Christy P. pointed me to a blog item/discussion thread at the NYT Well Blog asking "What Is 'Normal' Eating?" I started to read through the 150+ responses and after a short while got very fatigued with "arrrrgh! how wrong most of these people are!" feelings, and had to stop. It is a good question, but I don't think there is much wisdom to be found there in the answers. Maybe you are interested, though -- so here it is.
I will use it for a springboard to write about something I've been thinking lately. I've been mulling over whether it is at all helpful to think about overeating -- garden-variety overeating, not obviously disordered behavior like binge eating -- as a mental illness (an organic one -- body chemistry is involved) in and of itself.
I started wondering about that as I was reading through (and participating in) the discussion at Megan McArdle's. A lot of people, both the obese and the anti-obese, are obsessed with "blame" -- Should we blame obese people for their obesity? Should we avoid blaming them? Should we blame the food processing industry? Advertising? Is blame counterproductive? Are overeaters rational actors in an unhealthy environment? Who's responsible for obesity?
These facts are unassailable:
- Rigorous control of one's behavior, when it really is rigorous, reverses obesity.
- Most people who attempt such rigorous behavior don't actually succeed in producing it long-term. Some think they do and are wrong. Others are aware of their repeated failure.
- It is really, really, really difficult for people to eat less than their bodies tell them they should.
Whatever our eventual philosophy turns out to be, I think we must refuse any line of thinking that either leads us into "self-control is useless" OR into "obese people must have no self-control." The first is contradicted by facts, and also rather insulting to human agency and free will. The second is contradicted by the claims of many, many obese individuals, and also rather unkind and insulting to specific humans. Let's be charitable and take people at their word when they say they are trying hard, okay? And at the same time let's recognize that a portion of the people who try hard really do succeed, and their hard work and success is not meaningless, okay?
Which is why I keep coming back to the overeating-as-mental-illness model:
- It's individual: no two people can be treated exactly alike.
- It's not immutable: hard work, often extraordinarily hard work, and treatment, has successfully treated it.
- Yet not everyone can overcome it: many people have to live with and compensate for it their whole lives.
This leads me to two conclusions:
1. It is dishonest and dangerous to 'normalize' overeating (that is, to say it's just another kind of "normal") in a misguided attempt to make sufferers feel better about themselves or to remove stigma. It is and always will be intrinsically disordered (to borrow a phrase from another field of human behavior) to eat, over long periods of time, more food than is necessary for physical health.
(I say "over long periods" because it's pretty obvious that humans rationally anticipate future scarcity by building up fat stores, and also that it's normal human behavior since time immemorial to use food in social celebration during special feasts. Neither of these, however, describes the constantly grazing, every-plate-looks-like-Thanksgiving behavior that characterizes the overeating I see around me.)
2. And yet, it is unfair, unkind, and unhelpful to shame and blame people, or categorize them as lazy or without self-control, because they have not succeeded at the kind of drastic, long-term change that would reverse obesity. It's really hard. I don't say it's impossible because some succeed. But many don't. It doesn't mean they can't. It does mean that it's asking more than most people can handle without a significant commitment of resources that they might, reasonably, be unwilling to make.
We know better now than to shame people because they can't handle, say, bipolar disorder or drug dependence on their own. We know, too, that it's not pointless to try to encourage people to do the hard work of regaining control of their lives. Maybe we need a similar sort of sanity about overeating.
What does this have to do with normal eating? Well...
I question whether "normal eating" is really what recovering overeaters need to be shooting for. I'm not sure it's possible to eat normally, once you've been a compulsive overeater, just as most people agree that it's not possible for a recovering alcoholic to use alcohol like a "normal" person. I think it will always be somewhat artificial, never natural, for me to consume the amount of food I physically require. I am able to celebrate with food, to enjoy it as a social interaction, to feast; but always with a kind of calculation and attention, like a diabetic who must remember to measure blood sugar and apply corrections to the daily insulin dose.
Appropriate eating -- healthy eating -- for a recovering overeater is not the same as for someone who naturally eats "normally." Part of the reason that so many people in threads like the one at the NYT blog are so wrong wrong WRONG-- is because they fail to see that normal behavior is not what's best for abnormal people, and the corrections that abnormal people need to make are, well, ridiculous to try to apply to the whole population, especially the healthy ones.
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