A Babes battle with Binge Eating

For as long as I can remember I have had a troublesome relationship with food. The idea that food is simply consumed in order to nourish and sustain one, is foreign to me. This has been a great source of shame, guilt and self-loathing for me. I obsess over food, it is my first and greatest love and yet I am a prisoner. I think more about food than I do anything else. I plan my next meal. I fantasize about what I could eat and salivate at the thought of the delicious tastes entering my mouth. I spend most moments each day craving and thinking about chocolates, cheese and breads. I have been to a dietician, she did DNA testing and she attributed my problem to be associated with the heightened response triggered within my brain chemistry when I consume sugars. For me, when I eat sugar or refined carbs, the response is similar to that of a cocaine or heroin addict getting high. I have tried every magic pill that promises to take your appetite away, every new diet hack, to no avail. 

Before I go any further, I wish to clarify, I don’t believe a love of food is the problem here. In fact, I have thought many times about whether I would wish to be free of the passion for food and I wouldn’t. I derive a lot of pleasure from food. I celebrate life through indulging the senses. I would, however, love to direct this passion to healthier, more nourishing foods and to be able to master the elusive art of balance. I don’t want to suddenly wake up and hate chocolate. I just want to be one of those people who can eat a slab of chocolate and be content. I know that to those of you who don’t have a sweet tooth or who are lucky enough to find balance an easy and attainable goal, my aspirations may seem totally bizarre or dysfunctional. There are people who believe that no sugar should be consumed and that one chocolate is one too many, let alone a slab! Those same people would be horrified to learn that to someone like me, a slab of chocolate would be considered an accomplishment for which I would feel very proud of myself. 

It started when I was very young and my Mom or my Stepmom would reward me with a treat if I had behaved well or if I had been upset and had a bad day. For my Mother, chocolates were regarded as the cure for everything. If I was in a fight, she would suggest taking a chocolate to the other kid at school, in a bid to mend things. I suppose from then on, I realized that chocolate seemed to fix everything. At that stage, the repercussions of sugar dependency were not yet apparent. As I got a bit older and more body conscious, I learned that sugar could give me pimples. I suffered with acne at about the age of 12, so I tried persuading myself to resist. My Mom would buy my siblings or friends chocolates and then urge me not to have as  it was bad for my skin. I don’t remember her ever having been successful. In the end I always gave in to my cravings. As I got older, it became about weight gain. I began noticing the opposite sex and I believed that in order to gain any attention or interest from them, I had to be thin. As I wasn’t able to practice restraint, I sought out other tools to assist me. This involved binging on food and chocolates and then extreme exercise after. I would jump up and down for ages in the toilet cubicles after a meal at a restaurant. I remember going on a school tour and insisting on doing  jumps before bed after dinner had been consumed. It worked, I was skinny but  it stripped me of a lot of life enjoyment, and it was embarrassing. People  thought I was Fucking weird. My Stepmother picked up on my behavior and began to monitor me closely which didn’t  deter me, if anything, my behavior was fueled. I suppose that was due to the close link between eating disorders and control issues. As I entered High School I was ridiculed and bullied for being skinny. I soon realized that a little bit of extra weight might not be a bad thing. I then took up Athletics, discovered that I was extremely good at it and on the plus side it ensured that I was getting a great amount of exercise each day to burn up the food I was consuming. With time I became less anxious and more lax with regards to my standards of how thin I needed to be and I began putting on weight. I would enter into these cycles vasilitaing from being too thin, to being too curvy. Upon recognizing this I was always able to restrict myself a bit so that I could get back to an acceptable size.

I could continue with this story and talk about my gap year in London and how I spent four months there, essentially eating everything, realizing I had gained too much weight and flying back to South Africa but in the interest of getting to my point, I should fast track. At some point I discovered intermittent fasting and it was great. I would binge and fast, binge and fast and this seemed to work wonderfully when I was younger and not drinking(that’s another blog for another day), however since taking up boozing again, and entering my 30s my body has become less forgiving. It has become painfully apparent to me that I am a slave to food. I am an addict. Recently after a few weeks of overindulgence and having put on 4 kgs, I decided no more and began to enforce a two day fast. At the end of the second day, a hideous day and the onset of PMS, the cravings began. Ordinarily I would give in with little care or concern, because the fasting was keeping my weight at bay, but now I felt like I was losing control and believed that giving in to this urge for some food and chocolate would be detrimental to my weight. I decided to give in to the urges but to take 7 laxatives before, to hopefully counteract what I was doing. I  know better; laxatives don’t prevent the absorption of calories. I simply succeeded in losing sleep that night, due to frequent use of the toilet and spent the next day feeling the way one does after contracting a bug. I effectively lost water, nutrients and electrolytes. 

So now here we are and having not written for quite some time, I felt compelled to write about this, because after much reflection and discussion with many other women, I realize that this is actually a problem far more common than I had previously thought. I won’t speak on behalf of women around the world (although I definitely believe it’s prevalent), for the purposes of this blog I will focus on the women in South Africa. Very few South African women don’t have a love, hate relationship with food. They have all had some form of an eating disorder at some point in their life, have tried a range of diets, including the use of diet pills. Why is this the case? I believe that it might boil down to the following points:

1) An Imbalanced Root Chakra: We have 7 main chakras located at different regions of the body. Each chakra deals with different emotions and governs different organs in the body. The chakras are formed at different stages of our life. The root chakra based at the naval forms from conception through to the age of 7. These are regarded as the formative years. In order for us to grow and thrive as we should, we would ideally have two loving parents attending to our needs and who are emotionally and physically available and attentive to us. When this doesn’t happen (and it usually doesn’t simply because our parents are human), we develop unconscious fears. These fears, among many things, go on to affect our ability to healthily attach to another in a romantic relationship. This includes opening ourselves up to being vulnerable with another, establishing our independence and allowing for the formation of a secure bond. Imbalances in the root chakra typically stem from unconscious fears about safety. This includes our emotional and physical safety. The belief that we exist in an environment that we can survive and thrive in. Living in South Africa, we not only contend with emotional feelings of safety, we live in a country and are surrounded by a collective consciousness that is in a permanent state of fear. We aren’t able to safely walk the streets. We have to remain vigilant at all times. In South Africa a woman is murdered every three hours. This is, according to the World Health Organisation, more than five times higher than the global average. Even if you feel a lot safer than your average counterpart and are living in an enclosed estate, with 24/7 security, we don’t exist in silos. We are all a community of cells banded together, working together. We are all connected, biologically and energetically. We live in a community plagued by fear. Eating makes us feel safe, that is why one of the symptoms of root chakra imbalance are eating disorders .

2) The curse of the Millennial generation: Our parents and their parents… grew up in an era where pleasure and reward weren’t expected and they weren’t freely given either. Hard work was the norm and if you worked hard enough you would eventually receive some benefit for that work. 

Human beings and especially Women had less freedom. Nobody expected to be able to reach people the moment an urge arose. You didn’t  have endless options in the form of romantic partners, simply because there was far less accessibility. Technology wasn’t what it is today and there was no social media. Millennials are bombarded by external stimuli, making focusing on any one thing, increasingly challenging. We want instant gratification. If you are to research how an addict is to overcome addiction, the following remedies are commonly suggested; being present, the ability to sit with discomfort and pain, delaying gratification. Millennials are challenged by all three of the aforementioned remedies, those are not conditions, we are accustomed to.  

3)  Poorly functioning brain chemistry: The massive rise in technological advances and the pressure to grow with these advances and the expectation to be available and on the go 24/7 means that we have more stress than ever before. Chronic stress changes the chemicals in the brain, which modulate cognition and mood including serotonin. When we experience a dip in our serotonin levels our brain urges us to replace that serotonin and the quickest fix is refined carbs. Chronic stress has a shrinking effect on the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex offers an individual the capacity to exercise good judgment when presented with difficult life situations and focus our attention on one thing. It is responsible for the setting and achieving of goals. It manages impulse control and predicts the consequences of one’s actions. Further to that the Amygdala, which is connected to the prefrontal cortex, is vulnerable to stress-dependent disruptions in neural development. This makes us that much more vulnerable and ill-equipped to deal with stress. We then turn to sugars, to raise our dopamine levels and thus quickly alleviate the stress. This is a short term solution as excess sugar leads to poor gut health. Although serotonin is a brain neurotransmitter, it is estimated that 90 percent of the body’s serotonin is made in the digestive tract, so our poor gut health leads us to feel worse, more depressed than we were before, as a result we comfort eat and the cycle continues.

4) Poor nutrition: Fasting has many health benefits. It cleanses our body of toxins. When we fast, the body does not have its usual access to glucose, forcing the cells to resort to other means and materials to produce energy. As a result  the body begins gluconeogenesis, a natural process of producing its own sugar. During fasting, our basal metabolic rate (the amount of energy our bodies burn while resting) becomes more efficient, thereby lowering our heart rate and blood pressure. Fasting assists us in fighting free radicals. There is however a negative aspect to fasting. We may find ourselves starved of certain minerals and nutrients, disrupting our brain chemistry and leading us to want to binge on refined carbs for a boost of energy.  Having fasted we feel that we have earned it so we land up indulging in more junk  leading us to binge and fast all over again.

 5) Emotional Suppression: I am of the opinion that in the Western World, traits such as intuition, empathy and creativity are not regarded as highly or celebrated the way scientific reasoning, fact finding and logical application are. As a result we suppress many of our feelings and our intuition. Our intuition alerts us to circumstances that need to be changed like potential threats and danger and people that aren’t to be trusted. In modern day society one’s intuition is regarded as unreliable, and those who follow it  crazy. Your intuition will speak to you regardless of your efforts to ignore it. Emotions are necessary for similar reasons, they alert us to what our values are, what we need to change and the state of our physical well- being. A common behaviour associated with suppression of feelings is overeating in an attempt to numb, suppress and distract ourselves. If you are like me, then you might battle with feelings of empathy. I say battle because empathy is a wonderful trait but if one does not have boundaries you can land up feeling as though you have the world on your shoulder and when that becomes too much you may want to create additional insulation through eating.

I have read about the importance of staying present and remaining conscious when we wish to fight any addiction or compulsion. When we do so, we make decisions that are healthier and less attached to our ego or past traumas. Bad habits are formed through defective subconscious programming. In order to rewire that programming one has to consciously create new habits and stick to those habits for 21 days. I have heard that meditation using sounds designed to induce theta brainwaves, followed by positive affirmations also works well. I have never successfully managed 21 days of healthy eating. I have meditated with positive affirmations, I believe it may be helping. What we should not do is hate ourselves, reject and condemn the parts of us that we feel are bad, defective and not up to societal standards. Rejection and repression only seem to create a stronger beast. If we are to beat this beast, we need to do so with love.  As Jordan Peterson says, in his book, the 12 Rules for Life, an antidote to Chaos, “Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping”. We need to nurture and mother our little child within. That doesn’t mean starving ourselves or eating everything we can find, but rather giving ourselves the health and nutrition it needs to feel good and to thrive. If we need some ice cream after that, then that’s ok, just not the whole 2 litre tub. If we do eat the 2 litre tub then we simply forgive ourselves. Being human is hard. We just need to strive for tiny improvements every day. Today it’s a 2 litre tub, tomorrow it’s just 4 scoops- Voila, progress!