What is an eating disorder?
What is an eating disorder?
Dictionary definition: any of several psychological disorders (as anorexia nervosa or bulimia) characterized by serious disturbances of eating behaviour.
I would say it is the symptom of a much deeper problem.
We are all broken. No one knows how to bring up their children to achieve their highest potential, they only know how to copy their parents / carers and bring their children up the same way they were raised. You might tell yourself ‘when I have kids I will never do that, say that, let them feel that’ but you go onto auto pilot when you are in the position of parent and hear yourself saying the same things you were told, repeating the age old limiting beliefs that have been passed down in your family for generations.
How many of you heard things like ‘life’s a bitch, then you die’, ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’, ‘people like us weren’t meant to be rich’ ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’, ‘work hard, get a job, when you are 65 you can retire’ etc etc?
So you have limiting beliefs ingrained in your subconscious from day one!
You don’t know how to make your dreams for the future come true. Life just ‘happens’ to you. You feel (or get told) that all the bad stuff is your fault, you brought it on yourself. You feel helpless, have no control over your life.
The only thing you can control is how you feed your body!
We all have a relationship with food which goes back to our childhood. Families get together for birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas and they eat a huge feast, overeat in fact and over indulge in alcohol.
When you feel upset or depressed about something there is bound to be someone who will encourage you to ‘cheer yourself up’, ‘drown your sorrows’, ‘take your mind of it’ by eating sweet, fattening or greasy food or drinking too much alcohol, or both!
Food is used to comfort you, enhance your mood, socialise, show affection, and not just to feed and nourish your body. Is it any wonder then that we use food to control our own world?
We can over eat and become obese. We can starve ourselves and become anorexic. We can eat certain food groups and refuse others and become ill with blood disorders, kidney problems, headaches, candida, the list goes on.
We don’t, necessarily, know what we are doing on a conscious level but our subconscious has been trained from birth to know that food is powerful and it will direct you to use this powerful weapon to push away all the hurt, frustration, pain, suffering, rejection and also use it to celebrate the good things.
So the eating disorders that we suffer from and are diagnosed with, are just a symptom of the underlying problems that we really need to deal with on a subconscious level. Our subconscious mind rules our world and we should take more time to understand what is going on without our realising it so that we can live the amazing, abundant, joyful life that we were put here to enjoy!
More suggestions for study:
Dr Richard Bandler – NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming