I know from experience that living with eating issues is an intense and exhausting situation to navigate. It can be a roller coaster of bad days, days that offer hope, and then a run of low mood or heightened anxiety that throws everything into disarray again.
The relentless cycle of pushing yourself to stay in control or manage your weight can be all consuming, especially if no one else knows what you are dealing with. In the heat of this, it can be hard to make sense of how you arrived in this place. The pressure you’re experiencing can make it difficult to connect to some of the reasons why this began.
The childhood blueprint
With eating issues, there are usually clues from childhood that meant that you were predisposed to choose eating and food as a coping mechanism. This may include restriction, bingeing, purging, a focus on healthy eating or a combination of different patterns. Whichever form it takes, a diagnosed eating disorder or not, if we were to look back, there’s usually some connection.
Messaging about the role of food and body image can get absorbed early in life. It may be from a parent who is always on a diet of sorts, critical comments from those around you about the need to be thin or unkind words and peer pressure at school.
How you were treated as a child can also impact your eating patterns. Are you restricting your food because a caregiver restricted their attention? Are you bingeing because you stuff your feelings down inside yourself rather than expressing them?
Small elements of everyday life which might not mean much in isolation can provide clues to how your relationship to food developed and why it was not as balanced as it could be.
How the behaviours develop
As the factors that influence your relationship with food build over time, so too does the emergence of how you interact with food.
Whilst for some people their behaviours around food started at a very young age, I find the majority of distortions start during school and sixth form years. They emerge as coping mechanisms to deal with the frustration and confusion that can develop – consciously or subconsciously – as your range of feelings and experiences expands during these formative years.
The focus on how your body looks becomes more important as your awareness of the world around you grows. You seek a way to keep some control as life becomes less cosseted. You can become more self-conscious and prone to comparison. If you’re someone who is sensitive to their environment and/or has learnt it’s best not to express your feelings, food may become a release valve, a way to cope with the pressure.
Over time these patterns can become more entrenched, particularly as your exposure to external messaging, social media etc rises. It can become harder to separate your thoughts and feelings from how you feel about food and your body. They become so intertwined that it all just becomes a way of life.
It’s often not about food at all
Improving your relationship with food is often not about what you eat and much more about how you feel and how you look after yourself.
Shining a light on the clues which meant you developed a difficult relationship with food and your body can often reveal it wasn’t about what you ate. It might be much more about your low self-esteem, your inner critic, what drives your perfectionist standards, and your ability to stand up for yourself.
Understanding this is often an important initial step and the beginning of a different relationship with food and with yourself.
If you found this article helpful you may also find the posts below relevant:
When Did You Last Feel Good in Your Body?
How the Inner Critic Tells You to Dress
When Eating Issues are Misunderstood and Why Your Experience Still Matters
