The assignment was to pretend to that you are addressing a support group for eating disorders. That is why it begins in and goes off into first-person at times. I was up all night writing this, and it is by the far the most personally important paper I have ever written, so I had to do something more with it than just turn it in to my Biopsychology teacher and be done with it. Enjoy, and please share if you know anyone who could benefit from it. Namaste
Hello, everyone. My name is Karrie, and I am here today not
to only to talk about eating problems and eating disorders, but more
importantly, the psychological and emotional reasons behind them, because that
is my specialty. There are many reasons why we eat, and of course we need to
eat to survive, but none of us would be here today if we ate for those reasons
alone. We are here today because we have a problem with our relationship with
food, and I believe that problem actually begins with a much deeper one; our
relationships with ourselves.
How many here are familiar with Lady Gaga? I am assuming we
have all at least heard of her, and I am also assuming that most of us think
only of weird lyrics, meat dresses, and blue hair when we hear her name. Well,
what most people do not know about Lady Gaga is that she is a strong advocate
against bullying of all kinds, and that includes bullying ourselves. Her main
philosophy, the message she strives to pass on to her millions of fans around
the world, is self-love. In fact, she once told a reporter in reference to her
most recent album, “Born This Way is about being yourself, and loving who
you are and being proud” (2011).
What most people also do not know is that late in 2012, Lady
Gaga gained 30 pounds. It was quite a shock in the entertainment industry,
because she really was almost unrecognizable. Instead of hiding from the press
and heading straight to the nearest plastic surgeon for liposuction, though,
she made press release after press release, bashing the press for making a big
deal out it. Instead of rescheduling upcoming dates for her popular Born This
Way Ball, or scrambling to get new costumes made, she simply had her iconic
skimpy outfits altered to accommodate her new measurements. As the press
continued to crucify her, and post picture after picture of her new
not-so-flattering look onstage, she defiantly told reporters “I really don't
feel bad about the weight gain, not even for a second, because I have to be on
such a strict diet constantly" (International Business Times, 2012). She
continued her rebellion by Tweeting things like: “To all the girls that
think you're ugly because you're not a size 0, you're the beautiful one. It is
society who's ugly" (Twitter, 2012). While it is true that she
lost all the weight and got back into prime stage shape in just a few months,
she still stayed true to her message: love yourself, always, no matter what the
world thinks.
I talk about Lady Gaga when I am asked to speak about eating
disorders because her philosophy of self-love, and the way she handled her or
own weight gain publicly, serve as personal inspiration for me. I have bounced
between overweight and borderline anorexia since I was a teenager. I was
diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at 16 years old, and was told that if I did not
gain weight, I would have to be hospitalized and fed with a tube. I was as tall
as I am now, five-foot-seven, and I weighed 98 pounds. At the height of my
illness, I was totally unaware that I had an issue with eating. I wasn’t
starving myself intentionally, I was just never hungry, and I exercised a lot
because I was on the pom pom squad. The scary part is that I really believed
this, just as I am sure some you sitting in this room right now believe the
same thing. The scarier part was that when I looked in the mirror, I did not
see my collar and neck bones sticking out, or notice that every single one of
my ribs could be clearly seen. What I saw was a pooch belly, and what we used
to call “thunder thighs”. What I saw was the body I had when I was 13, when I
was made fun of at summer pool parties. This is called distorted
body-image (Pinel, 2011), and I will go into more depth about it later in
this discussion.
First, let us take a look at the physiological reasons
we eat, and some of the myths you may have learned about them. For over 60
years now, most of society, and even much of the medical world, has been
looking at hunger and eating based on theories that are no longer supported by
the evidence gathered from more modern research techniques. The prevailing
theory since the 40’s for why we get hungry and eat is called the set-point
theory, and it consists of two separate theories that worked together. The
first is called the glucostic theory. This theory implies that our levels of
energy are directly tied with our glucose- or blood sugar levels. That much is
true, but glucostic theory went on to say that we all have a “set point” of
normal glucose levels, and that when those glucose levels fall below normal, we
must eat to return to our set point, so our body tells us we are hungry.
According to Pinel (2011), there are a few problems with this theory.
The first problem is that it was originally tested by
injecting rats with high amounts of insulin, which drastically reduced their
glucose levels, usually by at least 50 percent. The injected rats would indeed
eat much more when their glucose was that low, but such extreme glucose
decreases very rarely occur in nature. In the 1990’s, glucose measuring
technology became much more reliable, so glucostic theory was tested again.
This time it was found that rats that where given free access to a mixed diet
maintained relatively stable glucose levels, that very rarely fluctuated by
more than 2 percent. However, when tested approximately 10 minutes before
eating, glucose levels dropped by about 8 percent. This seems to confirm
glucostic theory at first glance, but there are several reasons why it actually
does not (Pinel, 2011).
It has been found that glucose also drops when unexpected
meals are presented, especially when those meals consist of foods with high
positive-incentive value. Positive-incentive foods are foods that give us
pleasure, comfort, or some other kind of non-physiological reward. It was found
that insulin levels also began to drop before eating an unexpected meal, which
suggests that the idea of eating alone triggers the fluctuations
which cause hunger, not a gradual decrease in energy. It also needs to be noted
that because mammals turn excess fat into glucose to replenish energy, even
when expected meals are not served, blood glucose levels return to homeostasis
fairly quickly. This clearly suggests that hunger is much more affected by the
expectation of a meal than it is by the actual need to eat (Pinel, 2011).
The second part of set-point theory is called lipostatic
theory, which basically says we have a normal set point for fat as well. The
problem with lipostatic theory is obvious without even referring to the
research. We most likely would not have the kind of overweight and obesity
problems we have in this country if our bodies were signaled to eat only when
we fell below our set point for fat (Pinel, 2011). If the idea is to maintain a
healthy amount of body fat, it seems more likely that those of us with extra
fat deposits would feel compelled to eat less, or at least lower calorie
foods, in order to maintain lipostatic homeostasis.
So now that we have poked holes in traditional set-point
theory, let us take a look at why really eat. As we have established, the
expectation of food is what seems to trigger the drops in glucose that make us
feel hungry, not the need to replenish energy. Modern research suggests that we
really eat simply because we are used to eating at certain times of the day,
but moreover, we eat for positive incentive. Pinel (2011) explains:
“The major tenet of the positive-incentive perspective on eating is that eating
is controlled much in the same way as sexual behavior. We engage in sexual
behavior not because we have an internal deficit, but because we have evolved
to crave it” (p.304, para.6).
Now we have arrived at the psychological and emotional
reasons for why we eat. Most of the time when we have sex, we are not doing it
for procreation purposes. So why do we do it, then? Well, firstly, it brings us
pleasure. It also relieves tension, and gives us the emotional rewards of
intimacy. It can also boost our self-confidence by confirming that we are
sexually desirable. If you really think about it, food gives us almost exactly
those same rewards. The pleasure of eating our favorite foods reduces tension
and stress, and because we tend to eat socially, we also associate food with
positive feelings, like closeness and belonging. When we become emotionally
upset, we often turn to “comfort food”, both to reduce stress, and possibly as
a substitute for the intimacy we may be craving. Our relationship with food can
even lead to increased feelings of sexual desirability, because people who diet
frequently or suffer from anorexia/ bulimia often report feeling sexier when
they do not eat. It is these positive incentives, these emotional and
psychological rewards, combined with evolution that many researchers now
believe we get hungry and eat (Pinel, 2011).
Most people do not think about, or are simply unaware of,
the evolutionary reasons behind why, when, and what we eat. Way back when,
before there were 24-hour grocery stores stocked from floor to ceiling with
foods that are high in calories, fat, and sodium, but usually low in
nutritional value; our ancestors often went through long periods of food
drought. Even when food was plentiful, getting it was time-consuming and often
difficult. Obtaining quality food first required hunting or gathering,
and then later in history, farming. Since we were entirely dependent on nature
to get our food, and nature can be very unpredictable, our ancestors had to eat
as much quality food as they could when it was available, in order to build up
the fat reserves they would need to sustain them during the inevitable food
droughts. Evolution is a very slow process, and our bodies have not yet caught
up with these modern times of plenty, or modern diets, which usually have much
lower nutritional density than what our ancestors ate (Pinel, 2011).
To better understand the importance of nutritional
density, consider wild elephants in Africa. During the green season, elephants
have to consume 125 to 175 pounds of vegetation a day, to maintain their
weight. During the dry season, when the grass is brown and contains fewer
nutrients, they have to eat twice to three times that much (Smithsonian
Institution, 2012). It can be easily understood, then, that when we eat modern,
low-nutrition foods, we feel compelled to eat more of those foods, even though
they are rich in calories and fat. Those extra calories and fat are then
converted and stored as fatty deposits if we do not to burn them off.
Unfortunately, in our modern world, where most of us have jobs sitting at a
desk or standing on an assembly line all day, very few of us get enough
exercise to burn off the calories and fat we consume. It also needs to be noted
that because our bodies are such efficient machines, and because our
hunter/gatherer ancestors often had to walk for weeks or even months to find
new food supplies, we actually lose very few calories through exercise. In
fact, according to Calles-Escandon & Horton (1992), about 80 percent of
our energy is actually spent on physiological processes that occur when we are
at rest, and ironically, digesting the food we eat (Pinel, 2011).
Now we begin to see why obesity has become such a problem,
and there are also over 100 chromosome regions that have been linked to
obesity. Though very little is actually understood about the direct genetic
link to obesity, there is more than sufficient reason to believe that there is
one. So we become obese for many reasons and combinations of them, and
unfortunately, very few existing treatments have been proven to have long-term
success. There is an experimental form of treatment that has promise, though,
and it ties back in with the psychological and emotional reasons why we eat.
There has been a link established between serotonin and the eating
habits that lead to obesity. It is interesting to note that in clinically
depressed patients, drugs that regulate the flow of serotonin in the brain have
been used for years, with moderate to high success for most patients. Since we
get emotional rewards from eating, it makes sense, then, that drugs called serotonin
agonists could help change eating patterns in a way that results in weight
loss. In fact, the first two of these types of drugs that were tested actually
proved to be very successful, but they unfortunately came with dangerous side
effects. Science is currently working on safer serotonin agonists, but for the
time being, we must look for other ways to battle obesity (Pinel, 2011).
Now, some of you are here today because you have the
opposite problem. Anorexia and bulimia are medically considered two different
disorders, but most patients straddle the line between both diagnoses. Both
conditions stem from the same place, an obsession with body-image, and both
conditions can also distort body image (Pinel, 2011). Let us go back to my own
experience with anorexia. It started the way it does for most patients. I
became fixated on the parts of my body I did not like. I did not like those
parts of my body because I was taught not to like them, both by unrealistic
ideals perpetuated by the media and popular culture, and by my peers and family
members, who were also influenced by those same warped standards.
At first I was aware of hating my body, and I consciously
set out to lose weight and turn my extra fat into muscle. No matter how much
success I had in meeting those goals, though, it was never enough. Eventually
the dieting and exercising became obsessive-compulsive, to the point that I no
longer had any control over, or even awareness of the unhealthy habits. I
wasn’t intentionally dieting anymore, I just wasn’t ever hungry, and when I did
eat, I often felt tired and sick. This was because my body was not used to
eating on a regular basis, so doing so badly disrupted my homeostasis. I
also was not practicing pom pom routines for two hours a night to get in shape
anymore, but because I wanted to perform them perfectly. In my mind, my eating
and exercising habits had become totally normal. When my family and friends
started commenting about me being too thin, I actually took it as a compliment,
or I did not believe them, because I had developed a distorted body image. It
was not until my mother forced me to look at picture after picture of myself,
in a bikini, that I finally started break through the distortion that was lying
to me when I looked in the mirror.
Even that was not enough at first. I tried to eat more, but
nothing tasted good. In fact, I would often gag on the foods I had loved my
whole life. What had happened, and what happens for many anorexics and
bulimics, was that eating no longer held any positive incentives for me. In
fact, not eating became emotionally satisfying, because it made me
feel beautiful and desirable. In the end, the very same thing that had brought
on my anorexia helped me get over it. There was a boy in school that I was
completely infatuated with , and one day I overheard him talking to some other
boys, about which girls they thought were the “hottest”. My heart fluttered
when my name was mentioned, but my stomach sank when the boy said “she has a
really pretty face, and she would be the hottest girl in school if she wasn’t
so skinny. Did you see her in that strapless dress at the spring dance? She
looked like Skeletor.” The other boys laughed in agreement, and I left school
crying that day.
Now, here is the saddest part of my story. If I had been
taught real self-love, the kind that Lady Gaga now teaches to her millions of
fans, the things that both brought on and eventually ended my nightmare never
would have had any power over me. Yes, the media and pop culture have some
blame, and they always will, no matter what the fashionable body type happens
to be. There was a time when the most beautiful women in the world were what we
would now call medically overweight. Being heavier back then was not only a
sign of fertility, but also one of financial success. Only those who could
always afford good food were able to have ample curves, so that became the most
desirable look. If that look came back for some reason, insecure teenagers
would start intentionally eating too much to look that way, too. However, if
fashion was solely to blame, than nearly every teenager in America would have
anorexia or bulimia by now. Most teenagers do not, so we cannot blame pop
culture alone.
In my case, and I believe in most cases, eating disorders
are caused mostly by poor self-worth. Overweight can also be caused or
exacerbated by a deficit of self-love. Many people know they are overweight,
but they do not try to correct the problem, either because they do not believe
they can accomplish it, or because they have some other emotional problem that
they have learned to relieve with food. Some of them even think they are not
deserving of love or friendship, so they unconsciously maintain, or even
increase, their weight as a means of protecting themselves from relationships.
That was what happened to me, decades after I beat the anorexia. I had a few
close relationships that ended very badly and caused tremendous amounts of
pain, and I never wanted to feel that way again. So I let my appearance go
entirely, and began obsessively-compulsively eating for positive incentive
again. They were two different sides of the same coin, and that coin came from
one purse; I placed all of my self-worth into what others thought of me, and I
based what others thought of me on how I looked.
Unfortunately, we live in a very image-obsessed society, and
as a result, we have forgotten about the things that really make up who a
person is. Not only have we lost touch with what really makes us likable, but
we have also become largely incapable of loving ourselves for those qualities,
even when we do recognize them. We all have all been raised in a society where
“he/she has a great personality” is usually not a real compliment, but nicer
way of saying the person in unattractive. Personality has become secondary to
appearance, as long as appearance is the ruling qualification for likability,
how can anyone truly love themselves? No one is aesthetically perfect. Everyone
dislikes something about their appearance, no matter how close they are to what
society deems “ideal”.
So how do we fix this problem? It starts with
self-acceptance. Maybe you are overweight, or even obese. As you have hopefully
learned in this discussion, much of that is not really your fault. You are the
product of evolution and genetics, combined with a society that has forgotten
how to eat for nutrition, but still associates socializing with eating. You may
also have an unaddressed emotional problem, which has developed into obsessive-compulsive
tendencies that further complicate your condition. This is also not your fault.
We are all vulnerable, and so we all experience emotional and psychological
problems from time to time. Do not be ashamed of these things, and do not- not
even for one second- believe that you are alone, or that you are some kind of
“freak”.
Lady Gaga fans actually call themselves “Monsters”, and
refer to her as “Mother Monster.” We do not do this because we see ourselves as
truly monstrous or unlovable, but rather we do it to deny the power those kinds
of words have over us. We have consciously rejected the society that would call
us freaks, and embraced the very things about us that have earned us that
title. In doing so, we have found self-acceptance, and even a sense of pride.
Please do not mistake what I have just said as an endorsement for not making
healthy changes, because then you will have missed the whole point. The
hypothesis I am proposing is this: the secret to making healthy, lasting
changes is self-acceptance.
We need to be honest with ourselves as a society. We already
know that being overweight or underweight is bad for our health. If America was
really that concerned about its health, we wouldn’t be discussing this problem
to begin with, or passing laws to encourage people to quit smoking, or keeping
narcotics illegal. America is much more concerned about how we look and how we
feel than we ever were about being healthy. If we cannot accept this one simple
truth, then we have no hope of fixing any of our controllable health problems.
Positive incentive has actually caused most of our controllable health
problems, and we have already learned that negative feedback does not fix any
of them in the long term. Self-acceptance, though, creates positive incentive
for further self-improvement.
It is a very simple. Once you have learned self-acceptance,
you gain confidence. Once you have confidence, it is only one small step to
realizing that you can actually change the things about yourself that you do
not like, because you are the only person matters, and you deserve
to feel good about who you are. Once you have realized this, you have reached
self-love, and then everything you do for yourself becomes a labor of love. It
is much easier to throw ourselves into projects that we really love than it is
to try to complete some task we feel obligated to do, to please someone else.
So, in conclusion, as Lady Gaga (2011) says in the title
track of Born This Way, “I’m beautiful in my way, ‘cos God makes no
mistakes…so don’t hide yourself in regret, just love yourself and you’re set.
You’re on the right track baby, you were born this way!”
References
International Business Times. (2012). Singer Lady Gaga
admits weight gain, lashes out at
critics for calling her fat.
Retrieved 2/5/2013 from:
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/391401/20121005/singer-lady-gaga-admits-weight-gain-
lashed.htm#.URHVNx1EGSo
Lady Gaga. (n.d.) Brainy Quotes. Retrieved from:
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/l/ladygaga415010.html
see also:
Born This Way. (2011) Born
this way. Interscope Records. Universal Music Group,
Santa Monica, California
Pinel, J.P.J. (2011) Biopsychology. (8ed.)
Published by Allyn & Bacon. Retrieved from
The University of Phoenix eBook
Collection database.
Smithsonian Institution. (2012) How much do elephants eat?
Retrieved from:
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/asianelephants/elephantfaq.cfm
