Hunger
This week I had an epiphany... (Which I am putting behind a cut. Don't click if you don't want to hear me babble about emotions,food and obesity. This is likely to be controversial).
To put this epiphany in context for new people to my journal, I used to be obese. About 60 lbs heavier than right now.
I was watching someone at the office who I would describe as morbidly obese eating breakfast and it suddenly occurred to me that this person was absolutely starving. And the contrast of seeing someone who was over 100 lbs overweight shoveling food into their mouth like they had not eaten in a week made me realize: What this person was starving for was the most important thing on the planet for them, but they did not realize that it wasn't food.
It was so simple, and so congruent with my own experience of the world that my jaw literally dropped.
Then I read a short explanation of a poem about fasting on the poetry chaikhana blog that dovetailed nicely with this epiphany. Relevant point quoted:
"With a little practice, you discover that what we often assume is physical hunger is actually mental hunger. For well-fed Westerners, it can take days, literally days, for true physical hunger to arise. The hunger we feel when we miss a couple of meals is really just mental habit, the reflexive desire to use food in order to regulate consciousness and control emotion." -Ivan M. Granger
The reason I was obese was complicated, but also simple.
1) No one ever taught me to eat or I really wasn't listening. Weight watchers solved that once I wanted to start to learn.
2) No one ever taught me the value of regular exercise, or I really wasn't listening. Self motivation and the gym taught me that.
3) I was using food to fill the hunger inside of me, except what I was hungering for was healing from childhood sexual trauma, it wasn't food.
I suddenly understood this week that hunger is a broader physical sensation than we realize. That the hunger for personal safety or emotional fulfillment, or love, or healing, or control, can manifest in the body in such a way that the body mistakes it as a frantic signal for food.
Every book on weight loss out there talks about the importance of diet and exercise. Generally these books are split into two parts, the food part and the exercise part. The emotional part, the 3rd leg of the weight loss stool as I call it, is either left out entirely, or relegated to a paragraph where the reader is encouraged to "understand why they overeat".
"Understand why they..." WTF people? I could write a bible length book on this topic, and I'm not a LISCW. YEs, it's a simple and true statement, but there is an immensely long personal and painful journey each person needs to make to get to the root of "why they over eat" and a healing modality that is not practiced and not honored in our society in order to do it. You ever seen your health plan require talk therapy when you sign up with Weight Watchers?
The diet and weight loss coupling is not enough to save the people who really need the help. It only helps people who have problems with 1) and/or 2) on my list above. If they are morbidly obese I can guess that in about 90% of those cases, 1 and 2 might be a factor, but 3 is the core of the problem.
And I thought: well crap. I need to write this book... and since I am someone with absolutely no credentials on this topic no one will ever, ever publish it.
To put this epiphany in context for new people to my journal, I used to be obese. About 60 lbs heavier than right now.
I was watching someone at the office who I would describe as morbidly obese eating breakfast and it suddenly occurred to me that this person was absolutely starving. And the contrast of seeing someone who was over 100 lbs overweight shoveling food into their mouth like they had not eaten in a week made me realize: What this person was starving for was the most important thing on the planet for them, but they did not realize that it wasn't food.
It was so simple, and so congruent with my own experience of the world that my jaw literally dropped.
Then I read a short explanation of a poem about fasting on the poetry chaikhana blog that dovetailed nicely with this epiphany. Relevant point quoted:
"With a little practice, you discover that what we often assume is physical hunger is actually mental hunger. For well-fed Westerners, it can take days, literally days, for true physical hunger to arise. The hunger we feel when we miss a couple of meals is really just mental habit, the reflexive desire to use food in order to regulate consciousness and control emotion." -Ivan M. Granger
The reason I was obese was complicated, but also simple.
1) No one ever taught me to eat or I really wasn't listening. Weight watchers solved that once I wanted to start to learn.
2) No one ever taught me the value of regular exercise, or I really wasn't listening. Self motivation and the gym taught me that.
3) I was using food to fill the hunger inside of me, except what I was hungering for was healing from childhood sexual trauma, it wasn't food.
I suddenly understood this week that hunger is a broader physical sensation than we realize. That the hunger for personal safety or emotional fulfillment, or love, or healing, or control, can manifest in the body in such a way that the body mistakes it as a frantic signal for food.
Every book on weight loss out there talks about the importance of diet and exercise. Generally these books are split into two parts, the food part and the exercise part. The emotional part, the 3rd leg of the weight loss stool as I call it, is either left out entirely, or relegated to a paragraph where the reader is encouraged to "understand why they overeat".
"Understand why they..." WTF people? I could write a bible length book on this topic, and I'm not a LISCW. YEs, it's a simple and true statement, but there is an immensely long personal and painful journey each person needs to make to get to the root of "why they over eat" and a healing modality that is not practiced and not honored in our society in order to do it. You ever seen your health plan require talk therapy when you sign up with Weight Watchers?
The diet and weight loss coupling is not enough to save the people who really need the help. It only helps people who have problems with 1) and/or 2) on my list above. If they are morbidly obese I can guess that in about 90% of those cases, 1 and 2 might be a factor, but 3 is the core of the problem.
And I thought: well crap. I need to write this book... and since I am someone with absolutely no credentials on this topic no one will ever, ever publish it.