EAT: Embody. Awaken. Transform.

EMBODY. If the warfare of unmet needs, disowned emotions and disenfranchisement from cultural norms is waged in the body, and if low interoception is associated with poor mental and physical health, the first step in this process would be to become more embodied. Body-oriented approaches to healing could be critical in restoring body awareness to increase interoceptive capacities and to restore self-regulation. The use of mindfulness and somatic practices that increase body awareness and assist in the development of autonomic self-regulation, is quickly gaining relevance in the treatment of eating disorders. Yoga, the expressive arts and psychodrama, movement and dance therapies, and integrative mind-body psychotherapies such as Somatic Experiencing® are increasingly available at treatment centers.

AWAKEN. These right-brain therapeutic approaches increase interoceptive and proprioceptive – the awareness of the relative position and shape of the body relative in space -- awareness through the use of sensory-motor tracking skills that strengthen the insula, the anterior cingulate gyrus, and awaken the connections between sub-cortical (reptilian and limbic) and cortical areas (neo-cortex) of the brain. As awareness increases, people report feeling less “empty” and therefore not as hungry for things that do not “fill” them. In this process of awakening to their authentic inner realm, all aspects of a person’s experience --sensations, images, behaviors, affects, and meanings -- can be gradually integrated to restore their sense of wellbeing and resilience. This includes the internal hunger, fullness, and satiety cues necessary to establish long-term recovery and end the dieting, starvation, binge eating, and purging cycles.

TRANSFORM. Regardless of the eating disorder presentation, somatic awakening to deepen therapeutic interactions, provide access to disconnected emotions and sensations, and nurture a sense of ‘safe’ embodiment becomes crucial to healing. Conscious embodiment restores the wisdom of the body to move towards healing. And the skillful direction of awakened awareness begins to create new neural pathways that will pave the way to a conscious evolution of the whole person. What does this mean? It means that inner resources previously unavailable become available. At a practical level, people begin to have a different experience of themselves and their relationship to food, their body and their world. 

Do you Interocept? It May be the Key to Ending Eating Disorders

Interoception is the perception of body sensations as they relate to physical or emotional cues that inform and form our internal sense of self. 
Dissociation from bodily experience, leading to a chronic disregard of the body’s needs and psycho-physiological experiences, is a hallmark of these disorders regardless of where they fall on the spectrum – starvation in anorexia, binge-purge cycles in bulimia, or binge eating in the other extreme. Recent research shows that persons with eating disorders have low interoception. High interoception has been linked to both mental and physical health.

So what is one to do, given this landscape of failed approaches to address the “war on obesity” or improve outcomes in the treatment of eating disorders?

I am making a case that it’s time to EAT. 

Embody. 
Awaken. Transform.

Stop the Dieting Madness and EAT!

Even as large portions of the world’s population are starving, people in wealthy industrialized nations are either eating to excess or furiously dieting to eliminate weight. Our insatiable appetites and our relationship with food and weight have risen to the level of unsustainable obsessions. Being “fat” (i.e. not unduly thin) in a “thin world” – a world that demands we are “fashionably underweight” to meet cultural standards of beauty -- oppresses men and women every day. Trying to restrict food intake while flooded by a mass market of fast foods deliberatelymanufactured to be addictive, and “failing” at dieting and losing weight, leads people to feel “betrayed” by their own bodies. When bodily responses fail to measure up to these impossible standards, eating disorders brew. And the diet industry is there to prey on those failures.

The U.S. weight loss industry was estimated to reach $60.5 billion in annual revenues for products and services such as diet soft drinks, artificial sweeteners, health clubs, commercial weight loss chains, OTC meal replacements and diet pills, diet websites and apps, medical programs for weight loss surgery, MDs, hospital/clinic programs, Rx diet drugs, low-calorie meals, diet books, and exercise DVDs (The U.S. Weight Loss Market: 2014 Status Report &Forecast).

Despite those staggering figures, there is little evidence that diets lead to long-term weight loss or health gains. Researchers from UCLA who conducted a rigorous review of studies on dieting found that up to two-thirds of all dieters who lose weight go on to regain it and even add more pounds. And yet, when the more than two-thirds of U.S. adults who are overweight or obese visit a doctor, the only solution they are given – despite evidence of effectiveness – is to diet. Many of those dieters go on to develop “pathological dieting” or disordered eating, and a quarter of them move into full-blown eating disorders. A large portion of eating disordered individuals receiving treatment report their eating disorder began as a diet gone awry.

The “collateral damage” of this cultural obsession with dieting and thinness has resulted in a normative food and body preoccupation that plagues a majority of men and women.  Hatred of self and body, eating disorders, weight discrimination and poor health have become the norm. Living in a world where bodily hunger is in constant conflict with the ‘thin ideal,’ keeps a person in a physiologically-stressed state of constant hyper-vigilance that borders on traumatic stress. As external markers of identity -- such as weight or BMI, clothes size and appearance -- become the focus, people become increasingly disconnected from internal cues – a skill known as interoception. To regain interoception, it's time to stop the dieting madness and EAT!