Recover from Eating Disorders: The Homeodynamic Recovery Method, Step by Step Guide by Gwyneth Olwyn

Author:Gwyneth Olwyn [Olwyn, Gwyneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Akureyri Publishing
Published: 2017-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

Your gut and your mind

When a person is energy balanced, then hunger, fullness, and satiation are all synchronized. But after just a few weeks (let alone months or years) of catabolizing your own body, these things will be asynchronous when you begin to reverse the damage.

In the earlier phases of recovery, you experience significant sensory dissonance because physical fullness, as identified by your enteric nervous system, and extreme absence of satiation, as experienced by your central nervous system are confirming you are both full and hungry at the same time.

Here are several first-person accounts of what it actually feels like from The Eating Disorder Institute members posting on the forums:

“The concept to me is so confusing, because I can feel not hungry, satiated, or even nauseous with food, but there isn’t necessarily fullness in my stomach.”

“I have only been hitting my minimums consistently for a week and am now beginning (from two days ago) to get extreme hunger. It’s such an odd sensation of never feeling full and constantly just wanting to eat food then feeling absolutely stuffed…I just hate extreme hunger to be honest, and I wish I could just happily walk through recovery hitting my minimums. I guess this isn’t realistic for the amount of damage our bodies have undertaken, though, is it.”

“I definitely feel some compulsion to “finish everything” now, because I fear being deprived and am still obsessed with food to varying degrees. I am also very, very aware of my hunger. It’s weird that I seriously cannot remember how I ate before I started restricting...”

“I think I feel the food in my stomach, and I definitely feel “full”, but I still feel the urge to “finish everything”, too. Sometimes I feel like I am just forcing the food down. I don’t know whether it’s a lack of fullness or satiation, but I can definitely relate to never feeling full.”

“Even then if there was still food on my plate I would almost force myself to finish it because it “tasted so good”. I am really not sure what this is or what it means...if I was not full to bursting I would still feel hungry/not satiated.”

“I’ve recently (within a week or two) started to experience extreme hunger. It is nerve-racking: I feel some sort of hunger or emptiness in my stomach while also being full and bloated and feeling nauseous at the thought of food at the same time. It is truly bizarre and I sometimes hear myself say “oh god, please I don’t want to eat anymore” but the hunger persists and I force another sandwich down my throat.”

For these patients, the brain structures responsible for conscious thought are dealing with a completely novel experience, and it’s easy to see the profound struggle that it elicits. Biologically speaking, they are all gut-full yet brain-empty.

And the above quotes confirm there is tremendous variation in how those sensory contradictions are awkwardly resolved with posthoc rationalization. One feels fullness in the stomach but no sense of satiation, and yet the next person will describe exactly opposite sensations.

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