Hunger and Adoption
The other day someone asked me if I could exist on either food or music, which would I pick. It took me two seconds to decide.
Music.
I have never had a music hangover. I have never felt guilty for listening to music. I have never worried that there wouldn’t be enough music. I have never had to worry that music was hurting me. I depend on music to lift my mood, to mirror my mood, to calm me. Music reminds me of what it means to be alive—life, when you listen carefully, sings to you.
A have a friend who told me that at his funeral he wanted Abba’s “I Have a Dream” to play. I had another friend tell me she wanted Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” to play at her funeral. Neither one mentioned what they wanted to eat for their last meal or what they wanted the mourners to eat.
So it is possible to not think about food.
There is a scene in Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild” where she talks about not having enough money to buy food or drink after a day’s hike. She talks about walking out of a grocery store, hungry. This made no sense to me. You do not have to suffer, I wanted to yell. Just take it! I might have cried to the store owner, begged for a free loaf of bread, but more likely I would have just shoved what I wanted to eat down my pants and walked out like I owned the place. I would have done anything to get away from the intolerable fact that I was hungry and there was no food for me to eat.
I would have stolen because my brain would have been screaming at me that I was going to die.
Hunger is like that for me.
This doesn’t mean I don’t know how to be hungry. I can do the feast or famine thing. I can slip into starvation mode fairly easily, strangely enough. The decision not to eat much can feel like a relief. In my twenties when I worked hard to be really skinny, I didn’t have to manage food in the same way I normally did because I had lists of what and how much I could eat. I was my own jailer and had taken away my own choices. I just had to manage my commitment to lightness, to not feeding the machine. A commitment to starvation is different than being hungry and not having food available. A commitment to starvation is about power and control and a decision to disappear. Anorexia comes with its own good feelings, and so it comes with its own temptations for some people.
Living as a “normal” eater can be so confusing and stressful. What’s normal? What fills a hungry belly? A hungry soul? A body that seems to be a bottomless pit?
There should be book after book, guide after guide, about adoptees and food. About how to live as an adoptee who has a fearsome hunger.
We are in the holiday season, and if you are afraid of your hunger, if you are worried about gaining weight, this season of parties and mashed sweet potato and cookies and eggnog can be gasoline on fire. So let’s talk about hunger. Let’s show you how not alone you are if you have a hunger you fear more than you enjoy.
I googled “adoptees and hunger” and “adoption and hunger” and I am cutting and pasting big chunks of what I found. I thought much of the advice given to adoptive parents could be used by adult adoptees as they parent themselves to a healthy or at least gentle relationship with food.
Here is how you can help children feel secure with food, whether they are in the initial hoarding phase, or with entrenched food obsession.
Feed your child every 2-3 hours for younger children, every 3-4 for older children. You may need to offer food more often initially.
Let your child decide how much to eat from what you provide.
Aim for no eating between meals and snacks.
Sit and enjoy meals together. Avoid distractions like screens or arguing. Under stress, food-insecure children often eat more.
Reassure him there will always be enough.
A food stash may be reassuring (his own drawer in the fridge, pantry shelf, or baggie of food) but is not an out from providing regular meals and snacks. Providing and sharing meals deepens attachment. (The food stash does not work for entrenched food obsession, but may help with initial anxiety.)
Offer a variety of tasty foods including fat, protein and carbohydrates—even if she prefers the high fat and high carbohydrate foods initially. This preference is a natural response to food insecurity.
Remain calm.
Be patient.
Model and allow enjoyment of all foods to avoid the lure of the “forbidden.”
Work on routines, getting enough sleep, and opportunities to be active in fun ways.
Healing food obsession takes nerves of steel, as your child is likely to eat even more when you first stop restricting.
(https://www.bcadoption.com/resources/articles/love-me-feed-me-part-one)
Here, a mother, Rachel, writes about her adopted daughter:
She still struggles with her food issues, though, especially in times of stress. It’s one of the first clues that something is on her mind. Her table manners go out the window. She shovels food in with her hands at a rapid pace and eats until her stomach sticks way out. She’s taken money that wasn’t hers to buy snacks at camp and hid empty food wrappers in between the couch cushions. She suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and being hungry is a major trigger for her.
Here are some things we do to help her deal with her food panic:
We talk to her about it. She understands that not having enough food when she was little impacts her now. She knows that stress causes her brain to worry she’s starving.
We ask that she ask us before she get something to eat. This is so she can hear us say “yes”. Yes, we have food. Yes, we will provide for her. Yes, we will allow her to eat. Every single time.
We never tell her she can’t eat. That doesn’t mean we allow her to make unhealthy choices all day long. She might hear, “Yes, you can have a snack, but not ice cream right now. You are welcome to a piece of fruit or yogurt now and ice cream after dinner.”
We keep healthy foods in the house. We stockpile fruit. I chop veggies, such as red peppers and cucumbers, for her to grab. She can eat fruits and veggies anytime she wants.
We let her pick other healthy food items she can grab quickly anytime she wants. We currently have homemade ice pops in the freezer, yogurt in the fridge and pretzels, popcorn, granola bars and applesauce in the pantry.
We take her grocery shopping with us. She had never been grocery shopping before coming to us at age 9.
We don’t have any locks on the fridge or pantry. Many of her foster homes did.
We eat together as a family every night.
We pack snacks whenever we leave home. She takes snacks to school. I keep beef jerky in my purse in case she gets hungry when we’re out. We pack a little snack sack for car trips.
We talk about the meal plan if we’re away from home. “We’re going to eat pizza at Grandma’s tonight. If you get worried while we’re waiting for the pizza, I have some apples in my purse for you. Grandma is going to order enough pizza for everyone. If you get stressed, you and I can take our pizza outside and have our own little picnic.”
We avoid commenting on her weight or possibility of weight gain. It just brings more shame. Weight gain is inevitable as she learns that feelings of stress and starvation do not automatically come hand in hand. As she learns to separate the two, I’m confident she’ll gain control of her eating and fall into the appropriate weight range.
Most of all, we try to be patient, compassionate and understanding. She spent her early years literally starving. Her earliest memories are of being hungry. She’s going to need time and positive experiences with food to get past the trauma of neglect and poverty.
(http://adoptionnutrition.org/nutrition-profile-archive/nutrition-profile-11/)
Children who have spent years waiting for a family, whether in foster care in this country or in an orphanage abroad, are almost certain to have developed issues around food that they'll bring to their new home.
As a recent parent of a child who waited for a permanent family, you may notice that because of these food issues, you've begun to absolutely dread mealtimes. Whereas, before adopting, you used to love planning and serving nice family meals, now meals have suddenly been transformed into pitched battles.
What’s the Problem with Food?
To understand what is happening, you need to go back, far back. All of us have a personal relationship with food, one that is imprinted in early infancy when our loving parent responded quickly to our cries. The infant, held, snuggled, and fed, learned an important lesson: "I felt bad and now I feel good. This world is a pretty OK place." This is referred to as the "cycle of need" and every time the cycle is successfully completed, the child learns trust.
Sadly, with kids from foster care or an orphanage, this lovely scenario probably didn't happen often. Maybe the caretakers in the institution propped bottles leaving the babies to suckle on their own. Maybe the birth mother was too young or distracted to focus on feeding her baby.
Maybe the baby cried a long time before anyone came and the person who finally came was annoyed, abrupt, rough. Maybe no one came. The baby, as a result, learned a very different lesson: "They don't meet my needs. I can't trust them. I have to depend on myself."
For older children, perhaps there were times in the orphanage when food wasn't provided regularly. Maybe when it was, younger children learned quickly that if they hesitated for a moment, older kids would take it. Maybe in an American family, junk food was all there was and even that appeared when Mom remembered, not when the child was hungry.
Food, trust, and a sense of well being are intertwined for all of us. Parents who embrace a new child by adoption want to repair past pain; preparing and serving food is one way of showing how much we care. So it hurts and even infuriates us when that new child rejects our efforts ("I hate that! Yuk!"), abuses our efforts (gorging, endlessly asking for more when you know he can't possibly still be hungry), or sabotages family mealtime (being truly obnoxious at the table). Some parents take this behavior as a personal insult and go so far as to banish the child to another room or time for meals. This is a lost opportunity.
Food for Thought
Your child is not doing this to you. It is all about old habits, old experiences. Your child may not have conscious memories of the past but he does have a sensory memory of those feelings. And feelings are powerful and take a long time to change, especially in children who learned past lessons — in order to survive. Lots of time and lots of available food, offered with love, unconnected in any way to a child's behavior, offered day after day after day, is required to change a child's cycle of need and to build trust.
(https://www.adoptivefamilies.com/adoption-bonding-home/food-issues-adopted-children/)
Children who experience even intermittent struggles with child hunger may suffer serious, long-term consequences to their health, well-being and educational achievement. I know these effects first hand!
Our son experienced child hunger before being placed in foster care.
When our toddler’s tantrums morphed into rages as he got older, as parents, we felt more and more hopeless — we didn’t know what was going on in our little boy’s brain! We were frightened that our son could have serious psychological issues. However, thanks to Empowered to Connect, we began to realize that our son’s rages were associated with hunger.
Due to our son’s early neglect and experience of child hunger, his little brain had been rewired to believe: “When I’m hungry, I might not eat, I might die” which can trigger the fear response of fight or flight. (our son is a fighter) Once we realized our son’s fits were associated with child hunger, we have been able to help him by giving him a quick snack to reset his blood sugar. We have now reduced our strong-willed son’s fits by 95%!!!
(https://foster2forever.com/2014/05/end-childs-early-hunger.html)
It may come as no surprise that children who lack a stable family are at an increased risk of under-nutrition, but perhaps more surprising is that so are recently adopted children. Nutrition problems amongst Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVCs) and recent adoptees have nothing to do with the amount of love and care they are receiving but are the result of the complex and unique factors facing them. If these problems are not addressed, there can be long-term consequences to the health and development of these children. The resources available to parents, caregivers, and professionals have been limited in the past. Recognizing the importance of this issue and the lack of help available to those who work closely with these children, the Joint Council on International Children’s Services has taken a number of steps to fill these unmet needs.
(http://alliancetoendhunger.org/addressing-nutrition-with-orphans-and-adopted-children/)
Deanna, in her blog Adoptee Restoration wrote (first of someone else, Sherice, and then herself):
Sherice says:
“I developed many eating disorders growing up. I believe it’s because sometimes food is the only thing you can control when your world seems to be out of control. You can’t control who gave you away but you can control what’s put inside you. It doesn’t fill the void, but it releases hormones in your brain that gives comfort temporarily. My doctor told me it’s kind of like a high that removes you from everything else temporarily, but it’s still temporary. You keep doing it. It takes a long time to heal. You have to become conscious of it and tell yourself to stop or ask, “why am I eating this?” and “How do I feel right now and why is it driving me to food? Thank God for counseling. I have lost 80 pounds so far on the journey to wholeness, but it is still a struggle."
My adoptive mom told me that when they brought me home from the Children’s Home Society, I would eat, and eat, and eat and eat. She said I would never stop even if it was definitely clear I had more than enough. I probably would have eaten ten jars of baby food if she let me. I never closed my mouth or pushed away the spoon like most babies do. She had to just had to portion out how much food was appropriate for a child (and usually gave a little bit more) and say, “okay, that’s enough.”
Just so there are no misunderstandings, my adoptive parents took proper care of me with feedings and diaper changing and giving lots of appropriate physical touch when I was an infant.
And yet I seemed to have this insatiable hunger.
Where did it come from?
I didn’t grow out of it. Today in my forties, if I don’t tell myself, “Deanna, you’ve had enough,” after one or two brownies I will eat an crazy amount of them if I allow myself to...like five. Even though I am not physically hungry at all. It’s not just brownies, it could be mashed potatoes or even something healthy like salad. And it really has little to nothing to do with the food. It’s not about the food, it’s something that comes from an emotional place. Fortunately I have developed enough self control to stop at two, maybe three at the most of whatever I'm wanting. But that explains why I still have thirty pounds to lose.
The other day I counted up my personal friends who are adoptive parents and there are at least fifteen of them. I started thinking about the experiences they’ve shared with me over the years in adopting their children. The realization hit me that quite a number of them have said that their children have eating disorders. Some hide food or hoard it. As I was preparing this post, out of curiosity, I put “Adoptee Eating Disorders” into a search engine and there were at least fifteen articles!
I believe the struggle is love hunger…We try to fill the love hunger gap with lots of things, some healthy and some unhealthy.
It doesn't always manifest with food. Sometimes it comes through other ways of soothing ourselves or addictions of various kinds.
The unhealthy ways I’ve tried to fill my love hunger would take a lot more than one blog post.
Humans need their mothers in such a way that is not even fully explainable. There was immediate recognition, from the second my children exited my womb and were placed my arms. There was no “getting to know you” time required. We were already connected for nine months. And nothing met their heart cry but me. Yes, they recognized their father, and he also had a unique ability to soothe and comfort unlike a stranger. And yet, there was something different about them being at my breast.
Not just milk.
Or full tummies.
An emotional connection fulfilled that nothing and no one else could meet.
(http://www.adopteerestoration.com/p/about-me.html)
Karyn Purvis, a professor at TCU and the author of The Connected Child, discusses how children’s brain neurochemistry can be negatively changed due to early life experiences, causing the child to have learning, social, and behavioral issues. Neurochemicals are the chemicals in the brain that send signals. So if the brain is not sending the right signals this can affect the brain directly as well as the child’s behavior.
Of course, for many of our adopted children, even those who have come to us as newborn infants, they most likely were in a prenatal environment in which their neurochemistry could have been altered due to the birth mother’s stressful environment. The circumstances that often lead a woman to choose adoption are usually difficult.
For a child who has been adopted internationally, chances are the birthmother was stressed during the pregnancy; in addition, the child’s first days were probably bleaker — little holding, rocking and warm milk given based on hunger. Then most likely the child was also neglected. It may not have been profound neglect. Food may have been available, but the child could only eat at certain hours. There was a caretaker to bathe and change clothes, but that woman was probably there for one shift until the next person took over to care for 10 other children as well.
When a child experiences one of the risk factors listed above, the child can then have abnormal levels of certain neurotransmitters such as or cortisol, PEA and glutamate, which are excitatory neurochemicals. Then the child’s dopamine, which promotes fluid body movement, enhances memory and cognition and provides joy and pleasure, can be out of the normal range. In addition, GABA and serotonin, which are the calming neurotransmitters, may be lowered.
So a child needs proper levels of these neurotransmitters, and if the levels are off, this can impact healthy brain development and plasticity. For example, cortisol, which usually goes up with stress, provides energy for thinking and stamina for dealing with stress or a crisis. This neurotransmitter allows the child to be able to sense and respond to the environment. Fortunately, for the average person, cortisol rises about 30 minutes before awakening to provide energy for the day’s activity. It then subsides and diminishes before bedtime. Cortisol also enhances learning and memory, but prolonged stress with elevated cortisol can decrease a child’s ability to think and memorize. And these elevated levels can lead to emotional and behavioral problems.
If Serotonin, the calming neurotransmitter. is decreased, the child can become hopeless and depressed and also may have insomnia. It is no wonder there are children who appear depressed, even at a tender age.
We are all familiar with histamine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, which is associated with allergies –but it also associated with attention and alertness. An abnormal increase in histamine can cause allergies as well as behavioral problems.
The brain has a plasticity in which it is affected by abnormal levels of neurotransmitters, leading to change in brain functions. An increase in one neurotransmitter can then impact the level of other neurotransmitters, exacerbating the problem.
Fortunately, as a child’s environment changes and the neurotransmitter levels become normal, the child’s behavior changes, further changing the brain chemistry. This then affects the brain structure and operation, helping the brain, which is malleable, to then return to a more normal state.
What can parents do to change the child’s brain chemistry?
One simple way that all parents can help their children is by improving their children’s diets. We all need the right balance of omega-3 fatty acids — and not just to prevent heart disease. Also, blood sugar levels should be kept as constant as possible. After all, most of us get grumpy when we get hungry. Provide your child meals/snacks every 2 hours. See that your child has enough protein throughout the day for alertness. Instead of giving your child the usual white grains, give them complex carbohydrates (the good whole grains) to promote calmness.
(https://nightlight.org/2011/05/neurochemistry-and-the-adopted-child/)
A healthy feeding model
You may not know your child’s history, and you can’t change it if you do, but you will be better off if you follow his cues, consider things from his perspective, and take the lead as the parent. Satter developed the Division of Responsibility (DOR) in feeding, which is the principle underlying the Trust Model. The DOR says: Parents decide three things: the when, the where, and the what of feeding. (Infants do best fed on demand, so they decide the when. This responsibility shifts to the parent in late infancy/early toddlerhood.)
Children decide whether and how much they will eat from what is provided. The DOR is based on permission, nurturing, and providing. It rejects the idea that children should diet or worry about weight, and does not focus on avoidance or “shouldn’ts.”
It sounds simple, but it is not easy. Feeding well is hard work that you will do for years, but struggling with feeding is even harder. Most parents and children who struggle around food issues mix up their jobs. That is, the parents let the child do their job of selecting foods and deciding when and where to eat. Likewise, parents should not try to do the child’s job of deciding how much to eat by limiting food intake or by pressuring the child to take “just two more bites.”
(https://www.bcadoption.com/resources/articles/love-me-feed-me-part-one)
This is the end of the cut and paste section. Now we are back to me, Anne, writing my, her, little heart out.
What if, when we were adopted, our parents were taught about our hunger, taught about the reasons for our hunger, so that they, when we were old enough, could teach us? What if our hunger was like our breathing? Just something that was part of the package? Can you imagine if every time you inhaled, you worried you were talking in too much air? Can you imagine if every day you woke up with the awful knowledge that you were going to have to negotiation a whole day of breathing and you were bound to fail, to breathe too much, to be a loser, to become unlovable, too big, too needy, too sloppy?
One of the best things that happened to me after I wrote You Don’t Look Adopted and committed to living a life that was more about writing and less about making money was that I had to negotiate being strapped for cash. I used to panic when my bank balance was low. I would overeat in preparation for impending starvation. I would feel awful, scared, sick to my stomach. I was not safe. My hunger was going to kill me. The universe wanted me dead, and the fact that i didn’t have enough money to buy a burger was proof.
Then one day, I had a cluster of new thoughts: I could survive a day without food, even three days. Even a week. I was skinny, but I had a belly. I had plenty of fat that could melt away and feed the furnace. And: I could call a friend and tell her I was hungry. I didn’t have to hide. I could say, “I have run out of food. Do you think you could give me lunch?” and then, for the real doozy of a thought, I realized I could always find a way to earn money. I could feed myself. I could 100% count on myself to feed myself.
This was a revelation. I hadn’t realized just how much I didn’t trust myself. I hadn’t realized just how often I set myself up to be in the position where I could fear being hungry just so I could have feelings that were familiar to me, grounding. I was the girl who was terrified of ending up homeless. That person, we all know, is headed straight for the gutter since that is all she can see. I have lived with those feelings most of my life. They are part of me.
Fuck that.
There’s a new sheriff in town. Now I believe 100% that I can take care of myself. It’s amazing. I’m not waiting for my birth mother (who’s dead) to change her mind or for my parents to reparent me and do it in a way that feels complete this time. I mean, come on. My mom is dead. My father’s 80 something and I’m 55. If this isn’t the time to be a grown up I don’t know when is. At my funeral?
If I can take care of myself, that means I can decided what I eat, how much I eat, when I eat, and if I want to make a big deal of the whole situation. It means I stop looking at stupid fashion magazines and at women who have been airbrushed to pencils with plastic for skin. It means I stop comparing myself to other bodies because they are not my body. I am my own snowflake.
Hunger is good. Hunger brings me to the table where you are, and together we can feed our faces until we are full.
One time, when my daughter was a little girl, we were watching Ina Garten cook on TV, and Keats said, “She’d be a good mom,” and I nodded. A smiling woman with hips who knows her way around spaghetti sauce looks like a pretty good deal. We hunger for our mother’s bodies, and yet we think we want to look more like Jesus on the cross.
As a massage therapist, I have to tell you that skinny bodies are not my favorite to work on. Flesh is gorgeous, warm and alive. It’s easier to stay a while with a body that has some flesh, some heft, some do re me.
Know what I mean?
When I met Pam Cordano over a year ago, we both weighed about 155. We are both 5’10”. Sometime later, maybe six months, we both weighed 144. We hadn’t tried to lose weight. We didn’t see each other regularly. It was so weird. I never just lose weight. I am someone who stays the same. I’m pretty sure that the combination of learning I am safe to write what I think and feel in addition to finding a friend who resonated with me in a way that made me want to be the best myself possible made the burning need to fill the hole I carry in my center much less urgent. I think I found that other things besides food could fill me, things like being myself and taking photographs and working in community with other people, primary adoptees. I think I also found that the hole wasn’t a threatening space, wasn’t something that needed filling. I think I found that the emptiness inside of me that I used to find terrifying is now my favorite place for it is so peaceful and quiet. I say “I think” because I’m still not sure of any of this. I’m still in the middle of it. But I do know this: my hunger does not scare me anymore because I know I’m not going to hurt myself.
I think what happened is that Pam and I together moved from the back of the boat where we had been standing, focused on the past, focused on trying to make ourselves feel better because the past just kept hurting us, to the front of the boat where we were much more interested in seeing what we could do next, and curiosity, I’ll tell you, is a fire in the belly that is a whole new kind of hunger. It’s thrilling. Super fun. Sometimes a little scary, but in a cool, push myself kind of way.
There’s nothing I can do about the past. It’s over. It was helpful to write a book about it and turn it into a narrative that I could stick on the bookshelf and check off as done. I get to look to the horizon at which the boat is headed now, and the thought of living in the future makes me want to take care of myself, gets me ordering salad instead of fried chicken.
Healthy living just happens when you care about tomorrow.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t have pecan pie just now.
Because I did.
It was delicious. And the keyboard is totally sticky now.
Healthy living is a flexible term. It doesn’t mean perfect, salad only, blah blah blah. It means you are humming along, more alive than dead, singing the song you were put on earth to create.
