Hungry For Healing

How much of your day do you spend criticizing your body, trying to control your willful appetite, discussing food and diets with friends, and anguishing about needing to exercise? Is is 40%, 60%, 80%? If you are like most compulsive overeaters, it is high. Now here is the tough question.....what if you took all the energy you invest into changing your body and actually use it to change something in your life or the lives of others in your community? Imagine the results if we all did that?

Sounds easy, right? It certainly is not. Many people suffer for decades, if not a life time, negotiating a dysfunctional relationship with food. Try as they may, the disordered eating grows in intensity and destruction. Many of the people I work with tell me of the relationships they neglect, healthy risks they avoid in their careers, personal goals they don't achieve, places they won't visit, and joy they aren't allowing themselves all because of the preoccupation and distorted body image.

This is not all self-destructive behavior. We aren't usually just out to punish ourselves and mess with our lives for no good reason. Food and the disorder is very helpful and effective in the short term. It lets out the perfectionsitic pressures we put on ourselves., it comforts us immediately, it never demands a thing from us outside of receiving what it offers us, it allows us to get our insatiable needs met without anyone knowing, it allows us consistant and reliable access, unlike realistic relationships, and most of all, it offers anxiety reduction. Reserach is showing that chewing actually releases Seritonin, a "feel good" neurotransmitter. Compulsive overeaters are not stupid. It works. If you are like me and many of my clients, you have come to a point where the benefits are outweighing the consequences. Maybe you are overweight, maybe you are preoccupied with food and live in a normal sized body, or maybe restricting to the point of being underweight, whatever the size, the dysfunction has the same internal pain and functions in the same way to keep us from feeling that pain. These issues must be addressed and resolved before any permanent changes in your body can take place. Diets, when the emotional work has not been done, are temporary because we haven't worked the fat/eating disorder out of a job! The underlying issues associated with the disorder go all the way back into our childhoods because food was the one mood altering substance that we had access to as children. It is connected to our earliest pain.

Many compulsive overeaters struggle with symptoms such as hiding and sneaking food, eating alone, preoccupation of food and/or control of food, poor body image, shame and guilt about eating, use of food to medicate feelings, avoidance of activities, eating when you are full, and loss of control around food. These symptoms tend to get worse with each attempt to rid them. They progress over the years and leave people feeling depressed, anxious, helpless and hopeless, unbalanced personal and social lives, and frustration with their inability to get a handle on it. As our "super-sized" culture grows at an alarming rate, so to does this struggle for compulsive overeaters. There is no better time to take good care of yourself in a way that could get to the real problem. We are more than our bodies.

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