Why being a people pleaser makes you the queen of carbohydrates, from cognitive-behavioral therapist Karen R. Koenig, author of Nice Girls Finish Fat: Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever.

Emotionally healthy individuals feel good in the moment and flattered when folks compliment and praise them. They don’t need the approval of their partner, friends, children, family, neighbors, or boss to do the right thing and engage in activities they enjoy. If they get it, all well and good; if not, so what. Healthy people might get upset when they don’t feel valued or appreciated, but they can go a long way toward validating themselves when others don’t do it for them, and external validation is icing on their cake. If they’re regularly undervalued, they speak up to find out why and let others know that they’d like to be appreciated a bit more.

However, when you’ve built your whole life around seeking approval and acceptance, it’s devastating when you don’t get it. It can send you into a downward spiral or a tailspin that’s difficult to recover from. It can generate anxiety and depression and even make you feel suicidal. Sometimes when you’ve worked hard to curry favor and don’t receive it, you feel profoundly disappointed, worthless, empty, betrayed, and as if there’s no point in living. This is the problem with seeking external reward exclusively: If you don’t get it, you feel completely done in. You may even feel resentful and enraged and not understand where this surge of intense feeling comes from.

And what do you do to avoid or lessen these feelings? You eat, of course. You think, Well, if no one’s going to reward me, I’ll just reward myself with a treat. If you can’t fill up on compliments, you fill yourself up on calories. People can disappoint you, but food never does, so what the heck. You tell yourself, I deserve something good to eat, which is of course the truth but not a great way to decide whether to have pizza or not. Sure, you deserve to be loved and lauded, but that has nothing to do with food. When you really believe that you’re deserving, food doesn’t enter into the equation because your reward is your own good feelings about yourself.

Food fills the void left by lack of approval, but only temporarily. When you’re done eating, you’re still left with empty feelings of inadequacy and insecurity, made worse by mistrust in yourself for eating when you weren’t hungry or overeating when you were. You’re still yearning for external reinforcement and have compounded the problem by not focusing on what you can actively do to make yourself feel better — reminding yourself of your worth, realizing that your judgment of yourself is more important than how others judge you, and accepting that seeking approval outside the self is generally a fruitless endeavor.

GRAB YOUR THINKING CAP What do you do when you’ve failed to receive the acceptance, love, or approval you seek? How do you abuse food in these situations? What is it you’re seeking through eating?

I’ve been privileged to see many nice girls turn around people-pleasing behavior in a short time. It’s not easy, but it’s not as hard as you might think. It takes reflection, awareness, insight, and what’s called an observant ego, that is, the ability to act and assess your actions simultaneously. Using your observing ego on a date might involve noticing how you’re fawning or keeping your opinions to yourself because you sense your companion hates to be challenged. Or recognizing that you didn’t send your son to his room because you can’t stand how angry he gets at you when you punish him. Or realizing that you couldn’t refuse to give your drug-addict brother a handout because he so looks to his big sis as a savior. People pleasing is as addictive as any other behavior that lights up your brain’s reward center, but change becomes easier when you focus on approving of yourself. Work on lighting up your own pleasure center!

No More Nice Girl Manifesto for People Pleasing

Do:

• Share your authentic feelings with people you feel safe with.
• Cultivate family and friend relationships with folks who can accept you as you are and to whom you can speak honestly and directly.
• Try to understand where your people-pleasing behavior comes from in your childhood.
• Analyze your work situation and see if you are setting yourself up for excessive approval seeking and confrontation avoidance.
• Allow your children to be angry with you so that they can learn that it’s okay to be angry and continue to be loved.
• Explain to your partner why you fear being honest (unless your partner will retaliate and hurt you, in which case either seek counseling or get out of the relationship).
• Expect friends to love you in spite of your flaws.
• Make sure that your community work is being done not because you feel you should do it or will be rewarded for it, but because it feels pretty neat in your heart.
• Stop expecting acceptance, approval, praise, or love from others for what you do and instead give it to yourself.
• Stop saying nice things so folks will like you or won’t be angry with you.
• Expect that you’ll hurt people’s feelings and they’ll get over it.
• Practice saying no more often and think long and hard before saying yes.

Don’t:

• Worry if someone you meet doesn’t like you.
• Expect praise and compliments for everything you do as if you are a child who needs constant encouragement.
• Smile when you don’t feel like it just to cheer up someone.
• Say yes when the more self-nurturing answer is no.
• Stay in an abusive home, social, or work situation in which you’re walking on eggshells around a person who is critical, abusive, or in other ways habitually hurtful.
• Overdo just to make other people happy when it doesn’t seem right for you.
• Keep silent and make excuses for people who regularly behave badly.
• Let hurt fester because you’re afraid of sharing negative feelings.
• Catastrophize about folks not getting over hurt feelings, which are part of life.
• Say “please,” “thank you,” and “I’m sorry” unless it’s appropriate.

To do today:
The next time you do something you’re proud of, don’t ask anyone what they think, but focus on what you think of your behavior.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Karen R. Koenig, the author of Nice Girls Finish Fat: Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever (Copyright © 2009 by Karen R. Koenig), is a cognitive-behavioral therapist and author of three books on eating and weight. A national speaker, she regularly teaches workshops on eating to groups around the country. She lives in Sarasota, Florida.

MORE ARTICLES BY THE AUTHOR

• 23 Do’s and Don’ts to Prevent Packing on the Pounds at Work
• Are You Overweight Because You’re Just Too Nice?
• Does Your Family Make You Fat?
• Is Being a Perfectionist Ruining Your Life?

LEARN MORE

• Read the Introduction to Nice Girls Finish Fat: Put Yourself First and Change Your Eating Forever
• Read Chapter 1 of the book
• Learn more about the author