A Rethink: Part Three
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
There are two words within the above quote that anchor the paradox: faith and discipline.
You need faith you will prevail and discipline to confront your reality. In fact, I would say that applying discipline to confronting your reality can feed your faith that you will prevail.
The reality of any eating disorder is daunting. It may take some time to surveil the breadth of its impact. And while I would argue that no two realities are entirely the same, there are some fairly universal blocks to knowing your reality with an eating disorder.
Modern culture denies you the reality of an eating disorder.
Its categorization as mental disorder (whichever discrete checklist might be used: anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, etc.) is a double-edged sword that may actively enable or disable attempts to achieve remission.
The dominance of binary and linear thinking in our modern world is antithetical to dealing with the reality of a complex condition within a complex dynamic system (your living being).
Symptom checklists are not diagnoses or disease classifications but they dominate modern medicine’s approach to complex conditions for which we have no sense of the underlying cause or causes. I will go into quite a bit of detail on this item in a later installment in this series.
Modern Culture
The avoidance of food (through frank starvation, cycles of starvation and recovery eating, compensatory behaviours such as exercise, moralizing the attributes of so-called good and bad foods and pursuing ‘optimal’ nutrition) is a class and race issue in our culture that has been misrepresented as a responsible pursuit of protecting one’s own health and wellbeing.
By far the most important protections for health and wellbeing are baked into wealth, class and race. However, capitalism and viewing oneself as a unit of productive worth, is better suited to having us emphasize individual responsibility rather than look too closely at wealth inequality and determinants of health that require a societal level of commitment to change.
If your avoidance of food has resulted in behaviours and a body worthy of admiration and compliments, then it is exceedingly difficult to reject that reinforcement as illusory.
If your avoidance has not resulted in behaviours and a body worthy of admiration and compliments, then it is exceedingly difficult to reject that rejection as illusory.
That’s right – it’s a block either way.
The reality of an eating disorder is internally unrelenting, punitive and cruel. When modern culture commends you for the outer attractive veneer of that inner cruelty, you are hard pressed to reject the accepted wisdom of the masses. You doubt your own suffering reality in favour of the masses assuring you that you are worthy of envy and appreciation.
As starvation is not sustainable, we also know that most with anorexia shift to cycles of compensatory eating because the body is looking to push you to stay alive. Once in that phase, then shame is part and parcel of trying to return to unrelenting restriction. Punishing the so-called weakness of eating is the trap of doubling down on the tenets of modern culture: the desirable behaviours and outward acceptable veneer of health and wellbeing do not include eating a bag of Cheetos followed up by a tub of ice cream. And yet…
I had the good fortune to come across a piece of research recently where the researchers expressed real surprise they got the result they did. They found that diets of healthy vegetables and the like actually ratcheted up the production of inulin and inflammatory responses for those with bowel disease. [Dietary fiber is a critical determinant of pathologic ILC2 responses and intestinal inflammation]. For a good breakdown of what the significance of these findings encompass, check out this Twitter thread for a full explanation.
I have always noted anecdotally that people with quite different chronic conditions (lupus, MS, ME/CFS, now long Covid, IBS, eating disorders, etc.) all fare much better on ultra-processed ‘non’ foods than on the assumed “healthy” diets filled with vegetables and fruits.
Many of these chronic conditions have energy function issues and lower energy output is required from the body to extract the energy from ultra-processed foods when compared to cooked, and most particularly raw, foods.
But dogma and groupthink are powerful forces for all human beings. While our heroes in all our stories tend to be mavericks who refuse to bow to peer pressure and change the world for the better, in everyday real life being a “hero” is alienating, isolating and threatening to one’s very health and life.
For the vast majority, going along with the crowd is usually the way to go and it ensures your wellbeing and very existence. But sometimes throughout history, both on macro and micro levels, going against the crowd was the only way to survive. Not only that, if you are in the minority, you can often only thrive when you refuse to go along with the crowd
Bottom line: you cannot survive an eating disorder while going along with modern culture’s dominant belief system that a) you can only be healthy when exercising and eating “right” (read: moralizing of nourishment in categories of good to bad), and b) that bodies of a certain circumference and weight embody health, while those outside the parameters embody disease.
If you have an eating disorder, you are already a body with disease and the rules for the majority can no longer apply to you. Moving past the first block is to reject the modern culture followed by the majority from here on out.
