When Food is Love

Geneen Roth is an author who explores the intimate relationship between eating and feeling good, feeling loved, feeling stable.  She has written quite a few books, such as The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It,  When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair  and Women, Food and God.  For those of you with no patience for people who believe in exploring childhood experiences and how they affect our adult lives, go ahead and stop reading now.

For the rest of us who are interested in linking our behaviors and thought patterns with the past, Roth does an amazing job.  She is nakedly honest in her books and touches many nerves in my psyche as I read about her struggles. 

Here are some of my own food patterns:  I like to eat alone, with a book or the tv on.  I like my food in a bowl to be eaten with a spoon.  I like my food to touch, in fact, I create crazy mixes of flavors that make my husband and son shudder.  (My favorite way to eat spaghetti is with my dressed salad mixed in.  I learned this trick as a child.  I was not allowed to leave my Grandmother's table unless all my food was gone.  Over time I came up with a lot of devious ways to escape from the "yucky" parts of the meal like hiding the food in my underwear and flushing it down the toilet, learning to use my tongue to close off my sense of taste while chewing the food with a mouthful of milk and swallowing it down, and by camouflaging flavors by putting something I liked with something I didn't.  Thus my love for pasta sauce on salad was born.  Don't worry, I like salad now.)  I don't like to be interrupted when I eat.  I hate when the phone rings and I most likely will not answer it, or will be grouchy and short-lipped with the caller if I feel I must speak at that time.  I like my food to be piping hot, but can also handle the leftovers straight from the fridge.  My mom sometimes gave me leftover dinner for lunch.  My schoolmates sometimes raised an eyebrow at my tacos or meatloaf sandwiches, but now I can eat leftover dinner for breakfast anytime.  Prefer it to eggs, actually!

I gained quite a bit of weight last summer.  I had quit some habits that weren't healthy for me and as soon as I heard the term "cross-addiction" I knew food would be my next "feel good" retreat.  I eat when I'm happy, sad, mad, bored, wanting comfort, wanting sleep, or just because it's there.  Learning to eat when only hungry is quite a challenge.  Learning to eat smaller portions of protein and starch (especially rice, which I LOVE) and more veggies is a mind-game for me.  I make my plate (or bowl), heaped with veggies, but in the back of my mind I am contemplating the protein I will have for seconds. 

I didn't finish When Food is Love, but it is overdue at the library and I am going to return it today.  Here is what I gleaned so far: 

"Diets don't work because food and weight are the symptoms, not the problems.  The focus on weight provides a convenient and culturally reinforced distraction from the reasons why so many people use food when they are not hungry.  These reasons are more complex than-and will never be solved with--will-power, counting calories, and exercise.  They have to do with neglect, lack of trust, lack of love, sexual abuse, physical abuse, unexpressed rage, grief, being the object of discrimination, protection from getting hurt again.  People abuse themselves with food because they don't know they deserve better.  People abuse themselves because they've been abused.  They become self-loathing, unhappy adults not because they've experienced trauma but because they've repressed it."  (p. 4)

I feel I need to post a disclaimer here.  My childhood was, for the most part, very safe and loving.  Like pretty much everyone else I know, however, there are things I need to acknowledge, accept, forgive and let go.  When my "buttons are pushed" and I overreact unreasonably to not getting my own way or feeling abandoned or ignored, these are signs that stuff from the past is still shaping who I am and how I see the world.  Back to the book.

"When Food is Love speaks to the heart of why people turn to food.  It explores the messages we received as children, how we translate them into messages of self-hate, and how we pass this pain on to other people, including our children.  And it explores the importance of taking responsibility for change in the present rather than feeling victimized by the pain of the past.  Because our patterns of eating were formed by early patterns of loving, it is necessary to understand and work with both food and love to feel satisfied with our relationship to either." (p. 4)

My favorite line in the last paragraph is "the importance of taking responsibility for change in the present rather than feeling victimized by the pain of the past".  This is easier said than done, however, especially when I am in the throes of passionate emotion.  My ego rides that roller coaster and all sorts of voices speak in my head, promoting "unfairness" and "you don't really know me" and "you're gonna f*** it up anyway, so who are you kidding?"  Phew.  It makes me amped just to think about it.  How does one reprogram one's brain to stop reacting in such an emotional manner to people and situations in our lives that we can't control anyway???

"Compulsion is despair on the emotional level.  The substances, people, or activities that we become compulsive about are those that we believe are capable of taking our despair away.   . . .  Someone once came to a workshop after she had lost seventy-five pounds on a diet.  She stood up in front of 150 people and, with her voice shaking, said, "I feel like I've been robbed.  My best dream has been taken away.  I really thought that losing weight was going to change my life.  But it only changed the outside of me.  The inside is still the same.  My mother is still dead and my father still beat me when I was growing up.  I'm still angry and lonely and now I don't have getting thin to look forward to."     (p. 15)

"Compulsion is the feeling that there is no one home.  We become compulsive to put someone home.  All we ever wanted was love.  We didn't want to become compulsive about anything.  We did it to survive.  We did it to keep from going crazy.  Good for us.  Food was our love; eating was our way of being loved.  Food was available when our parents weren't.  Food didn't get up and walk away when our fathers did.  Food didn't hurt us.  Food didn't say no.  Food didn't hit.  Food didn't get drunk.  Food was always there.  Food tasted good.  Food was warm when we were cold and cold when we were hot.  Food became the closest thing we knew of love.  But it is only a substitute for love.  Food is not, nor was it ever, love." 

"Many of us have been using food to replace love for so many years that we no longer know the difference between turning to food for love and turning to love for food.  We wouldn't recognize love if it knocked us over.  Not because we are ignorant but because if we've never been loved well, we don't know what love feels like, what love is like.  And it follows that if we have not been loved well, we cannot love ourselves well.  Compulsive behavior, at its most fundamental, is a lack of self-love; it is an expression of a belief that we are not good enough." (pps. 18-19)

I could go on and on, quoting this amazing book that I have not even finished yet, but my belly is grumbling (ha!) and my coffee is cold and this book needs to get back to the library pronto.  Someone else has put it on hold and I got an embarrassing letter in the mail yesterday from the library.  Let me just parrot a few more tidbits and then I'll let you go:

"Love and compassion cannot coexist.  Love is the willingness and ability to be affected by another human being and to allow that effect to make a difference in what you do, say, become.  Compulsion is the act of wrapping ourselves around an activity, a substance, or a person to survive, to tolerate and numb our experience of the moment.  Love is a state of connectedness, one that includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face, rather than run from, the worst of ourselves.  Compulsion is a state of isolation, one that includes self-absorption, invulnerability, low self-esteem, unpredictability, and fear that if we faced our pain, it would destroy us.  Love expands, compulsion diminishes.  Compulsion leaves no room for love-which is, in fact, why many people started eating: because when there was room for love, the people around us were not loving.  The very purpose of compulsion is to protect ourselves from the pain associated with love."

"It is my belief that we become compulsive because of wounds from our past and the decisions we made at that time about our self-worth--decisions about our capacity to love and whether, in fact, we deserve to be loved.  Our mother goes away and we decide that we are unlovable.  Our father is emotionally distant and we decide that we need too much.  Someone we are close to dies and we decide that there is no reason to love anyone because it hurts too much at the end.  We made decisions based on how we made sense of the wounds and what we did to protect ourselves from being more wounded in that environment.  At the age of six or eleven or fifteen, we decide that loves hurts and that we are unworthy or unlovable or too demanding, and we live the rest of our lives protecting ourselves from being hurt again.  And there is no better protection than wrapping ourselves around a compulsion."  (pps. 23-24)

I myself am compulsive about a few things.  Just a few come to mind immediately, but perhaps there are more lurking beneath the surface.  I compulsively shop.  I compulsively create projects for myself.  I compulsively speak without thinking.  There are more, but I don't feel like baring any more of my tender neurosis to the public.  Let's just say that I'm gonna work on this self-esteem thing some more.  How about you?

Want to read more?  Check out Geneen's blog at:  http://blog.geneenroth.com/notes_from_geneen/.  You can order her books through her site.  You can also find some at a more discounted price (used and new versions are available) at http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=geneen+roth&sts=t&x=0&y=0.  I know I promote Abe Books enough to be an official spokesperson, but hey, when you can get a book for less than 4 bucks, including s/h, how can you lose?

Thanks for listening.  Take care of yourself.  Today I will notice my triggers and get a little more introspective about them.  Thanks for listening.