Eat Yourself Whole:Pixie Turner's Psychology Of Dietary Behaviour.

"The body is the stage upon which we enact the lessons we've learned about ourselves and our worth" - Pixie Turner

I'd seen Pixie Turner speak before (back in November 2018, for Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub, when it used to be at The Star & Garter) so I knew she was an interesting, and entertaining, speaker. She's knowledgeable, relatable, and she's funny. She's also not afraid to let fly with a volley of expletives and, last night, I also found out she's a huge fan of Mini Eggs.

To the point of bemoaning the fact that shops stop selling them after Easter. I like her. She's my kind of person. She's better educated than me though. She's a registered nutritionist (she puts emphasis on the word 'registered' as there are a lot of frauds out there calling themselves nutritionists), she's a psychotherapist, and she's the director of something called The Food Therapy Centre where she specialises in food and body image issues.

That's what last night's talk, 'Food Therapy:How our psychology affects how we eat' for Skeptics in the Pub - Online was all about and though there was some crossover with, and a tiny bit of repetition of, 2018's talk it was different enough to warrant its own blog.

In her day job, Pixie talks to people with food related mental health concerns and she finds that often, almost always, these are driven by larger underlying problems. She looks to integrate nutrition and psychology and she started her talk by showing us two photos of food. One of a load of bagels and one of a plate full of macaroons.

It was Pixie's contention, and I agreed with most if not quite everything she said, that a group of people looking at those two photos would all see, and metabolise, these foods differently. Different adjectives would come to different people. Some would think healthy, some unhealthy, some decadent, some - quite simply - tasty.

How we view food is affected by various factors. It's affected by the culture we grew up in, it's affected by the beliefs we have about food and the beliefs we have come to hold about ourselves, and it's affected, perhaps most obviously of all, by whether we're hungry or we're full up. It's Pixie's belief that many of us tell us ourselves, and others, two rather big lies.

(1) There is good food and there is bad food

(2) There are good emotions and there are bad emotions

Macaroons, or doughnuts, or indeed Mini Eggs, are not bad food. There's a time and a place for them, sure. But they're not bad. Sometimes they're ideal. Eating a macaroon, a doughnut, or a whole bag of Mini Eggs definitely does not make you a bad person. It's not as if you've burned down an orphanage or voted for the Tories.

Sadness is not a bad emotion. There are times when sadness is the correct emotion. If a family member or close friend has recently died then sadness would seem to be the most appropriate emotion. Anger, too, has its uses. It needs to be controlled and directed appropriately but without anger not much would ever improve in our lives or in the world.

We need to allow context and nuance in our emotions because to deprive ourselves, or others, of those things means we are pushing down, suppressing, our genuine emotions and that normally creates much bigger problems further down the road. 

While the intersection between food and psychology is incredibly complex it seems that the early years of our lives do shape us psychologically as regards to our relationship with food. Early life trauma can be a major factor. A study of 57,000 women who had suffered physical and/or sexual abuse as children showed that they were twice as likely to describe themselves as having a problem with overeating and 80% of individuals who engaged in 'disordered eating' reported undergoing exposure to traumatic incidents.

The reasons, it is believed, vary. Some people believe that the experiences they have undergone have left them 'broken'. They believe that they're not good enough, they blame themselves - as children often do when things don't go well, and they become discouraged from pursuing healthy behaviour (not just healthy food but exercise etc;) because they feel they don't deserve it, that they aren't worthy.

In other cases, though there is some crossover, the overeating arises from an attempt to protect one's self, to change one's body so that is no longer of interest to past and potential future abusers. A feeling of intense fullness is a useful distraction or displacement from the inner pain and sadness somebody may be suffering.

This path can be especially tempting for those that lack, or feel they lack, support. The overeating initially appears to work - because in the short term it does work - so the habits become reinforced and entrenched and ever harder to break. Of course it's the same with alcohol and drugs but while you can, and it's not easy of course, eventually give up alcohol and drugs entirely you can't give up food. You have to eat to stay alive.

'Emotional eaters' (and not all emotional eating is bad, eating for comfort or pleasure is actually good, eating for punishment or sedation less so) often report difficult family relationships in childhood. Eating becomes something that is done for love. Partners, parents, and siblings may abandon you but food will never leave you.

Of course, parents have it the toughest when it comes to eating habits. Parenthood looks bloody tough and I'd say getting your children to have a functional and healthy relationship with food must be one of the toughest parts of it. But then I would say that. My mum took me to the doctors when I was a little because I refused to eat anything except a cream cracker with some cheese on it.

Pixie wasn't out to blame parents (or so she said) but she did acknowledge how tough it is. She did, however, say there were certain things that parents (certainly of my generation) tend to say that don't really help. Words relating to emotional suppression. Things like "you're too sensitive" and that old classic "don't cry or I'll give you something to cry about".

Those examples are quite explicitly designed to shut a child's genuine emotions down but there are implicit ways this is done too. Parents who don't show any emotion themselves or parents with unstable and unpredictable emotions. Again, it sounds tough. It's a very thin tightrope that parents have to walk.

Not being able to deal with, or not being given the space to deal with, our own emotions means that it's hardly a surprise that some turn to food but, again, there are explicit messages sent out to us regarding our relationship with food. I know that for a fact as I have quite regularly been on the end of these messages and I've never found them to be much help.

Those that are deemed to eat too much are told "you can't be hungry again already" (pro tip:children do actually know when they're hungry or not). That was never an issue for me. Instead I was deemed not to eat enough so I was forced to stay at the dinner table until my plate was completely empty. As a small child I was bribed with a Sooty dish. If I ate everything I'd be able to see Sooty on the bottom of the dish.

I could see Sooty on television anyway - and that Sooty was doing magic tricks not just gawping up at me. I also remember being forced to eat a Brussels sprout and it being so disgusting that I stored it in my cheeks and spat it in to the toilet later. The experience has put me off Brussels sprouts for life. These are, again - of course, explicit examples of unhelpful messaging regards food but there are implicit ones too.

Family members who are always on diets, children regularly being on the receiving end of criticism as regards both what they eat and their body shape, and simply witnessing others receiving judgemental comments on those same issues. If you're worried you're overweight, or that you overeat, watching your family or friends be rude about fat people on television won't be very helpful.  

It's probably best not to teach children that their bodies, and their emotions, can't be trusted. Although there is one emotion that can be very difficult to deal with. That emotion is shame. As Walon (Steve Earle's character) in The Wire tells Bubbles:- "shame is some tricky shit, ain't it? Makes you feel like you want to change and then beats you back down when you think you can't".

Shame is a learned emotion. Shame of our bodies and shame of our body sizes. In Western society, we have a terrible habit of talking about 'beach ready' bodies, dad bods, and carrying 'timber' and all this does is reinforce shame and, in some, drive secret eating. Which, sadly, reinforces shame.

Shame can be a spiral and can feel like an inexorable vortex which cannot be escaped but food itself is rarely the problem. It's often the (short term) solution so what is the actual problem? That's not an easy one to answer but in the final section of Pixie Turner's talk she had a go at describing some of the things she thinks have not been useful in addressing people's dietary habits and their relationships with food.

There are styles of thinking and ways we talk, internally (though I've only recently discovered there are many people who have no interior monologue and presumably walk around with nothing in their head all day, I bet they sleep well), to ourselves. All or nothing thinking, the idea that something is either perfect or it's complete and utter shit, isn't helpful at all. Somebody I once knew would describe having a "fuck it" kind of day. One thing goes wrong so the whole day is fucked. I wasn't going to drink today but now I've had one pint I might as well have ten. I wasn't going to eat crisps today but now I've opened that tube of Pringles might as well finish the whole lot.

Pringles, "once you pop you can't stop", even incorporate it into their brand image. Pixie Turner also believes we overuse the word 'should'. A word she feels is just a version of 'could' but weighed down with a whole load of judgement. It feels nagging and overly authoritative for others to tell us what we SHOULD do. It might be kinder if others suggested what we COULD do. People want advice. They don't want to be given orders.

Catastrophising, immediately jumping to the worst case scenario (been there), isn't helpful either and neither is intense self-criticism. Many of us can be real dicks to ourselves. If we treated others the way we treat ourselves it would be seen as cruelty. All it does is build internal shame and as Walon's already pointed out "shame is some tricky shit".

Other emotions, though, we need to learn to sit with. It's not easy but we could, instead of using food to suppress emotions that we find difficult, spend time with our emotions, learn to live with them. Unhelpful media messaging doesn't help. There are so many conflicting diet books on the market that it's no wonder people get confused. Most of them are complete shit but Pixie Turner singled out a guy called Anthony William, the self styled Medical Medium, as a particularly egregious example.

William's USP is that he's been given dietary advice by a ghost and the ghost's advice, it seems, is that we all need to drink more celery juice. Despite this, clearly, being absolute horseshit, Anthony William is incredibly popular. It's not just diet books where information is not reliable. There are endless conflicting news reports about diet (the Daily Mail have gone so far as to claim that bagels, bacon, bread, cheese, chicken, coffee, curry, eggs, honey, lamb, Nutella, peanut butter, pizza, potatoes, sausages, tea, and Worcester sauce all cause cancer - oh, and dildos as well, for good measure) and there are lots of idiotic podcasts out there too. Not all podcasts are idiotic but many podcasters find themselves going down the pseudoscientific route because that's what, in this fucked up world, gets you the most listeners.

Food can't cure depression. There is no anti-depression diet. Food is not medicine. There are those that believe that certain foods (bananas, rice, walnuts, lentils, oranges, turmeric, garlic, olive oil, strawberries, and onions being some examples) can help with your mental state and while it's fine to give that a try, it's a bad idea to think that that alone will work. A very bad idea to stop taking any medication you're on or to give up any therapy you're having in the hope that your diet alone will cure you.

 

Cutting out sugar (or coffee, alcohol, chocolate, Coca-Cola, or energy drinks) won't cure your anxiety. Though it may help with your blood pressure. Food obviously has a physical effect on us and how we are physically affects our mental state but we'd be unwise to think that's down to what we eat as much as it's about how we eat and why we eat.

Like I said, I didn't agree with everything Pixie Turner said but I felt she made some very good, and very relevant, points. A Q&A (in which her cat joined in immediately, something of an online Skeptics tradition) took in evolution, dopamine pathways, the NHS, people who try to police other's diets (to my mind no different than trying to police someone's sexuality or the clothes they wear - it's their body, not yours), autism, neurodivergence, tinned potatoes, sticky toffee pudding, and our old enemy celery juice. 

It also saw Pixie Turner announcing that she believed "most diets are a load of bollocks". So I didn't feel too bad about wolfing down a large plate of veggie bangers and mash while I watched and listened. Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Brian Eggo for hosting, and thanks to Pixie Turner for being both interesting and entertaining. In two weeks time it's Dr Alice Howarth with Women, Wellness, and Woo. I'll be there. In my front room.