When food is love
Not a how-to guide, but more of a memoir about Roth's journey with compulsive eating, helping others to break free of compulsive eating, and unpacking the layers of trauma beneath the compulsion, which extended well past the point where she stopped dieting and started a career as a weight-loss guru. As she was helping others, she had to continue to find out the ways that she still was in need of healing herself. I like that she states that healing is really a never-ending process. I've grown suspicious of any path that suggests otherwise.
The basic message is that compulsions are a way to distance us from ourselves, and the hard but immensely rewarding work is to stay with yourself and not try to escape into food, love, or anything else. I agree.
I was reflecting as I read on how things have changed in the last years; when I was growing up the food obsessions mainly centered around gaining or losing weight, but now in addition to that there are all the health fads, the vegan, raw food, paleo, carnivore diets, the food sensitivities, and so forth. There is so much moralizing around that, the pressure to “eat clean” and so forth. Everyone seems to have their own idea of what is the one and only true way, and many of them are in direct opposition to each other. How can that be? It's just a new version of the religion wars. And as with religion, I believe that the real truth lies beyond all such superficial differences.
The “health-food” variety of obsession is more what I've been dealing with, because although I never got into the weight loss game, I was definitely a compulsive eater. And my guilt was more about eating things that were unhealthy, than things that were fattening. But even though I tried to be “good,” to eat clean according to my best understanding of what that meant, I had urges to binge on things I knew were “bad,” like cookies and potato chips and croissants – and even to eat too much of healthy things, using them to distance myself from my feelings. But I shoved my awareness of the unhealthiness of these urges aside and tried to tell myself they didn't matter, I was good enough, I needed a little fun now and then.
Recently my body started saying “no” and throwing out symptoms that forced me to reconsider my habits. To continue ignoring and abusing my body further, I would have had to ignore really uncomfortable things, and really abandon my true self and its feelings, and I guess I just decided I didn't want to do that any more. I decided to do what Roth says, to make a commitment to staying with myself, instead of going with whatever false savior of the moment was calling for me. To start noticing how I feel, and having faith in my ability to heal, to be nourished, to be filled, instead of panicking that I can never be satisfied and reaching for the nearest comfort food.
Eliminating certain foods was necessary as a step to reduce their hold on me, but it couldn't be just about not eating gluten or sugar or whatever because the real issue was that I was using those things to escape from myself. I could have continued trying to escape from myself using carrots or almond milk and those would eventually have become problematic as well.
Anyway, I think it would be interesting to address those issues – or maybe it's really just another version of the same thing. I am interested to read more on this topic from other angles. Food and psychological health are definitely intertwined and i want to know more about healing practices.