After three decades of studying, teaching and writing about our compulsions with food, bestselling author Geneen Roth adds a powerful new dimension to her work in Women Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God.
Chapter 5
Roth focuses a lot on trusting our bodies and ourselves and encourages readers to find goodness in who we are. She states that this is hard for most people because they believe there is no good in them, nothing to trust, that they are broken.
But she urges people to look beyond what they see from the outside. To look inside themselves and see what their true essence is. She asks women to think of a time when they were pure, when they enjoyed their life, when things were easy and simple. Who were you then?
More than likely most of us were children. She urges readers to think about a time in their childhood when they believed anything was possible, when knobby knees, sticky hands, and a thirst for adventure was enough. When we remember being beautiful because we didn't know anything else. When we are able to look back on those times we can find ourselves again, realize that we are not broken because we can return to that place again. That we can trust ourselves.
Because many of us feel broken with an empty hole, many women try to fix it and fill the holes with food. "Compulsive eating is reaching for, a yearning for, an attempt to contact the place that is already whole."
However, Roth says that we do not need fixing. Fixing implies that we are wrong for feeling certain things when instead we should be welcoming those feelings. Roth encourages readers to sit with feelings, to actually feel them and to realize that the only way we can get back to our true perfection is realizing that we are already whole. True peace and the end of over eating comes only when we feel like we can't fix ourselves, that we are who we are.
"We see there is no goal, no end place, no test to take. No one is keeping score. No one is watching us and deciding whether we are worth enough to ascend...the constant effort to fix ourselves, that was the very thing that kept the wholeness at bay. If you think that your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend."
Chapter 6
The beginning of this chapter really struck a chord with me. Roth writes that diets are not the way to a thin, healthy body. Diets will not make us happy or feel full. They do not lead to a new life. " Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. eventually you will destroy all that you love and so you need to be stopped. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being."
I have thought so many times that if I got rid of this food and if only I could just ____ (whatever it is) I would be happy. If I could just push through one more hungry hour, one more nasty broccoli head, then I could be thin. Then I would be perfect. Being thin, to me, always equaled perfection. This is a sad reality.
Roth moves through the chapter to talk about true understanding. That if we could understand ourselves then we could achieve the life we want, thin or not. She writes that until we understand ourselves love will never be enough, our careers will never be enough, our thighs will never be quiet as thin as we would like, and nothing about our lives will seem real.
"Until you understand that you are oriented toward damage and doom, toward being wedded to compulsive eating and all its problems, until you realize that you insist upon it, albeit unconsciously, no change will last because you will be working against your natural tendencies. You will be overriding your deepest convictions about being alive."
I think this quote speaks to the tendency to self sabotage. So many times I have thought, "Well, I'm never going to lose weight anyway..so I might as well.." This is because I was not taking time to understand myself and to think about what I needed and the feelings I was having. Was I fearful? Angry? Worried? Maybe all three and perhaps if I had taken time to understand myself, I would be in a different place.
I'm still mulling over the next theme of Roth's chapter: "The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value, and possibility. To change your body you must first understand that which is shaping it. Not fight it. Not force it. Not deprive it. Not shape it. Not do anything but accept-and, yes, Virgina- understand it."
Understanding ourselves is the true key to happiness and being thin, to ending the war on compulsive eating? Yes, I believe that. I believe that in order for my thighs to shrink something, perhaps self love and knowledge, must get bigger. Now I just have to find a way for that to happen.
"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."
Food for thought
Do you believe if you threw out all of your rules about food, what you can and cant eat, that you would self destruct?