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.
Cultural Challenges to Eating Disorder Recovery
Challenging Cultural Messages
Our culture sends unhealthy messages to the public. We are told to buy things we don’t want or need. We are told to look a certain way which encourages us to buy products and services regardless of health consequences.
We are told to borrow so we can pay for products and services with money we don’t have. We are told what to want and how to look like what someone else wants regardless of our genuine personal values and beliefs.
Vulnerability to Negative Messages
Eventually, if you are vulnerable, lonely, frightened, insecure, laden with self-doubt mixed with naiveté you may succumb to these cultural messages.
If you have an eating disorder, you have succumbed far more than you realize because the eating disorder will create a distortion in your thinking and perception. You will be living a life dictated by cultural messages supported by economics and power rather than by the values of your authentic self.
Eating Disorder Recovery Despite Destructive Messages
Recovery from an eating disorder is difficult, arduous and requires commitment as well as time and resources. Add to that, the great challenge of rising up from under the barrage of cultural forces that encourage eating disorder symptoms, and you get a glimpse of the courage and stability required to get well.
If you are healthy you eat and drink what supports your life. You weigh the amount that allows you to be healthy, flexible, and strong, child bearing and long lived. You wear what feels and looks good to you and does not cause your body harm. You use your resources (like time, money, energy) in ways that sustain your life and do not deplete your reserves or cause you anxiety.
Finally, you invest yourself with full commitment into a life that honors your heart, your soul, your talents and gifts to live your life your way based on your authentic self.
In a life like that, contrary to many cultural dictates to women, an eating disorder cannot exist.
Things to Do During National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (or Anytime!)
1. Sign the National Eating Disorders Association’s Declaration of Independence from a Weight- Obsessed World to free yourself from the three D’s: Dieting, Drive for Thinness, and Body Dissatisfaction.
2. Celebrate Fearless Friday - A Day Without Dieting - and feel how empowering a diet-free day of self-acceptance can be!
3. Attend a workshop, presentation, lecture, or meeting in your community that will help you feel better about yourself. See the National Eating Disorders Association’s website, your local newspaper or campus calendar for events.
4. Use your voice to effect change: join the National Eating Disorders Association’s national media advocacy campaign to write letters of protest and praise to media, corporations and advertisers who promote negative or positive messages concerning body size, weight, dieting and eating disorders. Sign up via the web at www.NationalEatingDisorders.org.
5. Consciously choose to avoid making comments about other people or yourself on the basis of body size or shape.
6. Compliment someone else for a skill, talent, or characteristic they have that you appreciate. Remind yourself that a person’s value is not determined by their shape or size.
7. Enjoy your favorite meal without feelings of guilt or anxiety over calories and fat grams.
8. Donate your jeans and other old clothes that no longer fit your body comfortably to charity. Someone else will appreciate them, and you won’t have to worry about the way they fit anymore.
9. Start each morning by looking in the mirror and saying something nice about yourself out loud.
10. Put away or throw away your bathroom scale.
11. Look through magazines and newspapers, ripping out advertisements, photos and articles that promote negative feelings about weight, body image and food. Talk back to the TV when you see or hear an ad that makes you feel dissatisfied with your body.
12. Read a book that lifts your self-esteem, promotes positive body image, encourages healthy living or helps you overcome stereotypes about social standards of beauty.
13. If you know someone who is struggling with an eating disorder, take the time to reassure them of your friendship and support for their recovery process.
14. Throw out all of the diet products in your house.
15. Remind yourself and others that It’s What’s Inside That Counts!
16. Become a member of the National Eating Disorders Association and join the effort to create a world where self-esteem is not weighed in pounds on a scale. Visit www.NationalEatingDisorders.org or call (206) 382-3587 for more information.
Challenge yourself to pick at least one of these easy-to-do tasks during each day of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week!
© 2004 National Eating Disorders Association. Permission is granted to copy and reprint materials for
educational purposes only. National Eating Disorders Association must be cited and web address listed.
www.NationalEatingDisorders.org ???? Information and Referral Helpline: 800.931.2237
Personal Note
The bold face type in the NEDA list is my contribution. My original intention, in making what I considered key words stand out, was for ease in reading (or scanning as blog visitors often do). But as I look at the words in bold as a group I realize they make a kind of affirmation statement that goes beyond the specific tasks. They address the kind of inner and outer energy rallying and action steps that contribute so greatly to eating disorder revocery.
I invite you to take another look at the NEDA list and catch those words. You might even make a list of them and see how they fit with what might be helpful in your personal recovery program. A word or two might fill in a blank spot you didn’t know was there.
By all means, share with us on this blog your experience when you do any of these activities.
For me, and all of us in the eating disorder recovery professional community, every day is eating disorder awareness day. I’ve been a member and supporter of NEDA since its inception. I support the recovery of others. I don’t diet. I wear clothes that fit, and I have no diet products in the house.
Whoops. Last night I co-hosted a wonderful dinner party in my home for the UCLA program, Dinner with 12 Strangers. Undergraduates, graduate students and alumni (that’s my category) met in my home for a terrific evening. Somebody brought tall bottles of soda including a diet soda. A left over half bottle full is in my kitchen but is on its way out.
These diet products do slip in, don’t they?
(I think “whoops” belongs on the list. We need to catch our errors of oblivion and carelessness and correct them as soon as possible. That’s essential for keeping on track in eating disorder recovery.)
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
Miss America, Anorexia, Fear: Hiding in Plain Sight?
Support for Carrie’s Post Regarding Control
Carrie, on ED-Bites wrote an indignant response to what I consider a rather cavalier column about eating disorders in the New York Daily News.
Carrie said her own anorexia was based not on controlling weight or the external world but on controlling fear. I agree. Controlling everything a person possibly can control in an attempt to control what is uncontrollable I feel is at the root of most eating disorders.
When that point is acknowledged the discussion goes away from food, fashion, weight, appearance, and even beauty and sexuality.
How Fear Relates to Control Issues
The discussion then becomes centered around the questions, Why are growing numbers of women at increasingly younger ages afraid? What are they afraid of? Why do they feel that their fears are justified and that they have no way of protecting themselves except through eating disorders?
Addressing those questions takes courage and honesty. In my experience as a psychotherapist, the attempt at reaching answers to these questions is the beginning of genuine eating disorder recovery.
Fitting into what our culture defines as beautiful, even if that definition encompasses an unhealthy and dangerous physical condition, may well be protection women seek from their fears.
Moore and Manville Get It Wrong
The authors of the Daily News column, Dr. David Moore and Bill Manville, end their discussion on a victorious note. They describe proof of Kirsten Haglund’s victory over anorexia in terms of her becoming Miss America. Good grief. The woman found a great hiding place. She is the epitome of what our culture describes as beautiful.
Challenges for Miss America in Early Recovery
I commend Miss Haglund for her industry, her hard work, her outspokenness in terms of eating disorder recovery. I wish her every success possible in living a long and healthy life.
I hope she and supportive loving people around her acknowledge that she is 19 years old, only four years away from her past experience of severe anorexia and that achieving a high cultural standard of beauty and acceptance – an anorexic’s dream – does not represent recovery.
I hope she is alert to her inner challenges and is prepared to cherish and honor her healthy emotional and psychological developmental needs as her term of Miss America fades and she continues.
Thank you, Carrie, for bringing up this issue and for letting your honest sense of indignation come through to all of us.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
Does Advertising Affect Eating Disorders?
A recent Hubpages blog raised the question: Does advertising affect eating disorders?
In my opinion, much of current advertising promotes both tiny size fashion in clothes and huge portion size in food. It’s an impossible combination many people strive to integrate.
Cashing in on Symptoms of Illness
A person vulnerable to eating disorders will strive to come up with a solution that allows her (or him!) to fit into tiny clothes and eat huge portions of food at the same time. This person can become terribly ensnared by an eating disorder.
But something worse exists. Advertising that pushes people to be small and eat large supports eating disorder thinking and behavior. The continual onslaught of emaciation, body surgery, and diet publicity actually convinces many people that the lifestyle being portrayed is normal.
Such media portrayal validates starvation, cutting behaviors and binge and purge cycles. Plus, this portrayal can delay recovery work. If a person with an eating disorder is subjected to a barrage of images and messages celebrating the symptoms of her illness, she may believe she is living well and wisely and will not seek treatment.
This is a cultural phenomenon that is tragic. It contributes to people taking pride in their illness, proselytizing eating disorders, destroying their health, ruining relationships and, in far too many cases, shortening their lives.
I often ask myself, what would be the economic repercussions in this country if all eating disorders vanished? If everyone with an eating disorder suddenly became healthy what would happen to dollars?
For example, diet books, diet programs, unhealthy life styles, size zero clothes, various magazines, commercials, diet foods, junk foods, binge foods, fast foods and all their supportive staff and structure (models, photographers, accountants, designers, advertisers) would be out of business. I think the stock market would plunge and the economy would reel.
Mighty forces are in place that cater to eating disorders. You need strength, courage, support and deep personal commitment to rise through these forces to honor your recovery work.
What kind of influence does advertising and media portrayal of fashion, beauty and diet have on you? I welcome your thoughts and feelings.
Joanna Poppink, MFT, psychotherapist eating disorder specialist, Los Angeles, CA bulimia, anorexia, compulsive overeating recovery, www.poppink.com
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