Hi Edoardo,

I am not in familiar territory here so I hope you will be patient with me.

How we see ourselves in the mirror is not necessarily borne out by how others see us.  We sometimes become our worst critics.  Generally speaking, we need a balance of all food groups – a rule of thumb is a third carbohydrates, a third protein and a third vegetables.  As a male adult you probably need to be eating around 2,500 calories a day.  This is not an exact science – it depends on what kind of metabolism you have, how active you are and probably one or two other things besides.  By carbohydrates I mean chiefly potatoes, rice, spaghetti, bread.  Whole grain spaghetti and bread will fill you up and sustain you for longer than the white varieties.

Anita has pinpointed the real problem which is one of anxiety and you already know the situations which have caused this.  You are clearly a highly intelligent, articulate, thoughtful person and you have worked out that your distress had happened by the time you reached the age of 7 or 8.  Without wishing to judge anyone, I wonder how your parents related to you and what messages you picked up in those early years regarding food/looks etc.

Looks seem to be very important to you and, even though somewhere inside you know you shouldn’t be judging someone on looks alone, the fat issue looms large with you.

People can’t tell how you feel by the outer shell of how you look.  I’m reading into your post that you might have had difficulty in discussing your feelings at certain times in your life.  People didn’t notice that you were repressing your feelings.

I am making a very strong connection between food and feelings here.  Your need for food being suppressed/denied along with your need to suppress your feelings.  This may have been further compounded when someone you connected with (Rico) whom you loved and was helping you, backed off due to your sexuality.  Now you are not happy at University, neither with the quality of the education nor with the people you are surrounded with – solution stop eating.  You have no control over this situation but you can control the amount you eat – practically nothing.

You can control what you eat and this gives you power which you crave.  What you really crave is healthy eating and a body which shows no signs of accumulating any fat.  Fat, by the way, is not the worst thing in the world and it never will be.  You are the grand old age of 19 and you have found out that you can’t control the outer world – you can, however, control your inner world.  This is the crux of the matter.  What you really need is self-control.  When you can be your own master you will have all the power that you will ever need.

Kind regards,

Peggy

Dear Edoardo:

I wasn’t able to read all of your second post but the beginning, having been told that you refused to eat, and having been fragile and small as a child, prone to infections, same as my history. I have never read, in my over four years here, history identical to mine in these regards. Can you elaborate on those first 4 lines, starting with “My relationship with food”?

I will be back to the computer to read and reply in about 17 hours from now.

anita

Hi Edoardo,

Firstly, can I congratulate you on your excellent English – it’s word perfect and you manage to give so much relevant detail in such a small space.  That’s quite an art.

I’m glad you brought up the Italians’ relationship with food.  I had thought of it but didn’t want to be guilty of stereotyping.  Having been brought up in a big family I think there may have been a bit of the ‘Italian’ in our household and I do love Italian food.  It’s interesting to note that your eating patterns improved when you spent most of your time with your grandmother.  Is there any way that you can capitalize on this by taking yourself back there at mealtimes.  My mother used to say that we live to eat, not eat to live.  So, in my inexperienced and simple mind, I would like you to change your mindset into one where you are  “eating to live”.  This is where mastering yourself comes into play.

On the subject of living, you describe two incidences as a child where you nearly died.  Have you ever thought that your life was saved on two occasions and maybe you had better find out why?  By this I mean what is your life’s purpose?  Being very intuitive, I feel that you are meant to achieve great things – maybe through art, through writing, through languages, through your love of beauty.

Incidentally, I share your love of beauty.  The English poet, Keats, wrote “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”.  I agree entirely with him.  It can take me to a whole new level.  It is also interesting to note that the Italians have produced some of the finest sculptures of the male form in the world.

Please write again.

Peggy

Dear Edoardo:

First, a summary with quotes of what you shared so far, then my thoughts:

When you were a young child (now 19), you lived with your paternal grandmother because your parents worked 11 hours a day. You were “really fragile and small, easily prone to disease.. almost died for two big bacterial infections”. You’ve “always been a somewhat strange child… wasn’t quite like the other boys”. While in elementary school , you experienced sexual attraction to boys and you tried to repress it. As a child and onward, “Insecurities always ruled me.. I’ve always been monstrously introspective and analytical”. You spent a lot of time alone, “studying various topics, reading encyclopedia after encyclopedia, while ignoring the other kids”.

Your mother, “very unpleasant.. materialistic, highly competitive, prideful, self-righteous and, most importantly, extremely prone to complaints”, put you in a private school “in a more ‘noble’ area of the city”, one with less immigrants than in public school, a religion oriented school,  where homosexuality “was considered a hellish sin”.

After two good years in private school, “episodes of harassment, revenge and gossip became more and more frequent” and you became by middle school, “an extremely twisted individual, prone to manipulation and narcissism”, and the void in you grew, and with it “a spiral of apathy, depression and paralysis”.

You were passionate about science and decided to attend the very prestigious technical high school, but you played with your phone and watched  youtube instead of studying, and your grades were very poor.

When you met Rico, at 14, “For the first time in my life I felt affection for someone, instead of hatred and aggression. And that was a big one. He taught me how to hope, something that I didn’t even considered up until that moment”. But he didn’t reciprocate your feelings, and that “resulted in a peak of depression”, and you almost got kicked out of school because of your “complete numbness and inability to do anything”. But somehow, for the following year and a half, you “decided to hope”, and started to change and challenge yourself. Your grades went up, you made friends and came out to your friends and parents.

Following this post Rico year and a half awakening of sorts, “a mechanical and soulless approach to study, and life in general” returned, you continued to repress your feelings and your social connections disintegrated, but you did make and keep a few friends who are the “backbone of my life, which I love very, very deeply”.

You graduated high school with one of the highest degrees but ended up in a university you don’t like, in a city you don’t like, receiving what you believe to be lacking education. Some time after high school, you started to go to the gym and aimed at improving your eating habits. Soon after, you started to binge eat, and although you were lean and athletic, you “started to notice a small roll of fat” on your body. You met a few men in Bologna, but you were critical of their body fat/ their looks didn’t match your standards of physical beauty. You wanted to push yourself “past the shallowness of eye candy”, but failed, and your “aversion for body fat only increased after those sexual experiences”.

You “started to exercise after every meal, with calorie counting that became almost an obsession. All because of body fat, that quickly became my horror”.

Now my thoughts (with quotes from you):

1. I don’t think you remember the following but you were told about it later in life, you were told the following: “When I was very little, I just refused to eat. I don’t know why, my mother always says that I wasn’t interested in it at all… My  mother couldn’t produce milk.. so I had all the baby foods and dried milk. Most of the time I just spat them out. People had to distract me in order for me to gulp down something”-

– we do have something in common, you and I, as babies/ very young children, we were force fed. My mother told me that I refused to eat and so, she blocked my nose with her fingers, forcing my mouth to open for air, and then she inserted the food into my mouth. In your case, one way food was forced into you was by distracting you and while your mouth was somehow open, food was inserted quickly,  before you were able to resist, or close your mouth to it.

Being force fed, especially when done repeatedly, is traumatic for any person, especially for a young child. The forcing of something (food) into a body that resists it, is a sort of a rape. Not a sexual rape, mind you, but a rape nonetheless.

The young child already powerless and dependent on the adults, feels even more powerless and in danger of the next time, the next feeding, the next.. rape.

2. Food means a whole lot and is a big part of our lives, in some families and cultures more than in others. The relationship with food starts early and goes on our whole lives. No two people have the same experience with food because .. there is so much experience with food in each of our lives. But certain elements of our experience can be extracted out of the whole and these experiences mean the same for everyone with that experience. One such element is that being forced fed is traumatic for a young child.

3. The issue of power: the force feeding was only the beginning of the distressing powerless experiences in your life, although a first and most significant experience.

Notice what happened when you did feel power, notice how good it felt when you fasted, temporarily lost your cravings and weight: “I felt amazing… finally able to control my cravings, and that terrifying fat deposit was finally gone… I find not eating at all a very magnificent solution. It gives me a wonderful sense of security, and protects me from the fat, which is apparently the worst thing in the world… Not eating gives me a power and a form of control that I truly crave”-

– This is how good power feels: amazing, magnificent, wonderful. Having no power feels like “apathy, depression and  paralysis”, no wonder you want to feel power.

The enemy has become Fat, on your body and on potential boyfriends’ bodies. In your real life there have been many enemies, many in school (the harassment, revenge, and the viewing of homosexuality as a hellish sin, all that you mentioned, as well as the difficult bureaucracy involved in getting into a good university, into which you didn’t get) and at home, having a somewhat aggressive mother who complains a whole lot and is self righteous.

But for you, all enemies morphed into one item: fat. It makes it easier to tackle an enemy when it is just one thing and when there are doable ways to fight it: fasting.

Clearly, what you need is a sense of power in your life. Problem is that as it is now, you only know one way to feel power: to fast. Problem is: one, you are not dealing with other enemies, or challenges when you fast, such as aggressive people in your life, homophobic society and so on. Second, following the euphoria of fasting, you get weak and scared so you stop the fasting, and cravings do return- each and every time- leading to binges that make you feel very badly

The more power you practice in your life, not limited to power-over-fat, the healthier you will become. Think of other ways to make that happen, beyond that one way that makes it worse for you, beyond that temporary euphoria.

If you would like, we can continue to communicate, post and I will reply further.

anita

Dear Edoardo:

I read your recent post which followed my post to you more than six hours ago. In your recent post you did not attend or respond to any of the items I brought to you. It is okay, of course, for you to not attend to my previous input for you. I suppose it didn’t click for you, you didn’t notice anything that might be of value to you.

anita

Hi Edoardo,

I’m a little lost on your scientific explanation – your mind controls your body every time.  It makes sense, therefore, to use your mind in a way that nurtures your body.  I am hungry therefore I will eat.  I will eat when I am hungry and I will stop when I am full.  I will take good care of myself.  Change your thoughts and you change your life.  Thoughts are fleeting.  Let the ones go that aren’t nurturing you.  Don’t dwell on them.

You say that yesterday you were forced to eat dinner after a big lunch.  “Forced”.  So someone had power over you – I presume you mean your parents.  I can understand that they might be very concerned about you but this language is a bit strong for my liking.  Do you mean they “encouraged” you to eat more than you needed?

It is pretty obvious to me that if you eat a large lunch and dinner and you are too full then you are going to be uncomfortable until your digestive system has had time to work.  It is easy to see why you were not hungry enough to eat breakfast the next morning.  Saying “no” to breakfast that you did not want is reclaiming your power.  As I said before, your body needs approximately 2,500 calories a day.  There is nothing wrong with calorie counting as long as you make that number.

There is nothing good about starvation.  Your whole body shuts down.  Don’t even go there.  The consumption of food is necessary.

Three meals a day is desirable.  That gives you about 800 calories per meal.  You could eat 600 at breakfast and 1000 at your main meal leaving 800 for your remaining meal.  You might even get to eat an apple or banana or a handful of grapes as extras.

The three things your body needs are 1) Food and drink  2) Exercise  3) Rest/relaxation/sleep.

Exercise doesn’t necessarily mean the gym.  Walking, running, dancing, swimming, tennis etc. are all valid.  This should not be approached as a weight loss regime – it’s just exercising your body because it’s what it needs.

Last week I wrote a poem which included the line “Today is the day that matters the most”.  Regardless of what has happened in the past, today is the only day that you have – make the most of it.

Peggy