Compulsive Lower-Level Movement
In the throes of my eating disorder, I was guilty 🙋🏻♀️ of something called “Compulsive Lower-Level Movement.”
Where any sensible person would drive or take the elevator, I walked and took the stairs. I jigged my legs when I sat, and relevéed my way through brushing my teeth. I elongated household chores to make them more physically taxing. I stood on the metro when there were plenty of seats available. Long story short: I was obsessed with employing my body as much as I could; I mean… I even stood to read. (Who does that?!)
Before we dive into the meat and potatoes of today’s post, let’s get a working definition:
Compulsive Lower-Level Movement (CLLM) (noun):
A psychological trait particular to eating disorders, characterized by urges to perform compounding, physically-taxing behaviors.
Let’s break it down:
Those with CLLM have urges to perform physical tasks. These urges create anxiety for the sufferer until they’re completed, which acts as negative reinforcement in favor of the eating disorder.
When I say “compounding,” what I mean is that the amount of movement someone taxes themselves with typically increases with time. For instance, once a new movement (like taking the stairs when the elevator breaks) is performed, it becomes incorporated with whatever routine of compulsive movement is already in place, so that this new movement (taking the stairs) is repeated the following day, and then some (taking them two steps at a time).
Compulsive Lower-Level Movement is time consuming, but it’s also mentally and physically exhausting. The nail in the coffin is that lower-level movements seem innocuous, so they’re often easily dismissed by anyone on the outside looking in. However, the compounding effect of being constantly in a state of action is entirely self-harming. In short, at it’s core, CLLM is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. To put it concisely:
Compulsive Lower-Level Movement is a form of purging.
To help us understand CLLM more, let’s take a look at why it so perfectly flies under the radar of many well-meaning treatment professionals, then, we’ll shift gears and talk about how to address Compulsive Lower-Level Movement in recovery.
CLLM is a brilliantly insidious way for an eating disorder to persist undetected, oftentimes unbeknownst even to the sufferer. As such, I think it’s important to take a closer look at how someone can be so openly unhealthy without raising any suspicions. I’d argue our culture is a good place to start.
Let’s be real:
we couldn’t be more anti-sedentary.
It’s radically true that we’re more like human doings than human beings these days. Take, for example, our burgeoning obsession with fitness trackers and wearables:
Little over sixty years ago, when it came to exercise, the only metric the general public was capable of tracking was distance. But nobody cared about distance, because running wasn’t popularized until the late 1960’s. And, if running wasn’t always the Nike-sponsored, Lululemon-and-Hoka-One-One-wearing supersport it is, what would make people want to run in the first place?
Running is weird. It’s like walking, but unpleasant. And it accomplishes none of our most basic human needs: you can’t socialize, eat, sleep, or really even breathe while you’re doing it. I’d argue it’s essentially the greatest non-disordered example of CLLM: walking, but faster, and longer, and for no purpose other than to feel like you’ve completed some inexplicably important task, which incidentally quells some people’s anxiety (purportedly).
But who said running from nothing in particular is an honorable task to complete in the first place? To answer this, let’s take a closer look at the history:
Prior to the popularization of running, the pedometer was born. As such, the general public was not only now able, but encouraged to track their daily steps. In fact, Japanese citizens were influenced to walk 10,000 steps a day by the various clubs and walking associations springing up all over the country.
Fast forward to the early eighties: we’re in the heart of the running craze, and we took our self-tracking one step further with the invention of the wireless wearable heart rate monitor.
Ten years later, Casio’s step, calorie, and distance tracker was the first wearable that drew direct (albeit misleading) connections between walking and calories burned. And come 2007, Fitbit was released.
Soon after, products like the Oura ring and the Apple Watch followed suit with a plethora of fitness tracking capabilities. At that point, sitting was deemed a disease, CGMs weren’t just for diabetics, and biohacking skyrocketed in popularity.
All of this to say, collecting real-time biometrics evolved into mainstream DIY Biology over just the past 30 years. You can now see your blood sugar, heart rate, and blood oxygen content, in real time, all by checking an app in your phone.
Essentially, exercise was packaged and sold as the world’s greatest biohacking panacea, so obviously, we all wanted a piece of the pie.
Based on common rhetoric, you’d think having 24/7 access to all this data would be turning us into Arnold-Schwarzenegger-in-the-Terminator-style athletically evolved super-humans. Because the logic goes: more access to biometrics, more healthy people… right?
Not exactly. In reality, we’re still seeing studies like this:
“Total daily energy expenditure has declined over the last 3 decades due to declining basal expenditure not reduced activity expenditure.”
==> “We conclude that increasing obesity in the United States/Earope has probably not been fueled by reduced physical activity leading to lowered TEE.”
So, what gives?? Here’s the thing:
Science is almost never absolute, Companies just want to sell you things, & the media is consistently sensationalist.
Problem is: they know that if they spew the same BS disinformation enough times, we’ll start acknowledging it as fact. And these days, they have us all drinking the exercise-loving Kool-Aid.
Think about it. What do you take for Bible truth about your health? The overwhelming majority of us believe that our health limitlessly increases from the ever-popular beliefs:
Move “more,”
Eat “less,”
Eat “more” plants, and my favorite;
Avoid “processed” food.
It’s obviously not helpful that these unchallenged beliefs set up residence in our thoughts, but what’s worse is how pervasive these thoughts become when they’re commonly reflected in our actions:
We believe we need to follow the media’s rhetoric to be healthy, so we do things like foregoing sleep for exercise, and blaming ourselves for the digestive troubles of following a diet based purely on fiber.
And now, even in light of their failed hype, companies continue to pump out headlines like:
“Standing is the new sitting,”
“Glucose Monitoring Is The Weight Loss Biohack You Never Knew You Needed,” and;
“6 Ways to Sweat This Week (Whether You Love HIIT or Just Want to Lie Down)” (because obviously, lying down is entirely out of the question unless you’re making it into a workout.)
And so, the battle continues in an all-out war between an individual’s intuition, and the media’s unremitting dogma.
Point being: our culture puts exercise on a shiny, effervescent pedestal. Whether it’s warranted or not is seemingly inconsequential.
With this in mind, let’s move forward into the ways in which Compulsive Lower-Level Movement effect recovery:
I go WAY in depth on this in my ebook, but the quick and dirty of it is this:
Eating disorders are kinda like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Regardless of diagnosis, there’s obsessions, and compulsions.
Here’s what I mean:
Someone with OCD might have the compulsion to check their alarm clock three times before going to bed. Similarly, for someone predisposed to an eating disorder, compulsions can arise in multitudinous ways. For me, movement was my obsession, and I felt absolutely compelled to complete various activities on a list that only grew larger the longer my disorder persisted.
I had to take longer and longer routes on my errands; I had to sit in a semi-ab-exhausting posture for entire airplane flights; I had to do specific pilates exercises in bed before I could fall asleep at night, and I had to beat the prior day’s step count; even if that meant having to staying up past midnight to walk alone through a sleepy city.
While I was actively disordered, these compulsions only grew louder and louder until I’d completed them. But the thing is, it wasn’t just me experiencing these compulsions. Turns out, these intrusive compulsions are so ubiquitous among those afflicted with eating disorders, that eating disorders and OCD have been comparatively studied by scientists time and time again.
So, what can be done about it?
If compulsive lower-level movement has a death grip on stalling your recovery effort, here’s what you should do:
Stop. Moving.
Yes, seriously. As much as you can, stop moving. Stop doing the dishes by hand and taking the long way to work. It seems counterintuitive, but here’s the truth: while giving in to compulsions quells anxiety momentarily, it actually strengthens the compulsions in the long run.
In my own disorder, the longer I gave into these compulsions, the fiercer they persisted and urged me to follow their orders. It wasn’t until I leaned straight into the discomfort of ignoring my disordered urges that I was finally able to find some lasting reprieve.
If remission is your goal, then extricating Compulsive Lower-Level Movement is absolutely necessary. And to do this, you need to ignore your compulsions.
Instead of giving into CLLM urges, do this instead:
Choose whatever requires the least amount of effort.
Sit down. Lay down. Force yourself to relax. As with everything in recovery, doing the opposite of what your disorder compels you to do is always the key to reaching remission.
If you’d like more support through this, please check out the recovery guide, which delves into all this and more.
I know you can do this.
Maria
