Food hurts and helps

A wise Spanish proverb states, "The belly rules the mind." Our tummy controls our behavior, cognition and mood. We overeat to feed the growling beast within, refuse to eat to control parents who try to control and intake small portions while exercising to excess to become the perfect pop cultural representation of physical health.

We eat when sad, when happy, when angry and when feeling nothing at all. The intake and output of food has become an array of psychological and biological disorders replacing food's initial purpose, to nourish our body and mind.

Food is like a marriage. We form a personal relationship with food, which changes when our mood cycles. When depressed or sad, we dive into fatty, sugary, high carbohydrate foods, which first comfort then deepens our depression and sadness as our waistband increases and body bloats. At a holiday party we indulge in culinary treats satisfying and lifting our mood, which creates happy memories and reinforces our desire to celebrate life. Let's examine the dysfunction of food then celebrate its merits.

Anorexia nervosa

Anorexia always begins as a weight-loss diet. People feel overweight then begin to diet and, as their weight drops, continue to feel fat and remain obsessed with losing weight. Most are women (9 out of 10) who continue to limit their food intake or exercise to excess even when their body is emaciated.

Bulimia nervosa

Bulimia almost always happens when someone breaks a diet cycle and gorges on food. Preoccupied with food (craving sweet and high-fat foods) but fearful of gaining weight, one with bulimia vomits, uses laxatives, fasts or exercises to excess to counteract the result of gorging.

People with bulimia often exhibit depression and anxiety following episodes of binging then purging. About half of those with anorexia also display the binge-purge-depression symptoms of bulimia. Unlike anorexia, bulimia is marked by weight gain and loss, making the condition easy to hide.

Mothers of girls with eating disorders are often critical of their own weight and hypercritical of the weight and physical appearance of their daughters. A family of children with bulimia has a higher-than-usual incidence of childhood obesity and negative self-evaluation. Sufferers set perfectionist standards, fret about falling short of expectations and are intensely concerned with how others perceive them.

There is a cultural explanation why anorexia and bulimia occur mostly in women and mostly in weight-conscious cultures. Body ideals vary across culture and time. In India, women students rate their body ideal as close to their actual shape. In Africa - where thinness can signal poverty, AIDS and hunger, and the prosperous are plump - bigger is better.

It seems clear that the sickness of today's eating disorders lies not just within the victims but also within our weight-obsessed culture - a culture that says, in countless ways, "Fat is bad," that motivates millions of women to be "always dieting," and that encourages eating binges by pressuring women to live in a constant state of semistarvation. As compelling as our biological motivations are, eating behavior is clearly also affected by psychological and social-cultural factors.

Obesity

Common arithmetic equates people get fat by consuming more calories than they expend, but is this true? Not always. Once we become fat, we require less food to maintain our weight than we did to attain it. Why? Because compared with other tissue, fat has a lower metabolic rate - it takes less food energy to maintain it. So, once the weight is on, it stays on unless we decide to radically change our behavior.

Obesity has many causes and all start with food intake. Putting large amounts of sugary, high-calorie foods in our sedentary body will increase our weight. Eating low-calorie, low-fat food and moving our bodies more decreases our weight. If you want to lose weight follow these seven tips and watch the numbers on the scale decrease.

1. Begin only if you feel motivated and self-disciplined. Weight loss is a lifelong decision to change family food traditions, eating habits, becoming more active and maintaining these activities for life. When struggling with motivation, a therapist might help define motivation and aid self-discipline.

2. Minimize exposure to tempting food cues. Remove unhealthy food from your house and go to the grocery store when full.

3. Take steps to boost your metabolism. Move your body. Walk, swim, run, play basketball or play with your children. Moving your body creates a calorie burning body and is fun.

4. Be realistic and moderate. A realistic time line for a 10 percent reduction in body weight is six months. It took time to put the weight on, allow time to take it off.

5. Eat healthy foods. Add foods with color to your plate and remove golden food. Replace bread and French fries with whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables.

6. Don't starve all day and eat one big meal at night. Eating throughout the day maintains one's energy level and avoids the gorge of starvation at night.

7. Beware of the binge. Most people occasionally lapse. After lapsing remind yourself you've succeeded before and get back on the healthy eating horse (Myers, 2007).

Celebrate food

Food should not punish but reward. Eating to punish or control creates dysfunction making food the enemy. Eating a healthy, nourishing meal with family and friends creates memories that desire to be relived. When happy, we remember the food we consume as part of our happiness and take a cognitive picture of the food experience to hopefully repeat the memory later with friends or family.

We crave ham on Mother's Day because of past memories from holidays with people we love. These positive memories are replayed in our minds to remember family and friends from our childhood who have died, or to forget silly family squabbles and disagreements, which are now unimportant. Food heals.

Bill Rutherford is a psychotherapist, public speaker, elementary school counselor, adjunct college psychology instructor and executive chef, and owner of Rutherford Education Group. Please e-mail him at bprutherford@hotmail.com and check out www.foodforthoughtcda.com.