As part of letting people know about this new lowcarb venture, I went through my e-dress book and sent a blanket e-mail to people who had contacted me over the years to personally discuss their lowcarb journeys, people who had dropped out of sight (and usually off of lowcarb) long ago.
“Sally’s” response to my note included the paragraph below...and it was then that it finally struck me how cheerleading, while well meaning, is ultimately unproductive, and in a long-term life and list culture sense, it can even be counterproductive for both the giver AND the receiver.
She wrote: I've bookmarked your site and I will make a point to read more soon. Don't know how active of a poster I'll be, though I appreciate that you're trying to keep the board "trim" as far as what is discussed. I think that that was one of the reasons I bailed on the old Atkins board...I just couldn't keep up with the "chit chat" posts that were going on. It felt "all or nothing," like if I didn't respond or acknowledge nearly all of them that I'd hurt someone's feelings or something. Like I have THAT power, right?? lol Just more of the learnin'...
It is because when we try to be helpful in this way, we slowly take on the unnecessary and distracting "responsibility" not just to lose weight and improve ourselves, but the additional DUTY to become a “good” friend and listmember. Then suddenly we’ve got a NEW worry about responding “right” to others in order to somehow make THEIR feelings and THEIR journey go better, and gosh, well now that we’ve been encouraging or complimentary to ONE person, then it behooves us to “show others” that we’re nice, good, polite, loving, giving people or, holy cow, we might accidentally insult or hurt them by our omission!!! Because we didn’t say something NICE!!!!
So here we are trying to have some (unnecessary!) impact on OTHER’S feelings which is in a sense overstepping a healthy boundary. And okay, c’mon, when we give out plenty of cheers and compliments, we’re also having at least a little impact on how the other listmembers feel about US too! The more we cheer, the NICER we are, the more others will LIKE us! But I think if over time, you carefully pay attention to what is at the core of a lot of people with emotional eating problems, you’ll see that what is deep down inside many of us is that we don’t like OURSELVES.
See how tangled this can get? Ever considered that somebody can just BE momentarily happy and proud of themselves and that’s...enough? That those feelings don’t NEED embellishment?
The process of trying to be this kind of “good” listmember also makes it almost effortless to shift the focus off ourselves. We get distracted! Emotional eaters and addicts LOVE to be distracted from focusing on their own eating behaviors. We’ve become adept at MAKING distractions and complications.
Part of the reason why Sally disappeared from her support board was because she wore herself out trying to DO THE LIST RIGHT instead of focusing on GETTING THE DIET RIGHT FOR HERSELF. So all her hours of giving and list participation ultimately didn’t help her get to her goal, and I would be willing to bet that all the love and cheerleading she offered was not a significant piece of why anyone on that list eventually succeeded either (in fact, it was a remarkably low-success list, in my not-so-humble opinion, BECAUSE it got so chatty and atta-girl focused.)
Now, take a look at this from the recipient’s point of view too. Let’s take a poster who once shared on our board that she was hesitant to come back to her lowcarb listmates in another lowcarb forum when she started to stumble. After seeing/hearing almost nothing but awe, praise and cheering for the strides she made toward goal, isn’t it part of her hesitation possibly because she ended up afraid/ashamed to come back to “the cheering place” to admit any kind of defeat when the going got tougher? She sort of intuitively feared the “equal but opposite reaction” from the cheerleaders. So ultimately, all that well-meaning cheerleading, then the “just hang in there’s, it WILL happen for you” DIDN’T prevent her from stumbling. She hung in there and it didn’t happen. Partly because she was cheered, and partly because in my opinion, "just hang in there" was not the right advice for HER at that point in the diet. It was time for her to change it a little to get any further in her journey.
Some of my views (as well as my success at this journey, I think) have been strongly influenced by the fact that I work at what I would term a progressive early childhood center. Believe it or not, one of our thrusts is to be very careful NOT to over-praise children.
There’s a fairly new concept arising from some of the fallout from the “feel-good” generation’s “praise, don’t punish” mindset: the praise-junkie. Educators are noticing a disturbing trend that many students are working for praise and good grades, instead of learning, growing and giving of themselves for the sheer joy and inner rewards of doing something challenging and personally satisfying. They are learning to PLEASE others over themselves and that’s not necessarily a good thing.
At our school we try not to say “good job” when a kid puts on his own coat for the first time. Instead we say “Wow, I see you just did that all by yourself!” When they say, “Do you like my painting?” we say “You used a lot of green. Tell me about this painting, do YOU like it?” We take note of their progress and their successes, but try not to mindlessly and endlessly praise them, especially about every little thing. We don’t want them learning to be approval-seekers; we work to shift the focus onto how THEY feel about their own choices and accomplishments.
We don’t want or need you to be “good little listmembers” here. We don’t want to create an atmosphere for trying to make you or anybody else FEEL good (or anything else) at all. We want you to focus on YOU and your eating choices, we want you to talk about your feelings about what you’re choosing, and the ramifications of your decisions on your feelings and your journey. We want you to be able to really HEAR how YOU are feeling, not how others expect you should feel. Often those aren't exactly the same thing.
We want a safe, but challenging place for people to share/gather information and experience, then muster the courage to risk changing if/when it’s necessary along each individual path.
We’re not perfect, we’re journeying too.. This board will evolved into what ever it evolves into—or it will fold if there’s insufficient interest or abuse by trolls. And it’s not that we don’t want people to become friends or that we can’t or won’t be friendly. We do have somewhat limited bandwitdth (we’ll see if we ever reach our limit), but we ALL have limited time, and we just want to remain focused as much as possible on the one thing that brings us all here in the first place.
Not getting focused on cheering others on is one little part of what we want to be different here. Here's to hoping it's a service to the strugglers among us
