Hungry Ghosts: Trauma-informed eating and weight loss
There is nothing like filling your stomach when your soul is hungry. I open the refrigerator looking for happiness missing in my day to day reality. Instant gratification on the shelves. The satiating fullness of the physical overcomes the nagging emptiness of the psychical. And this is why I eat. This is why I eat even after I am physically full. I am trying to fill the void the trauma that eats me. Is it no wonder that individuals who have undergone traumatic experiences have issues with weight or eating disorders.
Before I became trauma-informed about everything, even eating, I used to blame my voracious appetite on me. I blamed myself for lack of self-control, for stacking up on the $2 bags of white cheddar popcorn, not the 50 cent ones. For licking up the gravy or seasoned oils off my plate with thick wedges of Italian bread. In the pit of my stomach there was a bottomless pit. I imagine it looks like the black gaping mouth of hell in the Heironymous Bosch painting. I am a garbage can with the lid up that gets all sorts of food stuffs flung into it, even with wrappers intact. Even when I know I am full, I feel the need to eat, to devour every morsel around me. While, yes, I am a foodie and it is a practice that keeps me alive, I can tell that at times it is an addiction or an obsession. If I know there are three sandwiches of liverwurst under my seat on the long bus ride, I will not be at peace unless I’ve devoured them. There is an uncontrollable hunger that I cannot refuse. I can’t stop with one scoop of gelato I need three. Extra large McD meals, second me croissants in the morning, and french fries, french fries, just one more french fry.
Even when I go to the gym, I’d beat myself because of how I felt. Looking in the mirror made me cringe. Is that me? The one with the huge middle? Like the Michelin tire guy? I hated the look of myself; I avoided my reflection in mirrors, windows, store fronts, anything that revealed the bulging outlines of the Venus of Willendorf and the subsequent feelings of disgust. I scourge myself for not being able to control my appetite. And then the cycle of self flagellation repeated with the torture of the treadmill. Sweating and panting, I swear not to touch a morsel until the next day. No sooner do I see the package of Oreos on the counter that and transform into the Cookie Monster.
And then the mantra, “Why did I eat that? That’s not healthy. What’s wrong with you? You have no will power,” my inner critic bites at me. To make up for eating unhealthy cookie, I rationalize my hoard of the mesquite turkey and rolls of American cheese followed by whip cream straight from the can into my mouth. Back to the same square. I just can’t help myself. I am a failure.
This cycle of scourge/self hatred/ punishment/ overeating went on for years. Until I started reading about trauma and how it affects the body. Perhaps I was not totally to blame. The hunger I held, or rather that held onto me, had not come out of nowhere. I had inherited it my parents who had both nearly starved to death.
My mother was born seven months premature during a winter storm under the Nazi invasion of Athens. Her parents thought she would die, so they baptized her under the darkness of the kitchen table to make it appear as if their house has been bombed out. My grandmother under the stress of the war probably gave birth to her prematurely. She barely had anything to eat herself except for the greens and a piece of a hot potato every once in a while. During World War II and then the Civil War, there were kids in the streets of Athens with bloated stomachs literally starving to death. My grandmother had no milk for my mother, so they would do best thing they would — they gave my premature mother boiled birdseed. Yes, boiled birdseed and add a little bit of sugar and that was supposed to sustain her, that was supposed to build her lungs and her bones and give her the sustenance to survive the winter without heat. She was not expected to live, so they called the priest to baptize her in the first three days of coming home from the hospital.
My father side wasn’t much different. He grew up in a remote island where they had to sweat to grow the food for a family of six children. As farmers though, they at least could grow their own food but still with six kids and no running water or electricity you’d have to rush to get whatever squash or beans that you could from the table before everybody else snatch them from you. My father remembers being left alone to tend to a herd of cows in the mountains for two weeks while they took to pasture. He was sent there with a satchel of nothing but a tomato a cucumber all handful of olives and a loaf of bread. That was supposed to last him for a week. He supplemented his diet with the help of his two hunting dogs that would ravage the countryside snorting under the gray rocks for wild hares. My father would not have had much protein growing up. The way he tore through a steak was a spectacle for any David Attenborough nature documentary, a cross between an execution and a wedding. At every meal, he concentrated on the food as if his life depended on it; from watching him, you got the feeling that he was eating for the first and last time. My mother was no different — she hoarded food. Her cupboards stacked with cans, noodles, packages. The hinterland of the fridge spotted with clumps of aluminum foil bearing the remains of three to five day leftovers. On any given day there would be three pots in hot flame on the stove.
After deeply absorbing and observing, my parents’ relationship with food, I started thinking — perhaps it wasn’t just me or my lack of self-control. Perhaps it was that my parents had transmitted a complex trauma history surrounding food. As Van der kolk surmised the body keeps the score and my body was a product of two starving ones. I had inherited the hunger through the sense memories of starvation, lack, and food insecurity. It is what is — the hunger of my parents that I kept deep down in the core of me even when I wasn’t hungry. This explains why I can’t throw away food (I’ve been known to eat things that have gone bad beyond the expiration date or things that seem off) No. I cannot throw away food I have been known to eat stale food expired food and one food out of the garbage can. There is something that just does not let me be at peace about food. I cannot leave anything on my plate even if it makes me look bad in sophisticated company. Primal in my eating habits even when I know consciously rationally that I’m not starving. I carry the seed of starvation in the pit of my belly. The trauma of going hungry on both my parents’ sides has something to do with my inability to control my food intake. It might be intergenerational trauma. It’s a generational trauma of lack of the possibility of one that makes it so hard for me to resist a crumb of anything (or it’s just my lack of self-control).
Perhaps it’s the scepter of starvation ghost of my parents scrawny hungry so deep in my DNA that makes it hard to lose weight. If I bear this in mind, I have to forgive myself for over eating, for storing emergency food in my bag or in my glove compartment. When I embrace the trauma history of my family I can forgive myself for taking that extra cracker for reaching for the third or fourth banana. Of course now that I am trauma informed I can better compromise with the hungry ghosts circling the insides of my bowels. Now I can sit them down across the table and say. “Look we are no longer in a place or time where we might starve.” We have an over abundance of food in this country food that is full of fat and toxins. To keep alive we have to keep from eating. At least from eating junk food. “
I have had to come face to face with the scepter of starvation and exorcize it. let it go. don’t worry we have too much food to ever go hungry. You can calm down. Stop haunting my innards. Let me be. I am no longer starving. I have enough. I don’t need to fill that bottomless void. That black hole that the more I fill the More it demands. We are no longer on the verge of death. We have enough. You can leave me now.
Only when I brought the hungry ghosts of the past into the present was I able to finally lose weight.