Los Angeles DA. Harris v. Morris Trafficante M.D.
Eating Disorders: When Are the Hippocampus and Hippocampus Connected?
An exploration of the phenomenological basis of eating disorders.
Posted May 04, 2021
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Reviewed by Lybi Ma
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THE BASICS
What Is Eating Disorders?
Find a therapist to heal from an eating disorder
For over 30 years, researchers have believed that our sense of self was tied to the amount of food we consumed. This association, suggested by Harris, fits into a research theme known as the self-reports' fallacy. The word “I’ve had my food all night,” or at least more than half-full, while feeling totally guilt-ridden, has a certain charm that attracts people to self-help material. It’s not that the self-help books don’t have inherent power or even that they are ineffective — some of them are works of genius — they just maybe remind people of their true personality (see Bruner, 1964) and how they are different from everyone else. Here is a sampling of what people report consuming on a regular basis:
“I always take two cans of beer and a small container of tomato sauce in my everyday rotation.”
“When I am sitting watching the sports on Saturday, the sports I really like are those involving teams of friends or former pupils, whose participation I can control, at least not enough to make them envious, but who nevertheless contribute to the enjoyment of the evening together.”
“I enjoy my music and my taking long walks, rarely stopping to smell the flowers, spices, and so on. I’ve always found that my greatest pleasure is getting outdoors while my cats, Lately Breed, delight themselves in the sandy land between the wading pools.”
“I have always taken walks with a friend, and now, too, myself. I really enjoy this mixture of long walks and having myself explored.”
“I love listening to music. It gives me some pleasure to listen to the words that precede me, and that’s what I enjoy the most about my music.”
“I love to cook, and my favorite day is probably Christmas. My wish is that every year, we make this wish every year.”
“I have always found that my disability chews away at my spirit when I am trying to focus on something else. This year I want to find my ability to not be able to focus on anything other than making sure that I am not charged up to do something I enjoy doing.”
Many people with Lou Gehrig's disease, Duffy and her colleagues note, “have a stronger ability to focus on an activity than most people with mild cognitive impairment.” By way of explaining this difference, they note that people with mild cognitive impairment “often find that their brains focus more on ideas and less on details, making them less efficient problem solvers” (p. 14).
In their “Me, I Get Problemized” exercise, the researchers also offer the TRULIP code word nociceptive training to emphasize this theme. TRULIP means “a command of nature to change the way you respond to a problem” and refers to the ability to directly ask the “observer” (or another person) to change their behavior in response to a problem to improve their ability to respond to it.
In a UW-Madison news release, the researchers explained, “Simply asking people to think about things you want to change could be one of therapy’s most potent tools. By asking people to think about things you don’t want to change, you are essentially asking them to change their fundamental beliefs about how you think. This gives the result a heuristic quality.”
The rub is that not changing our fundamental beliefs puts us in great danger. Once we realize that our fundamental beliefs are under constant assault from the outside, we can make some decisive steps in our pursuit of life in a responsive manner. Noticing a skin disease and automatically drafting a treatment plan based on that knowledge, for example, are not necessarily actions that respond to a changing world. Effective therapy happens only when a person takes the time to question her beliefs and brings a more flexible mindset to bear on how she interacts with the world.