Clapped

Time after time over the years I have wondered, whenever I hear, usually a white middle/upper class girl/woman say of anorexia, binge/purge etc., stuff (exactly) like;

...it became a coping mechanism.... a safety valve, a way to comfort and forget..

They call it an "illness", currently insist it is "a serious mental health condition" and so on. I just assumed it was a cultural mode of expression. I have never related, nor found it particularly convincing, but what was, was that these people really want to keep saying this. Okay. I am not every woman. The problem came when this particular stripe of womanhood decided that they could impose this as the universal human standard, regardless of whether it is alienatingly meaningless or not.

That's a problem.

To me, eating or hunger disorders, over and above spontaneous development, are some of the consequences of inducing weight loss via calorie restriction. This leads the body to react and adapt to this triggering if it's sufficiently persistent. It is this adaptation that takes the triggering from voluntary to involuntary status. Where it can't just be stopped, some or all of it has to be dismantled to break the dynamic or cycle.

I exclaimed loudly when I came across this;

Bruch has proposed that eating disorders (obesity and anorexia nervosa) are caused by an inability to differentiate between bodily sensations and emotional states. 

Floored.

Obese persons are viewed as having a faulty awareness of physiological hunger, so that emotional states are mislabelled as hunger; this leads to an excessive intake of food.

Wow.

Schachter's theory consists of two hypotheses. The 'external hypothesis' states: ....there is growing reason to suspect that the eating behaviour of the obese is relatively unrelated to any internal gut state, but is, in large part, under external control; that is, eating behaviour is initiated and terminated by stimuli external to the organism. 

His 'internal hypothesis' states: The relationships are quite the reverse for the normal subject; his eating behaviour seems directly linked to an internal state but relatively unaffected by the external circumstances surrounding the eating routine and ritual.

~"The Experimental Psychology of Obesity" Orland W. Wooley, Susan C. Wooley

There it is.

This is what people keep repeating, this is what 'binge eaters' want in on. All this self-declamatory insistence was the product of someone's hypothesising. I'm beginning to wonder if anything people say in this area is a more or less direct report and reading of their experience.

This never occurred, so heartfelt and emphatic are people. You must explain your experience this way, you're experience will be explained to you this way. Everywhere you go people up to the most virulent trolls, concerned and not voice this sentiment.

You cannot escape it, it is the lore, you must be; "eating your feelings" or "eating for comfort". Well here, it, is. Emotional eating, comfort eating. Here's the root.

Suffice to say, I'm no more impressed than before, but at least I have a better sense of the why.