Since feedism has lately become kinda controversial (people vehemently pro and vehemently anti ever since I made that post) I'm going to try to keep the conversation open in a positive, non-judgmental way. I do want to do my best to make this a safe space for all experiences to be heard. There are people who have had EXTREMELY predatory experiences being drawn into feedism. There are, as I've learned, also people who feel they've been able to establish a gentle, positive, and consent-based experience around the practice. I'm not taking either side, just reflecting on the initial reason I made that post and felt so anti-feedism there.
We know that diet culture, starvation, and the ana/mia constant of setting lower and lower goal weights does irreparable harm to the human body. Restricting as a teen, during a crucial developmental period, definitely damaged mine.
But so did bingeing. When I came out of anorexia, I cycled back and forth between that and binge eating disorder. And bingeing was at least as destructive and damaging to my GI system as starving. I'm not kidding. There was more than one time in college that I had to lie on my side on my dorm room floor because I'd eaten so much that I was in too much pain to get up, my stomach all round and hard like a basketball from being so stuffed. And I still felt the compulsion to try and eat more. I was miserable and I hated myself for hurting myself like that, but I couldn't stop. The only thing that I found to be supportive of my health was practicing intuitive eating - letting my own body dictate exactly what I needed, exactly how much, and when - no more, and no less. And it took a VERY long time for me to settle into that pattern and lessen instances of compulsive binge eating.
Just because this was my experience doesn't mean I'm saying no one's allowed to have a different one. But I will say, it definitely makes me feel somewhat concerned, as someone who is a strong proponent of intuitive eating, that a lot of the feeder content I have seen does hold a deliberate emphasis on consistent weight gain. Not specifically the eating part - the way that a feeder can encourage a feedee to keep gaining. The way recovery has looked for me is this: I let my hunger cues dictate my needs. My body can settle into whatever size it needs to be as I follow these hunger cues. I do not make a practice of ignoring my body's needs in order to deliberately change the size it naturally wants to be - whether that be smaller, or larger. That's what I have always been a proponent of, and I have always made a point to emphasize that intuitive eating absolutely applies to people who are naturally fat, that they have no obligation to starve their bodies in an attempt to stop being fat. "Just let your body be what it needs to be" has been the mantra that has best supported my relationship with food.
I think that's specifically what made me find feedism suspect - the emphasis on pushing continuous gain for kink purposes rather than any specific health need. (This is not me dunking on people who do get off on that relationship - just talking about my perspective as someone who absolutely HAD to learn how to put my own body behind the wheel and nobody else when it comes to what I eat, and how much.)
That being said, if anybody in this community wants to talk to me about specific ways they feel the experience has benefited them. And while it's okay to talk to me about kink (I'll make sure to tag appropriately) as kink is an important part of some peoples' lives, I am curious to hear if people feel they've experienced benefits outside of the kink sphere too, and what that looks like for them. Hoping to keep this an open, and respectful, conversation.
