Oversensitive

Due to the nature of both the eating disorder and 'obesity' construct fields and their spread of disinformation, we've lost a real sense of what hyperphagia nervosa (HN) is really like. 

I want to try and give you a basic idea of what HN, which used to be called "compulsive eating disorder" and is now latterly being styled as/or overlapping with "food addiction" feels like.

I used to object routinely;

• a) CED/HN in essence a mechanical fault-of the nervous system functioning 

• b) neurosis can help cause it by provoking the nervous system to keep triggering the part/s of itself concerned with hunger and appetite 

• c) eating is not the real problem, excess hunger/appetite signals are 

• d) it is not eating to get high, nor can any food but alcohol make you high that is intoxicate 

• e) it is not done (directly) for pleasure. You are compelled by the signalling, which is even more powerful than normal hunger-which is more than compelling enough 

• f) it is not caused by eating, it's caused by the misfiring of your hunger/ appetite mechanisms i.e. it doesn't have the conscious input of A or BN 

• and g) treating it by suppressing that signalling is more likely to increase than reduce it. WLD alone can trigger it in those susceptible to it.

"Some crave food even after they have just eaten, suggesting addiction."

This kind of ideation is currently being spread around. It's from one of latest studies trying to craft hyperphagia into this nonsense category-the ubiquity ad absurdum use of [f]"addiction" should get your bs detector zinging like a buzzsaw;

Claus Voegele, Professor of Clinical and Health Psychology, said: ‘All addictions are similar in that the sufferer craves to excess the feel-good buzz they receive from chemical neurotransmitters produced when they eat, gamble, smoke, have sex or take drugs.’ 

Absolute cobblers.

Says more about the wild imaginings ignorant fat phobes want to have about fat people than real life hyperphagics who come in all sizes. I'd say they get a feel good buzz out of this similar to "drug addicts", except without the accountability of their actions being visited on their own bodies.

The 'obesity' construct, merges all fat people together-functional outliers and average alike-no matter what else they do-does being fat prevent you from using drugs? Prescription ones obviously-they're the more (immediately) fattening ones.

So what is the above, wanting to eat straight after eating quote referring to really? It may surprise you if I say that the thing that most came to mind was a friend of mine who's bladder became sensitive. She had a constant urge to go to the toilet, even when her bladder was not closed to full or even empty. More than once, she went to the toilet with an empty bladder, came back and then immediately felt like going again.

Catch any resemblance?

Wanting to eat, after just having eaten-in this case after the stimulus of seeing a picture of food. Versus wanting to go to the toilet straight after trying to empty an empty bladder.

Both centre around a sensitized area, subject to an excess of nerve signalling

There are several forms of bladder problems. My friend had a sensitive/sensitized bladder, but this woman developed both that and urge incontinence-the bladder releasing too quickly.

What's remarkable about her description and that of her doctor, is how many points touch on what I said long before I heard any of this. She Marlene Brown, talks about how her life came to revolve around going to the toilet.

How she tried to adapt to try and prevent it, which caused her other problems. How the "constant urge for the bathroom...... was making my life a misery."

How often do you hear that from hyperphagics? That the constant hunger/appetite signalling is wearing them out? How can you, when the standard issue fat phobic lens is fixated as ever, solely on food, determined to keep fat people in their box, no matter what?

The ever present signalling after about almost a couple of decades put me on the edge too. I described it before as like some who develops tinnitus. The inability to not hear that can drive them up the wall.

It's the unrelenting nature that can erode sanity, even more than the thing itself.

She even talks about how she felt as if something was pressing on her bladder. I used to talk about how I felt as if a foot had its foot on the accelerator of my hunger somewhere in my mind not my head. It was not as physical. More an impression, but a palpable one nonetheless.

Her specialist Wai Yoong, explained to her;

I had urge incontinence, where the nerves around the bladder send off faulty signals that cause it to become hypersensitive. So even when it’s holding just a little fluid, the bladder thinks it’s full and starts to contract and spasm, which is why you feel the urgent need for the loo.

That's far closer to my experience of HN than any eating disorder professional I've come across has come close to in their witterings of what they want HN to be, certainly since I hit the net. Every squeak that happened in that area was magnified by its sensitized state.

And what about the treatment that she says halved her symptoms;

The new procedure involved putting a needle into my ankle for half an hour at a time, with an electrode under my foot to create a circuit. This would stimulate a nerve that runs from the spine to the ankle, passing the bladder on the way — somehow this would get the nerves sending normal signals again. 

So, in order to affect signals going to the bladder, you can get to them through the ankle and foot?! Think of the way they freely bind and cut fat people's organs rather than creating careful and ingenious procedures like this. The absence of loathing is a wonderful thing.

You might also sense the trickiness of treating HN. You have to achieve similar, using your mind on itself. My current conclusion is AN is easier to treat, but is a lethal condition. HN is not acutely dangerous, in the main, but is far harder to dismantle. That's because it doesn't have the direct conscious input that a lot of AN does. It's body led and its extended from a normal state rather than an acquired pathology. 

Yes, I recognise, there are differing perspectives. Most in the ED field, dominated it seems by women, seek an emotional angle. And let me make clear again, just in case, I don't believe the notion that emotions are lesser than or in opposition to thought. I believe they are a form of thought, they are at a different sometimes earlier stage and stand alone to what we translate into word(y thinking).

Emotions are to thoughts as we understand them, what stem cells are to an organ or body part. Emotions are both matter and what larger more conscious thought is read as.

The emotional component is there, but its as much the physical effect of emotions than direct mental disturbance in itself, like anorexia. Emotional signals go through the nervous system. When this is in a permanently heightened state, via depression, anxiety, negative self imagine etc., that gets the nervous system into basic range where your everyday emotions, reactions, experience, activities, on top of that, create surges powerful enough to trigger the mechanics of eating and hunger to signal excessively.

Strictly, you could say that's hypothesis, but its based on experience, it's not speculative. Nor attempting cultural recognition or increased social status. It's about trying to accurately render what's going on, so that everyone who wants it, has a chance to grasp what we are dealing with here.

It was also the basis of understanding that led me to be able to dismantled HN and I did, so there's that. I'm of course not the only one. Others have stumbled on a similar path, though I don't pretend to endorse their typical faddiction lens or premise.

The key to sketching a detailed biochemical view is in the details of function. But we'll only know the full story, when people stop messing around with silliness like forcing HN and anything else remotely or otherwise associated with fatness, into mad, crazed, greedy, consciously degenerate, fat  baddies, faddiction crud.