Comparison

When I was young, I gave no energy into thinking about what anybody around me was eating. Other than perhaps if my sister got a bigger slice of cake than me (then, I got mad), I simply did not notice, pay attention to, or compare my intake to others.

Now, that I am recovered, I give no energy into thinking about what anybody else is eating. Not a single thought. I am so entirely oblivious to what other people are eating that I wouldn't be able to tell you if anybody else in my family even ate breakfast this morning. That's not to say that they didn't - they all do eat breakfast daily - but the fact is, I am not bothered enough to hang around in the kitchen snoop on what they had like I used to be. That is because I am no longer in energy deficit, so my brain doesn’t have to be hyper-focus on food and I simply do not care what or when other's are eating.

When I was unwell with Anorexia, however, this was not the case. I cared more than anything in the entire world. I had the ability to be able to tell you, not only, exactly what everyone else at the table was eating, but exactly how much they ate of what over the course of a meal. My hyperfocus didn't stop at the dinner table either. I remember questioning what my parents ate for lunch at work, daily, almost as soon as they stepped in the door. How wonderful that must have been for them?

"Hey Dad, how was your day? Good? Fantastic! I'm glad to hear it. Now we've got the formalities out of the way, let's get down to business. To those details about your day that actually matter. What flavour crisps did you have with your lunch today?".

If you are reading this and have an eating disorder, my bet is that you try to resist doing these type of weird things too. I'm guessing you get irritated when you deem a family member isn't eating what you deem to be 'enough', even if you are not eating as much as them. I'm willing to put money on the fact you have a 6th sense for what strangers are eating, or that you've caught craning your head to find out what filling was inside that man's sandwich who was sat 3 seats behind you on the train. I bet all hell breaks loose and you descend into a spiral of panic if a family member announces they're hungry because they haven't stopped to eat since lunch.

During the years that I was ill, I was the world's worst dinner guest. Not only because I was highly anxious about the food, but because I spent more time clocking other people’s food intake than I did engaging in conversation. I would have cared FAR more about getting to the bottom of why my had sister left a potato on her plate, than if I had spilt hot gravy on my lap by accident. All that my brain cared about when I was sick, was food. My food. My sister's food. My dad's food. My mum's food. My friend's food. That stranger's on the train food. I kid you not, I even cared and judged my dog when she left her breakfast. "What do you mean you aren't hungry, huh?? You only eat 2 meals per day, which means last time you ate was approximately 12 hours ago?? AND you've been on walkies since then? and running around chasing squirrels in the garden all morning??"

Why does this happen?

An energy deficit leads to a hyper-focus on food for a reason. It isn't a curse. It isn't something to 'force' yourself to stop. It is a biological response to restriction.

Let me ask you, if you hold your breath, after a while, all you can think about is wanting to breathe. If I were to drop you in the desert without water, after a few hours or days, all that would be on your mind was water. You'd imagine seeing water. You would dream about water. And, I bet, you would slip the topic of water into any conversation's you had, whenever possible, just because that's all your brain is focussed on.

Oxygen, water and food are the three substances your body needs in order to live. If one of these there substances is in deficit then your brain will use thought patterns and emotion to try and get you to find and consume whatever it is you are low on. Your hyper-focus on food is like the fuel gauge on your car flashing orange and screaming at you to refuel. And thank goodness for this remarkable mechanism! If our brains weren’t so great at making us focus our attention on the things that keep us alive, the human race would have been long gone.

Comparison to others

So, we've established why you might be preoccupied with food, but now onto comparison. What sense does it make to measure what you are 'allowed' to other people, and more importantly, how do you stop it from happening?

The 'adapt to flee famine' explanation for Anorexia genetics gives us some insight into why a malnourished body tends to be interested in other people's food.

You'll know this by now if you've read my other blogs, but I take the view that dieting/ restriction makes the body perceive famine or being a place of food scarcity. In order to get out of this 'scarcity' mindset, mammals start moving to a place of food abundance. Migrating animals can’t spend too much time taken out of moving journey— so their brains disincentivize feeding behaviour in favour of movement. This theory is supported by several studies on other animals, which show how a restriction to food intake correlates to significant increase to movement levels.

Comparison, biologically speaking, is lifesaving. That is why we are so programmed into doing it. Since primitive times, humans have relied on relationships, behaviour mimicking and 'sameness' to thrive. If a man or woman was accepted into a tribe, then he or she had a greater chance of living. The person who was acting differently would be cast out from the group and would most likely not have survived the primitive world on his own.

As a result, no matter how evolved we are as a species, the individual’s need for acceptance and social approval is a residue of our primitive function. Therefore, while you may be able to survive on your own in modern-day life, biologically you are compelled to fit in. Your tribal ancestry encourages you to depend on members of the tribe for both collaboration and agreement on social norms and accepted rules of behaviour. The price for civilization is community. A sense of “sameness” allows you to feel safe against the threats of physical and emotional annihilation. This innate feeling of fear of annihilation may be one of the reasons you've always felt a little uncomfortable going out alone to a restaurant, not for fear of the food, but due to not being the 'norm'. Or why parents groom and culturalise their children to fit in to their “tribe” norms. If we behave and act like others, then, chances are, we will survive. If we deviate and do our own stuff, then we are more isolated and 'at risk'.

So, we compare to keep us alive. But what about food, where does it fit into all of this biologically programmed stuff?

Comparison of food to others

If say, you were in a famine and were migrating with a tribe, then the person who stopped to eat the longest (and therefore ate the most) would be the person who got left behind. If you get left behind your chances of survival are lower. Your brain stem — the part that interprets your energy deficit state as due to famine — doesn’t want you to “feed” more than anyone else. It feels threatening and scary to do so.

Likewise, if other members of your tribe eat more, then it is safe for you to eat more because you are still with the pack. It almost feels a little like permission and reassurance that eating is ok because it's what everyone else is doing.

The problem is that in order to fully mentally and physically recover from a restrictive eating disorder, you must go against this primal drive for 'sameness' and deviate from the pack. This is essential for 3 main reasons:

1) In our weight-loss obsessed society, 'following the pack' means dieting and restriction. You cannot do this if you hope to recover.

2) You are recovering from a deficit. A body in deficit of anything needs to restore deficit with excess. Not just a 'normal'/'balanced' amount of food.

3) You exist in a different body. Not only do different bodies process/absorb/uptake the exact same of foods completely differently, but they need different amounts due to their genetics and life situations.

Although you may feel programmed to compare, you must remind yourself that you are not living thousands of years ago and your survival does not depend on acceptance due to acting the same. Your needs are different from everybody around you, now, in recovery, and forever. It may be useful to come up with a grounding mantra to remind you of this, such as, "my body, my needs" or "my needs are my own".

Anorexia and judgement.

In addition to this, you may find that you compare what you are eating with what others are eating even more when you start to try to eat proper recovery amounts of food. When you are restricting heavily, there is often less comparison because you are eating nowhere near what most other people are, so there seems less point.

However, when you start to eat more, it can turn into a bit of a mind game. You are starving hungry. You want to eat more. Your mind is begging for you to eat more. You know you have to eat more, but you are terrified of eating more than other people due to the fear of weight gain. If you eat more than other people, whose eating is generally keeping their weight stable, that puts you at 'risk'.

For this reason, it isn't uncommon to end up at this strange stage of recovery where you are indeed eating what can be perceived as a 'normal' amount of food and you are eating more than before, but you are not nearly as much as your mental hunger is begging for you to eat. Hear me when I say, if you ate to mental hunger, you would likely be eating vastly higher amounts of food than “normal” people. And so you should, because you are making up for energy deficit and this requires eating abnormally large amounts of food. But that scares you. And I see you. I understand you and I tell you that I experienced that too.

Simply put it, the only way out is to recognise your ability to act regardless of fear. Fear is an emotion that will be present to some degree throughout your recovery. Being scared doesn't have to stop you from acting because fear cannot 'force' you to do anything.

You have to go ahead and do exactly what feels undesirable, terrifying and wrong. You have to eat more than others regardless of if your brain is on board with it. You have to view as thoughts as just thoughts, as part of that cyclical restrictive wiring cycle that your actions have set up as automatic pathways. I promise, if you go through this, you can reach a point where eating more than others feels easy and something you don't even notice — but you won't reach this place until you emerge from energy deficit.

Up until then, you have to eat the amounts of food that your mental hunger desires regardless of how “wrong” doing so feels.

How to do make the comparing stop?

I no longer compare my intake to my family's, friends or strangers because I hauled myself out of energy deficit and my body has no interest doing it. It is not as a result of coming to terms that it was highly irrational and forcing myself to stop.

I don’t think that there is much point in focusing on trying to stop yourself comparing what you eat to what others eat because your brain is doing that for a reason (you are malnourished and so your brain is hyper-focussed on food). My suggestion is instead of putting energy into stopping the comparison, focus your attention on getting out of energy deficit instead.

Simply put it, you will not stop comparing your food if you remain in energy deficit. Therefore, to stop comparing your food, you get out of energy deficit.

My guess, and experience, is when your brain is out of energy deficit, you will naturally cease to give a single care in the world about what anyone else is eating.

The hyper-focus on food can become exhausting, boring and maddening. I think the constant, nagging mental hunger would have truly driven me mad if I wouldn't have got better. Please don't be driven to lunacy and waste energy fearing that there will never be a days respite from food comparison or food thoughts. Focus you energy on something productive. Once you are out of energy deficit your brain will no longer have to motivate you to look for food the whole time. One of the best parts of full recovery is that you get your brain back and can think of much more interesting things.

Like puppies.