No word for Snow: Why Hyperphagia Nervosa

The word anorexia means-without appetite, an- + -orexia. Hyperphagia means an excess of eating. It refers to both that and an excess of hunger/appetite signalling too. It's used for both. Anorexia experientially isn't what the word means. 

Still, we manage to learn from anorexics that it refers to a compulsive cycle of extreme (food) restriction. I hope others can dig deep and show the same grace with hyperphagia nervosa, even though its associated with being greater than slim. Though it must be said, not all with this condition are plump/fat.

Apart from because I say so, there's a specific and very important reason to locate the problem where it is, with hunger/appetite mechanics, rather than where disinterested others want it to be, with food.

It's not ego or shame. It to understand and grasp the underlying problem. In order to identify and formulate strategies to reverse and be relieved of substantially if not wholly of it. Something that has been left to lay people with this condition to do, given the uselessness of the usual ]professional] suspects and their tiresome fat phobia.

In the wake of 'obesity' panic neurosis, there have been many assertions that humans are naturally inclined totally towards fattening. That's construct related paranoia. Fatness is mysterious precisely because it happens whilst body's homeostasis is doing many things to arrest gain and/or stabilize weight.

A possible sly example of this is the unrecognized grip the use of starvation has on our consciousness. We all hate dieting. The very idea of restriction invokes repugnance and disgust in many across the weight spectrum. Strangely though, this doesn't affect the strength of the hold calorie restriction/ counting and such can gain over our minds.

Even if you barely diet a day in your life, deny yourself little, do less than a lick of exercise, it seems if calories in/out forms the basis of your understanding of hunger, food, eating and weight, that's enough to trigger one of the body's more prominent defenses against calorie restriction, becoming overly fixated with food.

As we've all been inculcated with ci/co as the default premise, we're all labouring under this fixation to some degree or another. Only when you begin to exit the pursuit of lifestyle anorexia, calories in/out and it unravels sufficiently enough, can you really appreciate the depths of this neurotic tunnel vision.

If that's not entirely clear, I'm saying that when you consider going on a wld, your nervous system averts your focus to food. People cast this as "rebellion," or "you feel like thinking about food" no, that is your nervous system directing itself and therefore you there. It is not conscious decision making. It's involuntary.

From throwing up visions of food into your conscious mind, like pop-ads. To making you gabble ceaseless paeans to your thwarted desire for _________ [insert verboten food]. This internal directive is defense by constant evocative reminder-against your imposition of lack. I'm saying, this occurs even with the potential for you doing this, it happens as a result of ideology, including your desire to impose restriction on others.

Thinking often is a tiny fraction of doing. And an action is often the power of thought in motion.  This is what the placebo effect is rooted in.

To think something is microscopic action, a form of activity in itself. If strongly charged enough, it can propel (you) straight into action, without much engagement of conscious thought.

Usually this is infinitesimal and leaves a certain mood or feeling in us, depending on our interpretation. But we know especially after, it often directs and leads to actions and influences our behaviour, responses, attitudes, expectations etc.,

This food fixation psychology seems to be why everything is focused on food and eating. Bodies come to = amounts of food. Fatter bodies, lots of/ too much food. What's effectively a starvation disorder-anorexia- is called an eating disorder.

And why a disorder of hunger/appetite mechanics, hyperphagia is called "compulsive (over)eating" and latterly "food addiction."

Hunger, not will is the cue to eat. Eating is the normal response to its anatomical signalling, not an elective decision apropos of nothing. To not eat when you are-at the right level of hunger is abnormal. 

Because hunger is generated by your anatomy, the more heightened a level it is performing, the more powerfully your body is functioning physically. And;

• the more there's an excess of physical function/tension in your body and/or nervous system-like a fist being tightly clenched 

• the more likely it is to be capable of animating/generating behaviour  without conscious input

• there more likely there are to be consequences from the energy diverted into all this excess of function, i.e. potential damage from overuse and/or exhaustion.

Shifting the focus to where the problem is, with the functioning of certain parts of your nervous system (concerned with eating), clarifies perspective to a more accurate and useful one. If I had ever seen hyperphagia only in the way it has been alluded to, I would have struggled to free myself of it to the extent that I've been lucky too.

I'm leaving binge eating disorder alone, because I'm not entirely sure of its distinctions. Nor do I claim to know for sure whether my experience is definitive. But I can describe my experience as accurately as possible, to be part of a resource for others who are going through this.

Constructive evaluation and criticism is welcome. At the same time, trying to understand those with the experience-not just me- is more important than reasserting the status quo.