The bottom line, whether you weigh 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug - grappling with boredom or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejections.
Food is only the middleman, the means to altering your emotions.
What would it be like to not use food today?
Geneen Roth just posted that on her Facebook page. It inspired me enough to actually come here and post something. I have been away much too long, but I think about my blog every day, and the fact that I "should" be over here. Sigh. Just one more "should" in my life that I use to beat myself up with and feel "less than." Seems I turn everything in my life into that.
This is not going to be a positive piece.
A therapist asked me years ago what I would think about if I were not agonizing, worrying and catastrophizing every second of the day. I could not answer.
I asked myself the other day what I would think about all day if I were not thinking about food, what I weigh, what I just ate, what I will eat next, or how fat I am. I cannot answer that.
What do thin people think about all day?
You know, those people who actually forget to eat?
20 some-odd years ago I read something in one of Geneen's books that was a revelation to me. I am going to sit here at my kitchen table and type every word of it because for me it is one of the most profound things ever written. It is about a woman in one of Geneen's workshops who had gained back half of the 100 pounds she had lost. It is about compulsion:
Chubby as a child, not Vogue modelish as an adult, this woman grew up thinking that the cause of all her troubles was her excess weight and, conversely, that when she lost that weight she would be happy. When she discovered that despite being the perfect size, she still felt lonely, got angry, and was easily hurt, she made a decision--albeit an unconscious one--that she would rather have the pain in her life be about her weight, which was in her sole control, rather than about circumstances, relationships, and emotions that included others and were, therefore, not as controllable.
In this way, she could continue to translate situations in terms of her weight: If she felt empty inside, it was because she was fat; if she felt rejected by a friend or lover, it must be that they didn't like her body; if she awoke on a Sunday morning with tears in her eyes it was because she had never stayed thin and was losing out on so much. Not because there might be something missing from her life, something she had promised herself long ago: a story she wanted to write, an instrument she wanted to play, a talk with her great grandmother about growing up in Russia.
The pain was not because the grief at her mother's death lay solid like a lump of clay between her breasts, waiting to be recognized and released. No, it was because she wasn't thin. And even though she had gained back fifty of the one hundred pounds, she would lose it again and this time, this time would be different, she'd keep it off. She could fill her dreamy moments with what she would do, wear, and say when she got thin again, and during the rest of her time she could decide what low-calorie meals she could cook for herself.
And so she could spend the next fifty years of her life this way: gaining weight because she was frightened, then losing it because it would make her happy to do so, then gaining it again because it didn't. She could live this way until she died.
And she wouldn't be unusual.
25 years later, Geneen is still out there, writing new books, making the rounds on Oprah and such. Because she will never lack people who need her message:
It's not about the food. It's about pain. And the attempt to avoid it.
And just for the hell of it, I have to go look at Louise's affirmation for today. I haven't looked at her site for weeks, for obvious reasons...
Hey, not bad:
"I see clearly."
