The Method to This Madness
Me trying to unravel the madness that landed me in the realm of restrictive eating and scarcity mindset
Any addict in the world has stumbled upon the question of “Why” at some point in their life.
Why did it happen?
Why me?
I’m no different. Let’s call the restrictive eating behaviour an addiction because it is.
All the journey, the amenorrhea, the random symptoms that flagged my autoimmunity, have a starting point.
It was easy to pinpoint the “when” part of the equation: my restrictive habit kicked off in late 2019. But the nuance that surrounded it evaded my otherwise sharp mind.
Truly, I’m the embodiment of the parable of the log and speck. It’s easy for me to recognise the addiction in other people’s behaviours, or the way they act that whisper unhealthiness (something is off, or This sounds unhealthy, is this how he always thinks, cue to squinty eyes). But when it comes to calling out my shortfalls, I stumbled into a wall whenever analysing deeper.
Isolating the root cause is key for me to correct the cause in the first place, because without the exact reason why it happened, I can’t replace the thoughts that spurred the habits that eventually resulted in the malnutrition.
I made simple visualisations on this. No generative AI used, as the act of designing the visualisation itself clarified my thoughts. Designing is part of the journey.
I walked backwards in dismantling the strong grip of this disordered thinking, in order to arrive at the thought. Let’s dive deep into it.
1 - Long-term Result
Needless to say, a whole array of malnutrition symptoms are caused by prolonged underfuelling while a bit overexercising (very subjective on the “a bit” part, though, because my body stopped menstruating. It must mean it was not just a bit, then).
2 - Result
Continuous, or rather, unchecked, body weight loss.
3 - Action
Dieting, restricting calories, intermittent fasting, and engaging in all sorts of restrictive eating patterns despite not objectively targeting calorie reduction, such as: whole foods plant-based, veganism, pescatarianism, and vegetarianism.
The action and result, if you noticed, create a feedback loop in the diagram. This is interesting because I could have botched the loop here before it solidified into a neural pathway that determined my future past-self.
The Method to This Restriction
The method to this madness started to blur here, as what had happened afterwards was simply repetitive actions, a habit. This is where an addict might have lost the reason that started it all.
I couldn’t recall it at the top of my head, but there must have been at least one film explaining the villain with the feeling of losing touch with the reason of their evil conducts—a tragedy that must have been forgotten or buried in the past, for they have carried on solely based on the obsession to conquer the world or subdue the protagonists out of habit.
The reason has lost to history and what lies underneath their strategy is the obsession alone, as they have rewired their brain to be autopilot on their evil scheming.
This is what habit serves. Once a certain action is rewarded, the brain registers it, so that the next step will be recalled from this catalogue rather than active causal thinking. This saves the mental processing energy.
It’s not an inherently bad process, because organisms survive by smartly allocating their energy. In the modern world, it’s akin to a company executive allocating the team’s budget and personnel based on the project prioritisation. Nothing’s wrong with that, and if a person assigned to this role doesn’t do their job, the company might collapse in the long run. That’s what an organism does. That’s what we do: we survive by prioritising mental focus and physical energy to things that matter.
This is me digressing into how the hypothalamic amenorrhea happens: as a woman’s body doesn’t have sufficient energy, reproductive function gets shut down. It’s not essential to survive. The body can then use the limited energy available for the activities that actually keep us alive, such as to keep the heart pumping and the brain running. Our heart is a muscle, by the way, so the muscle atrophy in malnutrition could range as vast as from the benign reduction of your body size to the rather distressing irregular heart rhythm.
Back to the main idea, the reward to any action is neutral. It can be a negative or positive reward that catalyses the neural pathways to form for recalling what action to be taken once the same event happens in the future.
Negative reward: sleeping late —> can’t wake up early —> late to the office —> performance issue. Action to be taken: sleep regularly at the same time every night. The habit of getting quality sleep is then formed.
Positive reward: restricting calories —> losing weight —> positive body image. Action to be taken: keep restricting calories.
From both examples, it’s become clear about the neutrality of a reward. A negative consequence can even spur a good, healthy habit in the long run, whereas a positive reward can turn excessive and harmful if unchecked.
Perhaps, the first few months of weight loss had given me a good feeling of achieving a goal (dopamine satisfaction). This is just one example of not-cheap dopamine-seeking: a genuinely healthy motivation being rewarded with seeing results. It’s completely different from the cheap dopamine like doom-scrolling behaviour. If losing weight is recommended for you to be healthier, then go for it. I don’t write this to stop people from losing weight.
As I mentioned, this formed habit was where the initial thought got blurred. Instead of stopping when a target weight has been achieved, I went down the slippery slope of the “feel-good” emotions that came with seeing my number go down on my scale.
Data visualisation is a double-edged sword. It motivates those who want to lose/gain weight by providing charts of our progress—you can easily do it in the good ol’ spreadsheets or any app that allows you to input your measurements over time.
I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t happy seeing the line chart of my kg decrease over the time period, like a short-seller cackling seeing the asset price continue dropping.
I was addicted to numbers. No, I call that back. I was addicted to the feel-good feelings I got from the numbers.
Like a frog in a boiling pot, I didn’t realise the goal post had moved—from achieving a specific target weight (at a time, I must add), into feeling worthy for managing to “conquer” my body to a certain aesthetic.
Segueing to the next point, the target weight was inflexible and was not adjusted for my situation. Maintaining a certain weight—if it doesn’t come naturally, requires hard work. You can only eat a certain amount of calories, you’ve got to be obsessed with moving your body—not for the enjoyment and balance after a lot of sitting, but for “fat-burning”, and you’re afraid of social functions where you will be exposed to foods you don’t know how it’s made, whether it’s cooked in which oil, or whether an array of number and letters (synthetic chemicals) found a way to your plate. Your browser history turns into a chock full of health sites’ articles and videos of anyone proselytising the best diet in the world.
The line between orthorexia and genuinely healthy eating habit is not blurred, it’s very clear, instead, in the crippling anxiety rooting in fear. It’s the fear of getting a heart attack from eating buttery goods. It’s the fear of getting your HbA1c (glycated haemoglobin) to tip into the borderline diabetes.
The target weight took root in my head despite the situation having changed. What a random dietitian (I used a telemedicine back then during the pandemic, so the lady hadn’t even seen me or understood my history, only my BMI) prescribed me to do was not adjusted to the facts that I moved back and forth between a Nordic climate and the tropical one, or that my accommodation was colder than the previous. Or, simply that my body had to cope with a different body clock rhythm as I had to start work earlier in the day and go to bed early.
But why couldn’t I react more “normally”, or more gently, about the healthy eating? As the writer behind the publication called The Gentle Roadmap, it’s so unsightly to react so harshly to prevent something from happening. Didn’t I know what balance meant? How could I even have developed fear of eating, under the blanket statement that eating itself was an inflammatory action? This is taking a statement from this book, actually. My mind was not healthy enough to apply the principle of balancing.
There are a few explanations I could link to my behaviours:
Health anxiety (I wrote several posts on this, but they were on the wrong spirit, so I don’t share the links here, you can read more on my “healing journey” category)
Adapted to flee from famine hypothesis. This is a scientific explanation that people with anorexia would have facilitated migration. All the symptoms mentioned in the article derived from the research by the author could be found in me: restlessness, the desire to lose even more, and so on.
Especially on the last point, it became crystal to me that I no longer wanted to lose weight to reach an objective—the weight loss had triggered the gene expression that motivated me to lose even further. My body had imagined that we were still in famine. Thus, losing weight was necessary for migration to find food. If you have listened to the “health” podcasts touting the benefits of intermittent fasting, with one of them being mentally “clear”, yeah, that’s the one—you need to be agile and restless because you’re still in famine, you must migrate ASAP to find food. That’s the explanation of this “mentally clear” feeling.
In other words, you’re running on cortisol and adrenaline—you’re living life on survival mode!
No wonder the signal sent to my hypothalamus was only distress. Hence, no period. The irregular heart rhythm and fatigue due to the lack of nutrition or electrolytes added onto the pile of distressing proofs that stoked my health anxiety further.
In summary, this feedback loop of action and result can further solidify into an addiction, which, in turn, detracts us from the actual reason why we started the behaviour.
1 - Thoughts
Intervening the goal-seeking, dopamine-fuelled addictive habit at its loop can only go so far. Introducing a new habit to replace the obsessive weight loss and number-worshipping behaviour will not stick unless I challenge the underlying thoughts that started the action.
I’ve gone all-in and retrieved my period for one cycle. In the past, I had retrieved my period for three cycles before it was gone again. It being finicky, I figured that my HPO (hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian) axis—the connectedness among all three functions, those are the hypothalamus in our brains, the pituitary for the hormones, and the reproductive organs, is easily dysregulated by any variability in energy balance and stressors.
My doctor mentioned homeostasis, it’s the “preferred” setting of the body, similar to a thermostat. When a function is off-balance, my body tries to reduce something and increase something else to return to the baseline. It’s not hard to imagine this happening at the biological level as there’s a thing called chemical buffers.
Because going all-in for a period in my life could easily be followed by another season of restriction, I tried to perform the surgery on the core thoughts.
One level of why wasn’t enough. I employed the “5 Whys” technique usually used in the product design or management thinking.
1st WHY: Why did I become hellbent on restricting my food?
Dad got a heart stent surgery in 2019 and was advised to cut out red meat in his recovery. I figured red meat must be harmful for heart health.
2nd WHY: Ok, but why did I continue cutting out other meat (poultry, even fish at some point) when Dad was back eating normally?
Unintended weight loss, the “feel-good” emotions
Pandemic, wanting to help my immune system
“Contributing” to the sustainability
3rd WHY: You know you can still achieve all three without going into the extreme, right? So, why continue pushing into malnutrition, then?
This was where the “control” reared its ugly head. It was not about achieving a target or being mindful. It was about controlling what I ate, and by extension, subjugating my body into a deliberate set of metrics (e.g. cholesterol and glucose levels).
My brain pulled all stored information about health that was the sole responsibility of the individuals: that we could reverse diabetes by our food, that we could kill cancer cells by avoiding food that fed them.
Despite the bigger picture of diseases that didn’t come only from one cause, my mind was laser-focused on the habit intervention.
4th WHY: But why? Why do you feel the need to control and manipulate your body, and in turn, your hunger signal until you feel no hunger anymore out of habit? Surely your brain knows that fatty food = heart attack is rather simplistic, and it places all the fault in your hand if something goes wrong.
Trigger warning: I used to tell myself, it was better to fall asleep starving than satiated.
The answers to the 4th question were multiple:
feeling out of control of the pandemic
and of Dad’s health and survival skills
and many other areas in my life that I couldn’t foresee the results
And I couldn’t refute the last argument in the fourth question. And yet, I still restricted my food. The more physical symptoms came—unfortunately, it was the heart, probably because I zoomed in on the heart and my body manifested it—the stricter I monitored my food intake, now including sugar and animal proteins being off the table.
As I couldn’t expand deeper after the fourth question, I also explored the other reasons, which came to me in the adapted to flee from famine hypothesis I’ve mentioned: that my affinity for weight loss was also aided by the epigenetic changes (gene expressions) rather than merely cognitive processes.
Your Reflection
Passing it over to you, have you got any addiction or pesky behaviour you want to correct?
Try my exercise of walking backwards to get to the root cause. You might need to expand to more than five whys, though.
Share your findings in the comments, if you wish.
Background Music
Ancient Chinese scholar preparing for an imperial exam playlist 💪
Now, you can glimpse my framework in using logical processes to change or correct my behaviours for future successes. I do this a lot on a personal level using storytelling techniques as well (the 5-whys is only a technique that can be employed for a robust plot in storytelling, as there are many more mental frameworks to use). If you’re interested in exploring more in how these techniques can benefit your growth, I invite you to ✨become a paid subscriber ✨ for The Gentle Roadmap.
Until next time,
Thank you for sharing your vulnerability, Sekar. I’m certain it will resonate deeply with others who might be struggling with similar thoughts and behaviours. It’s not easy, but as you said, unearthing those core beliefs can be the first step toward healing. In that, you’re not alone.