The Constant Dieter

THE CONSTANT DIETER:

A PHILOSOPHER’S GUIDE TO CONQUERING CHRONIC AND COMPULSIVE OVEREATING

Caroline Wiseblood Meline, Ph.D

THE CONSTANT DIETER: A Philosopher’s Guide to Conquering Chronic and Compulsive Overeating

Copyright ©2023 Caroline W. Meline

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. Copyright law.

Published by JetPress

Cover design by Molly Hynes

For my beloved family:

My sons Michael and Matthew, my daughter-in-law Betsy, my daughter-in-law Brenda (in memory), and my grandchildren Michele, Miles, Isabel, and Nathan.

You are my rocks.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two decades of my life went into writing this book, and during that time many people helped me think about the topics I have addressed. I can’t recover all those names, but I will thank those who became involved once I got serious about self-publishing. Diana Holquist is a top-notch editor who helped me flesh out parts of the book that were sketchy or unclear and gave me consistently good feedback on strengthening the text. Molly Hynes is a talented young designer who worked with me many hours to get a book cover that captured the tone and vision I had in mind. She also captured my dog Jet’s spirit perfectly for my publishing logo, JetPress. Janina Levin, my former St. Joe’s colleague, expertly proofread the book once I had a completed manuscript. Carol Lightwood, an accomplished self-publisher, provided excellent practical advice. Jamie from Draft2Digital answered innumerable questions, many dumb, and deserves my thanks.

Three philosopher friends read and commented on my chapter about free will and determinism—a complex topic that I worked on obsessively, striving for a middle way between too academic and too simple. They are Ralph Ellis, prolific author and professor at Clark Atlanta University; Patricia Murphy, long-time professor at St. Joseph’s University; and Joseph McGinn, independent scholar. Each had valuable comments and allowed me to feel secure about the philosophical overview and special compatibilist approach I have presented.

I am grateful to Richard Stine for allowing me to use four of his drawings as illustrations of my ideas, and to the Easton Foundation, managers of the Louise Bourgeois estate, for their generosity in permitting the use of several Bourgeois images. Andrea Mihalovic of Artists Rights Society helped with the image-permission process for both Bourgeois and Calder, as did Fintan Ryan of Tate Images. The Marsh agency facilitated permission from the Winnicott Trust for my use of a photo of D.W. Winnicott with a child.

Early encouragers to whom I am grateful are my wonderful cousins Toni Maples, Linda Kuzmack, Sylvia Devito, Ellen Shapiro, and Enid Cherenson. In addition, I leaned on my dear friends Joyce Newman, Paula Paul, Pat Brotman, Linda Good, Ilene Winikur, and Ed Stivender, as well as my special Curtis colleagues Jeanne McGinn, Eva Swidler, and Tim Fitts. My former Laura Scales housemates at Smith College, who formed a Zoom group a few years ago, also deserve mention. Some provided feedback, and all provided moral support. The latter is no small thing! I could have given up innumerable times.

Over the book-writing decades, there were also dogs! Several canines, including Jenny, Rita, Patches, Pearl, Evie, Stretch, and Lily, were my indispensable, constant companions, as Jet is now.

Of course, my family is my mainstay, and I have dedicated the book to them.

PREFACE

I am the Constant Dieter of the title, and formerly, a chronic and compulsive overeater.

I operated under the burden of a binge/fast eating disorder off and on from adolescence into my 40s, adding up to three decades of dieting failure. But I finally overcame it and achieved a stable, lifelong eating pattern and normal weight. That was more than 35 years ago! I call the method that allowed this achievement Constant Dieting to show its difference from short-term, temporary dieting.

After reaching my 30s and having suffered for more than 15 years, I desperately wanted to find out why I was binge eating so that I could end the behavior. I wrote my thoughts in a journal and read many books. My home library features all the major figures in psychoanalytic theory starting with Freud, plus the thinkers who rebelled against Freud, and the ones who rebelled against them. I was astounded by their ideas. At the same time, I began a course of psychotherapy, both group and individual.

The most important point of my process during those years is that I believed both my original problem and my eventual solution were mentally caused, meaning that they relied on my consciously accessed ideas and attitudes, as well as hidden, unconscious motivations. I believed the solution had to come through a change in understanding and not, in the first place, through a particular diet.

And that’s what happened. With the groundwork laid through my reading, thinking, journaling, and therapy, I finally had an epiphany that gave me the key to changing my eating behavior, permanently. On the basis of my epiphany, I came up with a rational eating plan and within a few months stopped bingeing and fasting. I describe the process fully in Chapter 6 of this book.

Eventually, I wanted to share my insights and rational eating plan with other people, and I decided to write a book. In my manuscript, I summarized what various psychoanalytic theorists said, using their theories as a sounding board to investigate my eating disorder. Pages accumulated, and I thought about refining the book for publication. During this process, I came up against a truly disturbing question: is it possible for others to do what I did?

In fact, is it possible for any of us to do what we are ourselves are trying to do? A better way to put this question is: Are we actually in charge of the circumstances of our lives? In other words, DO WE HAVE FREE WILL?

What I really wanted to know was, would others suffering with a similar problem be willing and able to do what I did? If they would not be willing and able, then my efforts to help them would be futile.

From my reading in the self-help literature on disordered eating, and, more generally, on breaking out of destructive behaviors of all kinds, I knew that the authors didn’t ask that crucial question—do others have the power to follow my advice? It’s a horrible question, really, because if it turns out that readers actually lack that power, then what is the point of giving them the advice? It means writers are merely talking to themselves, which is their worst nightmare.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what worried me—do other people have the power to do what self-help books tell them to do—is not a trivial issue. If we humans lack free will, so that the factors that control our decisions and actions are determined, meaning preprogrammed, then why does it matter which self-improvement program we try? Success is not within our control.

For a while, I tried to dodge these disturbing questions. I kept writing and simply hoped the reader would be able to follow my advice. But deep down, I knew there was a serious problem: People who have good intentions don’t live up to them. But if they have free will, why don’t they?

In writing about my experience with an eating disorder and my efforts to conquer it, I had never considered this particular question. I had assumed I was neurotic, and the way to solve the problem was to investigate the neurosis sufficiently to move past it. Then I reminded myself that in the process of investigating my neurosis, I suddenly had an epiphany, and that is how I solved my eating disorder.

That compounded the difficulty. No one has control over receiving a powerful, life-changing insight. I could not will myself to have such a revelation—it comes to a recipient as a complete surprise. In addition, I knew I couldn’t give the power of an epiphany to anyone else directly, because the experience is not transferable. Still, I thought that reporting what the epiphany showed me—that to stop bingeing I would first have to stop compensating for a binge with a fast or low-calorie diet—could benefit others. But could they follow this instruction without their own epiphany?

The idea that readers might lack the free will to take advantage of my information became a worm in my mind that did not stop nagging me until I faced it. At age 51, I did something drastic—I enrolled in a philosophy course with the idea starting to form that I might obtain a doctorate in philosophy. At the beginning, I knew only that free will was a philosophical issue, and I wanted to learn about free will. What did freedom of the will mean? If it didn’t exist, what were the implications of not having free will? Was there consensus about these questions?

At the same time, I realized that whether free will did or didn’t exist, I would have a dilemma. If free will did exist, how could I make sense of my own decades of failure? Did everyone have free will except neurotics? But I knew from reading Freud that everyone is neurotic to some degree. If free will didn’t exist, could I take credit for my success? And most importantly for this book project, would it make sense to provide guidance to anyone else?

While the questions went unanswered, I started the program unofficially, with one course. Then I took another course, and another. Eventually I formally applied and was accepted to the PhD program at Temple University. After that, I plodded on, sometimes wanting to quit, but I felt unable not to finish what I started. That is, I was compelled to finish. The process only reinforced my suspicion that I lacked free will.

Obtaining my PhD took me more than ten years, counting the unofficial part. That was on top of the decade-long, self-assigned course on psychoanalysis, and the overlapping eight years spent undergoing my own therapy. My labors toward understanding my own chronic and compulsive eating problem, and then trying to learn whether I could apply what I had discovered to helping other people, have been biblical!

This brief history may explain the unusual scope I have marked out in the book. When people try to conquer an eating problem, gaining and losing weight over and over again, they are operating with the deepest mental struggle humans can confront. Because eating is primary! Food provides the most basic pleasure and comfort there is. To investigate that struggle thoroughly enough for my own satisfaction, I had to go far beyond what is usually covered in the dieting and eating-disorder field, bringing in human knowledge across several disciplines.

The result is that this book is part academic philosophy, part psychoanalytic psychology, part memoir, and part dieting manual. It is clear to me that a serious eating problem cannot be solved through partial measures—certainly not through any kind of temporary diet, but also not through abandoning dieting and substituting clinical advice. Conquering compulsive or chronic overeating as a permanent change must involve our entire self, conscious and unconscious, within our entire causal context of external influences and inborn traits, and include a practical, rational eating program that is constant, for life.

A word on the writing process. I wrote this book in stages over several years. It took other forms before it took the present form. I kept rewriting through a succession of changing personas, as my studying continued, and then my philosophy teaching career began. My voice in this book—the I—has been a work in progress. A little bit at a time, it became stronger and more real. My fear and hesitation diminished only very gradually, as I excavated the topic and kept filling in holes in my own psyche. The field is too big for me to think I’ve found all the answers, but I have some, and I believe in their power to benefit others.

I credit several muses with helping me achieve the confidence I needed to persevere in finishing and publishing the book. Some are artists, some are writers, some are psychoanalysts, some are philosophers, some are friends, some are family, some are dogs.

Two special artists have helped me present my ideas through their artworks—Louise Bourgeois and Richard Stine. Their pictures, plus others, are scattered through the text, as much for the visual pleasure they provide as for their relevance to specific ideas.

Finally, I am one person, a human American woman, sharing a lifetime’s worth of thought and experience on a specialized issue—chronic and compulsive overeating. If it afflicts you, it carries terrible suffering. To end that suffering, a sane, patient method of Constant Dieting is surely worth the effort.

Caroline Wiseblood Meline, Philadelphia, 2023

CHAPTER 1

WHY NOT JUST EAT LESS?

TONI AND MAX

My cousin Toni’s son Max asked her one day, after hearing her complain, yet again, about her weight, Mom, if you want to lose weight, why don’t you just eat less?

The jackpot question. It is totally logical and makes perfect sense. However, if it were as easy and straightforward to lose weight as the boy’s well-meaning question makes it sound, then we would not have a weight-loss culture awash in diet and exercise programs, coaches, nutritional supplements, packaged meals, diet drinks, drugs, surgical options, hormonal treatments, etc.

If it were really a matter of following the advice to eat less, all dieters would easily attain, and maintain, their desired weight.  However, for many if not most people, changing one’s eating behavior is anything but easy and straightforward.

STATISTICS

For several decades we have been hearing that more than two-thirds of all adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese. If so, it must also be the case that overeating is happening on a large scale. That statistic means that less than one-third of adults in this country are within what is considered the normal weight range for their height.

Can this be true?

There are many online reports on the weight of Americans, and I’ll present a sampling of them. Consulting Healthline, I find this: More than one-third of adults in the United States have obesity. In the United States, 36.5 percent of adults have obesity. Another 32.5 percent of American adults are overweight. In all, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States are overweight or have obesity.[1]

Healthline relies on information from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) from 2017-2018. Here, I find that nearly one in three adults are overweight, more than two in five have obesity, and one in eleven adults have severe obesity.  The categories are based on BMI weight ranges for adults 20 and older.[2]

The Centers from Disease Control gives obesity (but not overweight) statistics from various demographic groups for the period 2017 to 2020. The overall figure is 41.9%, without counting those who are overweight but not obese.[3]

MEDPAGE Today, in a 2020 publication, gives the combined percentage of overweight and obese people as 73% of American adults. The breakdown is 42% obese (BMI of 30 or higher) and the remainder overweight (BMI of 25-29.9).[4]

A 2023 New York Times article presented the obesity figure this way: More than 100 million American adults are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[5] (I speak directly to factors related to obesity in the Appendix.)

All of these reports base their categorization of individuals by weight on the standard BMI (Body Mass Index) chart. This is an old and widely respected measuring tool for comparing and grouping humans in terms of their weight to height ratios. According to the World Health Organization, you are in the normal range if you have a BMI of 18.50 to 24.99; you are overweight/pre-obese if you have a BMI of 25.00 to 29.99; and you are obese if you have a BMI of 30.00 or above.[6]  Their website has an online calculator that allows you to input your own height and weight and then see your BMI.

I just fed in my specifics:

Height = 5 foot 1.5 inches [7]

Weight = 125 pounds

BMI = 23.2.

Thus, I am on the high end of the normal range (18.5 – 24.9), but as long as I’m in the range, I‘m considered to have a low health risk in relation to my weight. Note that this tool considers nothing but height and weight. There is no differentiation by gender or age.

The BMI is obviously not a fine-grained scale, and not everyone likes it as a standard for categorizing human weight. Besides that, there is considerable disagreement about using BMI figures to predict health. Prevention Magazine senior editor Adele Jackson Gibson is highly critical of the BM and explains the problems with overreliance on this index in relation to health.[8]

While I am aware of the problems with BMI data (not unlike the problems related to using IQ data to predict children’s success in later life), I take the BMI to be a good-enough index for comparing myself to a norm. I know that if my weight should change so that I reach or cross the divider of 24.9 to being overweight, I would be very concerned.

Setting the controversy aside, my basic point about BMI data is that it shows Americans are having serious weight issues as judged by official governmental and private medical standards. More than twice as many people are overweight or obese than are normal in weight according to this very widely used standard.

And how much of a problem is that? I’m not really focusing on health in this book, although I am concerned with health in terms of how much food and what kind is good to eat for the sake of health. But, primarily, I’m focusing on physical and psychological discomfort. The reason being overweight and/or having a chronic overeating problem is bad is that it causes discomfort. I can list three ways this is true for me, and perhaps they apply to you, too.

First, the discomfort refers to how I feel physically, inside my body, in terms of flexibility of movement and flow of breath. To feel good, I must have ease of mobility, which would be hampered if I had to drag around more bulk than what my skeleton can comfortably bear. I talk about this aspect of having a stable weight, appropriate for your body frame, in