During her years in practice as a dietitian,
Neala Ausmus says, she met many clients who could have taught the
mechanics of weight loss better than she. “As I worked with
clients,” she recalls, “I realized that they frequently
knew about calories, portion sizes, food groups, and
exercise.” After seeing this over and over, Ausmus came to
the conclusion that, for many people, overeating and overweight
were symptoms rather problems. Ausmus went to college planning to major in
art, but when her younger sister was found to have juvenile
diabetes at the age of 6, the dietitian’s proscription of
foods her sister could not have and her mother’s subsequent
fear led her to conclude that there had to be a better way to teach
proper nutrition. She dropped out of college, worked in a hospital
nutrition department for a year, then attended Utah State
University from which, in 1980, she earned a degree in clinical
nutrition. At St. John’s Hospital, Ausmus became
coordinator of the diabetes-education program, but, as the influx
of grant money slowed, she began working in other areas, teaching
weight-management classes at the wellness center and eventually
managing the weight-management center full time. It was there, using medically sound
techniques to approach weight loss, that Ausmus encountered the
phenomenon of people’s using food and eating to manage their
feelings and distress. She gives an example: “One woman I saw
talked about how weight had become a problem over the last 10 years
for her, and, again, she knew how to lose weight, but as I worked
with her I came to realize she used food to numb herself from the
emotional pain of losing her only child in a car accident 10 years
ago. I began to see this pattern in many of the people I worked
with, typically more subtle, and I realized that if the root cause
— the drive to overeat — wasn’t addressed, there
could not be a long lasting solution to the weight/eating
symptoms.”
Ausmus explains that teaching the mechanics
of weight loss isn’t enough. “That’s why some
dietitians have eating disorders and some respiratory therapists
smoke and some pharmacists have drug addictions,” she says.
These behaviors, she says, are driven by the desire to avoid
emotional pain and “numb out” by disconnecting from our
feelings. Eventually Ausmus chose to return to school
for training in counseling: “I decided that if I wanted to
move into this direction, to work on the underlying causes of
overeating and/or being overweight, then I needed more skill beyond my
nutrition degree.” In 2000, she completed her master’s
degree in clinical counseling at the University of Illinois at
Springfield. Ausmus was intrigued when she learned of the
Solution Method Program, developed by Laurel Mellin of the
University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco. She
describes the Solution as the only program she had seen that
provides the “how to” skills to address emotional
overeating. Ausmus took the training required to become a Certified
Solution Provider. “The Solution is based on health rather
than on pathology,” she says. “Participants are seen as
having within themselves inherent strength, goodness, and wisdom.
The role of the training is to equip them with the tools and skills
they need to access that intrinsic health.”
Now Ausmus conducts Solution Method Program
groups at St. John’s Center Living. Groups meet weekly for
two-hour sessions for a duration of 12 weeks. The participants work
through a series of journals as a means of getting to the
underlying emotional causes of their excessive behaviors.
Participants are taught how to better identify when their emotional
responses are setting them up for excessive behavior and to deal
more appropriately with those emotions, thoughts, and urges, a
process that Ausmus calls “doing a cycle.”
Approximately 75 percent of the people who go through the program
are addressing eating behaviors, but, Ausmus says, she also has
participants who are trying to control smoking, overspending, and
overwork. Ausmus insists that participants who fully
engage in this program can achieve long-lasting results and
experience emotional balance that is helpful to them in all areas
of their lives. “We can have emotional, sexual, and
social intimacy because we can be close to others without losing
ourselves in them or running away,” she says, “and, in
this state of balance, the drive to overeat and for the other
excesses are low.”
Those wanting to participate in the Solutions
Method Program in a group format should call Ausmus at St.
John’s Hospital, 217-544-6464, ext. 47133. A free orientation
will be held 5:30-7 p.m. Jan. 16 at the Dove Conference Center, in
the Prairie Heart Institute at St. John’s Hospital. Ausmus
also is available for individual counseling at Maher Psychiatric
Group, 217-793-9593.
This article appears in Jan 5-11, 2006.
