WEIGHT LOSS: PHYSICAL SIDE OF EATING AND HUNGER
Long ago, in the Far East, a monk went to his teacher and asked, “What is the secret of life?”
The teacher replied, “When hungry, eat. When full, stop. When tired, sleep.”
The monk was puzzled by this response. “That’s it?” he thought as he left. Only after years of study and meditation did the wisdom of the teacher’s words finally dawn on him.
The philosopher taught a valuable lesson, one that still applies hundreds of years later: Listen to your body. Struggling to control natural impulses leads to turmoil and conflict. It is better to be in harmony with your body.
We eat to live. Food supplies the organs and tissues with the fuel they need to function. Without food we die. An obvious truth, perhaps, but one worth stating.
Because its survival depends on eating, the body acts as a kind of biological food processor, one that is programmed to seek, consume, digest, and eliminate meals. When it senses that its fuel reserves are low, the body trips a “hunger” alarm. This alarm in turn triggers behavior whose goal is to find and consume food. At some point, when we’ve eaten enough, “fullness” signals reach the brain and shut off the urge to eat. Even before this point the process of digestion begins as the various organs secrete enzymes and acids to break the food down into its nutritional components.
In many ways this system operates automatically, on a purely physical level, without any need for conscious control. We don’t, for example, have to bother ourselves thinking, “Ah! I’ve just eaten a jelly doughnut! Time to tell my pancreas to produce insulin so I can deal with all that glucose.” If we did, we’d have no time or brainpower left to do our jobs, watch television, or talk to a friend on the telephone. And given the human capacity for error, it’s likely that we’d sometimes make the wrong decision anyway and wind up suffering from self-induced indigestion.
Yet anorexia or bulimia reflects just this kind of misguided attempt to over-control the physical process of eating.
Sometimes a physical malfunction-a chemical imbalance, for example-may trigger or contribute to abnormal eating behavior. Like other bodily systems, the one responsible for eating can break down in many different ways. Disease, physical damage, or a genetic defect can cause malfunctions at one or more points along the way and prevent the body from generating the proper signals. Our very diet affects behavior in direct and specific ways, as we’ll see shortly.
But a person with an eating disorder has, in a sense, declared war on the automatic aspects of the process of eating. She will now decide when to give in to hunger; she will now decide when and what she will eat. She declares her independence from the forces that govern from within. Doing so will show the world just how strong she is at resisting the forces that she fears are attempting to control her from without.
If the secret of life is to eat when hungry-that is, to respond to the body’s inner wisdom-then the anorexic or bulimic has set out on a difficult and dangerous road indeed.
*36/35/5*
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