Mothering and Recovery One
A reader submitted a request to have a post on the experience of being a mother and applying restriction of food as a form of stress management, or stress relief. And when I say “restriction of food” this always encompasses all the compensatory behaviours around food: exercise, attention to so-called healthy, natural, raw, or clean eating, so-called binges, purges, and/or delaying or lowering food intake through the use of alcohol or other prescription and non-prescription substances.
First up, I highly recommend Kerrie Baldwin’s memoir: I, Dragonfly. Kerrie navigated her recovery effort while caring for her three young children. Sometimes nothing is more helpful than to read about someone in a similar circumstance who prevailed and in what ways they were able to be successful.
I’m going to approach this topic as follows and it will be a multi-part series:
Does restriction of food (and compensatory behaviours around that) reduce stress?
The entanglement of stress management and eating disorder behaviours.
Grand unifying themes
Techniques to decouple the sense that stress is managed or eased when food is avoided (or compensatory behaviours are implemented to try to lessen the energy value of the food being consumed).
Does Restriction Reduce Stress?
Let’s address up front whether restriction is a stress alleviation technique. When anyone fasts, the level of glucocorticoids rises in the body. [1] And the same is true for those with active eating disorders. [2] Glucocorticoids are our stress hormones and when their levels rise the body this is a stressed state. When we fast, there is also a significant rise in orexigenic hormones (those driving us to re-energize and eat).
However, there’s subtext to the impacts of restriction as it also results in: “decreased regional cerebral blood flow in a distinct brain network of prefrontal, emotional, reward, motivation, sensory and homeostatic regions.” [3] Rephrasing that, starvation results in dulled and dysregulated thoughts, emotions and motivation.
For those with no history of eating disorders, the combination of this altered brain function along with the need to re-feed is not experienced as a pleasant or calm state. However, for those with active or in-remission eating disorders, it all tends to feel more comfortable despite the fact that the same orexigenic hormones are still urgently signalling the need to re-energize and feed.
In a biological sense, restriction of food does not remediate or alleviate stress for anyone.
Intermittent Fasting
Intermittent fasting is a very trendy approach these days for losing weight, reversing fatness and ostensibly improving various biomarkers linked to ill health.
All the published studies confirming that intermittent fasting precipitates improved health are assessing specific hormone level results before and after intermittent fasting is initiated. The studies then presume that the appropriate lowering or raising of specific hormones reflects an improvement in overall health for the participants. I have already addressed the limitations of depending on biomarker results as a suitable replacement for clinical endpoints in the post Biomarkers. Biomarker screening (hormone level testing) is not synonymous with an overall robust and dynamic health status.
All of our hormones are overseen by our circadian rhythm—the clock genes— and those hormones all fluctuate within a range of slightly longer than a 24-hour period thanks to those clock genes. As a result, almost all biomarker screening captures a moment in time (at best perhaps two or three moments over a 24-hour period), and it never reflects those dynamic, fluctuating rhythms.
An excellent and recent review paper attempted to address the significant gaps in intermittent fasting research by honing in on the circadian impacts of fasting on hormones such as insulin, glucocorticoids and thyroid hormones. The bottom line is that the circadian impacts of intermittent fasting generate aberrations and anomalies for the rhythm and ranges of those hormones. [4]
If a mother with an eating disorder has developed a habit of not eating all day to attend without interruption to her children’s needs, that habit may be rationalized as one of managing stress, or perhaps even improving health outcomes overall, but biologically it is a highly stressed and dysregulated state to maintain.
Why then do those with a history of eating disorders persist in restrictive behaviours when nothing in the dysregulated biological rhythm and hormonal ranges they experience is distinct from those who have no history of an eating disorder?
While the persistence, or habit, of restriction has many facets, one compelling reason is that this altered-by-starvation brain function can render in intrusion of traumatic experiences more subdued and distant. I will discuss trauma in more depth in part two of this series.
Tradwives and Orthorexia
For those not familiar with the term, tradwives (short for traditional wives) are young women, usually very young millennials or generation Z (GenZ) in age range. They eschew having a career and keep their attention exclusively on the home and the raising of their children. They expect their husbands to function as head of the household and they hold their husbands responsible for the financial security of the family. It is important to distinguish between stay-at-home mothers and the #tradwife:
“What really sets the broadest definition of tradwives apart from other ‘housewives’ is that the movement is seen as revolving around modesty and ‘submission’ or ‘service’ to one’s husband, all the while sharing the lifestyle via social media. Within the understanding of some who identify as tradwives, a woman not only stays at home because she wants to be domestically focused, but because she, as a woman, must cater to and take care of her husband in these ways. This difference can be demonstrated by juxtaposing possible male roles within both of these family units. Stay-at-home dads are typically considered to complete the same tasks and, essentially, be interchangeable with a stay-at-home mom, which demonstrates that this ‘role’ is not reliant on, or dictated by, gender. However, this parallelism does not exist with the #tradwife understanding, as a #tradhusband would still inhabit the role of the “head of the household” and would not be found completing the same tasks that his wife does.”
I am not sure that tradwives exist too far beyond the confines of influencers in social media spaces. And ironically, the most high-profile of tradwives are definitely contributing significant financial support to the family while enacting traditional aesthetics in online settings like YouTube and Instagram. And many have nannies and additional behind-the-camera staff to support the forward-facing image of running the perfect home and raising the perfect children.
At its core this trend is still really an extension of “having it all,” just with the phrase “at home” tacked on the end. These social media tradwives are all svelt, beautiful, often orthorexic [6] and as rooted in production and consumption as any woman in the corporate world.
Black Tradwives
Tradwivery is present within the black community as well. It’s worth reading the entire article on this topic here but the trend within black communities is utterly distinct from a romanticized view of the 1950s housewife that underlies the tradwife trend in white communities:
“During chattel slavery, Black wives and mothers were not allowed the legal benefits of either marriage or parenthood, nor were they allowed the ability to stay home. During Jim Crow, many Black women were forced to work instead. In 1918, the City of Greenville, South Carolina issued an ordinance requiring Black women to work. “A number of complaints have come to members of the Council of Negro women who are not at work and who refuse employment when it is offered them, the result being that it is exceedingly difficult for families who need cooks and laundresses to get them,” reported the Greenville News in October 1918.”
While black women have never had an opportunity to be stay-at-home mothers, the overlap for black and white women seeking a tradwife life is the disillusionment with capitalism. The author of the above quoted article arrives at this conclusion for black women:
“The idea that Black women should aspire to traditional marriage as a way out of capitalist exhaustion is a deeply flawed one, as these are the same systems that excluded us, and now this feels like another means to control us. Our inclusion is also a tool of control, as traditional marriages are also dependent on capitalism and are institutions that can harm Black women.”
What Bela Kellogg Uncovered
Bela Kellogg is a journalist who did a 3-part exposé on tradwives in the Michigan Daily last year. In the third installment, she joined a Facebook group of tradwives because she wanted to get beyond the theatre of the big influencers of the trend such as Hannah Neeleman, Estee Williams, Nara Smith and others.
When she was admitted to the group, what she uncovered gets to my point within this long subsection:
“… I scrolled through the feed of the Tradwife Life for the first time and discovered that these women acted nothing like the legions of crazy Facebook moms, banded together by obsessions like breast milk, essential oils and silent letters…These Facebook tradwives don’t coalesce around the ideals of traditionalism, but instead the symptoms of it — the anxiety, the guilt, the fear and the resentment that come from embracing a way of life designed to subordinate women. In a vast majority of posts, these women reckon with their fiscal unworthiness, their apprehension to ask their husbands for help, their unfulfilling housework and their indignation at caring for their partners like mothers instead of wives…Facebook tradwives have internalized this spousal inequality as inadequacy. Namely, the comparisons these women draw between the cost of feminine and masculine labor serves no other purpose but to invalidate their suffering.”
Retreating into traditional spaces for white women, or claiming such spaces for previously excluded black women, are all attempts to find a space that resolves inequality, inadequacy and the dehumanization implicit in a global capitalist system.
Inequality, inadequacy, outright subjugation and dehumanization are all stressors. They are famously captured in the Whitehall Studies (I and II) spanning decades. [10] The Whitehall Studies looked at civil servants in Britain and found that morbidity and mortality outcomes were progressively worse the further down the hierarchy of employment one went.
People find all sorts of ways of trying to alleviate constant external stressors in their lives. For women, it might be to become a tradwife, or to divorce an incompatible partner, or to remain single, or childless, or to fast while the children are awake and needing attention, or to adhere to wine o’clock to unwind after work or when the children are in bed, or to use an anxiolytic medication, or weed, or sleep medication. Some options in that list are efforts to remove external, or potential external, stressors, while others are suppressing one’s own brain function to impede one’s ability to register the physical impacts of unremitting external stressors in life.
Part Two March 21.
Bini J, Parikh L, Lacadie C, Hwang JJ, Shah S, Rosenberg SB, Seo D, Lam K, Hamza M, De Aguiar RB, Constable T. Stress-level glucocorticoids increase fasting hunger and decrease cerebral blood flow in regions regulating eating. NeuroImage: Clinical. 2022 Jan 1;36:103202.
2.Thavaraputta S, Ungprasert P, Witchel SF, Fazeli PK. Anorexia nervosa and adrenal hormones: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Endocrinology. 2023 Sep;189(3):S65-74.
Bini J, Parikh L, Lacadie C, Hwang JJ, Shah S, Rosenberg SB, Seo D, Lam K, Hamza M, De Aguiar RB, Constable T. Stress-level glucocorticoids increase fasting hunger and decrease cerebral blood flow in regions regulating eating. NeuroImage: Clinical. 2022 Jan 1;36:103202.
Kim BH, Joo Y, Kim MS, Choe HK, Tong Q, Kwon O. Effects of intermittent fasting on the circulating levels and circadian rhythms of hormones. Endocrinology and Metabolism. 2021 Aug 27;36(4):745-56.
Sitler-Elbel FH. From Swiffers to Swastikas: How the# tradwife movement of conventional gender roles became synonymous with white supremacy.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2022/12/11161942/tiktok-black-tradwives-burnout-marriage-capitalism
ibid.
Marmot MG, Smith GD, Stansfeld S, Patel C, North F, Head J, White I, Brunner E, Feeney A. Health inequalities among British civil servants: the Whitehall II study. InStress and the Brain 2013 Oct 23 (pp. 61-67). Routledge.
