The festive season is around the corner. Get-togethers and parties with friends and family are in order, and one key ingredient that we cannot ignore in that celebration is food — lots of it. While many of us are looking forward to a good feast over the five days of Durga Puja, some perhaps are already dreading the aftermath of such indulgence.

The connection between mental health and sleep is obvious; what is not so known is that our relationship with food is linked to our mental health too. When our body is starved or undernourished, it is normal to feel irritated, angry or even depressed. At times overeating can make us feel low about ourselves and take away our usual drive. In the context of mental health, food habit is very important: A balanced diet and healthy fluid intake can help one feel better and grounded.

There is another side to the story. Many times we neglect food as we neglect ourselves. This could be out of simple carelessness or a deep-seated self-loathing. We may starve ourselves as punishment and may not even be aware that we are doing so.

On the other hand, when one is feeling emotionally distressed or stressed, it is also not uncommon to binge-eat. We end up using the normal act of eating as a way to feel good. In that case, we use food as something known and comforting, something that fills up our psychological void, although for a very short period.

Eating or staying away from food — both give us a sense of control. Our dynamics with food is far from being simple and linear.

For thousands of years, in fact, for the longest period of human evolution, our most significant survival drive has been to secure our food supply by procuring enough. When we could gather food, we were valued by our community.

Bulimia and anorexia

Eating, for evolutionary purposes, has an intrinsic pleasure component attached to it in our mind. We feel good when we eat well. It’s not difficult to understand why food has always been a jubilant way to celebrate and enjoy. However, our expectations and conditioned ideal of ourselves have changed over the years. Being overweight, now, has an added component of shame and injury to self-esteem. So, it is not uncommon to see some of us being in a vicious cycle of craving food in order to feel good but ending up feeling worse after binge-eating.

In the extremes of this complex and layered dynamics with food, there are pathological eating disorders which are under the purview of mental health and psychiatry.

There is ‘Bulimia nervosa’, which is characterised by repeated episodes of binge-eating with compensatory behaviours. Here one is morbidly afraid of becoming fat, yet at the same time they cannot help but eat more than they ought to. In a typical case, a person is persistently preoccupied with eating or thoughts of eating. They have irresistible cravings followed by binges or episodes of overeating. Often immediately after that, they try to counter the fattening effect of their binges by starving themselves, intentionally inducing vomiting, or misusing over-the-counter purgatives or other drugs. The idea is to reduce the fattening effect by purging or by increasing the metabolism or by dulling the appetite.

Another common disorder is ‘Anorexia nervosa’, most commonly seen in young women in which there is a marked distortion of one’s body image in the mind. Even when they are thin, they see themselves as fat and there is a pathological desire for thinness. They try various methods to keep on reducing weight, which severely damages their physical health. Because of their continuous effort to lose weight, they suffer from severe malnourishment, low body weight, anaemia and various hormonal problems. Death due to anorexia nervosa is not uncommon. Often patients resist any attempt of treatment as they lack insight into their physical health condition.

Regularise your food habit

Both the eating disorders have severe self-image and self-esteem issues associated with them. Like any relationship, our relationship with food vastly depends on how we feel about ourselves. Feeling good about ourselves doesn’t mean that we have to feel we are perfect or that we are infallible or that we can make no mistake. Paradoxically, feeling good about ourselves means we see ourselves as we are, with our flaws and vulnerabilities with honesty but without judgement, and without any need of pretence to hide them.

Feeling good about ourselves means that we let go of our insecurities, we are ready to improve, open to learn and are not defensive or rigid about ourselves. There is no need to stick to a particular “how I should be” image, but if need be we are ready to work towards a goal.

We accept ourselves as always learning, growing and changing. If we don’t know how to feel comfortable with ourselves, we will always depend on something external to make us feel good about ourselves.

Unfortunately, nothing external — whether it is parental approval, peer acceptance, love of life, success, money, fame, respect or, in this case, food — can make us feel good about ourselves. It’s us who need to see ourselves gently, softly and with a little compassion. It is up to us to let go of any conditions or yardstick for accepting and valuing ourselves, and then as a society we need to learn to let go of this need to constantly measure people by some standards and ideals and impose these ideas.

So try to regularise your food habit. Watch out for stress eating. Acknowledge your cravings and examine them closely. You may get never-before insights about yourself. Be mindful of the craving for food just as a strategy to feel good about yourself. Put your “I can feel good ONLY IF…” ideas under the scanner and examine those rigid conditions.

If you want to exercise and lose weight, that is fine. But do it because you want to be healthy, rather than out of pity and shame of being your current self. Remind yourself that it is an informed choice you are making as you want to take care of yourself, nothing more, nothing less.

Explore your relationship with yourself as you explore your relationship with food. Like every journey of self-exploration, you need to be patient and gentle with yourself.

Dr Sangbarta Chattopadhyay and Dr Namita Bhuta are medical practitioners and practising psychotherapists. They conduct individual and group therapy sessions

THE SCOFF QUESTIONS

These are the screening questions for eating disorders. A score of more than two “yes” answers indicates that eating disorder should be ruled out by a clinician.

Do you often make yourself sick (induce vomiting) because you feel uncomfortably full?

Do you worry that you have lost control over how much you eat?

Have you recently lost 6.35kg in a three-month period?

Do you believe yourself to be fat when others say you are too thin?

Source: Morgan JF, Reid F and Lacey JH (1999) The SCOFF questionnaire

Zayn Malik: “Something I’ve never talked about in public before, but which I have come to terms with since leaving the band (One Direction), is that I was suffering from an eating disorder” — The singer in his book, Zayn

Lily Collins: “I suffered with eating disorders when I was a teenager” — The actress wrote in her book Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me