Mindless Munching, Eating Disorder Recovery, Economic Consequences, Getting Better Anyway
Mindless Munching is the topic of a Wall Street Journal May 13, 2008 article by Melinda Beck.
Mindful Eating
Her article, “Put a End to Mindless Munching,” is a credible piece on mindful eating. I’m glad to see this perspective on eating move into greater public awareness via this well respected news publication.
My gladness has several aspects. One, information about paying attention to the specific details of your eating experience may help you develop a valuable exercise that can bring you to a normal and healthy way of being present for your genuine experience and genuine body need for nourishment.
When you practice mindful eating you can discover what food can offer you. The other deep yearnings you have that are not satisfied by food are then exposed so you can learn to address those needs in a more life enhancing way.
If you have an eating disorder, mindful eating can show you the power of your resistance to being present in this world.
Moving through that resistance, gently, respectfully and with compassion for yourself Is fundamental for eating disorder recovery. If you actually eat mindfully you will be vulnerable to your own feelings, which is the beginning of recovery work.
This information is important and the Wall Street Journal is an important periodical. But it’s not known as a health journal. The reputation of the WSJ is built on its being a fair and in depth business journal.
Mindless Consumption in our Culture
So while Melinda Beck is writing about ending mindless munching with reference to food, the fact that her article appears in the WSJ connects her writing to business.
I am so very glad to see this. Endless munching can refer to eating mindlessly at anything, i.e. mindless and endless consumption with little or no criteria for stopping. You can buy and the fact you have no more money doesn’t stop you. You can buy on credit or borrow.
Mindless consumption involves a lack of recognition of what you truly need in terms of objects. It is based your need to not be present as the vulnerable and feeling human being you are.
When your goal is to be and remain in a kind of invisible oblivion, unknown to others and even yourself you must maintain mindlessness. If you stop munching, you might feel something, and those feelings cannot be tolerated without the healing that comes from recovery work.
Clutter as Part of Mindless Munching
So you collect, you buy, you have a clutter problem. You attempt to declutter and even hire declutter specialists. Clutter means different things to different people.
Clutter can mean piles of paper and magazines. It can mean too many cars, too many houses, too many dresses or shoes. It can mean too many dogs or cats. It can mean too many lovers or even too many children. It can certainly mean too many husbands or wives. It can mean too many dishes, too many tires on the front lawn, too many trash cans, too many arguments, too many, too many, too many, too many…..
And every aspect of “too many” has a financial consequence. Have you ever looked at the clutter in the back of your closet or in your bathroom cupboard and wondered how much you paid in dollars for all that stuff?
This brings me to a third aspect of my gladness about Melinda Beck’s article. Its placement in the WSJ brings up for consideration the economic ramifications of mindless munching in our culture.
Eating Disorders as an Economic Force
The existence of full blown eating disorders in an every increasing segment of our population brings prosperity to many industries.
Three Eating Disorder Areas of Purchasing Power
1. Diets:
Think of everything associated with diets: Pills – aka drug companies; Exercise – machines, health clubs, shoes, exercise fashion, designer water, walking meters, magazines, personal trainers, classes, lectures, tapes, cds and dvds; Books – diet book are almost always in the top ten bestseller lists
2. Binges
Think of what appeals to you when you are vulnerable to a binge experience: “Super size me” items in fast (and not so fast) food restaurants, Junk Food – what a huge industry. In a world where food that maintains life is becoming scarcer, we have industries pumping out non-nutritious and even dangerous consumables geared for mindless munching on a grand scale: candy, cookies, chips, sodas and items all sorts of edibles considered “munchies”.
3. Body Image Distortions and Concerns
Skeletal bodies held as a beauty standard which encourage endless obsession on achieving an unachievable body without surgery, starvation, and serious health risks that can be lethal.
Pandering to this obsession creates an endless array of items and services that can be and are purchased by women with eating disorders. Some of you will undergo surgeries of various kinds to add, remove or reshape body parts to achieve a look not achievable by a normal human body. And of course, drugs again come up as an aid to achieve a skeletal look.
Every item and service listed above involves buying, selling as part of huge industrial efforts.
I would very much like to see the Wall Street Journal present a well researched article that provides the financial consequences to our culture if eating disorders and all purchases that are part of living an eating disordered life, stopped. Where would our nation be without mindless munching?
Hope and Reality
I wish the world stood outside the consulting room waiting to greet with cheers the woman who emerges with more health and eating disorder recovery as she exits the healing sanctuary to take her full place in society.
The reality is that powerful cultural as well as personal challenges need to be confronted as you move on your eating disorder recovery path.
My hope is that true eating disorder recovery will stimulate and influence a cultural recovery. My hope is that someday we all can live mindfully and healthfully together in a culture that depends on each of us to be healthy and fully present human beings.
My determination now is to help women strengthen themselves to the point where they can recover from an eating disorder despite oppostional cultural pressures. In other words, it would be nice if we lived in a nicer world. But we don’t. And you can get better anyway.
Eating Disorder Recovery and Nourishing Your Right Hemisphere
Misunderstood Nourishment
Food is nourishment. This is an obvious fact. But eating disorders aren’t about nourishment, at least not nourishment for the body.
If you have an eating disorder you eat too much or too little or of types of food that provide little or no physical sustenance.
You know, and so much on the Internet repeats, that you eat or starve for emotional reasons, for soothing, for going numb. You eat or don’t eat in order to treat your body as if it were a thing whose shape and size you can control (or can’t control).
But what does using food this way actually mean? Why use food, which is supposed to sustain life, in a life destructive manner?
Suppose You Can Find Real Nourishment
Will you suppose with me?
Suppose you need nourishment of a kind you don’t recognize.
Suppose the right hemisphere of your brain, the source of intuitive awareness, emotional intelligence, creativity and emotional wisdom concerning self and others is neglected and ignored.
Suppose this half of your very existence is denied.
Suppose deep yearnings that come from this side of you are experienced as irrational, illogical, neurotic, childish, inefficient, and probably part of some anxiety problem.
Suppose then, you attempt to squelch all that yearning by overwhelming it with bingeing, purging, starving, compulsive eating activities that go along with an eating disorder.
Suppose you are substituting physical nourishment for the nourishment you actually need because you don’t know how to honor yearnings coming from your right hemisphere.
Granted, this is a lot of supposing.
But what if you were “looking for love in all the wrong places?”
A Personal Experiment in Nourishing Yourself
I propose, that as an experiment, you give some nourishment to your right hemisphere.
For starters, read some fairy tales. Go to the library or a bookstore and get the old unabridged as close to the original as possible versions. The Yellow Fairy Book is a nice place to start.
If you have one or more favorites from childhood, read them again with the adult mind you have now.
Read The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S.Lewis,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (the original version), by Lewis Carroll,
The Moonintrolls by Trove Jansson,
Peter Pan, by James Barry,
The Little Lame Prince by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (watch out on this one. The original is wonderful. The picture book and other new versions drain the story of its depth and significance).
Give your right brain some nourishment, some attention, some images and stories to sustain and strengthen you.
Read some poetry.
Walk slowly through an art museum and place your eyes in front of some master works. Even if you think you are not interested, give yourself this opportunity. Your left hemisphere may not be interested in art.
However, your eyes have access to both side of your brain and the nourishment from the art will get in to your right.
You might be surprised at your ability to be present in this world in a more expanded way when you give yourself the kind of nourishment you didn’t know you craved.
Dreams
Pay attention to your dreams, especially when you are giving your right brain the nourishment and images to speak through your dreams in ways you may more readily understand.
Keep a dream journal, and see what happens.
Eating Disorder Recovery
You may not know keys exist in your right hemisphere. They yearn to be used to open doors to your more full and complete life. If you nourish your right brain you have an opportunity to satisfy those yearnings you know so well.
Moving into recovery from an eating disorder doesn’t mean stopping the behaviors. It means learning to truly nourish yourself. It means shedding those eating disorder behaviors as the real, complete and self sustaining you emerges in the world.
Do I believe fairy tales and art can cure eating disorders? Of course not. Do I believe that all of you is worth nourishing well and that real nourishment is needed so false nourishment can be dropped. Yes, I do.
Bingeing on Eating Disorder Recovery (not a typo)
This title is not a typo. I don’t mean bingeing during recovery. I mean actually bingeing on the recovery process itself.
Fear and Hope
If you have an eating disorder you enter psychotherapy with fear and hope. You fear the loss of your eating disorder, and you fear that therapy won’t work to end your eating disorder.
You hope you will get rid of the burden of the eating disorder and you hope you will keep your life as it is so you will have access to the eating disorder when you need it.
Binge Method of Sabotage
One way to combine your fear and hope is to binge on getting well so that you sabotage your recovery. You do this by rushing into goal-oriented behaviors.
You have a list of positive goals that you tell yourself you will work to achieve, but you don’t get very far. This is the life of a person with an eating disorder. You know what you would like to be able to do or not do, but you cannot make those activities real and steady in your every day life.
Does this sound familiar?
Goals
Get adequate sleep.
Eat three meals a day.
Clean and organize home.
Get back to the gym or walk every day.
Get back to classes.
Stop all bad habits (booze, drugs, negative or abusive relationships, shop lifting, lying, postponing etc.).
Fix everything that is broken – clock, watch, car, windowpane, and chair leg.
Organize money and papers. Pay bills.
Clear out clutter.
Write apology and thank you notes.
Come out of isolation and be with people.
Be responsible at work or go back to work in a responsible way.
Start the project that is meaningful to you that you never really get into.
Bingeing on Recovery
Nothing is wrong with these goals. But bingeing on recovery involves sailing into action on all these goals immediately. You clear the decks and begin to set your life straight.
But you’ve only been in therapy for a week. You haven’t even established a solid relationship with your therapist yet. You haven’t healed any wounds or developed coping skills based on newly acquired strength.
You haven’t cleared your mind or your perceptions of the eating disorder distortions that affect your ability to think and make reasonable judgments. You are bingeing.
You are filled with hope and determination. You exhaust yourself with activity and frighten yourself by removing defenses.
Binge Aftermath
When your momentum, fueled by hope and fear, hurls you into a situation where you are more exposed and available to the world with which you cannot cope, you crash. (You always crash after a binge.)
Then you criticize yourself for failing. At the same time, you are home in the familiar zone of binge aftermath with your eating disorder intact.
You binged on your recovery. You feel miserable that you failed and relieved that you failed. That’s effective sabotage.
How to Understand
Nothing is wrong with that goal list. Nothing is wrong with you. You are using the skills, knowledge and energy you possess to move forward with your life and cooperate with the aims of your recovery.
But you are still governed by the force and the limitations of your eating disorder. You act out your symptoms with therapeutic goals as well as food.
Relationship with Your Psychotherapist
Your therapist will encourage you to take it easy, slow down, go gently into your work by being present for the therapy itself. Early in therapy you’ll most likely think that she is being easy on you.
You’ll think that she doesn’t understand how competent you are and how you have the ability to do these things. You’ll believe that she doesn’t appreciate how important these tasks are or the urgency involved in getting them done.
You may feel offended or angry or superior or all three, just as you do when anyone attempts to interrupt you in a binge.
Real Challenge in Beginning Recovery
Your challenge is to let yourself be present with this unknown person, this therapist and discover if he or she is trustworthy, is reliable, and is warm, caring and firm at the same time.
The first step in recovery is not to sail into all those goal tasks, but to develop an honest relationship with your therapist. Establishing that relationship will allow her to help you slow down your eating disorder momentum.
Focusing on showing up for your appointments and giving yourself a chance to have a relationship with your therapist will give your therapist a chance to help you.
Then you can believe her when she says, “You don’t have to do everything at once. In fact, you can’t. If you try you will only set yourself up to fail and then feel bad about yourself.”
If you can let her help you pace yourself in a reasonable way, something you can’t do if an eating disorder is running your life, you can drop the binge behavior and begin genuine recovery work.
A lot of learning happens when you discover you can binge on recovery.
Even more learning happens when you discover you can stop that binge and open yourself to genuine recovery.
(Related blog post, “Eating Disorder Recovery: Why “To Do Lists” Work and Don’t Work”)
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