When I read about this book in O Magazine, I thought, Hmmm, could be interesting.  Because, you see, I if I’m blatantly honest, I’ve been trying to stay a certain weight all my life.  Ostensibly for health, but really for looks.

Roth, in a chapter called “Tigers in the Mind” begins: “No matter how developed you are in any other area of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat tells all.  Bummer.”

And I’ll add a big ouch.

She goes on to say, “We want to be thin because thinness is the purported currency of happiness and peace and contentment in our time.  And although that currency is a lie—the tabloids are filled with miserable skinny celebrities—most systems of weight loss fail because they don’t live up to their promise: weight loss does not make people happy.  Or peaceful.  Or content.  Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name.  Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.  Spiritual hunger can never be solved on the physical level.”  [By the way, she refers to God in the book as a spiritual entity whom you see as God.]

I posted over a year and a half ago regarding what I was told by my father growing up, and as much as I’d like those words to go away, they won’t.  They’ve become part of The Voice, an amalgamation of all the negative voices I’ve heard my entire life.  Everyone has a version of The Voice.  It tells you what you can and cannot do.  It tells you people are looking at you and they won’t like you if you behave a certain way (heavens, please consider how the neighbors will view us!).  It tells you that you’re dumb and ugly and inept.  It exclaims How on earth did you think you could you wear that? and Why aren’t you more like her? and How long is it going to take you to make a name for yourself?

“Psychologists and spiritual teachers alike call this learned version of ourselves ‘ego’ or ‘personality’ or ‘false self.’  It’s false because it’s based on inference, not direct experience.  It’s false because if your idea of yourself is based on who your mother took you to be, and her idea of herself was based on who her mother took her to be, which was based on how her mother took her to be.  Your idea of yourself—the person whose feelings get hurt, who takes offense at being criticized, who is wedded to her opinions or preferences or ideas—is based on those of someone who’s never met you.  Your self-image is refracted so many times—with learned inferences and memories and conditioning—that it is nothing more than a hall of mirrors.”

Roth further comments on these negative feelings:

“Recurrent negative feelings—those that loop in the same cycles 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.”

The book had remarkable passages in it.  Long sections that rang true to me.

But.

A lot of the book appeals to the mind, even though it’s telling you to listen to your body’s signals.  And this is a problem because that’s exactly where the messages are coming from—your overactive, mud-flinging mind.  So, how do we get all this head knowledge into practical, workable form?  How can we override all those messages we’ve been playing ever since that one horrid day in our childhood where we were first assaulted?

Be aware of how you’re feeling.

“Awareness and compulsion cannot coexist, since the latter depends on obliteration of the former.  With the awareness of the desire to stuff yourself without stuffing yourself, you’ve stepped out of your immersion in your past and begun arriving in the present: the you that is aware of your past without being it….

“You bring yourself back to the present moment, and since your body is right here, right now, since hunger or lack of it is also right here, you ask yourself if you are hungry.  Simple.  Am I hungry?”

Roth asks us to inquire of ourselves, as we’re reaching for that next potato chip, what we’re feeling.   How does it feel?  What color is it?  This inquiry is supposed to lead us into the why of our compulsive eating (or whatever addictive habit you may possess).  Thing is: while reading, I kept insisting to myself that I’ve already tried this inquiry, but the only thing I can come up with is that I simply love the taste of food.  My taste buds like it; the whole experience is joyful—isn’t that enough of a reason?  How do I stop eating, if I enjoy it so much?  Is it a crime to love food that much?

No, Roth insists that there’s a reason behind everything, and just the fact that I enjoy eating is not good enough.  “Sometimes people will say, ‘But I just like the taste of food.  In fact, I love the taste!  Why can’t it be that simple?  I overeat because I like food.’

“But.

“When you like something, you pay attention to it.  When you like something—love something—you take time with it.  You want to be present for every second of the rapture.

“Overeating does not lead to rapture.  It leads to burping and farting and being so sick that you can’t think of anything but how full you are.  That’s not love; that’s suffering. [Bold emphasis mine.]

“Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product.  Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life.  Even with aching joints, it’s not about food.  Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure.  It’s about your desire to flatten your life.  It’s about the fact that you’ve given up without saying so.  It’s about your belief that it’s not possible to life any other way—and you’re using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.”

Well.

I feel like I need an extra, honest-to-goodness live person who can sit across from me and probe deeper and deeper until they get at the core of why I enjoy eating.  Because I can’t come up with anything on my own, other than what I’ve stated above.  [Okay, truth be told, I have a few ideas…]

That said, it makes sense to me that there must be another emotional reason I’m blind to—or at least resistant to.

Roth says, “Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away.  When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop.  When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart.  When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears.  And yes, it really is that simple.”

Later in the book: “Either you are willing to believe in kindness or you aren’t.  Either you are willing to believe in the basic sanity of your being or you aren’t.  To be given wings, you’ve go to be willing to believe that you were put on this earth for more than your endless attempts to lose the same thirty pounds three hundred times for eighty years.  And that goodness and loveliness are possible, even in something as mundane as what you put in your mouth for breakfast.  Beginning now.

“Once you take the first few steps, once you begin treating yourself with the kindness that you believe only thin or perfect people deserve, you can’t help but discover that love didn’t abandon you after all.”

Roth offers up guidelines, not meant as rules, but as another way.  [You’ll find them listed below.  There are seven of them.]

“Each one [guideline] has its nonfood equivalent, its nonapparent or “spiritual” dimension.  You can sneak food, for instance, hide what you eat from friends and family, but you can also sneak your true feelings.  You can lie to people about what you believe, what you want, what you need.  And you can examine your life by either looking at the way you live or the way you eat.  Both are paths to what is underneath and beyond the eating: to what has never gotten hungry, never binged, never gained or lost a pound.”

Roth’s Eating Guidelines:

1. Eat when you are hungry.
2. Eat sitting down in a calm environment.  This does not include the car.
3. Eat without distractions.  Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.
4. Eat what your body wants.
5. Eat until you are satisfied.
6. Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.
7. Eat with enjoyment, gusto and pleasure.

Another part of me wonders (also) if the types of foods we’re eating are addictive, and if we’ve become high-sugar, high-fat junkies who can’t stop.  It’s been proven with rats–on such a diet–that they’ll literally starve themselves when their high-fat, high-sugar food is withheld from them.  They’re addicted, and they don’t want anything else.  Could it be that we’re going down the same path?  Shudder, shudder.

Let’s just put it this way.  I have lots to think about this week.

Just don’t take that Pepperidge Farm Milano cookie out of my hand!  No, seriously…back…away…from…the…Milano…

[Post image: Partial of Women Food and God by Geneen Roth cover]