Do You Want to Get Well?

I was so inspired by our minister's sermon at last night's service that I posted the following on the ThinWithin community board and wanted to also post this here:

Tonight our minister preached about John 5:1-19. As the story goes:

Some time later Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews. Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which ... is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here (many) disabled people used to lie ... One ... had been an invalid for 38 years. When Jesus saw him lying there and learned he had been in this condition for a long time, He asked him, "Do you want to get well?"

"Sir", the invalid replied, "I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me."

Then Jesus said to him, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk." At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked."

That story seemed appropriate as we approach New Year's Day, when many people vow to change their bodies, their habits and their lives. However, many of those people resist the very changes they seek, which makes us wonder: "Do they really WANT to change (or get well)?"

Our minister said "Questions, not answers, are the key to change." We may get answers but still feel stuck, because we don't ask the right questions. Jesus asked the right question. Ironically the invalid's answer seemed to ignore Jesus's question. The invalid blamed his failure to recover on his circumstances, his lack of people to help him into the pool, and other disabled people crowding ahead of him. Although the man by the pool may have wanted to be well, maybe that change meant he would have new responsibilities, less help from friends than he had as an invalid. Maybe he feared that he really couldn't change.

The man by the pool saw only one solution to his problem, being the first person to dip into the pool when the waters were stirred. He didn't consider any other way to recover. Jesus broke into the man's closed reality and gave him greater imagination to see answers 'outside the box', when He said, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk." However, change through Jesus often requires that we take the first step, like the invalid who had to risk standing up. We may have to risk trusting that God can satisfy us better than the internet (or food) when we are stressed. Following Jesus can mean asking more questions, rather than just clinging to one answer.

If you would have asked me 10 years ago whether I wanted to change my habits of bingeing and purging, I would have said, "Of course. That's a silly question." Yet as I clung to those habits, I realized I didn't have a mental disorder, but I used those habits to cope with some fears about food as well as gastrointestinal problems. I never really believed I was powerless over my disordered eating. I knew I chose to binge and then chose to purge afterwards. However, I couldn't see any other answers.

I believed that I would stop purging when I stopped bingeing. I eventually learned to abstain from purging after I overate, so that simple overeating didn't become a binge. Nevertheless, I still chose to binge an average of once a month. I wouldn't admit to other people that I believed bingeing and purging was the only way I could eat certain foods. However I feared my reaction to sweets. Eventually I learned I had an allergy to cane sugar, which caused tachycardia, which felt like a panic reaction. That certainly could have made me want to 'get rid of' whatever I ate before I got that reaction. Other food allergies caused painful gut cramps. Before I was diagnosed with those allergies, I thought purging would eliminate the gut pain I experienced after overeating. I didn't realize until after diagnosis, that even a tiny smidgeon of my allergen foods could cause weeks of pain. I didn't need to purge to control weight. I had been thin for many years. Nevertheless purging remained a necessary part of my binge episodes.

Even after I eliminated cane sugar and other food allergies, I still binged and purged on 'safe foods', especially after I restricted sweet (nonallergenic) foods for awhile. My pattern was: I'd try to eat sweets moderately. Then I would overeat a few times and feel guilty. So I would put the sweets away for awhile. However, if those sweet foods were still in the house, when I felt stressed or just deprived of anything else in my life, I'd binge on my stash of sweets. Then I'd go back to restricting. Did I want to change my binge/purge habit? Of course, but I didn't believe I had any other solutions, besides abstaining from my binge foods. Moderate consumption never 'seemed' to work.

So I worked on changing how I dealt with stress. I learned to cope with feelings, rather than distract or comfort myself with food. I also learned to cope with stress differently, by taking my concerns and frustrations, to God. I binged less often and had long periods of abstinence from my disordered eating habits. However, I still binge/purged an average once a month. Only when I began to ask myself "Do I want to become a normal eater?", rather than "How do I stop bingeing and purging?", did I begin to focus on eating only when hungry and stopping when satisfied, any food that I enjoyed (which included many of my former binge foods). I also suspended judgment when I didn't stop right at 'satisfaction' or 5. My goal was NOT to lose weight. I just wanted to eat as normally as I could with 7 food allergies, so that I wouldn't stress my body with binge/purge episodes.

So I experimented with the 'eat any foods your body wants' part of normal eating as much as I worked on 0-5 eating. After years of binge/purging certain sweet foods, I didn't really know whether my body wanted those or my mind wanted what I didn't let myself have. I needed to give those foods a fair trial with several nonjudgmental eating experiences, before I could understand whether those former binge foods were teasers, pleasers or whole body pleasers. During that process, I finally began to see my former binge foods as 'just foods', some great, some okay, and some worthless, according to how my body felt after nonjudgmentally eating those. I now suspect I binged because I wouldn't let myself eat some very desirable foods any other way and purged because I also believed those foods were 'bad' for my body. Changing the question helped me find a way to change those irratioinal beliefs which led to counterproductive behaviors.

If we keep returning to the eating habits we want to eliminate, if we don't see the results we want, if we keep slipping back into any undesirable habits, maybe we need to ask ourselves different questions. Maybe we need to consider different solutions. Do we want to get well?