A phrase in my last gluttony post fairly jumped out at me today as I re-read it over my eggs Benedict.
…[I]t is possible to become, out of habit, so psychologically deranged with respect to food that one begins unnecessarily violating social norms and the demands of duty and charity in order to secure one's food supply (when in fact the food necessary to support health is not at risk).
The phrase is "to secure one's food supply."
It jumped out at me because it so perfectly encapsulates the constant feeling of need I used to have, all the fretting about my next snack or my next meal, before I got better, before the weight came off. It sums up perfectly the remnants, almost like flashbacks, that I still have once in a while — the sudden urges that I've learned to dismiss (most of the time), the odd tendencies I still have to fret about whether I've bought enough for the dinner guests.
Back when I was heavy, I was always trying to secure my food supply.
Never mind that my food supply was not at risk; I had a constant feeling that I had to secure my food supply.
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Once I remember feeling faint at school and being taken to the cafeteria — I remember sitting there with my saltine crackers and paper cup of juice, feeling naughty and special for being out of class.
That used to happen a lot: the bottom would fall out of my brain and I couldn't think until I got something to eat. A strange panic would rise, and I would go looking for food. Within a few bites of, say, a cheeseburger, I would feel oddly soothed, relieved; but the panicky feeling wouldn't go away until I no longer felt the slightest twinge of anything that resembled hunger. I would have to eat until I literally felt full before I felt safe.
This would happen between meals.
At meals there was never any question of stopping before I was stuffed. I hated that feeling of "head-hungry," not being able to concentrate; it always hit long before I felt "stomach-hungry." I tried to prevent it by eating in advance.
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Though this is the first time I've lit upon this phrase, I've known about this problem for a long time. One of my very first gluttony/weight loss posts on this blog, "What's wrong with me," identified the problem as "an irrational fear of getting hungry:"
Consider the evidence:
- I tend to "stock up" at meals by eating extra. I catch myself explicitly thinking, "I'd better eat more now so I won't get hungry later."
- There are certain foods that I eat compulsively if they are just sitting around as leftovers, even if they don't taste very good to me. Never sweets, always carbohydrates, great for packing in as many calories as possible in a short period of time. White rice; plain pasta; tortilla chips; dry cereal; white bread; pizza; saltine crackers. I can still eat a whole sleeve of saltine crackers, no problem. (No wonder going low carb helped me. Eliminating these things from my house was a good thing.)
- I rely on external cues to tell me how much to eat. If people around me are eating, I do too. If there's still food on the table, I have another helping. If something will be thrown out if I don't eat it, I eat some.
- I get very antsy on road trips as mealtime approaches, if we haven't yet planned when and where we're going to stop for the next meal.
- I get irrationally irritated when I'm over at someone's house for dinner and dinner is delayed for some reason. I have to squelch the urge to keep asking, "So, when's dinner going to be ready?" I mean, I know it makes me a terrible guest, so I do my best, but it's really hard!
- My friends who dine with me regularly will tell you that whenever I am responsible for feeding a crowd, I am very preoccupied with there being "enough" food. Either I make too much, or I start apologizing for it the minute people arrive. "Erin! Chill out! If we get hungry we'll make some sandwiches!" Doesn't matter. Hostess anxiety is my lot in life.
- Oh, and then there's this recurring dream I keep having where someone gives me piles and piles of food and I know that I have to eat it. The menu, the reason I have to eat the stuff, and the setting varies (buffet restaurant; friend's house; interview luncheon), but the theme is always there. I have had this dream for as long as I can remember, maybe five or six times a year.
Ready to psychoanalyze me yet? Look, you can call it "gluttony" if you want. I won't shy away from that term. It is a self-centered way to be, I'm tired of it, and I'd be a better person if I overcame it.
Obviously I long ago "named and claimed" it as gluttony. But looking at it deeper, what I was trying to do — the reason I behaved as a glutton — was "securing my food supply."
Even though, as I said, my food supply was not. ever. at. risk.
It's a little bit crazy.
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I could quite readily believe that the need to secure my food supply originated in my brain or body chemistry, and that it had something to do with the hypoglycemia and the insulin resistance that I pretty clearly experienced. It's the hormones that drive hunger and cravings, most notably insulin; maybe there are more yet to be discovered (after all, ghrelin and leptin were only discovered in the mid-1990s). Maybe there's some hormone that drives food-supply-securing behavior, some kind of hunting and gathering and storing away. Something that drives you to stab people with your salad fork when they try to steal your French fries. Something that drives you to hide your favorite ice cream in the back of the freezer where no one else can get it. Something that drives you to eat "so you won't get hungry later" even if you're not hungry. Something that drives you to fret all the time about whether you made enough food for everyone.
(What should we call this hypothetical hormone? I vote for "squirrelin.")
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This isn't the only body-brain mismatch I've experienced. Here's a bit from (believe it or not) a 2009 meditation on Holy Thursday:
Have you ever had a genuine panic attack? I have. I had a string of maybe five panic attacks over a period of about six months when I was in college. I never knew why they appeared, and I never knew why they went away again — I've never had any since. I remember it vividly though, one of the most surreal things ever to happen to me.
It was surreal because at every moment I knew exactly what was happening to me. I recognized the sensation as a panic attack. I knew I was, in fact, safe. I knew there was no thing that could have triggered a legitimate fear response. And yet my body was behaving as if I was in terrible danger. My heart was pounding, my skin was sweating, the prickly hairs were standing up on my neck and arms, my blood was dumping adrenaline into my muscles, my breath came swift and panting, the lights brightened as my pupils dilated.
I suffered. Not because I knew fear but because I felt it in my body. My physical response created an unbearable restlessness — my very cells shrieked, Run! Fight! And in a way that made it even worse, because I knew there was, in fact, no point in running and nothing to fight. And yet my body urged me to do something — I kept having this urge to leave the house I was in, to run away into the night. But since I knew I was safe, I had to bring all the strength of my will to bear against the irrational urges of my body to flee. I told myself "This is a panic attack, it will pass," but the one thing I did not know was how long it would last. In the end I sought help, called a friend (to my embarrassment, waking up his parents in the middle of the night) and begged him to keep me company on the phone until the terrible sensations passed.
It wasn't very nice of me to wake up my friend's parents, because I knew perfectly well that I had no "real" reason to seek help. I put it off and put it off and finally my will snapped and I couldn't bear to be alone anymore.
I wonder now if this is a little bit analogous to resisting the cravings for unhelpful food at the wrong times. I wrote that gluttony comes in once you know when and what you're supposed to eat, and once you've put the plan in place to get rid of all the obvious external barriers to doing "the right thing" by your endocrine system. Gluttony's what's you're up against when you know what you are supposed to eat and you know why and there's nothing stopping you except your own lack of will.
But that's sort of like saying that I was up against uncharity, selfishness, that night that I was sweating by the phone, wanting to call, knowing that I wasn't in any true danger, knowing that I would wake my friend's parents up and ruin their sleep if I called. I knew if I called I would inconvenience several people and if I didn't call until morning the only thing that would happen was I would suffer for a few hours. Oh, but it was hard, and in the end selfishness won out; I rationalized that I needed to call, and that they would not be so inconvenienced, and that was the end of that.
Yes, I was selfish. But in part it's because I managed to convince myself "What I'm about to do isn't nearly as bad as what I'm going through now."
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So I wonder about that.
I can point to my panic attack and say, "Well, I had this ideopathic reaction in my sympathetic nervous system, and it created an illusion that I needed something, and that I could get that thing (another person's voice) only by inconveniencing another person. Even though I knew rationally I had no real need, ultimately I rationalized that my perceived need superseded another person's real need, and that is why I behaved uncharitably."
Can I point to my bingeing and hoarding and say, "Well, something in my endocrine system created this constant, low-level illusion that my food supply was endangered. Even though I knew rationally that I would never really go hungry or even miss a meal, I rationalized that this constant need to secure my personal food supply superseded my obligations to my health and to others, and that is why I developed my habit of gluttony."
It is not an excuse. It is more of a diagnosis. A "motivation" for gluttony. And I think that understanding that motivation, understanding that I had a fear of hunger, was something that helped me, finally, tear it out (if incompletely) by the roots.
I think there can be other motivations in other people. I'll speculate about some possibilities in another post.
In the meantime, if you think you might be a glutton, but it has nothing to do with securing your food supply, tell your story in the combox.
[Editing note. Years and years later, I wish I’d done a better job distinguishing gluttony from other problems with food, like clinical eating disorders and other kinds of compulsiveness.
I want to emphasize that, whereas I identified some behaviors in myself that probably qualified as self-centered gluttony in the technical sense, I am not and never have been qualified to make that distinction for anyone else.
I hope to add some commentary to all the posts that have this problem as I find the time to review them. Here’s a more recent post where I acknowledge some of the problematic material I wrote and set new ground rules for myself going forward.]
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