Summary: (http://www.mortylefkoe.com/wp-content/uploads/marty_lefkoe_headshots_053_2-01_edit_235-150x150.jpg) When I first started helping clients whose major complaint was emotional eating—eating for emotional reasons when they really weren’t hungry—I assumed that the problem was caused by beliefs and conditioning, like most other behavioral or emotional problems. But when all the beliefs and conditionings that appeared to be relevant had been eliminated, the problem usually was as bad as ever. At which point I went back to the drawing board. I knew all about “classical” conditioning, in which a stimulus is conditioned to produce a behavioral or emotional response. So rejection or making a mistake can be conditioned to produce anxiety. Or being told what to do can be conditioned to produce anger. This type of conditioning was demonstrated by Pavlov’s dogs who were conditioned to salivate by the ringing of a bell. The Lefkoe Stimulus Process can easily de-condition this type of conditioning. But that type of conditioning didn’t seem relevant for emotional eating, which involves a behavior that seems compulsive. There is another type of conditioning called “operant” conditioning. This type of conditioning is the result of rewarding or punishing a behavior. As a result you become conditioned to act in a certain way in order to achieve the “reward” or avoid the punishment. Merely desiring the reward results in the behavior. In an earlier blog post about eating (October 13, 2009) I pointed out: "… if every time you got upset as a child your mom gave you food to make you feel better, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you got upset in order to feel better. "Or, if your parents continually rewarded you for special things you did as a child by giving you a special meal with the food you really liked, you could get conditioned to eat whenever you wanted to feel acknowledged for something you did." I finally realized that almost all emotional eating involves both types of conditioning. So in order to help people with an emotional eating problem, I had to create a process that would easily, quickly, and permanently de-condition both “classical” and “operant” conditioning. I started working on a process in 1997 and it took six revisions over the next 11 years before I finally had something that worked in most situations. I call it the Lefkoe De-conditioning Process (LDP) and I’ll describe how it works in a minute. The reason it took so long is that I wasn’t working with many individual clients and, even more importantly, the problems presented by the clients I did have didn’t need operant de-conditioning. Then toward the end of last year a friend asked me to help him with his eating problem. I decided then to figure out how to permanently eliminate emotional eating, not just for him, but for others as well. So I worked with him and a few additional clients. Much to my surprise, in most cases there were very few beliefs involved. Their emotional eating was caused primarily by a combination of classical and operant conditioning. No wonder emotional eating has been so hard to stop and will power is so useless in the long run! Consider this: first someone with an emotional eating problem conditions eating to produce emotional “rewards” (relieving anxiety or any other negative feeling, feeling loved, a sense of celebration, feeling calm, etc). In other words, the mere act of eating automatically results in emotional rewards. This classical conditioning would make it difficult enough to stop over-eating. Then the problem is intensified by operant conditioning, where the behavior is conditioned to occur whenever there is a desire for the “reward.” In other words, merely desiring one of the emotional rewards (such as feeling loved, a sense of celebration, or feeling calm) will result in emotional eating, because you’ve learned that you’ll get this feeling each time you eat.
