Q&A 4 – Why is overeating not about the food?

The title of Alexandra Amor’s book about healing the drive to overeat is It’s Not About the Food. How is it possible that a ‘problem’ related to eating too much can not be about the food we consume?You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Transcription of the EpisodeHello, and welcome back explorers to another question and answer episode of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. I’m here today with a question from early on in my exploration of this understanding. If you would like to submit a question to be answered here on the show, please go to alexandraamor.com/question and you’ll see a little form there. You can submit your question to me using that, and I’ll be happy to answer it. Today, the question is actually about the title of my book, It’s Not About the Food, which you see here behind me. And why is it called that? Why is overeating not about the food?To answer that, I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story, first of all, kind of an analogy. For years, I’ve had this weird little pain in my mid upper arm. So for those of you just listening it’s sort of between my elbow and my shoulder midway, on the outside. And it definitely doesn’t feel like nerve pain. It’s more like a kind of a pinching feeling when I make certain motions. I would say about 10, or 12 years ago, I went to massage therapy and I explained to the girl, and she got me to point to exactly where the pain was. And then she worked on that pain for, I want to say two or three appointments. And it really didn’t move the needle at all. And so I kind of left it. It’s not debilitating, it’s not interfering with my quality of life at all. I just notice it sometimes and it would be nicer if it wasn’t there. So I just kind of left it alone, because we weren’t really making any progress. Then a week or two ago, I was at a different massage therapist and she was asking me what we wanted to focus on that day. And almost as an afterthought, I said to her, “Oh, and also, by the way, I have this weird pain here in the middle of my upper arm between my elbow and my shoulder.” I pointed to it, and instantly, I mean, right away, she said, “Oh, yeah, that’s because your rotator cuff muscles are really stiff and tight.” I got her to explain what rotator cuff was. And it’s apparently a series of muscles kind of around your shoulder. And they have something to do with your with our shoulder blades. I can’t explain it entirely. I’m not a massage therapist. So what she did then was she worked on those muscles a little bit during that session. And she gave me some exercises to do on my own at home. I’ve been doing those; stretching my arms and doing various things to relieve or release some of the tension of that rotator cuff muscle. And this pain in my arm is actually improving. After the massage session, I got her to explain what that was. And she said what it’s called is referral. So there’s something that can happen in one part of the body and it will refer to a different part of the body. So that’s exactly what was going on here. That rotator cuff muscle, according to this massage therapist, is not connected in any way to my the middle of my upper arm. There aren’t any nerve paths that lead from one to the other.