Psychedelics and Eating Disorders: It's More Than Just The Food

We need to go deeper than helping people find an intuitive relationship with food.

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We need to address why food - something that is nourishing and that is needed for life - can turn into something that is feared and used as a tool to push life away.

Of course, we need to establish supportive eating patterns to ensure our own (or our loved one’s) physical wellbeing is taken care of, and at the same time, we need to address what drove someone to start using food as a way to:

• try gain a sense of purpose or direction

• control overwhelming feelings

• manage inner and outer chaos

• get people to finally listen and take them seriously

• feel a sense of power, agency or independence

• keep feelings far away

• keep people away

• bring some sense of balance to a dysregulated nervous system  

It is so much more than just the food. The food is a symbol, pointing us towards what is out of balance and thus what is asking to be realigned and rebalanced.

If we follow the food to the root, we get to a very tender place, often a very vulnerable place that requires the deepest nurturing and seeing and tending to.

We then start to recognize that alongside the food and nutrition support, we also need nourishment that support us in aligning with purpose, developing nervous system regulation skills and introceptive awareness, learning how to create boundaries, practicing how to state our wants and needs, attuning to our personal power and true inner authority, trusting in our capacity to feel, and remembering our innate belonging.

There are many layers to recovery. Food is just one aspect. Sometimes we need to nourish ourselves in other ways first before the food can be addressed. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Sometimes they work hand in hand.

It is indeed not a linear process. There are many spirals to journey through and many layers to peel back in order to reach those tender places.   

These layers are not always easy to face. However, it seems that with more research coming out on how psychedelics and plant medicines have the potential to support eating disorder recovery, it seems like facing those layers and the tender parts that are buried underneath with the help of psychedelics, recovery is possible.

There is currently no clear way on how to treat eating disorders, nor is there a single cause. However, psychedelic research and anecdotal reports are telling us that psychedelics and plant medicine may hold potential in support the complex process of eating disorder recovery.

In eating disorders, one often holds negative self-image and feels encouraged to repeat maladaptive behaviors around eating, exercising, and weight monitoring.

Psychedelics and plant medicine are known to affect the structure of the brain that upholds the various cognitive processing related to introspection and self-reflection. No drug has been shown to break these connections, and it seems that psychedelics seem to be able to facilitate that.

Through this process, the rigid patterns of thought break down, leading to new perspectives and ways of seeing oneself, and the root causes of the eating disorder. People may be able to go to the root where right there lies the tender, vulnerable aspects of oneself that have been hidden, rejected, ignored, or feared.

With psychedelics and plant medicine, the brain becomes more malleable and plastic, so people can move from a narrow focus to a wider focus, as they are able to generate new neuronal connections and thinking patterns.

Individuals may see the reasons why the eating disorder developed in the first place, and how it helped them survive and get through challenging times (acting like self-medication). With psychedelics, individuals can perceive themselves, their emotions, their body sensations (including huger and fullness cues), and life with more flexibility.

They may be able to connect with those harder-to-reach, vulnerable parts with greater compassion, patience, understanding, and love.

Despite this, healing is usually nonlinear. Disordered eating behaviours are often deeply ingrained pervasive and require time, patience, and courage – an ongoing chipping away and disentangling of old patterns, a reconnecting to and nurturing of the tender, wounded aspects self, and support to help forge the new, sustainable, life-supporting patterns around relationships with food, body, and the world.

Our ability to digest food improves, as does our system with feelings, interactions, and experiences.

We have clarity around when we are hungry as well as hear when we need to fill up our energetic cups and nourish ourselves with love, connection, embodiment movement, soothing smells, inspiring music, and grounding nature.

We can respond to our food needs, reaching for the foods that we want, as well as asking for help and support in general. We feel satisfied with our food and our body feels nourished, and we discover we engage with other people and activities also nourish our soul.

We can hear our fullness cues and reach a sense of happy completion with our meals, and feel a sense of enoughness with who we are in the world regardless of what we did or didn’t do that day.

With ongoing support, continued bottom-up and top-down integration, and the inner holding of the belief that ‘recovery is possible’ is how the food and body coping strategies and dysregulation are able to release.

Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash