It feels silly to even be thinking about this when I feel so fat and ugly, and so far from being able to lose weight, but this is probably the right time: because I’m not losing weight, and I’m not making progress with Intuitive Eating, and I’m not sure why. I’ve noticed that when I get to those moments where I could stop eating or keep going, a lot of fears come up, and that’s part of what makes me choose to continue eating.
One of my fears is that even if I lose weight, nothing else in my life will change; nothing else in my body will change, so I’ll still be sick and tired and in pain, and nothing else in my mind will change, either. And if that’s what I’m thinking when I’m trying to decide whether or not it’s worth it to eat the last few bites of something, no wonder I choose the momentary feeling of relief that comes with eating, instead of the fear that I will never feel any relief at all.
Another fear I’m aware of is that eating less food will lead to depression. I rely heavily on food to make up for the happiness hormones I don’t have in my body (and that my antidepressants can’t seem to completely make up for), and I’m afraid that eating less will mean feeling worse. But I don’t understand why I feel quite so wretched and impatient and frightened and hopeless over just a few more bites of food.
My theory is that, maybe, food has been the secret to shutting off a lot of uncomfortable feelings that I haven’t wanted to feel, and if I eat even a little bit less they will all come rushing back; I will be swamped by loneliness, and impatience, and so much more, like a sleeping giant that I have been drugging into a stupor for years.
When I check in with myself during a meal I feel uncomfortable in my body, but most of all I hear this crowd of inarticulate mush in my head that I can’t identify, and I can’t tolerate sitting with those thoughts and feelings long enough to figure out what they really are, let alone to manage them.
All of this makes it sound, to me, as if I should keep eating the way I’ve been eating, because if I stop I will be in hell.
But what about all of the uncomfortable feelings that food doesn’t get rid of, and what about the discomfort that eating too much actually causes itself? And what about the idea that feeling these feelings could give me a chance to heal the wounds that created them in the first place?
Except, my brain is so programmed to believe that food is the answer to everything, that even when food doesn’t help I can’t quite believe it. In science I think they’d call that a confirmation bias.
So I tried to figure out which emotions might be part of the big inarticulate mush I’ve been avoiding, in the hopes that starting to identify the specific emotions could make them more bearable.
Shame is one of the biggest feelings I try to mute with food. I feel it like a heat in my belly, and I felt it most acutely when I was skinny, especially as a teenager. Eating didn’t resolve the feelings of shame in the moment, but as I gained weight the shame started to quiet down.
Anxiety is another big one. Anxiety makes me feel as if everything in my body is in the wrong place: my belly is in my heart and my shoulders are at my knees. Also, I feel sped up, even manic, like I’m jumping out of my skin, and if I eat something I can start to feel more grounded. There are often times when I can write through, or exercise through, a bout of anxiety, but first I have to eat something so that I can even think about a better way to handle it.
Helplessness and hopelessness bring on an on-the-edge-of-tears feeling, in my throat and behind my eyes, and sometimes an overall body shivering, and food seems to settle my body down, even if it can’t relieve the underlying hurt.
Disappointment, or feeling like a failure, feels like an overwhelming emptiness in my belly, which is probably why it seems so much like hunger to me.
Loneliness often leads to eating too, because food is like a good friend who knows me and knows what I need without having to ask. When I feel really lonely, the feeling of disconnection is inside of me and makes it impossible for me to connect with other people, but food starts to help me feel reconnected to myself, which is at least a place to start.
These are the emotions I can identify, but I think there must be so much more that I’m keeping on mute, because I just can’t figure out how to eat less, no matter how hard I try and no matter how many writing/thinking/eating/breathing exercises I put in place. It’s not even that I eat so much; it’s that what I eat, and when I eat, and how I choose what to eat is determined by the need to mute those unbearable emotions, instead of by physical hunger. And until I can feel my physical hunger, and not confuse it with all of these other feelings in my body, I can’t figure out how much I really need to eat and how much is too much. No wonder I felt safer being on a diet for so many years, with someone else to tell me what to eat and what not to eat. As long as they did the thinking for me, I didn’t have to listen to the thoughts in my own head around food, and even if I didn’t lose weight from those diets, at least I felt safer. From myself.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 