Getting High on Recovery

What eats at you makes you. It drives you.

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Science got it wrong. You are not what you eat.

Want proof? If you eat a lot of doughnuts, what happens? You don’t become a doughnut, you get flabby. If you eat a lot of vegetables, you don’t turn green or become more stringy. Eating more meat won’t make look more like a bull.

Eating foods will help to form your overall body structure, but it won’t make you who you are. You are not what you eat, but you are what eats at you.

I will repeat it, mostly so that I get it this time: You are not what you eat, but you are what eats at you.

When we overeat because of things that eat at us, it doesn’t help. Overeating doesn’t get to the heart of something. Overeating is more a sign that you and I are feeling inward pain. Eating may feel like we are doing something, but really we are not moving anywhere.

A while back I remember writing about how I felt after one of my incidents of binge eating. I wrote,

“I am feeling a swollen-puffy-haze from overeating, but something else was eating at me. My mortality. I turn 48 this year and some part of me compares myself with other people and I always lose.”

As I age I am realising that time is not always friendly. I hope that I have a lot of years ahead of me but I don’t want to reach retirement and feel like I wasted what opportunity was given to me. Sometimes this eats at me.

What eats at you makes you. It drives you. Anger because of stupidity at work, gloom over where you are at in life, regret about relationships, fear of risk, pain that stabs at you, and longings for a different life can eat at you and drive your eating behaviours or other unhealthy behaviours.

How do you pull yourself back from the edge, back to more functional and healthy living?

I have found a couple of things that work for me and over the years have helped me to overeat less often.

1.When I realise that I am eating because of what eats at me, I need to say that. When I talk about it, the urge to eat diminishes. Not just talking about the urge, but naming what I am feeling or thinking. Naming it is the key here.

2.Writing down the foods that I eat has proven to be helpful. Writing an actual list of exactly what you eat puts it right in front of you.

3.When I write about it, I understand myself a little better. That is in part why I am writing my blog, and writing for the Good Men Project and other places. Writing in a journal helps to gain greater self-clarity.

What writing does is it reminds you that you are not your food. You are not what you eat. You are unique and valuable, and that your food is just your energy source. Your food is not your life, but it can drive you. And having a disordered relationship with food can throw your life out of balance.

For more about healing, see Healing the Man Inside and To Heal You Must Become the Art.

I write articles about wellness, leadership, parenting and personal growth. My hope is to deliver the best content I can to inspire, to inform and to entertain.

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Keep it Real

Photo by Wesley Fryer