Food Is: Control

Although I was not able to be present at this week's class due to a conflict with my clinical schedule, the topic of Disordered Eating and the assigned readings struck a chord with me: the idea of food being a means of control. When I was 14 and 15, I had a very unhealthy relationship with food, and displayed many anorexic and orhorexic behaviors. I remember trying a few pilates videos the summer before I started 8th grade, and soon displaying obsessive behaviors of doing multiple videos a day, and restricting myself to a 1200 calorie diet. Though I was a healthy weight for an adolescent girl to begin with, I remember weighing myself daily in fear that I would have any increase in weight. At my lowest weight, I was 103 lbs and 5'5''.

But more than any memory of the physical hunger I put myself through, I remember distinctly the obsessive thoughts I constantly had about food; doing mental math throughout the day to painstakingly track my calorie consumption, and the fear, panic, and shame I would feel if I ate more than about 1400 calories. The idea of going out to eat and choosing whatever sounded good to me was incomprehensible. Having friends or family suggest going out to eat with short notice gave me anxiety. For my parent's part, they never contributed to or provoked these unhealthy behaviors, but they also didn't really do anything to put a stop to them. I think they were unsure of how to handle the situation, and didn't want to damage their relationship with their teenage daughter by policing my behavior. In retrospect, it was really necessary given the situation.

While the readings Dr. Craighead assigned focused more on unhealthy behaviors and mindsets when dieting to lose excess weight, the commentary on emotions and their effect on eating behavior jumped out at me. The authors describe emotional overeating as a behavior that happens as a maladaptive response to negative emotions. Overeating acts as a method of  Experiental Avoidance, suppressing and numbing negative emotions as a way of trying to control one's thoughts and feelings. I think that this same concept can relate to disordered eating behaviors of deprivation. Personally, I think that my struggle with disordered eating was a way of trying to assert control over feelings of anxiety that I'm now know conscious of, and that I'll continue to work on managing in healthy ways for the rest of my life. As a teenager, however, I think I lacked the ability to identify these emotions and manage them in a healthy way. It was difficult to change my behaviors when they gave me feelings of internal control and power that I otherwise didn't know how to achieve.

I'd like to say that those two years were the only time I experienced those behaviors, but I have had occasional relapses of disordered eating, always associated with exacerbations in anxiety level. I feel like disordered eating behaviors are like cold sores- while they may go away with time, you never know when a stressor will again bring them to the surface. As the authors suggest, and what I've found to be true myself, is that the best thing a person can do is cultivate mindfulness about the relationship between their emotions and eating behaviors, and to work on choosing healthy ways of dealing with negative emotions that don't involve eating.