your head. You "think" about your affirmations. But mostly you do not actually put the affirmations into practice. What would it mean, really mean to "do whatever it takes?"