Feature: Disordered Eating
Today, more women than ever find themselves in a struggle with their weight. Diet books and programs for weight loss are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating have reached epidemic proportions. In America, millions of women struggle with anorexia and bulimia, and thousands of them die from complications resulting from these disorders. Statistics indicate that 95 percent of those who have been diagnosed with eating disorders are female.
Dr. Anita Johnston offers an untraditional approach to healing disordered eating. She uses myths, metaphors and storytelling as a counseling tool to help women get back into their body's wisdom.
Here are a few of Dr. Johnston's insights and suggestions for reclaiming the battleground between food, fat and self-imposed starvation.
1. Rediscover the Feminine
Women who struggle with disordered eating, more often than not have an overly dominant inner masculine aspect that continually attempts to control the inner feminine. Recovery from disordered eating calls for a deliberate, conscious attempt to reclaim our feminine side so we can bring our masculine side back into balance.
2. Revisioning the Self
A women in recovery needs to consider the possibility that the development of disordered eating patterns may not necessarily have been such a poor choice, given the limited options, resources, or coping skills she has available to her during stressful periods or times of crisis in her life. Her perspective must shift so that she can see this obsession not as some horrible character defect, but rather, as a simple, and much-needed protective mechanism.
3. Food is Not the Issue
Food is a smoke screen, designed to distract and divert attention from the real issues a women struggles with in life. When we only focus on what someone is doing with food, we fail to see the real culprit.
4. Addiction
Someone who is addicted to eating is actually starving on an emotional and spiritual level. Her longing for food is a longing for emotional and spiritual nourishment. To recover, a woman must recognize she is starving. She needs to understand that the food she requires is not material food. She must name her hunger, recall it from her past and remember it in each moment. Only then will she know how to feed it, one step at a time.
5. Relationships
When a woman is disconnected from her true self, she clings to her relationships with others, hoping to get the attention, love and support she is not able to give herself. A women seeking freedom from disordered eating must maintain a balance between her need to be in relationships with others and her need to remain true to herself.
6. Story Time
When we hear wisdom in stories, we are listening to a language of symbols that speaks to inner truths. This language of symbol and metaphor helps women recognize the existence of deeper meanings and truths. We can see how food is a metaphor for emotional and spiritual nourishment, how eating is an attempt to respond to inner hungers for attention, acknowledgement, affection or appreciation.
Open Dr. Johnston's book today and revel in the stories that reflect the above insights.
Adapted from "Eating in the Light of the Moon, How women can transform their relationships with food through myths, metaphors and storytelling." by Anita Johnston, PhD
A Gurze Books Publication $13.95 www.gurze.com