 Hello and welcome to MIPS TV and with me as always is Bob Cook who's bringing us one of his really exciting book reviews and in this review, we're going to go to a Kind of place that isn't usual for therapy. It's it's not usual to have Therapy for something as specific as what this book covers and it's called the overweight Patients and effectively it's a TA model for dealing with Obesity and people who effectively from what we're saying, you know as a preamble before we switch to record around Are eating their emotions Bob? Yeah, it's a it's an interesting Model transaction answers anyway But it can be used to help people look at their eating challenges their disorders in this case in this book obesity issues and Parent adult child, which is a major psychological model With regards to transaction analysis is what she uses and she's a TA therapist to age TA trainer, I think And she uses the ideas of the pack model and especially the ideas of the internalized parent or The internalized parental programming and the child decisions with that As looking for the underlining issues if you like that make up the obese or The person that's got challenging issues around eating And how to go forward from that Yeah, so from from just all put those opening remarks Bob. It sounds to me like what's being proposed here is that The the the eating issues come from the past and are directed by kind of parental injunctions I'll give you an example in my way of understanding it Well, I I'm 61 now when I grew up as a kind of what? Second World War, baby. So so to speak bit late, but second World War, baby I was told that you know always eat always eat everything because you know rationing and And then later on always eat everything because we're starving children in Africa, which of course there are but Eating more food than you need here Really doesn't have any indication or help people in another country really does it? So as those are kind of Parental injunctions that that people have who have have difficulty with food Yeah, and Kathy Leitch goes into that she talks about What she calls the internalized parenting messages So those sort of commands that you've just put there, you know, exactly, right, you know I remember in my childhood and I am 68 so That generation my mother would say invariably almost every meal Look, if you're gonna leave any chips on your plate Make sure you don't do this because you've got to eat it all up because just think of all the people starving in Biafra Then yeah, and I I was really Quite scared of going against that so I made sure I jolly where I made sure that I At every morsel on the plate. Yes You know go forward a bit if you if I was a person who then I grew up, you know, obviously grew up and I carried those commands through without any discrimination discrimination so that I religiously made sure I Made sure every time I ate a meal that I ate every morsel on the plate You can start to see some of the psychological issues Under, you know underneath the the surface around overweight problems Yeah, and you know, there's a lot that you know if you if you're you know If you're a young person certainly people of our age and you were seeing and you know by no means Am I ridiculing people are starving in the world? It's a terrible thing But the idea that the by not eating the food. You're somehow contributing to it That somehow this is your fault, which is sometimes how the messages certainly came down in our family Yeah, you just ate until you until he flipping well exploded in some cases Yeah, and to leave anything behind was was almost shameful That's right. And of course there's a name guilt So you'd you know, you didn't want to feel guilty So you you carried on eating now if you carried that out throughout your life You can understand why people put on weight. Yeah from that perspective So it's just not those sorts of messages. I was just thinking one of the reasons I like this book Is this quite a few case studies of her work with people who've got obesity issues or a read, you know Reading issues if you like and I was just thinking of one of them I think the person was called Allison it might might be wrong But one of the internalized messages she got in her parenting Was What you've got you won't eat anything else until you've eaten up your pudding in other words Yes, you have to make sure she got all her pudding before she could have any afters. Yes, you're to earn you earn your desert Yeah, yeah Yeah, so it's like again. It's guilt again, but she says what happened was that she carried on with the same Pattern and the parental messages were so severe that she wasn't able to in ta language find a robust adult To discriminate with those messages. So she acted out As if she was still in the past. Yeah Yeah, it's it's it's all it's almost like a culinary transference, isn't it where you're where you're When you're eating, you're not actually eating in the here and now You're eating as you would a child and Enjoying that and of course that goes for speed of eating you as well Speed of eating now in my own history We take a just example going away from this book about but the theme of this book is that the past informs the present, of course you know, I grew up when There was hardly any food around and so I had to eat very fast to get what food there was Yeah, yeah Yeah, I mean we know that once that happens the ball when people eat very quickly the the brain adapts to that and Doesn't have any kind of shut-off Mechanism, it's been well known for years that the people who eat quickly can have a lot of difficulty with With weight issues because the brains keeps sending messages saying you're hungry Yeah, so that doesn't so in this book is two or three case studies talking about the dominant parenting In other words a dominant parent message, I don't mean the parenting style I mean a dominant parent message that the person obeys through fear or guilt and carries on doing that Like a default system Even though she may know or he may know that it doesn't help her in terms of Health problems keeping him or herself slim or whichever way we look at this So what Kathy leached us is does an inquiry of questions to find out What was the parenting style and the messages that the mother father or significant others passed on to the person that they may still be obeying and Once they've got that information they can start doing a Decontamination or or getting a situation where the adult can come stronger To be able to Change their response So in TA some of the techniques you might use will be that you might actually do a parent interview And that's what that would mean and she talks about this in a book There's a whole chapter on the parent interview is that you would actually talk to the mother father or significant ever and Just talk about how come They were passing these messages on and where it comes from and in your case the way you just talked about that from the war Or wherever it was so we understand where it comes from and to start Having this conversation with the parents so that the child or adult listening on can start separating out To a different time zone. Yeah, I'm just I'm just thinking about how I observe You know parents and food with the children, you know Sometimes food's given to a child as a distraction to shut them up. You know, you know child's going, you know So once in attention from the parent instead of the parent giving of themselves they give them a chocolate bar Correct. So there's that that's the process and she talks a lot about that She also talks about another technique, which is two chair technique Where the child talks to the parent is again It's the child talking to the parent To get a dialogue going so that the person listening on can separate out between present and past Yeah So that's another nice chapter in the book And another further chapter book is about the child response and the child's decisions to this type of parenting And their feelings So another theoretical approach in this book is that we eat our feelings in other words We repress our feelings by eating and push them away Yes, and in in very extreme cases. It's said that bulimia Is is people swallowing their feelings swallowing their emotions the the acts of overeating and then And then making oneself sick Is is an extreme case of that Is it's absolutely fascinating and and I'm minded to think bob the the few years ago Though, you know, there's lots of organizations that run diet clubs and things like that But there was one who used ta as a basis of Healthy Yeah He ran groups So you had to so you went along and got some education, but yours had to be part of a group Use ta model parent adult child to understand Reasons why people ate and to help people separate our path from presence And it was very successful and I still think it's running that group lighter for life With ta groups. Yeah. Yeah, it is it is really interesting and you know in the west How we have a relationship With food, which is sometimes quite quite unhealthy and quite unhelpful So beauty about this model just far and through the idea is you can get a more resilient adult Yeah, that's number one. Secondly that the person can separate out past and present So they are able to understand what's happening and thirdly and then To actually start expressing the emotions that were repressed So that the adult could be more into charge And it's a really good model for understanding the different parts of the self that are battle battling with each other And food becomes the sort of Way we we repress our emotions or parts of ourself So it's a really good model for understanding what's happening internally and the causes Of why we find it hard or difficult to stop eating Yeah, it really is interesting. I'm I'm also reminded of a book we reviewed Which you find in this playlist called an evil cradling About Brian Keenan who was an Irish national Who was held hostage in Baruch for a number of years? And I seem to remember he was he was interviewed And the interviewer offered him some chocolate and he said no, that's just for children And it always it was something that struck me for a long as someone who loves chocolate It struck me for a long time That really adult voice that came from him and often wondered if that was part of his Part part of his experience. I mean rather than an evil cradling part of his experience of survival to try and be in that adult place And anything else was seen as a bit of a literally a luxury and he said no, it's for children And the the person was interviewing him Said he said he said it quite quite quite not aggressively but very firmly And maybe you need ta because ta developmental model where you would say that type of response. Yeah, yeah Child adult parents. So I really do suggest people read this book Not only for therapists to be to have an understanding of a model to look at the underlying causes Which drive the phenomena, but also um Just for a general lead. It's really really really interesting. I think So the book is called um, the overweight patient the author just remind me bob is Kath leech Kathy Yeah, Kathy leech. Yeah, Kathy leech. We'll put um, I'll put a link in the comments bar Um, so you can have a look and inspect the book as always bob Um, doesn't get paid for book reviews. We have to take this on on youtube now Um, does it for the love of it and we'll we'll see you in the next book review. So bob cook. Thank you very much