Which Stage Are You? A Unique Approach to Navigating Food

You know that the five stages of grief apply to a loved one’s passing. But food? How do the five stages apply to being over fifty and smart eating?

Take a look:

• Food Denial – Pour me another margarita! Who has the chips? Food is not a problem. I merely overdo it here or there. I’ll eat well for a month and the pounds will melt off (but they don’t).
• Food Anger – My entire life I’ve eaten more food than I do now and it wasn’t a problem. But now I’m on less food and gaining. What the he@# is happening?!
• Food Bargaining – I’ll inhale this pan of brownies right this second, and start a healthy eating plan Monday morning.
• Food Depression/sadness – But I want to eat half the cheesecake. It seems like everyone else gets fun-food but me. I either get awesome food or I starve. 🙁
• Food Acceptance – Heavy sigh. We live in a food-gone-wild culture with a thousand temptations across every mile. If I want to live at a specific weight, there are clear-cut steps I need to take.

Which Stage Are You?

Denial.

You and I are past fifty and are years and years past denial when it comes to smart eating. So it’s unlikely that most of us harbor illusions that the thirty extra pounds will be a snap to lose.

We’re so not in denial.

Anger.

But anger, now this is an emotion we can get behind. In our 40s we finally lost the baby weight that hung on for years, and figured out an eating plan that — even if it didn’t help us lose — didn’t cause gain.

Then menopause hit, our weight inched upward, and our stomach went all kangaroo pouch.

As my friend Barbara would say, “WTF?!”

It sure seems like just as we became accustomed to our adult body in our 40s – not perfect, but good enough – somebody pulled the rug out from under us and told us to get used to the kangaroo-pouch expanding every year.

Yes. Definitely angry. Count us in.

Bargaining.

Everyone knows how the bargaining stage rolls.

We tell ourselves:

• I’m eating tons of great food on this vacation lol, but as soon as I get home it’s nothing but salads-no-dressing and smoothies for me!
• Or, I can eat the homemade ice cream this summer with the kids because I’ll walk for an hour every morning.
• And finally, I toss a lot of my favorite dark chocolate into the grocery cart. It’s okay because I’ll only take a nibble.

I lounged for decades in the bargaining stage.

Depression/Sadness.

We know we’re in the depression/sadness stage when we watch our family plowing through waffles on Sunday morning only to think, I’m so bummed to be over fifty and not able to eat like everyone else.

Or, if I didn’t overeat so much on the regular, I wouldn’t be in this predicament in the first place. (Wendy’s note: this is not necessarily true of the post-menopausal woman.)

And then – one day — we might see acceptance on the horizon.

Acceptance!

Acceptance — the misunderstood stage of grief — means that while we don’t like it we’ve made peace with the reality that if we want to be a size eight, ninety-five percent of the time we need to eat smart food in small portions.

Acceptance says that we will likely gain if we don’t make changes to our eating plan. What worked in our 40s, won’t work in our 50s.

Acceptance also says that smart eating at smart times of the day – as in, eating after seven o’clock in the evening is not a good idea for most of us – will deliver a downward trending scale.

Acceptance adds that no, it’s not fair that everyone else gets to have fun-food while we have to rewire our brains to navigate our food-is-everywhere world.

Bridging to Acceptance.

The thing about food and the grief stages is that you can absolutely be in two stages at once. Or more likely bounce back and forth between two stages.

One week you might feel like, I’ve made it!! I accept that I prefer a size-eight pant-size to unlimited eating. I feel great.

And then the next week you might bounce back to the bargaining stage thinking, Mexican food on Cinco de Mayo can’t be a bad thing, right? And just to be clear: special food on a holiday is always fine. It’s the portion size that matters when it comes to getting to – and remaining at — a size-eight.

The Mission Should You Accept It

When it comes to the best therapy ever I’m committed to the value of therapy-writing. Not just in thinking answers, but in actually writing the answers. (I use a One Note program, but many rave about Evernote.)

First, journal-write about the five stages and answer these questions:

• Which stage(s) do you live within? Feel free to give more than one. (Some move from one stage to another in the course of the same day.) As an example, let’s say you discover you’re in the bargaining stage.
• How has the bargaining stage helped you in life (there’s often a reward to behavior we’d rather ditch)? How is it hurting you?
• What would you need to do — or think — to leave bargaining and head towards acceptance?
• List three things you’d miss by leaving the bargaining stage.
• List three reasons about why the acceptance stage seems so hard.
• What will you have to accept or understand to live in the acceptance stage?
• How can you bring daily awareness to living with acceptance?
• Living in the acceptance stage will mean. . .

How to Talk to Yourself is Huge.

Mantra is a woo-woo word that I use to mean: repeat this new info. to yourself on the regular. You’re essentially rewiring how you think about food.

The acceptance mantras go like this:

• I’m over fifty and I get it: if I want to be a size-eight, I can’t eat like I’m thirty-eight.
• I can eat whatever I want whenever I want, but can’t also be a size-eight.
• Bakery treats versus size-eight jeans? I choose size-eight jeans. (I say this to myself all the time when my husband lays out his bakery buffet.)

Remember, acceptance is about making peace with reality. There’s a reality to being over fifty: for example, some of us (maybe me) could really use a hearing aide, sometimes we forget mid-sentence what we’re talking about, and we can’t eat like we did in our thirties and forties.

If smart eating and losing weight are a priority, a lighter weight can be yours but it means making a difficult daily choice: chocolate croissant with your morning coffee or size-eight jeans?

My new sign off I once heard a friend say (her part in quotes): It is not just your imagination, “health is hard.”

Please share in the comments below which stage you’re in and ideas you have to bridge to the acceptance stage. It’s so cool that we can build a community and learn from each other in the comments section. 🙂

Always remember, it’s not just you. Health is hard!

♥, Wendy