I met with a lovely student the other day.
He had just begun a new diet.
“I read this book”, he said…”and what I read made sense, and so I am doing it, but I am miserable and honestly I feel like I just got sucked back into trying to find a quick fix for my irregular eating. I can’t just keep starving myself and then bingeing, but being on a diet feels like walking through hell, too…”
I asked a bit about the foods he knows he enjoys, the foods he prefers.
The more we spoke about it, the clearer he got that the new diet he had chosen won’t work for him long term.
He disliked most of the foods on this diet plan, and many of them upset his stomach. “But I need more than just eating whatever to thrive, I am sure my body is needing some sort of structure…”
Being able to nourish yourself is set up on a complex, but understandable and predictable feedback loop. There are several distinct phases to each meal designed to follow each other.
However, if your interoceptive system (the system giving you signals about states of the body – such as feeling tired, or hungry, or fearful…) is busy processing the many overwhelming signals from previous and current events that you haven’t had a chance to digest (some of them traumatic, some just plain too much to deal with in a short time), it has no chance to give you the most accurate pertinent information about vital details regarding food.
When are you getting hungry? What are you hungry for? Can you decide, select, prepare, enjoy, digest, and be satisfied with your meal?
Every step from the decision to the completion and assimilation of your meal depends on your body communicating to you through sensations and emotions (we call these homeostatic emotions – thank you, Bud Graig!).
When the interoceptive system is overrun by giving you signals about processes that have nothing to do with eating (for example the guilt you feel after standing up for yourself), then we run into an obstacle.
This is where people notice wonderful and life-giving approaches like intuitive eating not working. In my personal healing journey as soon as I wasn’t on a structured diet I was either starving myself or overeating on foods I was scared of, not because my body couldn’t give me the right signals, but because they were silenced by other important signals.
No amount of body scanning and being mindful helped – I needed to get specific support for the traumatic imprints I was living with.
Once these loosened and enough of the old information was digested, I felt free to hear from my body.
It had been communicating all along.
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