Morning all.
I’ve got to a really interesting but in brain over binge. She’s currently talking about the strategy she used to recover, and she discusses a work called ‘rational recovery’ meant for alcoholics. The premise is that everyone has a part of their brain responsible for basic survival just like every other animal. It can’t control your arms, legs mouth etc etc it can only influence you to do things by making you feel and think.
This animal brain sometimes gets mixed up and grabs hold of something non essential to life as if you need it to survive. This can be drugs or alcohol or yes, food. The difference with food is you do need it to survive, but in some people this translates to very large quantities of food very quickly like the need to take a big gulp of air after you hold your breath.
Skadoosh. When we diet, to the animal brain it’s like we’re holding our breath hence it intensifies the thoughts and feelings it bombards us with to make us eat and creates the mental cravings you get particularly badly on a diet.
In the book, her solution is to treat the animal brain a bit like a zoo creature and observe its behaviour, using her ‘self’ (higher brain) to detatch from it and watch what it does as a sort of experiment. She says it was the realisation that the animal brain only controls thoughts and feelings and not physical actions that caused her to recover, because she realised you can’t rationalise with an animal, you just have to ignore it until it buggers off. The animal brain categorically cannot control your actions, that’s the work of the human, higher brain.
I’m going to try this next time I get an urge to binge. Although, I’ve got a distinct lack of urges at the moment. There’s been a couple of ‘but it’s friday’ whinges In my brain this morning but I’ve shut them down before they’ve become a complete thought let alone and actual urge. Tonight will be hard I imagine, weekends are a nightmare for me so hopefully this will help.
I think whether you call your animal brain your inner fat kid, the pig etc etc it’s all the same theory essentially just applied slightly differently.
I can’t quite picture mine yet, I’m not sure what my animal brain looks like and I think I need to figure this out, it will help me detach from it.
I’m on the train to work at the moment and feeling positive. I needed to work from
Home yesterday, that was a good decision. I haven’t cried since the nurse practitioner appointment and I’m feeling fairly strong.
Have a fab day everyone, remember to keep breathing 