Healing Your Hungry Heart. Joanna Poppink
“Every patient carries her or his own doctor inside.”
—Albert Schweitzer
This chapter goes more deeply into how you live and what needs your attention. What follows are possible early warning signs of an eating disorder or behaviors that, when repeated, can indicate an ongoing eating disorder. Be gentle with yourself as you examine the things you consider normal and routine, but which may indicate a serious problem.
You benefit from reviewing the way you live. How you behave with and around food, how you eat and do not eat, and the habits and idiosyncrasies you've developed around eating relate to the full scope of your life. For example, if you binge on food, you may also binge on people, or clothes, or drama. If you purge, you may feel clean and powerful when you throw away objects, leave gatherings, or end relationships. If you starve yourself, you may also restrict emotional nourishment and deprive yourself of money, education, and the opportunity for healthy relationships. If you feel proud when you refuse food, you may feel proud when you refuse assistance or opportunities to better your life.
Once you have an accurate picture of your eating disorder, you have a window into the patterns of your emotions and psychology. You also—and this is important—can use your eating disorder behaviors as a metaphor to understand how you behave in other situations. This is the beginning of making your eating disorder a valuable life teacher.
Your first and ongoing challenge is to not judge yourself. Merciless self-condemnation is a symptom of an eating disorder. You may have people in place who do that for you—that's another sign. If you can't resist criticizing yourself, give yourself a time limit to do so, and then do your breathing exercises. A brief mindful breathing practice after a bout of self criticism can help you realign yourself with self-kindness.
Defining unusual eating behaviors is a challenge, because what's considered normal keeps changing in our culture. Unfortunately, this difficulty makes it easier for early warning signs of an eating disorder to be missed, denied, or rationalized. Today, eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS) cover more of the population than identified eating disorders. Disordered eating, emotional eating, binge eating, or occasional purging may qualify as EDNOS. For recovery purposes, look at any form of eating that seems disordered and that troubles you, causes you problems, or is essential for you to cope with unbearable feelings.
In the not-so-distant past, taking time to sit at a dining table and eat three meals a day at a slow and gentle pace was normal. Now, grabbing a smoothie for breakfast while you dash for the car, rushing through a twenty-minute lunch “hour,” or ordering Chinese food and then eating it from the container with a group of friends are not extraordinary or bizarre activities today. Living on fast food may not be part of a healthy lifestyle, but it doesn't necessarily signal an eating disorder.
Eating a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast and having pancakes or scrambled eggs for dinner is not unusual in a fast-paced urban life, nor does it signal an eating disorder. Eating leftovers for breakfast doesn't indicate an eating disorder, either. Such behavior may mean the food is convenient when you are in a hurry or that you liked it and are eager to have more before it spoils. It could also mean that you are being economical by not wasting food.
Similarly, it's possible to have a seemingly healthy diet and suffer from an eating disorder. For example, in the past decade, the term “slow food” has entered the mainstream American vocabulary. Growing your own food or shopping at farmers’ markets for items you will cook slowly at home can enrich family life, enhance health, and help the environment. Eating slow food, however, doesn't mean you don't have an eating disorder.
Unusual eating behaviors that indicate a problem might include: hiding food so you won't be tempted to eat it, but then becoming frantic when you can't find it in your usual hiding places or can't remember if you ate it already. Frantic, you suck on raw sugar cubes, drink maple syrup from the bottle, or find a bottle of chocolate sauce and drink it straight. None of this soothes as well as your binge food, but you feel a little more calm. You also feel terribly ashamed. And now the kitchen is a mess, and you're anxious because you've got to cover your tracks.
Another indication is when you finish food that is partially eaten, like a container of ice cream. Then you replace the carton with another that is the same size, brand, and flavor, eating from it until the amount of ice cream matches the original before you took any.
You may pour hot sauce or hot spices on your food, not because you like the spices, but so the food will burn your mouth and throat and stomach. You hope that the pain involved with every bite will slow down your ability to binge or stop you completely. If any of these examples sound familiar to you, you have an eating disorder.
Eating disorder indications take many forms. You cut food into many tiny pieces. You feel busy, thoroughly occupied, and safe for the moment while you are cutting because you are close to food but not eating. When you are eating with others you spit food into your napkin and hide it under your plate. You are angry or anxious if someone comments on what you are eating.
Appetite control drugs won't stop this kind of behavior, because you are not reacting to food on the basis of physical hunger. When you see what may be your own episodes articulated, you are more likely to sense the anguish and almost blind fear and desperation behind the behavior. Awareness of proper nutrition and portion size for a healthy body is irrelevant to your needs on these occasions. Strict dieting only pulls back these urges like a sling shot. As your fears and tensions build, you snap back into an even more voracious binge episode with or without purging.
If you are anorexic, you may starve for long periods of time and then break through with a binge that would amaze even a bulimic woman. The purging afterwards can bring up blood as well as food. You might pass out.
Internally, you may feel like you're warding off an incoming dark, rolling thundercloud that could destroy you unless you reach for your eating disorder behavior. Recovery is about developing ways to cope with such feelings without resorting to self-destructive behavior.
I often tell a new client that I'm not going to take her eating disorder away from her. I can't.
I often tell a new client that I'm not going to take her eating disorder away. I can't. I don't know how, and even if I did know how, I wouldn't. It's serving a purpose. To strip your eating disorder away would leave you exposed and vulnerable to your unbearable fears with no protection. It would be like taking off your armor in the middle of a battle. Yes, the armor is heavy. You are hot and sticky in there. You can't move quickly. You could drown in a stream. You can't touch another person or feel another's touch. But the armor does protect you from arrows and spears that are coming at you from all directions. You take off armor when you can take care of yourself. Then the benefits of your defense outweigh the discomforts and risks. You seek recovery work when you realize the eating disorder you rely on to soothe you is causing more suffering than you can accept. Or you seek recovery when your eating disorder fails and you can no longer use it for emotional relief.
As you recognize symptoms and situations that relate to your eating disorder and understand that they are not fundamental to your nature, you develop more distance and more curiosity about them. This helps you be more gentle and patient with yourself. When your self-criticism diminishes, you are free to take new recovery steps.
You may discover you have unusual attitudes about food. Some foods may seem to have the power to call out with emotional messages, memories, promises, threats, joys, or dangers. Perhaps pasta, pancakes, Asian noodles, popcorn, or ice cream seem to promise you a safe haven. You can eat these foods and be comforted. Perhaps chocolate kisses or chocolate-covered cherries or thick grilled cheese sandwiches, or bananas with peanut butter, or whole jars of olives, or bread heavily laden with melted butter were family favorites and indulgences when you were a child. Perhaps your family had lovely private times together while eating these foods. Thus, they call to you when you are craving safety or intimacy—or maybe they frighten you for the same reason. The glitch in your system that creates the eating disorder is that you go for the symbol rather than the real thing. If you don't know a realistic way to bring safety and ease into your life, you may eat or starve to reach your personal safe haven.