Adverse Childhood Events
Part of your health history is to do with Adverse Childhood Events (ACE). These events can be big, like having surgery of being in a motor vehicle accident or they can be relational, to do with home, school, friends, extended family or the absence of relationship. These can also be emotional, physical, or sexual abuse as well as being in the presence of intimate partner violence, household substance abuse, mental illness, parental separation or divorce, or an incarcerated household member. All of this goes under the heading of trauma and trauma can happen at any time in your life, not just as a child but also as an adult. Based on the prevalence of ACE there are complex relationships that have been determined between the experience of these traumatic exposures and a number of side effects. These side effects are not only to do with mental health issues, but they are also a result of chronic inflammatory responses. Chronic inflammatory responses in your body can lead to mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, as well as the need to self medicate. Eating disorders actually are under the heading of dissociative disorders and dissociative disorders are based in the need to disassociate or separate from reality. Other dissociative disorders inclusive of eating disorders are to do with pain as well as substance abuse. These are also to do with autoimmune disease responses, sleep disturbances, gastro intestinal disturbances as well as fibromyalgia. Trauma in early life can effect your attitudes towards meal times, food choices, and the ability to engage in nutritional self-care. There is a nutritional basis for your symptoms and there is a connection between mental health symptoms and your physical symptoms, with your resulting mental and physical condition. And the truth is, that your food related behaviours may actually be an effort to reestablish balance in your system. To self-soothe to balance the inflammatory response. First you need to consider for yourself the meaning of food! What does the ingestion of food mean to you? The second thing you need to consider is how do you gather your food, and how do you prepare your food? How did you grow up in regards to how you looked at your diet and how you looked at meal times and what food was about for you. How many meals do you actually prepare in a day? And how many of those meals that you eat in a week are actually composed of fast food or junk food? Which foods make you feel great? And which foods make you feel poorly? Do you use foods to alter your sense of consciousness? What food do you like but you don’t often prepare? And who are your allies if you would like to change your diet within your family? And who are your allies for change of diet among your friends? It might be really significant for you to keep a food/mood diary and write down everything that you eat and drink for a week, including the amount of water that you are drinking and pay attention to your energy level, your mood levels, and your digestive responses. Everyone digests food differently and it is good to pay attention to your digestion as well as your elimination responses in order to know how you are reacting to the particular foods that you are eating in order to start to break the cycle.
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