Recovery from Overeating - Overeating Recovery

Written by HealthyPlace.com Staff Writer

Blue: How can I feel my feelings, when I don't even know what feelings I'm hiding from? When I binge, I don't necessarily know why I'm doing it. I mean, it's easy to understand if you have a fight with your spouse, or a bad day at work, or any other obvious reason.

Joanna: You can't know in advance, and you don't have to know.

Your feelings and your associations are being remembered and expressed through your body. So first we get in touch with the body and bear what the experience is. Often we (and I say we, because this is a human experience not exclusive to people with eating disorders) feel something, and then use our clever minds to try to come up with a reason, a local external reason for our experience. It makes us feel in control. It also makes us feel hopeful. If we know that it's 'his" or 'her' or 'it's' fault, we can do something to make the problem stop. Often this kind of thinking doesn't work and just creates more problems.

So again and again, the healing effort goes into postponing, waiting, being still, staying with whatever we feel until eventually it passes or we get a helpful association to bring to our therapist to work on.

dr2b: Do you feel that there are truly "trigger" foods, and that you (like an alcoholic) must totally abstain from them?

Joanna: Healing from eating disorders proceeds in stages. Not systematic, planned, controlled stages. Not stages where anyone could criticize themselves for skipping stages or going out of order, but stages nonetheless. Someone in early eating disorder recovery is often quite terrified. She or he can feel that the eating disorder is just waiting to jump out at any time and take over. So certain foods that have been classic binge foods are emotionally loaded.

Also, going back to a previous question, the physicality of the binge food, the way it feels in the mouth going down, the taste, the consistency, are all familiar physical sensations that can invite a person back into old habits. So early on it's probably a very good idea to avoid binge foods. But, at some later time, we want to revisit those foods. Not because you have to eat them. You could probably live your life without ever eating those particular foods again. But, wouldn't it be nice to get the fear out of the association, so you eat or don't eat something out of choice and not out of fear?

So when you are ready to experiment, to tiptoe back to those old scary places, like a child grown older who is looking in what used to be a scary closet, you do. You take the fear out.

Healing is freeing. It's very nice to discover that you can live as a free person. It's nice to know that you can choose based on your own deep authentic feelings and desires.

debpop: Sometimes I eat and the food tastes so good. I could be stressed or not, but I end up eating more than I need to. I know when I am full but I feel I can't stop. How can I stop?

Joanna: You are saying that you are experiencing a rich experience of pleasure while eating. I wonder where else you experience pleasure? The good feeling from eating is comforting, good company, fun, entertaining. Where else in your life can you have those experiences?

If your choices are limited, it's only natural that you would want to get as much as you can from what you do have available, i.e. delicious food.

I invite you to think about putting more pleasure in your life that takes other forms. Then we would find out if you would choose food over these other ways of enriching your experience

David: I'm assuming that recovery takes a lot of hard work. What are the benefits someone will derive being able to stop overeating?

Joanna: A new and amazing world opens up and you can run and play and work and love in it. When you stop overeating you start feeling what you could not feel. At first you feel some pretty difficult emotions. But... once you are able to feel those, you also start to feel other kinds of feelings, wonderful feelings that were buried and numbed along with the pain.

These feelings, all of them, help you choose people, places, things, ideas, activities, that are directly related to what you genuinely care about, now that you are capable of genuinely caring. Can you imagine the difference this means to someone's life?

• What if the people in your life were people you really wanted to be with?
• What if you were eager to go to work?
• What if you were eager to be at home?
• What if you experienced joy at being with yourself?

And, of course, there are health benefits. You'll live longer and healthier. In my personal opinion, there is no beauty treatment that compares to health and joy. And that comes with healing.

David: So many times Joanna, well-meaning people will say to the overeater: "all you have to do is not eat all the time." But we know it's not that simple. What makes it so difficult to stop overeating?

Joanna: When we are babies we are pretty helpless. We have two abilities that are essential to survive. We can cry, and let our caretakers know we are in distress. We can suck, to take in nourishment. So eating, taking in nourishment, hooks into the very basic feelings of survival.

There is a powerful biological imperative to continue the individual life and the species that goes far beyond any emotional or intellectual decision of our adult lives. When we eat to numb ourselves we are eating to protect ourselves from feelings we cannot bear. That means that we believe in an unconscious and primitive way that we will die if we feel those feelings. So we are back in that early stage where we are taking in nourishment so we will stay alive.

This is extremely powerful. It's why recovery takes time. It's why trust and developing trust in stages, as it is earned, is so crucial in recovery. A person will feel (even though their mind says differently) that they will die if they stop overeating. This is why people in recovery develop courage. It truly does take courage to heal.

David: Thank you Joanna for being our guest tonight and for sharing this information with us. And to those in the audience, thank you for coming and participating. I hope you found it helpful. We have a very large Eating Disorders community here at HealthyPlace.com. You will always find people interacting with various sites.

Joanna: Good-bye all. It was a pleasure for me to speak with you tonight. Thank you for your wonderful participation.

David: Good night everyone.

Disclaimer: We are not recommending or endorsing any of the suggestions of our guest. In fact, we strongly encourage you to talk over any therapies, remedies or suggestions with your doctor BEFORE you implement them or make any changes in your treatment.

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