Our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself.
Pay attention to the way you eat… You will quickly discover if you believe the world is a hostile place and that you need to be in control of the immediate universe for things to go smoothly. You will discover if you believe there is not enough to go around and that taking more than you need is necessary for survival. You will find out if you believe that being quiet is unbearable, and that being alone means being lonely. If feeling your feelings means being destroyed. If being vulnerable is for sissies or if opening to love is a big mistake. And you will discover how you use food to express each one of these core beliefs.
Women turn to food when they are not hungry because they are hungry for something they can’t name: a connection to what is beyond the concerns of daily life.
Compulsive eating is an attempt to avoid the absence (of love, comfort, knowing what to do) when we find ourselves in the desert of a particular moment, feeling, situation.
When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself – that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control.
Recurrent negative feelings – those that loop in the same cycle again and again without changing – are unmet knots of our past that got frozen in time for the precise reason that they were not met with kindness or acceptance.
Can you imagine how your life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid an adult said to you, “Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it.” If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend’s rejection, someone said to you, “Oh darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I’m here to listen to you, hold you, be with you.”
When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself – but never quite believing it because you don’t sense yourself directly.
Restrictors believe in control. Of themselves, their food intake, their environments. And whenever possible, they’d also like to control the entire world. Restrictors operate on the conviction that chaos is imminent and steps need to be taken now to minimize its impact.
The only way I can explain this even now is say that my suffering reached a critical mass of desperation: either I was going to kill myself or a completely different way of living was going to be revealed.
“Can you remember a time, perhaps when you were very young, when life as it was – just the fact that it was early morning or any old day in summer – was enough? When you were enough – not because of what you looked like or what you did, but just because everything was the way it was. Nothing was wrong. When you were sad, you cried and then it was over. You were back to a fundamental feeling of positivity, of goodness just because you were alive. What if you could live that way now? And what if your relationship to food was the doorway?”
To remember what it was like to be a child before they began to label and name the objects in their worlds. What it was like to see an extravaganza of form and color before they knew it was a rose and could compare it to other roses. What it was like to come upon a treasure, any treasure – a rock, the ocean, their mother’s hand – before they learned to label and dismiss it as something they already knew.
Change happens when you understand what you want to change so deeply that there is no reason to do anything but act in your own best interest.
Freedom is hearing The Voice ramble and posture and lecture and not believing a word of it.
I am beginning to understand that this whole struggle with food is not about discipline or self-control or bargaining with myself; it’s not even about food. It is a story – a powerful story – about loving and wanting and having.
