Why Working with the Gut is Key for Eating Disorder Recovery

Trauma is not in the event itself, but about what happens within the nervous system, which impacts our digestion system, and our ability to have health, regeneration and flow in this system.

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Our digestion gets impacted due to trauma. Eating disorders are a trauma response that exacerbate the digestive system, and as such working with the digestive organs are important for recovery.

Now of course, if there’s a history of restrictive eating, bingeing and restricting, weight cycling, or dieting, the gut is going to be affected by these coping behaviours that use food. But this connection to the gut goes back to an earlier time in our lives and connecting to the gut is an important piece of healing from trauma and eating disorders.

The gut is considered our first brain and through the vagus nerve connects to the brain. There's a direct communication gut to brain, brain to gut. The chemicals that we find in the gut are also the chemicals within the brain. When we heal on a gut level, we support our brain healing too.

There is this superhighway between the gut and the brain that connects the two through the vagus nerve In fact, 80% of nerve information goes from the gut to the brain (where the brain interprets the information coming from the gut and then sends a message back down to the body) and only 20% of nerve information goes from the brain to the gut. The 80% is called "efferent nerve pathways" and the 20% is called "afferent".

This means that the gut is involved in almost everything we experience. And because it is linked via the vagus nerve, our gut is part of our social engagement system - which needs to be activated if we want to heal from trauma and eating disorders.

When it is in good health, we find more flow and ease in our ability to connect with others, to create and take in information, to instill healthy boundaries, and to utilize supportive resources.

Think about your history: was there high stress around the dinner table or when eating was going on? Do you remember feeling a lot of fear or anxiety in your belly as a child? Did your survival instincts increase when it was mealtime?

Over time, our system connects eating with stress. When there’s heightened levels of stress chemistry in our body, the gut won’t be in a good flow. This leads to gut challenges, like IBS, constipation, chronic diarrhea, food not being digested properly, as well as mental issues including brain fog, distractibility, depression, social anxiety, and all of this discomfort can exacerbate eating disorders.

When there’s been chronic stress (which can also be perpetuated from diet culture) or early childhood trauma, the stress survival energies get trapped inside of us which makes it incredibly hard to be in the body.

With the trauma energies and memories still swirling around with nowhere to go to be processed, we find ways to not feel all of that. We may start to exist in the mind, cutting ourselves from the body, and ignoring its subtle cues.

This means that it can be challenging to connect to the gut – which is also the place that governs instinctual, internal, intuitive knowings (there’s a reason why we say “I feel it in my gut” or “I have this gut instinct”). This is the concept of interoception – sensing and perceiving what is going on inside of us.

Gor many people who have experienced trauma, that 6th sense has become dimmed, and as a result, may make choices that aren’t good for them. They may only realise that they are tired when they are about to faint, or that they are full once they have reached a point of discomfort. In this case, the cues from the gut are harder to detect and can only be heard at the extreme edges.

For people with eating disorders reestablishing interoception and connection to the gut is key.

For people with an eating disorder, there is often a feeling of not having goodness and that there's always something missing (which can be further internalised as “I am not enough” or “something is wrong with me”).

These feelings can be shifted when we start to make connection to that first brain, to acknowledge it, and to work with it with gentleness, intention, and presence (not a “fix it” mode).

Through somatic awareness practices and developing tools that support nervous system regulation, within the context of eating disorder recovery is what I support my clients with, and together we bring in the support from the bottom-up, from the gut-up to heal at a body-first level.

Over time, as we let the gut know we are here for it, and listening, it begins to reorganise to flow and works in the way it’s can work. There is an integration of the whole system.

We have more capacity to feel and digest our emotions in the present moment, make aligned decisions, create spontaneously, instill healthy boundaries, trust in ourselves and what is good for us.

An intuitive wisdom starts to emerge from within: we start to know what is safe or not safe for us, what resonates or doesn’t, and what brings clarity, coherence and connection to our lives.

Photo by Imani Bahati on Unsplash