My Spiritual Eating Disorder

This past summer I was faced with the harsh reality that one of my very best high school friends was suffering from an eating disorder. At first it didn’t seem real – she was so good at covering it all up. I knew something was up – all the signs were there – but she kept on living life the way I had always remembered. In the fall after graduation, after we had all dispersed to our respective colleges, was when things started noticeably falling apart. After a few months, around Christmas, she finally started
seeking out real help. It wasn’t long after that she told me she would be moving into an inpatient treatment center for her eating disorder and related complications. Even then, though, the whole situation didn’t seem completely real or as complicated as it was. It seemed like all it would take was a
quick-fix, 3-month stint in treatment and everything would be back to normal again. It wasn’t until four months after she moved into the Anna Westin House that things started to click for me. I visited her at AWH for the first time on April 10th. It had been a solid 4 months, if not longer, since we had seen each other, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. Would she look better? Worse? Would she be the same incredible friend I had come to love so much in high school? I got to the house and still everything felt so surreal. The place didn’t look or feel like a treatment center, at least not to me. The other girls there were (or at least looked like) perfectly normal, fun-loving girls, about my age. You would never know most of them had a problem if you saw them outside of the treatment center. It wasn’t until a couple of days after I had visited that the reality of this disease really began to hit me. I had been processing all the things I saw, heard and experienced on my visit to AWH, and the realities of my friend’s eating disorder started to make sense. My heart went out to the girls I met there, especially my own dear friend, but I think the reason I really felt compelled to visit her was so that God could really use her situation to help me understand one in my own life. In all the ways that a person with anorexia or bulimia experiences physical consequences of their disease, it is possible for someone to experience a spiritual eating disorder. I have seen the natural effects of an eating disorder firsthand, and through that experience, God has shown me that I, too, have an eating disorder – a spiritual one.

You may be asking what I could possibly mean by that. Let me see if I can explain this in a way that makes sense outside of my head as much as it makes sense within it. When a person has an eating disorder, it usually stems from them being unhappy with some part of their life, whether it be what
they look like, their lack of control over certain situations, or a number of other reasons. In a spiritual eating disorder, I think a lack of control is often the driving factor. It is hard to hand over one’s entire life to an invisible Creator whom we only believe in by this obscure feeling of assurance we call faith. When something feels as out-of-reach as that, we often look for something tangible to place our trust in, and a lot of times we find that thing to be ourselves. Sometimes it can be fear, too, that leads us to a place of not knowing what else to do, so we start to take matters into our own hands. We may also feel a sense of pride, arrogance or selfishness, like “I know how to handle this and I don’t really care how things happen as long as they turn out the way it seems to me that they should.” In any sense, some underlying factor, different for every individual, can drive us to a sort of spiritual eating disorder.
What does this spiritual eating disorder look like, then?
Well, think about a natural eating disorder. When someone has anorexia, they have made a conscious decision to restrict the food they eat, in quantity, quality, and numerous other ways. They may supplement with vitamins or diet pills that would make them not feel hungry or would sort of replace the nutrients they are lacking by not eating. In a spiritual sense, someone might decide to starve themselves of their time with God and His Word, possibly thinking they don’t need it right now, they can handle things on their own, or that they don’t feel it working anyway so why bother. They find ways to replace this time: being with friends that seem to have a positive influence, reading books,
watching movies or listening to music that makes them feel satisfied or healthy about what they’re doing, etc. As this goes on, the person becomes numb to the feeling of hunger that their spirit once had for the Word of God, and they lose interest in even considering feeding it.
In my case, the thought of feeding my spirit the Word of God became something that made me actually physically ill. I would think about going to Bible study or having a quiet time and I would get shaky, nauseated, nervous, and start to panic about it. It was miserable. It doesn’t stop there, though. Someone can have spiritual bulimia just as much as they can anorexia. With bulimia, one binges on all the things they’ve been going without until they have eaten so much they feel guilty and so they find a way to purge it. This works the same with spiritual bulimia. One can go a long time without feeding their spirit the Word and then experience a time of spiritual bingeing where it seems like they just cannot get enough. However, after they have binged they feel ashamed and weak for having given in and not remaining in control of the situation on their own. To make up for it, they purge, in any way they possibly can, in hopes that they can remove everything from themselves that causes them to feel guilt, shame, remorse or weakness. Physically this is done using practices such as making oneself throw up, taking laxatives, and a number of other ways. Spiritually, one purges the Word they have put into their spirits in much the same way that they “replace” the missing nutrients with spiritual
anorexia. Listening to secular music, reading secular books, spending time with the wrong crowd and in general denying anything that God may bring to mind to deal with are some ways that someone may spiritually purge. I have noticed this pattern in my own life, as well. I have a period of spiritual ‘high’ where I am on top of the world, nothing can touch me, and I am allowing God to show me some incredible facets to who He is and what He has in store for my life; but then something happens,
sometimes unidentifiable, that causes me to rid myself of any trace of my time spent with God and I go back to starving my spirit of the One thing it needs most of all.

The main mistake we make is to view coming to God as a weakness. The truth is, God wants us to come to Him. He created humans to have a sense of need for relationship, a need to rely on others and to not carry our burden alone. He fulfills this need by way of the people he places in our life as friends, parents, teachers, and significant others; but He also desires for this need to be met by way of a personal relationship we experience with Him. He knows our hearts deeper than anyone else and He understands what we are going through. Hebrews 4:14-16 tells us that Jesus was tempted and understood weakness just the same as we experience, and therefore He sympathizes with us, giving us the strength to come boldly to the Father any time. God knows our need, He knows where we came from, and He wants to be the solution to our every problem. We have to know, as humans, that it is our tendency to want to have control in most every situation, especially the ones where we could be
positively or negatively affected by the outcome. It is also very hard to accept love from and trust a Creator that we don’t think did a satisfactory job when He made us. This makes trusting God and coming to Him even more challenging; but God wants us to know and experience a part of Him that only we, as an individual, can experience for ourselves. He wants to reveal Himself to each of us in a
way that only we understand, and remind us of His everlasting love for us, proven by the work of Jesus on the cross. In order for this to occur, though, we have to open ourselves to His intentions in our lives, understand that His plans are far better than our own, and accept that our having control is not the best thing for the situation. Then and only then, can God begin a work in our lives that will transform us forever.

The treatment for this spiritual eating disorder, like a physical one, is not an easy process. It is slow, agonizing, painful, and often seems absolutely impossible; but, like a physical eating disorder, God wants to do a work of healing in our hearts. When we turn our focus back to Him, things begin to change. We can find help in going to spiritual leaders that have experience with this sort of thing themselves for help and guidance, but ultimately it is up to us to make the changes and have an effective treatment. There are all sorts of therapies, just like in physical eating disorders. There’s  music therapy through spending time in praise and worship. There is art therapy by looking at the incredible creation God has laid out before us – we can even use it as inspiration to paint, draw, journal, or just as a way to experience God in a more tangible way. There is physical therapy through getting your spirit back out there into the game and working hard at your quiet times or Bible study.
Bible study also works great as a sort of group therapy, all of us coming together and sharing our strengths and weaknesses to help one another overcome their own situation. There are countless other ways that God provides therapy for our spiritual eating disorders that parallel the treatment for physical ones. Granted, there are going to be a lot of days when our treatment is the absolute last thing we want, but we have to force ourselves to persevere because those who do are the ones that win the race and receive the ultimate prize of eternal life in Christ.