Food Doesn’t Have to Be a Four-Letter Word

Fat. It’s what many people tend to see in the mirror. Like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, people with eating disorders inhabit an alternate reality, perceiving themselves as "fun house" reflections sporting thunder thighs and prominent girth—even if this image holds nary a grain of truth.



The pressure to look good is no secret. Advertising especially targets prepubescent girls, hawking make-up and designer clothes. An Exeter University survey found that by the time they’re teens, more than half of all girls say their appearance is the prime concern of their lives.



Not every teen who diets to fit society’s definition of beautiful will develop an eating disorder. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders (ANAD), eating disorders are caused by a complex interaction of genetics, psychological issues, and social factors, such as a culture that promotes thinness above all else. Eating disorders are, however, an epidemic:







•Seven million women and one million men suffer from an eating disorder.

•86% are afflicted before they turn 20.

•Only 50% say that they’ve been cured.

How Has Food Become the Enemy?

Kim Chernin, author of The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity, calls it a cultural crisis: In our perpetual struggle to meet the Madison Avenue definition of beauty, we lose ourselves. It’s also a survival issue: Food, like shelter and love, is one of our most basic human needs. If we feel we have little control over anything else in our lives, at least we can control our bodies by starving them.



For many of us, with or without eating disorders, food is a stand-in for love. People who have grown up in dysfunctional families may eat to hide their loneliness and to ensure that love keeps a safe distance. One person we know began gaining weight as he began losing family members. By the time both of his parents and his older brother had died, he was more than 100 pounds overweight, with kitchen cabinets stockpiled against further pain.



Becoming our true selves is work, although it doesn’t have to be painful. Nor does food need to serve as a substitute for the nourishment we crave. Instead, food can be our medicine, as indigenous peoples use this word: that which heals us into wholeness.



Anita Johnston, PhD, author of Eating in the Light of the Moon, sees a spiritual and emotional hunger that women try to fill with food, when what they need is a strong connection to the feminine spirit. Johnston uses myth and storytelling to reconnect women to the natural rhythms of the Earth "that celebrate the power of women’s intuitive wisdom—a formidable gift that contemporary women often conceal or suppress (like the natural roundness of their bodies) in order to fit into society’s emphasis on the linear, rational, logical mind."



Rekindling Your Relationship with Food

If food is a four-letter word in your life, there is reason to hope for a new kind of relationship. Doing so requires us to separate our emotional and spiritual hungers that food cannot satisfy from the physiological experience of needing food as fuel for our bodies. Too often, however, these messages have become merged with one another—and the relationship we have with our own selves gets played out in the way we act with food.



Restoring a healthy relationship with food requires a great deal of support, both from friends and family as well as a skilled therapist and dietician who specialize in eating disorders. As Geneen Roth, author of Women, Food and God states, "Trying to heal your relationship with food without support is like standing on the edge of the water during a tsunami and saying "bring it on." Hopefully, you wouldn’t expect that from yourself!



Your therapist can aid you in recognizing what you are expressing in your relationship with food. In addition, a dietician specializing in eating disorders can support you in developing healthier eating habits that support your new relationship with food. Asking for help is the first step towards acknowledging your own needs for the life you want and deserve.



The Athena Center provides psychotherapy services and treatment in eating disorders, depression and anxiety in individual and group therapy. New to the center is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), an evidenced based psychotherapy technique shown to be effective for the treatment of trauma and psychological stress.