Body Wisdom Part 2: Food and Eating

A couple of months ago, I posted about overworking and the challenges I have listening to my body's wisdom.

In that post, I mentioned that I was planning to write a blog about my challenges with food and eating. This is that post.

My early experiences with food and eating

I've spent a lot of my life feeling really screwed up about food and eating. I was a latch-key kid in a divorced family in the 70s and I learned early that a lot of things I wanted to be able to change were outside of my control. I couldn't get my family back together. Or escape my feelings about my family's collapse: they were so much bigger than my little 7-year-old self.

What I could do was take my allowance and buy something to eat that would make me feel temporarily better: a chocolate bar, ice cream cone, popsicle, or, the most cost-effective sugar high available at the Korean corner store near my house: rice candy.

Eating became my main way of coping with pretty much everything: disconnection, shame, intimacy, humiliation, loss, fatigue – with anything really, that reminded me of how it felt to live in a world where I don't have much control, but for some reason am supposed to be able to pretend to be in control – at least of myself and my emotions. A world in which I am not supposed to be a crybaby or a sook, even if that's how I sometimes feel like reacting to life.

 

Getting in to psychotherapy

Because I was an unhappy kid who repressed her feelings, I grew into a very unhappy (and pretty mean-spirited) young adult.

When I fell madly in love for the first time at 21, and then couldn't stop that relationship from repeatedly spiralling down into conflict and misery, I realized that I had some serious work to do. As a result, I spent a lot of time in my twenties and thirties involved in an in-depth psychotherapeutic process. Therapy helped me immensely. I worked out many things – I became calmer and kinder and more relaxed.

But interestingly, my issues around food and eating didn't budge. I remained addicted to sugar, especially soda pop, and I remained an out-of-control eater. I felt hungry almost all of the time. When I was particularly stressed, I would go unconscious and eat until the feelings stopped. Over and over again. I couldn't make peace with food and eating.

And every year, I gained another five or ten pounds.

 

I'll try (almost) anything!

So, I tried a bunch of other things.

I read myriad self-help books: Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach, lots of things by Geneen Roth, Potatoes, not Prozac, by Kathleen DesMaisons. I related to many things in many of those books. They helped me feel less alone. If there were diet recommendations, I tried to follow them. For a little while.

Once, I had a lover talk me in to going to the most common North American weight loss program™. I enrolled and then he sabotaged my attempts to follow the program. That program helped me lose weight for sure. It also helped me realize that that lover was gaslighting me. But it didn't help me make peace with my eating. I could control my eating, for a little while, but I felt FAR from peaceful.

After leaving that relationship (and that weight loss program), I did an excellent in-person conscious eating course – all the rules of how to be a more conscious eater were presented, practiced and processed. It was a great class. I related. I released feelings. And it didn't change a damn thing for me.

In my next attempt to grapple with the issue, I tried to do some eating and fitness coaching with a friend. It was hopeless and she fired me as a client (I count myself lucky that we are still friends).

I thought about going to OverEaters Anonymous. But I just wasn't ready to 12-step anything. (I've crossed that line now, on another issue, and am currently pretty in love with the many awesome things about 12-step programs – but that's for another post).

I was frustrated and let the whole thing go. "To hell with it," I thought. "Let me just eat whatever I want and be as big as a house. I don't care."

But my knees cared. And my right hip. And my feet. And also my pride and vanity. Ours can be a hard world in which to be a fat woman.

 

Finally, something works!

So, I kept looking around. And then I saw a course on the Internet called "Transform Your Relationship with Food™."

That sounded like what I needed to do. 

I thought and deliberated and then decided. I ponied up the dough and got ready to take the course. 

It was at the worst-possible time of year for me, when I knew I'd be super-busy with graphic design work, but I didn't want to wait until the next time it was offered. That could have been in the fall or the following year even and I felt ready to tackle the issue right away.

You never know what you're going to get with an e-course. Most of the courses I've taken on line have been excellent, but a couple have been duds. 

This one was beyond excellent. It's delivered as a series of video and audio presentations over eight weeks with journaling exercises and practices for each week. 

The audio presentations were the most powerful thing for me. They are long, most over an hour and a half and I found it very therapeutic to listen to Marc David, the founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating (IPE), talk kindly (and expertly) to me about food, nutrition and eating.

I think the biggest breakthrough for me was the moment when I heard him say that OF COURSE we sometimes manage our emotions with food. OF COURSE we do, because it works. And sometimes that's what we need and it's okay. But we have choices and we're allowed to have deliberateness and joy in our decisions. We don't have to feel out-of-control and loaded down by shame.

What a contrast this is from the usual: You should eat this. You should eat that. It's all about portion control. You know how to lose weight, don't you? EAT LESS. Use a smaller plate to make your portions look bigger. Aren't you sick of buying new clothes every year? (These are all actual unhelpful things various GPs have said to me over the years).

The program has had its challenges for me. I got a little lost in week four, when some nutritional suggestions started to feel like the kind of food prescriptions I was used to rebelling against and ignoring. But by week 6, I was back on board, having made peace with the fact that I have no longing to be a "clean" eater. There are no plans in my future to go macrobiotic, all-raw, vegan, gluten-free or even vegetarian. No, I don't aspire to any dietary regime. My only aspiration is to become a peaceful eater.

And I'm well on my way.

The Transform Your Relationship with Food program encourages participants to become curious experimenters to figure out what foods and eating practices work for them, and how to explore feelings and ideas to create a new story around food and eating.

I still have many steps to take on this journey. There are a lot of practices I have yet to try, a lot of feelings and beliefs that I have yet to explore. Fortunately, the whole program is sitting on my hard drive, available for me to use on an ongoing basis.

Already, this seemingly immovable patch of disturbance in my life has shifted. I'm not hungry all the time anymore. When I eat consciously, I'm nowhere near as overwhelmed by fear and shame and rage as I used to be. And I've dropped three notches on my belt without doing anything in particular - well, nothing outside of beginning to transform my relationship with food and eating. 

I feel deeply grateful for this newfound peace and hope. When an issue remains stuck for over 30 years, it's tempting to think that it's impossible to change. But I believe there is always a way to do the work. Sometimes it's a matter of finding the right kind of help.