Rehabilitate, Rewire, Recover: Force feeding yourself as an adult.

In this podcast I talk about the skill of being able to force feed yourself as an adult in recovery from anorexia.  In the process of making yourself eat food you are afraid of you achieve both nutritional rehabiliation and neural rewiring goals. You train your brain that these foods are not a threat to you, and you eat the types of food that your body really needs in order to get out of malnutrition. When you are faced with food that you are not used to eating, or in larger quantites that you usually allow yourself to eat, you go into your sympathetic nervous system -- that's the fight or flight one. Food doesn't taste that good when you are stressed about it! But, if you continue to force yourself to eat, your brain learns that the food is not a threat, and in time, you remain calm when eating. This is what leads to the neural rewiring of your brain that these foods are not a threat to you.