closet-keys:

heavyweightheart:

when we breathe heavily after, say, holding our breath underwater, we don’t call that breathing “compulsive”. we don’t say we’re “overbreathing”.

when we nap bc we got 4 hours of sleep the night before, we don’t see that compensatory act as something pathological. we think, “my body didn’t get the amount of sleep it needs and now it’s making up for it”

but we will restrict our food intake as much as we can for as long as we can, and when the reactive eating inevitably comes, we call it “bingeing” or “compulsive overeating”, instead of seeing it (as w the other functions) as a biological drive to meet one of our bodies’ basic needs.

we don’t have this different view of eating patterns bc it’s actually the case that compensatory eating is pathological… we view it in the way we do bc we’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated by diet culture, a form of social control

my therapist was talking about this a little while ago. She was talking about how cycles of deprivation tend to function like 

deny yourself a physical need (food, rest, emotion, etc.)  –> your body takes over and you [eat a lot/aren’t able to do anything physically or psychologically draining/experience extreme emotions] for a period of time –> you feel guilty/ashamed/worthless –> you deny yourself a physical need

and she said that most of us are conditioned to believe (if we recognize this as a problem/something we’re genuinely struggling with at all) that the way to solve it is through trying to force ourselves to stop “over-indulging” in our needs. But the way to break the cycle isn’t during the deprivation or the need-recovery stages– it’s during the stage where you feel guilty/ashamed/worthless. 

She was saying that if you can work on that stage and start to internalize that your body keeping you alive through recovering [calories/energy/connection with yourself] is a good thing and nothing to be ashamed of, but instead something to be grateful for, then you can gradually stop depriving yourself out of an attempt to maintain self-worth, which in turn means you won’t be waiting until your body goes into crisis mode to get your needs met. 

It was really insightful and it’s something I’ve been kind of turning over in my head since.