There are barrack-room lawyers a-plenty among us, who always have the answer to everything from a position of knowing very little about it. Some psychologists once did some interesting research on the best way to lose weight. They discovered that it had little to do with food and much more to do with one's mindset. If you cultivated the habit of thinking differently, of doing different things from those you habitually did before, it produced weight loss! Hey presto! Or 'expecto Patronum!' ' as Harry Potter would say.
Actually, it is possible to be depressed and just live with it for a while. Self-acceptance will work miracles with all kinds of mental disorders. (I am not deriding useful treatments of which there are many. But they usually start with some sort of simple attempt at self-acceptance. 'I am a person who seems to have mood swings.') And moods do change. Similarly, it is possible to go into a pub and order any manner of things - and the only alternatives are not booze or soda water! There are enough varieties for you to drink something different every day. But choose something that satisfies your particular taste - do not settle for the soda water you hate as a kind of self-punishment. And as for running, I thought of running as an example because it can be extremely addictive, and is often a substitute for the addiction you are trying to recover from. In other words, addiction is far more widespread than we imagine among human behaviours, and they don't all look anti-social at first glance. Does it matter? No, in my opinion, though I think it helps if you are aware. Awareness will lead you to consider whether you are overdoing, for example, and whether it really is a matter of life and death that you did not get in your run today.
Food is like that. Sometimes just eating differently will make a difference. It is death to the process of recovery from an eating disorder if you insist on drawing up rules of engagement of the 'no sugar', 'no fast eating', 'must use smaller plate' variety. First of all, these rules of engagement pit you against yourself, as though you were your own adversary. You are not. The way to make change happen is to work alongside yourself, as a friend with a kindly concern would. All the above are rules, not boundaries, and a rule of human nature is that all rules will be broken at some point - including this one. Boundaries, on the other hand, express our human understanding (so far) of our limitations. They involve us in cultivating good spiritual values like humility and self-acceptance. "I can only work for about six hours on the trot, I find, and then I have to have a break." That is to say, I would love to be Superwoman, but probably not today! This way, you get six good hours of work out of yourself, and the fact that it is not twelve is neither here nor there. Do what you can, not what you can't. Good boundaries will help with food and eating and weight issues. 'I seem to love my breakfast too much to give it up, but I perhaps don't need to eat so much at dinner time.' This type of thinking is an acknowledgement that your self is neither good nor bad, just accustomed to certain ways of living, some of which can change. Challenge it to a duel, though, and the self will always win - it is far stronger and more determined than your narrow little ego! It is also thinking which recognises that what works for you is not necessarily what worked for the population in some scientific test. Diets are like that. "We tested this on a hundred volunteers and expecto . . . . etc!" The population of this country alone is something like 60 million, and as for the planet, I have long since lost count. Any test that purports to tell you anything incontrovertible about human nature should be suspect automatically for that very reason. There ain't no such thing. Equally, diets involve reference, indeed genuflection, to 'authority' - the barrack room lawyers in the scientific community who just know! I am not against science, but it needs to be good science, and much of what has been written and said about food and eating and health is questionable at the very least. Eat the way you can and not the way you can't.
So I decided last year that instead of joining the anti-social media club I would at least first try it out and see what I made of it. Revised my Twitter page this week, and am working on my first attempt to penetrate Facebook. At the moment my mindset tells me that I can see no point whatever in giving an account of my doings every day and painting a marvellous (and incorrect) picture of them - my life is no different from anybody else's, and hardly worth the wear and tear on my keyboard. Also, I have no interest whatever in what other people are thinking about my life. I'm confident they have better things to do with their time. Nonetheless, I think that by joining the club, if only for a while, I can be in a much better position to work with the client who comes along beset with acute anxieties about what is happening to them on Facebook. And these people do exist - they are not one in a hundred million any more, they are a real community in our midst who are driven to depression and even worse by their reactions to it.
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