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Yes & No

About a year ago I attended a conference on the treatment of people with eating disorders. One of the presenters introduced an interesting perspective about the relationship between the way people relate to their food and the way they relate to boundaries and their personal needs and desires, as expressed by how much they say yes and no in their lives. She pointed out how at the far end of being anorexic, where life becomes an extreme practice of restriction, restraint, and control, treatment guides these people to start saying “YES” to more in their lives instead of so much “NO”. Yes, not just to food, but yes to love, yes to joy, yes to desire, yes to life!

On the flip side, at the far end of binging and overeating, people lean toward the extreme of saying yes to everything even when a no would more closely serve their needs. YES to the bread basket, h'orderves, appetizers, the soup, the main course, the wine, and the dessert. Feeling stuffed yet? This kind of eating can be a mirror to boundary-less YES-ing, and lately I can relate to this. As I’ve watched my waistline expand and certain overeating habits re-emerge in my life, I’ve started to see how much this directly reflects the balance of my saying yes to no.
 
My life of late has been a wide open yes! Yes to a new relationship. Yes to new ideas and experiences. Yes to later nights…and the expansion was feeling really good for a while. The blurring of boundaries, the surrender to every experience was ecstatic. The high of challenging myself to expand, of chronically pushing past my edges felt great until the loss of integrity, and the lack of clarity about my boundaries, my values, and my needs set in. I lost myself and started caring more about what people were seeing than who I was being. Life was starting to feel like an out of body experience. No wonder the extra food! I’ve probably just been trying to ground myself.
 
Well, since recognizing this I’ve started to say no again; no to the party after the dance performance; no to staying out past my “bedtime”. And amazingly it’s been easier to say no to late night eating, no to seconds, no to stuffing myself. It’s actually saying yes to me again in a way that honors my body and heart’s needs and limits. Yes to the bath, no to the before bed snack. Yes to getting up for yoga, no to staying up late. Yes to caring about what I think of me, no to being concerned with what you think of me. And really it’s not about being focused on whether or not I’m saying yes or no. It’s about being honest and connected to what my values, my needs, and my desires are.
 
In my courses, participants find it useful to engage in the daily practice of identifying their needs and desires. As they become more aware of what they want and need and practice asking for it, the desire to seek satisfaction in food shifts. All too often we don’t know what our needs and desires are, so it can be unclear where to put our yes’s and no’s.
 
I love how as I’ve been thinking about this, the latest Oprah magazine that is sitting in my living room has a big "SAY YES TO LIFE!” on the front cover. I think my contribution based on my most recent observations with myself is that the really big yes to life includes and often rides on a no, where we find our boundaries, our clarity of needs, & our personal integrity. It’s all about the balance and being connected to our own center choosing to say yes or say no from within!
 
I’m obviously a yes lover! Accepting a limitation? Not my forte, but in recognizing all this I'm finally willing to practice giving as well as taking the no’s of life. And yes is fabulous! But a yes is only really a yes when the option to say no is present, otherwise it’s doing what you think you should do or have to do, and those yes’s breed resentment like a damp basement breeds mold.
 
If you’ve been overeating or under-eating perhaps you may also feel like your yes’s and no’s are off balance. If so, do you think it’s time to reconnect with yourself again and let yourself see in every moment what your needs and desires are? Yes? No?