I have a precarious relationship with hunger as a physiological and mental phenomenon. Because of my past experience with and ongoing feelings around hunger, I live my life in such a way to avoid encountering this sensation. Hunger creates tremendous panic in me. It\u2019s the harbinger of certain and impending loss of safety, stability, and control.<\/p>\n
I developed anorexia in high school \u2013 by accident. I participated in team and club athletics, and constantly sought ways to improve my performance. My focus narrowed in on nutrition as a tool for manipulating my body\u2019s ability and capacity for precision. This escalated to the level of obsession, and subsequently became a full-blown eating disorder. From that point, I struggled with eating disorders in various forms for over a decade. I was afraid of my body and its signals; I stopped trusting my own biology.<\/p>\n
Thankfully, I no longer struggle with any of this. I have a healthy and positive relationship with food and my body. That being said, I\u2019ve noticed that I carry some mental and emotional vestiges of my disordered eating days. As I recovered, I learned to eat with rigid regularity to avoid falling into dangerous patterns and relapsing. In doing so, I never learned to sit with hunger. I never learned to experience it in a \u201cnormal\u201d way. I still eat this way \u2013 constantly, with no consideration towards hunger or its signals (or, frankly, the lack thereof). From the moment I wake up, to the literal moment I fall asleep, I am either: eating, just ate, or am about to eat. I eat every hour or so, sometimes with one snack bleeding into the next. I don’t eat “meals;” I intake a steady stream of food all day. I always have snacks with me (which is also partially due to a severe autoimmune reaction I have when I ingest certain foods, making planning ahead a necessity in order to avoid being stranded without options). I never go to sleep without food in my stomach. Hunger terrifies me.<\/p>\n
Because of my struggles, I associate hunger with desperation, self-hate, self-harm, fear, loss of control, and feeling unsafe in my skin. I eat when I’m not hungry, because I never allow myself to become hungry. Hunger is the monster under my bed. I have been subtly aware of my relationship with hunger for some time, but this week’s contemplative practice ushered these thoughts and feelings to the center of my consciousness. Despite the prompt suggesting that we perform the practice while feeling hungry, I was not. In fact, I was eating at the time; it seemed more fitting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have a precarious relationship with hunger as a physiological and mental phenomenon. Because of my past experience with and ongoing feelings around hunger, I live my life in such a way to avoid encountering this sensation. Hunger creates tremendous panic in me. It\u2019s the harbinger of certain and impending loss of safety, stability, and control. I developed anorexia in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[153,152,67,105],"class_list":["post-514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hunger","tag-contemplative-practice","tag-eating-disorder","tag-health","tag-hunger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":515,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514\/revisions\/515"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}