Consuming the Earth: Eating Disorders and Ecopsychology

Abstract

Eating disorders, which involve the misuse of vast quantities of food by millions of people, are described as a direct threat to the environment. Eating disorders are also suggested as a metaphor for the psychopathology underlying our environmental crisis. In this article, the scope of the problem, its psychological and economic roots, its similarity to the environmental crisis in general, and possible solutions are described.

Full text

Consuming the EarthLinda Riebel
CONSUMING THE EARTH: EATING
DISORDERS AND ECOPSYCHOLOGY
LINDA RIEBEL, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist
and family counselor in private practice in Berkeley
and San Francisco, where she is on the adjunct fac
-
ulty of Saybrook Graduate School. An eating dis-
order specialist for 19 years, she is also the associate
director of the Bay Area Depression and Anxiety
Treatment Center. An ardent lover of nature and
animals, Linda is a vegetarian and environmental
educator and enjoys traveling to distant lands. Her
current book (forthcoming from Ten Speed Press),
Eating to Save the Earth, shows how consumers can
contribute to environmental healing with their food
choices.
Summary
Eating disorders, which involve the misuse of vast quantities of food
by millions of people, are described as a direct threat to the environ-
ment. Eating disorders are also suggested as a metaphor for the
psychopathology underlying our environmental crisis. In this arti-
cle,the scope of the problem, its psychological and economic roots, its
similarity to the environmental crisis in general, and possible solu
-
tions are described.
Consumption of the earth’s natural resources exists in its starkest
and most literal form in the act of eating.The production and use of
food for human consumption are of concern to ecologists (Hawken,
Lovins, & Lovins, 1999), who fear that through overpopulation, we
will strip the earth to cultivate crops and feed animals destined to
be eaten. A particularly invidious extension of this problem is the
eating disorder, described by an expert as a “misuse of the eating
function to solve the problems of living” (Bruch, 1981, p. 212). To
quell feelings, to reward, to punish, and to procrastinate, some peo
-
ple turn food into a kind of drug and eating into an addiction. Mil
-
lions of citizens are suffering from eating disorders in the United
States alone, not counting other millions who are merely
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overweight. Collectively, they misuse and waste millions of tons of
food every year. In this article, I will survey the scope of the prob
-
lem, its causes, and how they parallel the causes of environmental
devastation in general, and suggest similarities in the healing of
both.
THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM
Eating disorders exist on a massive scale in America. According
to the National Women’s Health Report, 5 million American women
have eating disorders. Furthermore, 55% of the U.S. population is
overweight, half of those being clinically obese. This amounts to 97
million adults (Miller, 1999; Worldwatch Institute, 2000).
There are several major eating disorders. Bulimia consists of
gorging followed by urgent attempts to avoid weight gain (Ameri-
can Psychiatric Association, 1994). Although some bulimics sub-
jectively label as a “binge” an amount of food that is not excessive,
many actually do ingest huge amounts—up to 11,500 calories in a
sitting or (in extreme cases) 54,000 in a day (Walsh, 1993, p. 39; see
also Marcus, 1993). Thus, one person might consume what could
literally feed a village. Such persons may develop a lifestyle that
revolves around eating—buying special food, avoiding places or
events incompatible with their habits, hiding the truth from loved
ones, or shopping in multiple stores in attempts to conceal how
much they are buying. Developmental tasks are neglected. Their
finances, health, and relationships suffer.
Bulimics’ urgent attempts to avoid weight gain occur through
fasting, excessive exercise, laxative abuse, or (the most common
method) vomiting. For there is a cost to the oblivion brought about
by overeating—fat is severely punished in our culture, whereas the
exaggeratedly thin body is exalted (Garner,1997; Murray,Touyz,&
Beumont, 1995). Fear of being fat is understandable, in light of the
well-documented and pervasive prejudice against fat people (Cogan &
Ernsberger, 1999; Eldredge & Agras, 1996; Millman, 1980; Robin
-
son, Bacon, & O’Reilly, 1993), a prejudice that has been called
“weightism” (Steiner-Adair & Purcell, 1996). Referring to the
habitual dieter’s life of constant vigilance and deprivation, eating
disorder experts Susan and Wayne Wooley (1984) have said, “If
this is,indeed, a better fate than being fat, it only shows how miser
-
able we have made the world for fat people” (p. 187).
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In contrast, the anorexics deny themselves sufficient food and
endanger their health. Their restraint is extraordinary, sustained
despite obvious signs of malnutrition and weight loss. Some
anorexics periodically break out of their self-imposed jails: Their
bodies simply rebel against the unnatural restraint and veer into
its opposite, and they binge and purge briefly before returning to a
life of self-starvation.
The most recently developed diagnosis is binge eating disorder
(American Psychiatric Association, 1994; Goldfein, Walsh,
LaChaussee, Kissileff, & Devlin, 1993; Marcus, 1997), in which
bingeing is not accompanied by compensatory behavior. There are
many other possible variations of eating, so that eating disorders
exist along a continuum (Hay & Fairburn, 1998; Shisslak, Crago, &
Estes, 1995). For example, some people eat compulsively, unable to
stop, but do not binge or purge. Many of these become overweight,
with obesity ranging from a few extra pounds, through seriously
overweight, to morbid obesity, in which the person may be hun-
dreds of pounds overweight and unable to perform the simplest
acts of daily self-care. Still others do not have eating disorders at
all but simply eat too much and exercise too little. Whatever the
cause, obesity is one of the largest single health problems in the
United States, leading to diabetes, hypertension, heart disease,
stroke, gout, and some cancers. (However, these alarming claims of
obesity’s risks have been overstated, according to some experts;
Ernsberger & Koletsky, 1999). It is estimated that 97 million
Americans, or about 55% of the adult population, are seriously
overweight. Deaths from complications of obesity, anorexia, and
bulimia have been recorded.
For all eating disorders, the psychological toll is sobering. Seeking
oblivion at the trough, millions of people distort their natures and
their daily lives. Ecopsychologist Allen Kanner (personal commu
-
nication, June 1, 1999) comments on
the psychology of the act of consuming—gorging, inhaling, shooting
in without tasting, smelling, seeing, sensually enjoying the food—
and the violence of vomiting, ejecting, disgorging....There is a des
-
perate disconnected quality, the body as a sack to be filled rather
than a sacred site to be nurtured.
Unfortunately, food works all too well as a soporific or mood reg
-
ulator. It effectively numbs and distracts from life’s disappoint
-
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ments, to the point that for some people, eating can be considered a
form of dissociation (Dalle Grave, Oliosi, Todisco, & Vanderlinden
1997; Reto, Dalenberg, & Coe, 1993; Sands, 1991; Vanderlinden,
Vandereycken, van Dyck, & Vertommen, 1993). For others, obses
-
sion with eating, dieting, resolving to change, backsliding, and
renewed obsession become the central focus of life. “Food and the
body can become the battleground for a variety of psychological
and interpersonal conflicts” (Garner, 1997, p. 171).
The environmental cost of these eating disorders is truly stag
-
gering. Apart from the cost to human health and happiness, let us
consider the sheer quantity of the earth’s substance being con
-
sumed by eating-disordered persons and overeaters. First note
that the biodynamics of digestion,metabolism, set point (hypothet
-
ical mechanism of weight stability), and exercise physiology are
extremely complex and cannot be discussed here in detail; please
take the figures below as extremely crude guides. A sedentary life-
style is also an important factor contributing to obesity. The eco-
nomics of food storage and distribution are also complex. Never-
theless, we can engage in some instructive calculations.
Roughly speaking, a pound of body weight represents an invest-
ment of 3,500 calories. The overeater who consumes an extra 2,000
calories a day is using resources that could feed another adult or
several children. A person who is 50 pounds overweight may have
stored 175,000 calories on his or her body, not including the calo-
ries dissipated through a temperature rise and sweating,two of the
means by which the body indicates that it is overweight. Multiply
the 175,000 stored calories by 1 million people, and you get
175,000,000,000 wasted calories,not including the calories flushed
down the toilet. A purging bulimic might consume and purge 5,000
calories a day, adding up to 1 million calories a year—for one per
-
son. Add to these figures the environmental cost of packaging and
transporting the food, and the hidden tax consisting of the surger
-
ies, medicines, and other treatments for eating–disorder–related
illnesses.
Such exercises in numbers are obviously speculative and do lit
-
tle to solve the problem of eating disorders, but they do throw into
sharp relief the environmental cost of the psychosocial epidemic
they represent.
In this article, I set forth the underlying individual and collec
-
tive causes of these disorders, continuing the ecopsychology tradi
-
tion of diagnosing the psychopathology of modern society. Some
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writers trace our misuse of nature back to distant historical
roots—the invention of agriculture (Glendinning, 1994) and male
domination (Eisler, 1987). The forms of pathology manifested in
our present ecological crisis have been described as dissociation,
autism, addiction, collective amnesia (Metzner, 1995), narcissism
(Kanner, 1999), the all-consuming self (Kanner & Gomes, 1995),
and technoaddiction (Glendinning, 1995). This article will extend
that practice, suggesting that not only are millions of individuals
involved but also that modern industrial societies are engaged in a
massive collective eating disorder.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR AN INDIVIDUAL
TO TOLERATE AN EATING DISORDER?
Once an individual has developed a disorder, certain psychologi-
cal traits are required for him or her to sustain its bizarre prac-
tices. Some of these traits have been repeatedly emphasized in the
eating disorder literature for the past 15 years and are summa-
rized below. (Other important eating disorder features, such as
black-and-white thinking,suppression of anger, and poor assertion
skills, are less relevant to the topic of this article.)
1. Poor proprioceptive awareness. Once a person has had an eat-
ing disorder for a while, he or she may no longer recognize sensa-
tions of hunger or satiation (Blundell & Hill, 1993). Such persons
may not taste the food or feel the painful distension of the stomach.
The mind-body split is for some the goal of eating, for others just a
by-product.
2. Poor self-regulation of affect. Eating and purging are used to
modulate mood—to lift a depressed mood or restrain an angry or
elated one (Christensen, 1993; Eldredge & Agras, 1996). The indi
-
vidual has forgotten (or never learned) alternative forms of self-
nurturing and may have personality deficits that contribute to the
need to use external sources for regulation. Depression and anxi
-
ety are important etiological factors for eating disorders (Arnow,
Kenardy, & Agras, 1995; Breaux & Moreno, 1994; Lazarus &
Galassi, 1994).
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3. Cognitive narrowing. The person thinks about food, diets, and
body shape above all else, neglecting broader issues of personal
development and social reality. This could be compared to the
materialism by which dedicated consumers measure their self-worth
by the amount and style of their possessions.
4. Disowning the body, hating the body’s curves and female func
-
tions, its appetites and rhythms, feeling that the true self is differ
-
ent from and dwelling in an ugly body. The body is seen as a robot,
rebellious slave, or billboard for attracting mates and interpersonal
influence, and its needs are ignored.
5. Self-hatred initiates the eating disorder and also blocks the
attempts to escape it. Eating disorder sufferers frequently feel, “I
don’t deserve to be well, happy, or thin.” They then use a continual
supply of food to drown out the ongoing self-hating messages.
6. Distorted ethics. Eating-disordered people can be exquisitely
aware of moral values, blaming themselves for being selfish or for
complaining when their problems are so much smaller than those
of people in zones of war or famine. But the ethics are quarantined
in a kind of limbo, unable to emerge and influence the person’s life,
except perhaps to encourage codependent behavior and its resul-
tant resentment. The ethical awareness reduces the person’s already
low self-respect and recharges the urge to eat to drown out the crit-
ical voice. It obviously has no power to awaken the person to the
environmental damage wrought by his or her habit.
7. Fragmentation of self into top dog and underdog, vigilant
dieter and impulsive gobbler, victim and persecutor. The person
oscillates between the positions, a dance reflected in the variation
in his or her eating practices. The complex psychopathology of eat
-
ing disorders has been described by such schools as object relations
(Selvini Palazzoli, 1978; Sugarman & Kurash, 1982), self-psychology
(Goodsitt, 1997; Sands, 1989, 1991), cognitive-behavioral therapy
(Garner, Vitousek, & Pike, 1997; Wilson, Fairburn, & Agras, 1997),
interpersonal therapy (Fairburn, 1997), family therapy (Dare &
Eisler, 1997), and feminist therapy (Orbach, 1978, 1985) and femi
-
nist prevention and activism (Piran, 1996). Entire volumes have
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been written to delineate the causes and manifestations in the self
of eating disorders.
The existential-humanistic psychologist surveying these traits
(Riebel, 1988) would see a person who has abandoned or disowned
the body and emotions, avoiding genuine choices and despising the
self—a far cry from the actualized or authentic self (Bugental,
1965). Both being and deficiency motivations (Maslow, 1968) are
thwarted and channeled into an unholy dance with food.
EATING DISORDERS AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION
The careful reader may have observed that the above-mentioned
individual eating disorder traits resemble some of those thought to
be at the root of environmental problems—dissociation from the
body, emotional numbing, focus on narrowly individual and mate-
rial concerns, and use of the natural world as a source of sub-
stances used to quell emotional distress. The personal traits out-
lined above are thus supported or actively encouraged by broader
social forces, which have been critiqued by ecologists (Shepard,
1982), ecopsychologists (Kanner & Gomes, 1995), and humanistic
psychologists (Cushman, 1990; Metzner, 1999).
Although modern Western civilization has carried eating excesses
to an almost unimaginable extreme, we didn’t invent them. Histo-
rians note the vomitorium of ancient Rome, the starving saints of
the middle ages, and both extremes in the 18th and 19th centuries
(Bruch, 1973; Casper, 1983; Habermas, 1992; Russell, 1997; Stunkard,
1993). Cross-cultural observers note that “obesity is not universally
stigmatized” and that “many developing nations consider obesity a
sign of status and wealth” (Cogan & Ernsberger, 1999, p. 198).
However, modern civilization did perfect eating disorders. As
epidemiological studies show, where Western civilization goes, eat
-
ing disorders follow (Ford, 1992; Garner, 1997; Grant et al., 1999;
Iijima Hall, 1995; Krch, 1995; Mumford, Whitehouse, & Choudry,
1992). What is it about Western civilization that so prolifically gen
-
erates eating disorders? Lee (1996) calls this spreading influence
the culture of modernity, which is “composed of increased afflu
-
ence,fear of fatness, proliferation of body-oriented advertisements,
conflicting roles of women, and diffusion of biomedical technology”
(p. 1). The impact of the unrealistically slim media image of women
is overwhelmingly cited by experts (Phelps, Johnston, & August-
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yniak, 1999; Shaw & Waller, 1995; Thompson & Heinberg, 1999;
also see below) as causal to eating disorders. Barber (1998) and
Silverstein, Peterson, and Perdue (1986) pointed to the opportuni
-
ties for women to acquire education and enter the workforce, with
the consequent role stress.
Below, I review key economic and cultural features of Western
and developed countries that may contribute to eating disorders.
1. Surplus food. The supplies for eating disorders come from
industrialized agriculture and factory farming, processing, and
distribution, which drive down the price of food and drive up the
availability of food in tempting varieties and huge quantities.
2. Readily available prepared food. Food manufacturers prepare
an enormous variety of edibles, from frozen meals to many kinds of
sweets. Distributors advertise and make available their wares on
every street corner, one cookie at a time, so the person need not
even take the trouble to prepare the food to be consumed. This
allows the trance state to proceed uninterrupted.
3. Women’s bodies as currency. The visual appearance of the
female body has for millennia been a source of personal leverage in
the mating marketplace. The quest for beauty (Wolf, 1991) is thus a
quest for economic capital, a burden familiar to women through
the ages in the forms of foot binding, scarification, waist-crushing
corsets, ingestion of poisons to induce fashionable paleness, and
many more damaging practices. What is new is the commodifica
-
tion of female appearance for purposes other than mating. This
brings us to the next point.
4. Advertising. The advertising industry, a $199-billion-a-year
segment of the American economy (Sampat, 1999), makes the pre
-
ceding factor (women’s bodies as currency) an invasive and unavoid
-
able psychological force. It is estimated that the average U.S. citi
-
zen is exposed to 254 advertisements a day (Sampat, 1999), although
the larger figure of 3,000 has also been widely cited (Landler,
1991). Women’s bodies are used to advertise not just clothing and
cosmetics,which at least bear some relationship to the female body,
but also such wildly unrelated products as automobiles, cigarettes,
and carpets. Advertising is an invention of modernity—a
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profession designed to coordinate calculated efforts to influence
unseen people for commercial gain. It is, alas, all too effective.
5. Well-compensated enablers. Manufacturers of chocolate, among
other products, profit from food addictions, although they may be
innocent of intending to cause them. Eating disorder experts have
for years noted the incongruity that women’s magazines display
luscious photos of food next to diet articles and even—supreme
irony—next to articles about eating disorders (Wiseman, Gray,
Mosimann, & Ahrens, 1992). Then, there is the very lucrative diet
industry, which earns $40 billion a year as part of our total expen
-
diture on thinness of $60 billion a year (Ernsberger & Koletstky,
1999). Although commercial, medical, and popular diet programs
appear to offer solutions to eating disorders, they implicitly con
-
tribute to the problem by adding their advertisements of thin exul
-
tant customers to the cascade of thin images, which, experts agree,
are the prime causes of eating disorders (Garner, 1997; Huon,
Braganza, Brown, Ritchie, & Roncolato, 1998; Kearney-Cooke &
Striegel-Moore, 1997; Moulton, Moulton, & Roach, 1998; Murray
et al., 1995).
Moreover, even when their systems succeed, they don’t succeed
for long. Ninety to 95% of adults who do lose weight will regain it
within a few years (Garner, 1997; Miller, 1999; Steiner-Adair &
Purcell, 1996). Furthermore, there are physical and psychological
risks of most weight-loss programs (Berg, 1999; McFarlane, Polivy, &
McCabe, 1999). Says one expert, “If the cure from obesity is defined
as reduction to ideal weight and maintenance of that weight for 5
years, a person is more likely to recover from most forms of cancer
than from obesity [italics added]” (Brownell, quoted in Garner,
1997, p. 151). Most disheartening is the finding (Ernsberger &
Koletsky, 1999) that many of those medical professionals charged
with setting impartial national standards for health and weight
have compromising ties with pharmaceutical or weight-loss corpo
-
rations. Many of the people who use commercial weight-loss estab
-
lishments are repeat customers. One reliable client of mine, a psy
-
chologist, said she had joined one diet center or another at least 50
times by the age of 35. All these represent first-order change—
superficial adjustments that do not address individual psycho-
pathology or the cultural roots of eating disorders.
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WHAT DOES IT TAKE FOR A CULTURE
TO TOLERATE EATING DISORDERS?
In the past 20 years, a concerted campaign to overcome eating
disorders has blossomed into a mature scholarly and clinical field,
with educational programs; a veritable avalanche of research; con
-
ferences; journals; and multifaceted forms of treatment in clinics,
hospitals, and private practices. The professional effort to solve
eating disorders is impressive but, with the exception of preven
-
tion efforts, tackles the problem one person at a time. Unfortu
-
nately, even primary prevention can backfire, informing some peo
-
ple of a “solution” to weight gain (purging) that they had not
thought of on their own, thereby inadvertently creating some cases
of bulimia (Huon et al., 1998).
However,we do not seem willing to uproot the original sources of
the pain and malaise that cause a person to use food as a drug.
What kinds of national blindness and deafness allow us to leave
intact the root causes?
1. Taking food for granted as an endlessly available commodity
that someone else will grow and deliver. This is the same immature
dependence by which people assume that water and gasoline are
their inexhaustible birthrights.
2. Numbing, acceptance of the act of drowning out awareness.
We distract our minds and senses with music, noise, and movies of
explosions. Televisions play in hospital wards, emergency rooms,
car repair shop waiting areas, and airport lounges. Eating becomes,
then, an interchangeable means, like television, coffee, cigarettes,
and mass entertainment, to drown out awareness. We seem unable
simply to sit quietly.
3. Lack of participation in the rhythms of cultivating, harvest
-
ing, or even preparing the food oneself.
4. Disrespect for nature. Plants and animals are seen as lifeless,
unentitled, nameless fodder for one’s addiction. In my 19 years as
an eating disorder specialist, I have never heard a client express
regret for wasting the earth’s bounty.
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5. Ignorance of the web of cooperation and labor that goes into
making every cookie, which may include disregard of the exploita
-
tion of farm workers and factory laborers.
6. Denial of shared public responsibility, defining eating dis-
orders as problems belonging to individuals. This is not new. Only
in the past 20 years has smoking been reframed as a matter of pub
-
lic health and communal responsibility, calling for regulation, pol
-
icy, and counteradvertising.Likewise, I have never known a parent
or relative of an eating-disordered client, no matter how caring, to
mention (let alone protest or oppose) the commercial exploitation
of women’s bodies.
7. Competitiveness. In a country where the pursuit of athletic
victory has become a national religion, being the thinnest is the tri
-
umph of the dieter. One bulimic boasted of her capacity to use and
eliminate food. “I was the Miss America of purging,” she said. “I
was the best. Friends of mine got exhausted after one or two times.
I could do it nine or ten....Itwasamazing what I could do” (Sands,
1989, p. 80).
8. The empty self. The misuse of food as an addictive substance
and the failed efforts to undo the results and to break the habit do
not exist in a vacuum. Except for rare medical conditions,an eating
disorder is a statement by and about a person—a person living in a
civilization that, as Cushman (1990) said, is the home of the empty
self.
Thus, the culture, like the individual, has evolved adaptations
that permit the continuance of bizarre food practices, factors that
parallel those relevant to environmental degradation. Eating dis
-
orders are symbols and manifestations of psychopathology on a
grand scale, made more poignant by the fact that they are so
difficult to cure. We consume the earth to ease our pain. But the
success of this strategy is fleeting—the pain comes back, so we do
more of the same, demanding more consumption-induced oblivion.
Attempts to stop merely reinstate the cycle. We become ever more
disconnected from our bodies, our fellow humans, our fellow crea
-
tures, and our self-respect.
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HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY AND
ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS
Some present-day humanistic psychologists have made similar
critiques of mainstream values and prepared the way for a saner
attitude toward the natural world. Yet, it is worth noting that
humanism has been vulnerable to the charge of anthropocentrism
(Spretnak, 1986). Metzner (1999) points out that Renaissance
humanism arose as an affirmation of human worth after a millen
-
nium of self-abasement but ultimately led to the opposite extreme,
seeming to endorse the arrogance that is, of course, at the root of
the present environmental crisis. Humanistic psychology, too, arose
in revolt against disliked self-images to celebrate what is uniquely
human (Davidson, 1992) and, some say, has likewise gone too far in
the direction of self-centeredness (O’Hara, 1992).
Fortunately, individual humanistic psychologists have begun
participating in the work of reshaping our attitudes. Howard
(1992) cited environmental hazards, particularly overpopulation,
about which he set forth concrete actions that humanistic psychol-
ogists could take. Pilisuk (2001 [this issue]) proposes a paradigm of
interdependence and caring to replace one emphasizing individual
development. Pilisuk and Tardella (in press) challenge humanistic
psychologists to acknowledge the very real dangers that human
folly and technology have created and to
develop an ecological self in which the pain of the contaminated
world is our own pain and the preservation of life in general gives
meaning to our own life....Weareinneed of an ethic to replace ram
-
pant individualism. The pursuit of happiness needs to be replaced
by the pursuit of compassion.
O’Hara’s (1992) plea to incorporate cultural plurality could easily
be broadened to include our nonhuman fellow creatures.
Courage, humility, and compassion are called for if we humans
are to relinquish our self-serving image as the crown of creation
and to step off our narcissistic pedestal. Discipline, a sense of com
-
munity, and commitment to peace and justice are required if we are
to translate this shift into real efforts to dismantle the wasteful
consumerist lifestyle and work actively for environmental healing.
Are these not humanistic values?
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Psychologists as a profession have been embarrassingly silent
in the face of the environmental crisis brought about by human
beliefs and behaviors. Only recently have appeals for psychologists
to respond to the environmental crisis reached mainstream profes
-
sional publications (Howard, 2000; McKenzie-Mohr, 2000; Oskamp,
2000; Stern, 2000; Winter, 2000). Humanistic psychologists were
among the first to correct this omission (Aanstoos, 1998; Conn,
1998; Gomes, 1998; Metzner, 1998)—not the first time they have
anticipated a movement. Humanistic psychologists were among
the first to study the positive aspects of human nature, topics
that have at last reached the profession’s mainstream and filled an
entire issue of its association’s flagship journal (Seligman &
Czikszentmihalyi, 2000). I invite all psychologists to ponder how
they can refine or transform their cherished ideas to embrace a
love of the earth and the creatures that share it with us.
WHAT TO DO?
In practical terms, the threat to the planet posed by eating dis-
orders is obvious. If, as some have said, commercial fishing resem-
bles “underwater clear-cutting,” then eating disorders are like
giant vacuum cleaners, sucking up and wasting the earth’s sub-
stance.Healing eating disorders would be a direct aid to the plants,
animals, and ecosystems.
The nonspecialist may wonder what can be done for the individ-
ual eating-disordered client. The first point is that simple exhorta
-
tions fail—the eating-disordered person has already tried them for
years. The psychic damage is too great and complex, and exhorta
-
tions simply fail if they pit one intrapsychic force against another.
If a simple “Don’t do it!” worked, everyone would have been cured
by now. Furthermore, the ambivalence toward change is too great—
part of the eating-disordered self does not want to give up the prob
-
lem. This mirrors the larger environmental hazard posed by the
fact that people do not want to give up their fossil fuels.
Just as some are now calling for ecopsychology to broaden its
forms of appeal beyond guilt and fear (Roszak, 1995), the cure for
eating disorders calls for compassionate and skillful intervention.
Reminding clients of the environmental cost of their eating dis-
orders would simply add another layer of counterproductive guilt,
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so the therapist who loves both patient and planet must walk a
tightrope. I propose the following approaches, some of which are
outside the usual clinical strategies for treating eating disorders,
yet in harmony with their goals of restoring a healthy sense of self,
body, and relationship to others. Drawn partly from ecopsychology
ideas, they also reach beyond individual clients to root causes.
1. Develop alternative nurturing behaviors. Like most eating dis
-
order specialists, I seek to expand my clients’ repertoires of plea
-
surable or soothing activities (Riebel, 2000). All too often, they
have nothing other than food to reward or soothe themselves, dis
-
play creativity, or offer love to others. Alternatives could range
from listening to music; playing with animals; learning a new lan
-
guage; to any of dozens of avocations, arts, and games. The eco-
psychologist would add walking in nature, gardening, learning
about the local habitat and species, volunteering to restore local
creeks— healing the earth’s body as a parallel to healing one’s own.
2. Envision the web of people who bring the food to one’s table.
Community-supported agriculture (Fox, 1997; Kittredge, 1996) is a
step in this direction: Organic farmers sell their produce directly to
their subscribers in an economic arrangement based on personal
relationships.
3. Teach baking bread, planting seed, harvesting fruit—the
pleasures of creating food and admiring earth’s bounty. Like the
other suggestions, however, this is not foolproof. Some anorexics
are diligent cooks, preparing for others what they will not eat
themselves. But others, typically bulimics, are indifferent to the
qualities of food and might benefit from attuning to them.
4. Teach composting. Some eating-disordered people overeat
because, having once served themselves huge portions, they are
averse to throwing out food, thinking it would be a waste. (Never
mind that adding fat to one’s body is just another kind of waste.)
Composting represents renewing the earth and could redirect this
hitherto unproductive guilt. It is, of course, an interim step, as
ecopsychologists and eating disorder specialists alike hope eating-
disordered persons would ultimately cease serving themselves so
much to begin with.
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5. Build community. Distorted relationships are part of eating
disorders. Loneliness, the conviction that the others are judging
one, suppressed anger, poor boundaries, and taking care of others
at one’s own expense are all features of the personality styles of
those who develop eating disorders (Riebel, 1985, 1989, 1990, 2000;
Steiger, Leung, & Thibodeau, 1993). Other people are seen as those
to be envied, feared, or placated (Moulton et al., 1998). Interper
-
sonal therapy (Fairburn, 1997) is a highly recommended treatment for
bulimics. Support groups could take the form of any activity—
dancing,foreign languages, yoga, and vegetarian societies and gar
-
dening clubs.
6. Awaken awareness of our interdependence with all life forms and
of the cost to the planet of eating disorders. This is the consciousness-
raising task of ecopsychology across the board. With the eating-dis
-
ordered population, this must be done carefully, to avoid the risk of
simply adding one more guilt-inducing message to an already
heavy cargo of self-rejection and guilt. We must reimagine the
beauty of the body and the earth and use all our skill to instill it in
others who may have become deadened to nature and the body.
Spretnak (1997) has made a brilliant call for just this.
Together, these recommendations—for pleasure, creativity, rela-
tionships, community, and interdependence—embody values that
humanistic psychologists should find familiar. What can be done
by environmentally aware psychologists who are not directly engaged
in treating people with eating disorders? As with many other steps
we take to serve our planet, we can vote with our dollars and our
attention. Don’t patronize entertainments and industries that
exploit women’s bodies. Don’t comment on people’s weight. Con
-
tinue offering healthy food or nonfood activities at social events.
Humans are not always rational and, as the environmental cri
-
sis shows on a ghastly scale, are capable of ignoring even the most
elementary factors needed for survival. The epidemic of eating dis
-
orders shows that the most basic fact of feeding can be abused to
the point of death from starvation or stuffing. Eating disorders are
a metaphor for our national consumption binge and for the tasks
facing ecopsychology. But humans also embody qualities such as
compassion and courage that can help us teach our fellow citizens
that consuming the earth is not the answer to life’s challenges.
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