There is a connection we have with our bodies (and our bodies have with our mind) that is convoluted, dialectical, impatient, loving, and downright complicated (See Part 1).  Sometimes, things go catastrophically wrong with that connection and we are left wondering what is wrong with us.   What does a disconnection look like?


1) There are the people that don't know they have a body.  I'm not kidding.  They get dressed in the morning and eat every day and exercise and hug people, but never do so from a point of actually being IN their body.  Their bodies are full of pain that that is just about the only thing they know about it.  They have cut off their bodies and don't really feel much.  They often don’t even realize that they don’t realize that they have cut off their bodies.  When they start unfreezing or something gets through their tough and numbed exterior, they are often surprised that there is a whole world they never knew existed.  These are the people that say things like my world became alive or full of color after falling in love or recovering from depression or finally getting relief from a debilitating illness.  



2) There are the people that change their bodies in extreme ways to fit into an ideal image.  They get surgery, take drugs, sculpt themselves at the gym, and watch or count everything that enters their mouth.  They feel like their body doesn't match their internal image of themselves and are so dysphoric they are willing to do ANYTHING to not be what other people see them as on the outside.  Their brains quite literally have an image (or a map) of what their bodies are supposed to look like.  In fact, there is a whole section of the brain called the parietal lobes that integrates information from your senses and your experiences and expectations of what it means to be a human and what a human is supposed to look like to give you an internal image of what you are supposed to look like.  You hear these people spending the majority of their day preoccupied with “improving” themselves.  This disconnection between what you think or feel you should look like and what you actually look like is what causes why skinny people to say they feel fat and transgender individuals to say their bodies don’t match their gender.



3) There are the people that abuse their bodies in ways that poses a threat their own health.  Something has happened that is so overwhelming emotionally that self-abuse and self-harm through pain, abstinence, denial, and more is the only way to get a break from the weight of the emotions and thoughts.  Abusing their bodies seem to be the only thing that makes life REAL.  Everyday life is like walking through a movie watching someone else, or is so horribly hellish that they feel completely and utterly isolated and alone.  Physical pain and denial is a way to gain control and mastery over their own lives.  The only time they feel alive is when they are getting that adrenaline rush or consuming food and drink that is making them sick or cutting themselves to make sure they are still alive.



How do you heal from a disconnection when we never acknowledged there was a connection, or even recognize that the problem is the actual connection?


Check back tomorrow for Part 3 of Thoughts on Bodies: Healing the Divide

Bodies.  Our bodies define us in so many ways, yet we disown them in so many more.  Our uniforms, our haircuts, our styles and the way we showcase ourselves signify everything from socio-economic class and race, to gender identity, to the community we identify with and our "tribe".  At the same time, we disown our bodies and disconnect with them in profound and sometimes abusive ways.  Our relationships and experiences with our bodies, whether it is dragging them around and making them wait while we think or learn, or taking them out for a walk, or getting frustrated when they get sick or break out in hives or whatever, define our core experience.  We struggle each day to feed them the right way, rest them enough, and exercise them enough.  We become so shameful about them that we try and force our bodies to conform to an ideal, and we get frustrated that they can't keep up with us.  


We tend to treat our bodies as something separate from our "self".  We are embarrassed by them, dress them up, hide them, sculpt them with weights and dumbbells or plastic surgery, ink them, mutilate them, starve them, or overfeed them.  At the same time, they are what make us and helps define us as "who I am".  It is exactly the way we dress them up, or hide them, or sculpt them, or ink them, mutilate, starve, or overfeed them that sends a message about "this is who I am".  


Underneath all of that, though, is another dialectic.  We insist that our bodies are different than our minds and in many ways they most definitively are.  You can't think up E=mc2 by putting your body in a pink tutu or running around a tree (although you might be able to do those simultaneously), yet our bodies also create and define how our minds function.... and vice versa.  There is a connection between our minds and bodies that is so profound that we get pits and butterflies in our stomachs or feel like our hearts are breaking.  When we get angry, we clench our fists and when we get scared we lock our knees.  There is an intricate connection between mind and body that is so obvious that we often deny it exists at all.  In fact, the concept of separating our bodies so much as to talk about taking them for a walk or making them wait around while we learn seems ludicrous.  We are fundamentally intertwined with our bodies.


What happens when things go catastrophically wrong with that connection and we are left wondering what is wrong with us?  How do you heal from a disconnection when we never acknowledged there was a connection, or even recognize that the problem is the actual connection?  What does a disconnection look like?


These are the people that don't know they have a body, change it in ways to fit into an ideal image, or abuse it in ways that poses a threat their own health.   


Stay tuned for tomorrow on "Thoughts on Bodies- Part 2: Catastrophic Disconnection".  

Just two months ago, I came upon an article in the New York Times in my Twitter feed called The Science of Junk Food.  It was a 14 page article and there was no way I was going to read yet ANOTHER rant about the evils of our food supply.  It was old news to me.  As someone with a long and vested history in the food supply, being allergic to just about the world, I skipped it.  Just the previous week my roommate was telling me about some guy that changed the food industry by conducting an experiment to see what kind of flavors people liked best.  It had opened the door to companies such as Ragu to recreate their entire line of food to offer a plethora of options.  I thought that was kind of cool.  I loved Ragu sauce growing up!  I went on with my Twitter scan and moved on to my daily Facebook newsfeed scan.  Then, in an attempt to procrastinate, I went back to Twitter and saw that article again.  I opened up the link and thought, I'll just scan it to see if there is anything interesting.  Its a 14 page article and I got to get ready for work soon anyway but I still have some extra time.

I started reading it, and it was unlike any food article I have ever read.  It wasn't about the evil of our food supply.  No PETA pictures.  It read like a book I had read about the financial crash from the perspective of the exec's on the inside.  It was full of politics and intrigue and manipulation and injustice..... but not the abstract kind of statistics that usually get thrown out there about obesity rates and the like.  No, the politics and injustice of CEO's vying for power, manipulation of scientists and marketing campaign managers wanting to do the right thing, and whistleblowers being screwed over.  

I got through about half and I stopped. This was describing a version of our food supply that was different than I had ever heard of, and I thought I had seen and heard it all.  I started thinking about my own relationship with the food industry.

Growing up, I LOVED hotdogs, chips, cottage cheese, cereals, McDonalds, etc, etc.  When I visited my grandparents during the holidays it perplexed me why my grandmother would not keep things like hotdogs and cottage cheese in the house.  Each time I brought it up, my Grandmother would describe to me the horror of visiting a factory as a child for a school trip where they made hot dogs and cottage cheese.  I saw images of pink slime and the smell of oozing, rotting dairy just like the glasses of milk I sometimes forgot about in the basement mixed with Mr. Rogers footage .  It didn't deter me (much), but the images still stuck in my mind.  

In 10th grade chemistry class, we had a guest presenter from the local Kraft factory who was a food scientist.  My mother had worked at the Kraft factory where they made Cool-Whip long before I was born.  He showed us what he did for a living by mixing chemicals to make food last longer, taste better, and look prettier.  While part of me was horrified, for the most part I thought it was kind of ingenious that food could be made better.  Hey, I loved cool-whip on my hot chocolate!

After high school I did an exchange program in Germany where I lived out in the country.  My neighbors had an industrial cow farm and not too far away was a chicken farm.  They were small scale, so for the most part all I saw was the milking barns, the stench of chickens from down the road, and trails in the dirt where I supposed they peacefully grazed all day when I was out at school or traveling.  At night, the bright lights of the distant barn would reflect on my walls.  Neighbors warned me to stay away from the chicken farm but never really said why.  I envisioned clouds of nasty dried chicken poop and a deadly stench with the occasional PETA image of crowed coops, but this was Germany.... not the USA, so there was no need to worry.

I went to college to study the sciences and worked in the Chemistry lab one summer.  I learned all about how the chemical structure of anything was identical, no matter if I created it or nature did.  Sodium Chloride is salt, whether it comes out of the ocean, or out of my test tube.  What is "natural"?  ALL things are "natural".  In biology labs, we tested corn products to identify GMO contamination and see if they actually held up to industry labeling and then MADE genetically modified organisms.  GMO crops and animals, I learned, were saving lives.  In fact, I knew this first hand because I spent spring break among the starving Oaxacan people of central-west Mexico on medical mission where they were barely eating 2 meals a day of beans and any vegetables that could be salvaged from the semi-arid terrain.  They were running away illegally across the border to the USA to send home money to families because they couldn't afford flour or corn.  We recommended that they boil rusty nails with their beans to make sure they were getting iron in their diets.  


What has been your relationship or prior knowledge of our food supply?  Next week in Part 2, I will discuss the second half of the New York Times article "The Science of Junk Food" and the nutritional content of of our food.