Following is an article on the roots of binge eating by my good friend, Denise Seyler. Denise has offered me so many amazing thoughts and brilliant guidance that I would never have been exposed to had I never met her, and I am truly grateful to be exposed to her knowledge.
I hope that what she has written here resonates with you. My opinion is that what is behind binge eating, restrictive eating, and pretty much all modern habits, norms and standards of eating run very deep. This can be a dark and difficult road to navigate…we do need to start somewhere in order to gain a sense of what exactly is going on in our minds and in our hearts when we engage in self-destructive eating patterns, and all other forms of self-destructive patterns.
Denise gets to the heart of it here, I think. Read, enjoy, and let me know what you think! - Marlena
I think the most important thing to remember when it comes to binge eating is that we have to be compassionate with ourselves. Most people do suffer from some kind of disordered eating due to the way we’ve been trained to view food, our environment and the way we’ve been taught to systematically numb our emotions through the use of food, alcohol, drugs, and constant stimulation. We weren’t taught to listen to our bodies and to question authority figures. We were taught how to best serve an oppressive system, where becoming the norm is your job, your duty, your function and productivity is the number one goal. It’s no wonder that as a society we engage in such self-sabotaging behaviors since, in the short term, they feel like an escape, entertainment, a way to let loose and have fun. All addictive and harmful behavior that we partake in is, in my opinion, connected to a desire to destroy – to destroy the ugliness (the oppression) that we experience. What I believe happens along the way is that we start to feel an uneasiness, we start to feel anger, and we start to realize that something is not quite right. Something inside of us starts screaming and demanding for the truth because at some level we know that what we are being told about life just can’t be so. I think we start to get to a point where we recognize that we are compromising…compromising our vitality, our relationships, our whole existence. We know that something needs to change, we need to change, transform, create and feel life, become life. This is an extremely painful experience to go through.
What I have discovered with my own binge eating (which I do fall prey to from time to time) is that it provides me with a false sense of control because it is a behavior that I can always change, modify and turn into whatever I want. Although I may feel out of control while bingeing, another part of me feels satisfied because I am not feeling exposed, raw, or on the verge of breaking down. At the very least, it keeps me from dealing with the bigger societal issues that affect all of us such as racism, sexism, classism and all the other isims. Although I am continually trying to discover what feels right for me, to face the darkness and come out even stronger than before, sometimes it just feels too overwhelming and this is definitely a trigger for me. I am learning to recognize it for what it is.
I think what is most important is for us to realize that we are not the problem, we are not inadequate or inferior. Yes, we are responsible for our actions and fully capable of changing our reality, but we need to be patient with ourselves because we have suffered years of abuse from living in an oppressive system. We need to love ourselves and know that we are powerful beyond our dreams – that we can go within, face our fears, our pain, our utter desperation and fight – fight for ourselves and all of humanity.
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