I found this interesting. Many people on this board are already well aware that much of our disordered eating is a way to mask some painful feeling or experience. People such as Prana have often mentioned this. I have always been a bit resistant to this idea - thinking that my desire for chocolate is just my sweet tooth - thinking that I have sorted all my 'feelings' out over the years.

But how deep can they (feelings) be buried? I have a nagging feeling that there is something I need to find out - but I don't know what and I don't know how. Is my continued desire for good quality vegan chocolate my last 'piece de resistance' - I don't know - or is just a bad habit that I need to snap out of?

I'm afraid I don't know what the whole of her article says as I do not subscribe to the magazine ( I did once ! )

[fresh-network.typepad.com]

What are your ideas about this subject? and have you any ideas about unlocking deeply held 'forgotten' memories.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2010 04:25PM by flipperjan.

Thank you for linking to the interview and posting your comments. I find this topic fascinating.

I agree that people use unhealthy foods to numb themselves in order to avoid feeling strong, negative emotions. Who hasn’t been down that road? Unfortunately, that bad use of food has come about because our society has forced people to find ways to suppress their emotions.

Haven’t you seen a parent scold or smack a child for crying?

If an adult is shaking from being nervous, you wouldn’t be surprised to see another person say, “Get a hold of yourself!” or at least in a misguided, but well-intentioned, way to tell the person to calm down.

The reason for those (incorrect) responses is that people don’t know how to deal with expressions of strong, negative emotions from others, so they try to stop their very expression.

It’s faulty thinking.

When people have distressing and hurtful experiences, emotional expression is our innately human way of dealing with them and healing from the pain.

Unfortunately, most people have confused healing from the hurt (such as crying) with the actual hurt (a physical injury, a personal rejection, whatever). Shutting down emotional expression stops the subsequent attempt at HEALING – not the original HURT.

All of those little and big physical and emotional injuries that have been suppressed over a lifetime add up!

Rozalind Graham is right. People use food for sedation and stimulation as a coping mechanism. How SAD!!! (pun intended) But it is entirely understandable.

What is worse is that using food for sedation and stimulation is ITSELF injurious - more pain heaped on top of unresolved pain. What a vicious cycle!

Starting a raw diet - and consequently stopping using food as sedatives and stimulants - goes a long way to helping us live emotionally healthy lives. If we could also add learning to take turns allowing each other to communicate and heal from past emotional hurts, what a world this could be!!!

People can learn to use effective communication skills and to allow people to express negative emotions without shutting them off. (Granted this would need to be at appropriate times and places, but what a difference it would make to individuals and the world!)

Imagine what the world could be like if we all ate raw food and used effective communication skills to help each other deal with negative emotions! I HAVE A DREAM!!!

P. S.: After several months of eating a raw diet, I tried a small amount of chocolate. I enjoyed it when I ate it, but had my first night of fitful sleep since eating raw food.
It's a No Brainer: Chocolate is a stimulant that I have found is not good for me.


My favorite raw vegan

Trive - thank you so much for your wonderful response.

so many of my doubts are ideas that were planted by my mother - when I suffered from depression it was 4 years before I reconised it. 6 years before I sought help and 10 years before I told my mother. Her reaction was - 'when I was bringing you up on my own I didn't have time for stress'. Then she couldn't understand why I wasn't 'better' omce I had seen the doctor. Time and again this was her kind of reaction to 'emotion' of any kind.

> Unfortunately, most people have confused healing from the hurt (such as crying) with the actual hurt (a physical injury, a personal rejection, whatever). Shutting down emotional expression stops the subsequent attempt at HEALING – not the original HURT. >

This is an interesting sentence that I shall mull over - so true but I hadn't realised it.


< P. S.: After several months of eating a raw diet, I tried a small amount of chocolate. I enjoyed it when I ate it, but had my first night of fitful sleep since eating raw food.
It's a No Brainer: Chocolate is a stimulant that I have found is not good for me.>

Umm - this happens to me so many times but I choose not to heed the lesson - WHY?
Alcohol does the same thing but i can go without that now - training for a race (running) is a good incentive not to drink - but it occurs to me that I am swopping addictions or habits!!!


<Imagine what the world could be like if we all ate raw food and used effective communication skills to help each other deal with negative emotions! I HAVE A DREAM!!! >

I love this - thanks again for your fab post

[video.google.com]#

No, no, thank you. This is stuff we rarely get to talk about. I hope folks don't mind me going on for a bit about this. I really do care about it tremendously. So, here goes a bit more...

Parents! My mother didn't permit expressions of strong or negative emotions. As long as I made good grades and acted happy, everything must be fine, right? Gosh, I love her dearly, but a little honest communication would have gone a long way. Had I been given support in difficult times, I might not have developed the eating disorder that started when I was as a teenager and that plagued me for many years. The good thing that came of it is that it made me face the reality that I needed to learn to deal with my issues. Sure, my parents had a huge role in shaping me into the adult I became, but I could only blame them for my continued weaknesses for so long. Ultimately. I am responsible for my beliefs, behaviors and choices, whether I make them consciously or pretend that they aren't choices. To think if I known about good communication skills and raw food as a teenager! My life would have been soooo much easier. Better mid-life, than never, though!

flipperjan, one thing I have learned to do is to take an irrational untruth (such as the doubts your mother "instilled" in you), turn it into a positive affirmation, and then say implications of that new way of thinking.
Example: I was labelled shy as a child. Now I tell myself that I am a friendly and outgoing person. One implication is that I now seek people out to introduce myself and ask them questions about themselves. It was surprising for me to learn that many other people were more afraid, unsure and shy than I was. Maybe I'll never be seen as the life of the party, but people don't think of me as shy now.

I see that you no longer feel the need to self-medicating with alcohol. Good for you! However, now you're using chocolate in its place despite some negative results and you don't know why you continue to do that. Here are my guesses as to why you "choose not to heed the lesson." I am no scientist or therapist, so these are only my theories:

1) Chocolate is a stimulant that deceives our bodies. In some ways it mimics feeling good and that confuses us. When the good feeling is gone and we start to feel nervous, headachy, or whatever, (probably as we are detoxing from it), we seek the stimulant again to relieve those negative feelings that were CAUSED by taking the stimulant in the first place. From an old psychology class I remember that removal of a negative stimulus is reinforcing. We tend to repeat those behaviors.

2) When you don't eat chocolate (or whatever stimulating or numbing food), feelings from old, unresolved emotional hurts come up. (Our bodies want to detox emotionally too! We have new energy to deal with old emotional stuff, so it bubbles to the surface.) If you don't have enough support to deal with those feelings, you go back to chocolate to prevent them from surfacing without resolution. The trick is to find the support you need.

Unfortunately, people rarely get to deal with emotional hurts at the time that they occur. Babies and young children are lucky; they insist on expressing their hurts and haven't yet been squashed from doing so.

When as an adult you allow old suppressed hurts to surface, they are out of context and so are hard to identify and deal with. It's hard to do alone because it's difficult to be objective about one's own experiences. People do lots of irrational stuff to us and around us. No wonder it's hard to deal with suppressed feelings about past hurts! The best thing is to have another person who also wants to deal with his or her own issues. That person can have objectivity about your experiences as you can have about theirs. That is needed to be able to spot faulty thinking (such as, in my case, believing you are doomed to shyness). You can each take turns being supportive of each other, listening, and pointing out reality. When someone expresses some old hurtful experience and releases healing emotions related to it, mostly listen, but also say something relevant to validate the superb person they truly are like, "You are a good and powerful person, worthy of being loved and cherished." (Hearing something like that usually does the trick for me!) Just be sure to take turns so that neither person feels used.


Hmmm... raw food and raw emotions.

THEY MAKE ME STRONG!!!


My favorite raw vegan

I think that the high doses of sugar are natural too us. We should all eat a lot of fruit. Chocolate is just a replacement for that. I eat a lot of grapes, and I can feel the same effect as when eating chocolate. THe sugar rush is great, I think clearly, I can work at the computer with more focus.

So, sugar is our natural food, that is one of the reasons why chocolate is so popular, I think.

Lisa - fantastic link - I have just listened to all of it and feel really buoyed up now. Lots to think about.

Rab - I agree, in my case I think it is the sugar that I go after in chocolate but with that, as I have just learnt I am also getting: cannabinoid, theobromine, refined sugar and caffeine. I apologise for the spelling - undoubtedly dodgy but I will look up these things - and I think I am ready almost to say goodbye to chocolate - It is NOT serving me well

It's great how inspiring a good speaker can be especially when they really touch a nerve.

I feel I am about to take a great big step forward - dealing with the emotions that arise as my food choices get 'lighter and lighter'

Going raw - attempting to go 100% raw in the last few years has increased my binge eating disorder. I would overreat on fruit - talking 9-12 bananas and then continue to eat....moving to cooked before I could stop.
If a peice of chocolate is what you want have it.
Or you may just find yourself eating your fruit supply and then eating the chocolate anyway...
I do believe the RAW way is the way to superior health, but overeating anyfood is bad.... and I overeat all food....
A food disorder will be carried over from SAD to VEGAN to RAW....
Raw is not the answer....
I saw Genine Roth on Oprah and just bought her book yesterday WOMEN< FOOD AND GOD.
YES, food and emotions, how we feel about ourselves and the world is in direct relation to what is on our plates....er.....shoved down our mouths mindlessly...
I will go and read this article now....thank you for the link...

Just read the article - GREAT READ...
Not sure RAW is the answer to stopping eating disorders though....like I said the disorder - in my case binging, follows you...
Restricting certain foods mostly makes the disorder worse...
I have expereinced this during my last 5-6 years of being high raw....
I LOVE LOVE LOVE what she says here:

A lot of people spend their lives trying to forget their true nature, using every way they can find to numb themselves because the human experience is so painful. Others just float around dazed and confused and that can manifest as fear, resulting in lost ability to think independently. Some become enraged. Others just feel guilty and that can cause them to become disempowered, weakened and depressed. But some people desperately try to remain who they are; to connect back with loving kindness and light. They’re the spiritual seekers.


THAT is the beginning to the answer...

For me anyway..

rawrnr

good to hear from you again. I think you may be right about having a piece of chocolate if that's what I want/ crave etc.

I find that if I have some chocolate in the fridge I can eat very sensibly and look forward to a bit with my tea at night, last thing. The problem for me is if I have some say, at lunch time, because then I don't seem to have the will power not to keep popping back to the fridge all afternoon. Having it in the house at all can be dodgy because of controlling how much and when. Sometimes it works perfectly and other times it's a disaster. But you are right if I am craving chocolate and don't have any then I start thinking about toast etc which I normally never do.

I would like to never eat it and never think about it but I just can't seem to get there agggggh. I keep looking for the reasons why but the truth is that I simply don't have an answer for it. Lots of stuff sounds good, makes sense but doesn't change anything!!!