Healing Your Hungry Heart. Joanna Poppink

Healing Your Hungry Heart - Joanna Poppink


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may have a loved one in your life who also has difficulties with food. He or she may encourage you to eat more than is healthy and satisfying for you or less than is adequate to sustain a healthy weight.

      Nora, fifty-five, has suffered from compulsive overeating since she was a teenager. When she was a teen, her mother criticized her for being fat during the day but secretly gave her deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate shakes at night when everyone had gone to bed. Nora liked the experience of kindness and intimacy with her mother during those times. Now, without realizing it, she tries to reclaim that sense of being loved through food.

      The glitch in your system that creates the eating disorder is that you go for the symbol rather than the real thing.

      Sylvia, twenty-three, said she had no control or influence over her finances and lived with her aunt, who locked the refrigerators and cupboards and carefully monitored Sylvia's eating allowance—small portions of inexpensive food—while the aunt ate normally. Sylvia, very thin, suffered from a kind of anorexia. She was caught in a system that perpetuated the eating disorder. Away from that environment, when a friend offered her food, she was afraid to eat, afraid of being punished for disobeying the rules she believed she must live by.

      One afternoon, while I was grocery shopping, I saw a young woman I knew shopping with her mother. Martha was EDNOS with strong anorexic symptoms. She didn't see me, and her mother didn't know me. The pair was hovering over a fruit display. I saw Martha caress apples, bananas, and mangos and look questioningly at her mother. Her mother frowned and shook her head. Martha, carrying an empty shopping basket, like a beggar woman hoping for crumbs, walked alongside her mother as she filled her cart with food that was destined for a locked refrigerator.

      Martha, though intelligent and creative, didn't have a sturdy enough psyche to create a life of her own where she could earn her own money to buy and eat her own food. She was well educated, but she had been sexually molested regularly and was physically abused as a young child. Her mother, perhaps unaware of her jealousy and rage, treated her like an unwanted captive. Her distant father considered her a sexual toy. The young woman's heart, spirit, and ability to be her true self were locked away in a psychological prison long ago. She didn't have access to a way out yet.

      Martha haunts me. I wonder how many women are like her. What doorway or window, or glimmer of light, could reach through her interior prison so she could begin to move toward recovery as I hope you are doing? Maybe she is reading this book.

      Cooking masses of food for family and friends or as a caterer, yet not eating anything yourself, is another warning sign. Carolyn, forty-seven and a working professional, watched friends eat food she longed to eat herself. She used all the control she could muster to deny herself the nourishment she craved and her body needed. She felt proud of her success in not eating.

      Carolyn needed to maintain a sense of superiority over other people. She believed she could live without what she considered to be mundane needs for physical nourishment. She felt others were stuck in heavy body prisons while she was moving beyond the need of her slight frame. She was striving to be perfect, a pure spirit with no need for the gross consumption of food. She used the words, “It will make me fat” frequently, but her real fear was that food would make her solid and present and part of the human community. If that happened, she wouldn't be able to find safety through her pursuit of being light, untouchable, and perfect. This issue of striving for self-defined perfection will come up again in future chapters.

      Cleo, forty-two, looked at foods with a sauce as dangerous because they might taste good. She feared that if she took one mouthful of a food that tasted good to her, she would have no control, eat too much, and get fat before she left the table. Cleo behaved as if her imagined fear was a real threat. She believed if she reached for something she desired, she would lose all control. Cleo not only denied herself food but also intimate relationships, career opportunities, and even simple items to decorate her home. Her walls were bare.

      I remember speaking to an emaciated woman lying in a UCLA hospital bed, dying of starvation. She was asking for help and said she wanted to live, but she wouldn't let the doctors give her a feeding tube because, she said, “They all want to make me fat.” The tragedy is that the extreme of this distorted thinking ends in death.

      Fear permeates many examples of eating disorders; fear needs to be addressed more than the food itself.

      Another unusual attitude about food results in weight gain rather than thinness. Food can seem dangerous if you are hungry. You then become more afraid of feeling hungry than of the food. If you graze continually throughout the day, especially on high fat/high sugar snacks, you can assure yourself of never being hungry. Then you have a sense of being in control even though you are frustrated and miserable as your weight continually climbs.

      Fear permeates these examples, and fear needs to be addressed more than the food itself.

      Further complicating matters, a starved body also means a starved brain. A starved brain creates a mind that cannot think clearly and is subject to wild distortions. It's important to remember that a heavy person can have a starved brain as well as a thin person.

      If you have an eating disorder, you ignore the genuine needs of your body. Yet, your body is real, and the human body needs adequate nourishment to function. Adequate nourishment becomes part of recovery, yet it has to be approached with caution since you will experience any change in your eating habits as tampering with what keeps you safe in this world.

      You control your moods and experience by eating the foods you have learned “work” for you. For example, you can eat several handfuls of nuts or some fruit and cheese before you go out to dinner with other people. By eating this heavy food, you protect yourself against feeling hunger in public. You protect yourself from feeling out of control, vulnerable, or natural with your companions. You can choose what you will eat and feel comfortable.

      This may or may not be a problem. Only you know if this is troublesome for you. If you need to binge and purge before a social dinner, you have a problem.

      If you know you will be eating with people who delay the meal beyond your comfort zone, it makes sense to eat beforehand so you aren't too famished. But if you are unwilling to allow others to see you when you feel something authentic, including hunger, then you are eating in advance for protection.

      Emotional eating presents a dilemma if you eat to relieve tension even though your stomach is quite full. You might eat on a full stomach and cause yourself pain so you can't participate in activities. Or maybe you eat on a full stomach and throw up. Hours on a treadmill might take care of those calories, but running while your stomach is overloaded can create digestive problems.

      Eating until you are so full you pass out is an indication of a possible eating disorder. If you do this to relieve stress, you make yourself non-functional. You have to cancel appointments, miss opportunities, and are unavailable to friends and family. Trying to get through emotional strain by chewing packs of sugar-free gum is an attempt to get binge eating relief without eating. The excessive chewing can cause gas, painful gastric distress, and embarrassing diarrhea. If and when these complications occur, they only add to your sense of shame and worthlessness.

      The ultimate goal of a woman in the grip of severe anorexia is to disappear, to lose her body completely, to not only be as light as air, but to actually be air. This dangerous goal gets mixed up with spirituality. The anorexic woman wants to be “pure spirit,” gossamer in the wind. If she could reach this impossible ultimate fantasy, she would be invisible to the human eye and sensed only as a vibrating energy that others could feel but not see. If this is you, please know that in your attempt to reach such a goal, you can starve yourself into emaciation, organ destruction, and loss of brain function. If you continue striving for this “ultimate” goal, you will die.

      A different anorexia scenario involves separating your sense of self from your body. If you achieve this psychological split, you create an experience where you send your body into the world while your real self remains unknown. You become a puppeteer moving the strings of your body, manipulating it to be the shape required and to function as needed. This, I believe,


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