Attached Eating?

My mom told me that when she gave birth to me, her firstborn, back in the early 60's, there was no real breastfeeding support in the general or medical community. Everyone believed in formula as the miracle food. She tried to breastfeed me nevertheless, but the conventional wisdom was that babies should be on a four-hour schedule. I screamed and screamed, and only later did she realize I must have been hungry all the time. The story was common in those days -- I believe this is why La Leche League was first formed -- her milk supply dried up and I went on formula, much to her regret and sorrow.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder whether this initial experience of deprivation led to some of my eating "issues" now. I have an active Scottish metabolism and I am fairly tall, so I am not overweight on the charts, but I've always struggled with what the Church calls "intemperance" -- not love for alcohol (I can take that or leave it) but just a general tendency towards excess in various ways -- but one way it shows up plainly is in eating habits. In the Myth of Laziness, Mel Levine calls it "insatiability", which I think is probably a secular psychological synonym. Some people struggle with it more than others. You crave more and more. It's all about "never enough", not really the joy of the experience itself. In fact, sometimes you cause yourself actual physical, mental and emotional pain trying to "get enough".

To counter that, I used to impose strict limits on myself and castigate myself for slip-ups. It didn't work, or it worked too well. I found myself on the wrong border of some very heavy-duty eating disorders. I struggled with anorexia during my teen years and after. St Augustine says that temperance with eating is one of the most difficult virtues because you HAVE to eat, no question. You have to moderate, not renounce; renunciation is easier in certain ways for a certain type of person. Well, I tried to renounce eating. He was right. It doesn't work. You have to confront yourself as a human creature with an appetite, a need for sustenance. Marriage and childbearing put a love and caregiving motive in the place of my fear/control pattern, and I was able with God's grace to move away from the scary side of self-denial.

More recently, I have tried not to do strict limits or castigation. This is one of the ways that our unschooling sabbatical forced me to confront some of my own personal challenges. Unschooling seeps into the rest of life, inevitably, as all serious things do. When I "deschooled" my eating habits, meaning that I tried to listen and follow mindfully rather than dismiss and control, at first I gained weight and struggled with all the interior messages I was in the habit of giving myself. But it was way worth it. I got a much clearer perspective on how I was using self-blame and impossible standards as an excuse for continuing in my set, ineffective habits. It can be a real vicious cycle.

I also came to grips with my expectations. Dr Phil, who I don't generally quote because I don't like him much, has a phrase called the "Get Real" weight. Like many people with anorexic tendencies, I have an ideal weight in mind which is probably about 15 pounds lower than a healthy mid-range weight. I have made a conscious decision to accept what's real. That doesn't mean lowering my standards. It means lining them up with truth, which is that there is no real need to have a 19 percent BMI. It sounds silly when I write that, but it's a battle I fight with myself regularly. It's like I think that if I'm dropping off the low end of the weight range charts, I can tell myself I've won the battle against my intemperance. Not so. Temperance is about habits in the service of love, not statistics.

I think there is also an emotional expectation. I found myself setting up some very rigorous eating systems that didn't suit my way of functioning at all. It is similar to homeschooling or to the spiritual life. It was a lightbulb moment for me when I realized you shouldn't stretch way out of your comfort range in your methods of addressing something that is intrinsically difficult for you. This applies to kids too! When something is difficult, do what you can to make it doable. Save the challenges for something that you are already coasting on. Helen has a nice hiking metaphor for homeschooling that expresses this truth, which to me applies across the board. Avoid injuring yourself~!

I'm not recommending unschooling, or dropping the diet, or navel-gazing, or being as weird as I am about weight charts when I don't put a lid on it. I'm not recommending anything at all, just sharing personal experience ( true confessions!). It has helped me to think of food cravings as simply expressions of my body and my emotions. Like a newborn, my body does not have a language except expressions of appetite. My mind, the adult in the picture, can patiently learn to listen and interpret the calls as real signals, and then can figure out what the cries are really asking for. I think LLL's emphasis on attachment mothering --"mothering through breastfeeding" -- has been a bit of a help to me here. When a baby is crying, it is expressing something real, but it needs help. It can't meet its needs on its own. It shouldn't have to. It shouldn't be punished for expressing its needs. It should have a commited older person to interpret its messages wisely with respect. That way, it can grow up trustfully, and not gain the false impression that virtue is about severity and misery. Though the parallel isn't exact, something similar could be said of our soul's attitude to our physical body.

Similarly, food cravings can be a displacement of strong emotions. It is difficult to deal with those emotions. Personally, I took it step by step, and made a commitment to see myself through many falls and backtracks. But backing off on the reflexive blame when I "failed" gave me a chance to see what was going on with my feelings, that was causing me to eat impulsively. Blame is a verdict -- it ends the analyzing process. It is a shortcut.

I really recommend Debra Waterhouse's books. They helped me think of my body's messages in a positive way, and figure out logistical ways to affirm that in a healthy manner. For instance, a craving for chocolate can mean a magnesium shortfall. Sometimes you feel hungry when you are dehydrated. And so on. The details differ from person to person and that is a great thing about the individual person -- she is unique, "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Waterhouse does not quote Scripture, but the message fits in with that theme).

You would think that validation means indulgence, but it does not seem to work that way, not in the long run. Distrusting or ignoring something real is not rational, when you think about it. It is like Uncle Andrew in the Narnia books ignoring the animals speaking to him because his preconception was that animals couldn't speak. After a while he had darkened his own understanding and really DID hear only barks and growls, and couldn't go back to hearing speech even if he tried. This is what I basically did to myself in regard to food in my teenage years and it took a long time to work out of it.

Another possible way to think about it is in terms of Celebrating Abundance . If I am feeling deprived -- hungry -- I can turn that over and look at the other side. Not in terms of restrictions but in terms of possibilities. It takes work for a melancholic temperament like me to do this, but it helps. I don't have to eat a whole pan of brownies. I can have a half of one. Or I can have a sandwich first and then have a brownie or two. Yes, I know that never sounds convincing, because I never find it convincing myself when I read it, but the attitude of abundance DOES seem to help my thinking. Because the mindset behind my " 'satiability", is not the joy of the experience, but a hunger to acquire and hold onto something comforting or pleasant. If I recognize that hunger as a separate one from physical hunger it is easier to address each one on its own.

Enough.... this is another one of those posts that I'm writing because I may need to read it again sometime. I know I'm probably not the only one thinking philosophically about food in the Easter Octave, after Lent! It's better than digging into those jellybeans in the closet; they were only 25 cents a pound at the store yesterday....

Some of my Catholic unschooling friends have a blog called Lean but not Mean! that is inspiring -- just in case you haven't seen it.