Did you know that your nervous system state directly affects how your body processes the food you eat? We often think of our ability to control our bodies through behavior modification, diet discipline, and working so hard is where it all begins and (maybe one day) ends but what about the state and story that your nervous system is neurocepting (meaning, how your NS is sensing if something around you is safe or a threat) as you look in the mirror or sit down to eat or avoid the plate?
Could an embodied mindset approach really create change in the overwhelm toward our bodies and the food we eat? The study of Psychoneuroimmunology (the study of the interaction between psychological processes and the nervous and immune systems of the human body) tell us yes - and so does this team at Steyn. If you need a nervous system refresher, we’ve got you here.
As we neurocept threats toward our bodies and the food we eat, our body reacts and responds accordingly - our weight may serve as protection or food may be sensed as unsafe - and many responses in between. This is happening inside us much before we are aware. There is good news, you have a team within you that wants to help keep you alive in this process, this is the team of your nervous system.
They are managing daily life, firefighting out extreme distress, and exiling away the pain within us. These parts of us try their best, with much effort, to help through responses like modifying, restricting, comparing, criticizing, comforting through food, and these parts hold grand stories and exert grand efforts all toward trying to keep us alive. They know the story your body holds all too well, the story they want to protect you from, and they see how effective it has been to help you through focusing their efforts on your body and what you consume or don’t consume.
Common Parts around Eating and Body Image - Protectors Against Threats
There are well-known, nearly universal parts that may show up in our body/eating inner system. These can be the Inner Critic, The Restrictor, The Binge or Food as Comfort-er, and Comparison. These can be sensed through the ANS (Autonomic nervous system) as Sympathetic parts, or parts that seek action toward the threat that is sensed, or Dorsal Vagal parts, parts that seek disengagement toward the threat.
Should we enact the Perfectionist? Or seek safety via action with our Sympathetic ANS parts.
Should we numb out and Binge? Or seek safety via disconnection with our Dorsal ANS parts.
Which parts do you notice in your own system? How can even a little bit of awareness bring into your inner sight how much activity is happening internally, or opposite, how quiet it is? Does it feel like they are protecting you once you begin to ask them?
It is fairly common that when we start to tune in, we see the Inner Critic present as we dressed for the day protecting us from familiar external judgment or the Comforter shows up after a painful feeling starts to emerge and take us away from it. Awareness is an effective first step, because that observer energy can lead you closer to your fully custom, fully capable, fully loving Self-energy to help all these protective parts!
Awareness can look like:
Noticing a sensation in our body and spending time being curious about it by asking, “If this sensation could share with me, what would you want to say?”
Naming our parts present and beginning to build a relationship with them.
Burdens our parts protect us from
The burden of our society centered around ideal body image, ideal food consumption, ideal health, and ideal diets is significant. Our parts want us to get the ideal love, care, repair and connection we might have missed out on from our early experiences or relational hurts, it makes sense they see an effective strategy by using our bodies to help us achieve connection or protect from it. It can bring a sense of insight into our system to ask how the burdens of societal pressures have directly effective our own parts.
Ask: What is hardest for you to see? Is there a form of media you want more of? Less of?
Other burdens are much more custom to our lives, usually buried under precise hedges of protection. Though many of our body and eating protectors may use their tools due to an exiled wound about our body, it can also be a wound of desiring control, feeling forgotten, being parentified at an early age, or being filled with fear. In this sense, the only way toward Self-led freedom begins with listening and learning about the roles of our protectors with curiosity.
What does it look like when Self-leads then?
When Self begins to lead, we have the eyesight of love and compassion toward our inner world and external circumstance. This could look like eating in a relaxed state, listening to cues of hunger and fullness with clarity, finally feeling hungry or having your biological systems respond now that they are no longer carrying fear, or having radical acceptance toward the body you were born in and attaching to confidence within. It really simply means creating enough space and healing within so that our true Self, filled with wisdom, can drive the ship - like a confident, flexible leader within.
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