Working With Eating Behavior

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Since in my main therapy my hands all the time do not reach to work with eating behavior and with normalizing weight, I went to a nutritionist who specializes in eating disorders. Today was the first session. This nutritionist was also recommended as a specialist in intuitive nutrition.

I agreed with myself that if I hear something about "eating more green vegetables", lists of recommended and prohibited foods, and other tips on how to urgently improve your diet for weight loss, as well as "keep a diary of everything you eat, and then I will criticize ", there will be no second session. As a result, not a sound was heard about vegetables, but you still have to record, just not the volumes and calories, but in what state, in what feelings the decision was made to eat, what were the thoughts, and where the food was consumed.

I described the highlights of my nutritional history. She grew up in a family where everyone had weight problems with a lack of knowledge about healthy eating and healthy weight loss. Eating disorders - no, have not heard. A small town in the deep Siberian boondocks. There is no Internet, of course. The library contains only collections of recipes from books about food. There is only one nutritionist in the whole city, and all he can do is put fat women on a diet of oats and rice so that they lose weight and become pregnant. He and me, an anorexic, put on this diet, because this is all that he could, as a specialist, offer.

Until 7 years old she was a thin child, after 7 she was always fat. At the age of 15, she decided to take the situation into her own hands, and in the absence of knowledge about how to do this, she brought herself to anorexia with subsequent bulimia. I then lost 50 kg in six months, my periods stopped, I lived on 500 calories a day. I didn't really know then how many calories a person needs, and the figure "500" seemed adequate. If I ate 600 calories instead of 500, I would go on a 24-hour dry fast. Plus daily dance classes, one to three different sessions. Six months later, the body said - that's enough. And bulimia began. Since then, my body does not tolerate two things: hunger and the feeling that the weight began to go away. In both cases, he gets hysterical and begins to sweep away everything that is not nailed down. I tried to lose weight correctly, with a bju, gym and nutrition 5 times a day, where in each meal there is the right combination of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. Tantrums in the body still happened, every kilogram 8. In the end, I realized that trying to control or regulate something costs myself more and left the body alone: eat what you want, as much as you want and when you want. Left to himself, for some reason known to him alone, he decides that for these six months we eat in moderation and almost do not feel hunger, and then we eat everything for a month and a half without stopping, and then again suddenly it seems to him that the food is - this is secondary, and therefore we will only eat twice a day and even then a little.

The nutritionist listened to my story and said a few things:

1) Bulimia - it's usually about trying to break free. And with all the understanding of the consequences, this is a "lesser and familiar evil" for the body and psyche, and the rest of the ways to cope are a continuous frightening unknown.

2) Bulimia slows down the metabolism. Also, they want bulimia with anorexia as a couple, and there is no one without the other.

3) Despite the fact that my brutal attempt to lose weight by starvation was a very long time ago, the body remembered it firmly and made conclusions for itself:

a) the hostess ignores weak and medium hunger signals, so you can get food from her only by stunning her in the head with hunger

b) the hostess cannot be trusted that she will not repeat that famine, so you need to take care of yourself in the only known way - to store more fat, and to replenish the reserves, suppress her with unbearable hunger, so that she dares more

c) when the hostess tries to restrict food at least in something, grab all the food that you can reach and shove into yourself until they have taken away

d) if more than 2 kg of weight was somehow stolen from us, immediately return them back and put another 1-2 on top in reserve.

4) Since I do not hear weak and medium signals of hunger and eat only when they are very loud, the body by that time has already freaked out, and from fear it will eat more than it needs. Therefore, my first steps are to eat every 3-4 hours, even if hunger is not felt.

5) Physiological overeating (from severe hunger) differs from psychological as "I eat, because the body really needs food" from "I eat from a feeling of psychological lack."

6) The decision "I'm going to eat" is not taken by someone alone inside, but by a group of internal comrades, which include experts in calorie content and food composition, experts on food culture, experts on hunger levels, experts on the nearest places where you can take food, and so on Further.

I asked her, but what about intuitive nutrition, can it help in my case? She said that first you need to fix your relationship with food and correct patterns of behavior in this area, in parallel with this, developing ways to cope with stress without food, and then you can master PI. In general, she voiced my own suspicions that PI does not work without therapy.

The nutritionist didn’t tell me anything that I didn’t already know and what I wouldn’t have guessed, but she structured all this information for me in such a way that I got a very clear picture out of the pieces.

And I suddenly understood my body and its eating behavior. Today, my attitude to the behavior of the body in this area could be described as "tired doom" - despite all the work done to establish contact with the body, to track states, to take care of it, it remained stubborn, intractable, bending its line in spite of everything. Didn't want to hear anything, didn't want any dialogue. Accepting and allowing him to be what it wants didn't work either. My hands dropped from powerlessness and despair. "Parental" such despair, with head banging against the wall and wringing of hands "Lord, why am I punished in the form of this body ?!"

But thanks to this session, the obvious suddenly dawned on me: my body is as traumatic as I am, showing all the signs of PTSD. As I! And we have a lot in common.

For example, I always carry a small screwdriver and small folding pliers with me, because a couple of times I really needed these things, but it was not at hand. Since then, it is very important for me that this situation and others like it does not happen again. People know me as a person who always has everything with him, from a screwdriver to pain reliever, gum, napkins, stain remover and extra charge for the phone. Every six months I try to unload my large cosmetic bag, but the screwdrivers and pliers are soon slipping back into it. In this, we are one-on-one with our bodies - we stock up, equip ourselves so that the bad does not happen again.

And I personally caused one of the biggest injuries to my body, the consequences of which are still being heard. Yes, it was all from not knowing how to do it right, etc. (insert any typical "parental" excuses), but the fact remains: I behaved towards him like a heartless rapist, and he has no reason to trust me. It, one might say, lives in the same state as a small child of a parent-rapist - there is nowhere to go, copes as best it can, lives in constant fear and loneliness. And I also kick him, as I was kicked in due time: "Well, what kind of child are you so different, why do you disappoint so much, what's wrong with you?", While I tried to cope with the trauma alone. And yet this area of the body does not understand the language of words, it only understands sensations and interaction through food, and I was waiting for him, damn it, a dialogue!

Bad, in general, I was the mistress of the body and a nightmare parent to him as part of my system. And now I will be doing the work to eliminate the consequences of the trauma and restore confidence.