You probably read this title over a couple of times thinking that you’d caught a typo. Perhaps you thought I must have meant end your love affair with food, not start one. But nope, you read it right the first time. It’s time for you to start a real love affair with food.
What you’ve had up to this point has been an obsessive relationship, and an obsessive relationship is not love. Whether with a substance or with a person, an obsessive relationship is a dance of the wounded . . . a carnival of pain . . . but not a real love affair, because there is no love there. To think you need food that you don’t really need, to practically inhale food, to crave food, to obsess about food, to binge on and then alternately avoid food, to control food and need to be rigid around it—none of these bespeak a love affair. Pain and compulsion and self-hate are not love.
The true lover of food is able to take time with it. She can savor food, and non-neurotically delight in it. She can chew it thoroughly and actually taste it. She can eat without guilt and stop eating without too great an effort. She can celebrate how food is contributing to her health. She can wonder at it and appreciate its beauty. She can linger over a fruit stand and study the curves of a pear. She can gaze at a pomegranate and feel awe at the fact that thousands of years ago, people ate these, too. She can shop for groceries without wondering if anyone is watching her or judging her. She can gaze at a pretty bunch of grapes and consider whether she’d prefer them in her stomach or in a crystal bowl on her table. She can take one bite of something delicious, ecstatically breathe in the taste, and enjoy waiting before taking another bite. For her, the spaces in between each bite are part of the joy of her experience.
No, the compulsive eater is no lover of food. When it comes to your enjoyment of eating, your best days are not behind you but ahead of you!
The eating patterns of an overeater are chaotic, fearful, furtive, and out of control. And yet, these dysfunctional patterns are not your deeper problem. They are symptoms of the problem. Your deeper problem is the hysteria in your gut—the silent, traumatized shriek of “I’m empty! Fill me! I’m empty! Fill me!”—the irrational and irresistible energy that’s wormed its way into your brain, stationed itself in your nervous system, and won’t let go until you’ve eaten the whole thing. This course is a plan in dissolving your hysteria and filling your emptiness by replacing it with love.
Years ago, after a spate of horrifying incidents in which high-school students perpetrated acts of violence against teachers and classmates, I noticed an interesting but, I thought, disturbing kind of discipline imposed at my daughter’s school. All of a sudden the students had not five minutes between class but only two. Passing notes in class was punishable by serious time in detention. Outdoor activities of all kinds were forbidden, and “downtime” of any sort became verboten.
I lobbied the school administration, arguing that while I myself worked hard all day, every once in a while I needed to get up from my desk, stretch, do something silly for five minutes, go get some air . . . take a break! Kids are human and need that, too! In encountering the school’s resistance to my argument, I realized what had gone on here. This school—and perhaps others as well, I don’t know—had come up with a plan to prevent and discourage negative socialization by suppressing any socialization whatsoever. Don’t let kids meet each other; something awful might happen! Don’t let them form relationships; they might hurt each other! Don’t let them relax; they might use the time to hatch some awful plan! So, what is the plan here? I thought. Train them to be dehumanized zombies and then all will be well?
My daughter left that school soon thereafter, but what stayed in my mind was the odd irrationality of trying to keep children separate from each other at school. The answer to antisocial behavior among our children is not that we suppress socialization, but that we teach and model positive socialization for them. For me, that’s a really big “Duuuuuhhhhh!”
So it is with dysfunctional eating. The solution to overeating is obviously not to deny yourself food altogether; the answer is not to deny yourself at all (exception: the addict’s need to abstain from foods, at least temporarily, that trigger biological cravings). You don’t need to forget food, run away from food, deny yourself food, or avoid food. And the last thing you need to do if you want to stop thinking obsessively about food is to tell yourself not to think about it! Doing so is an invitation for such thoughts to overwhelm you.
It is often said in Alcoholics Anonymous that “every problem comes bearing its own solution.” Food is not only your problem, it is also your teacher. It is a reflection of an even deeper problem, an opportunity and an invitation to face that which underlies your compulsive eating. Your only real problem—everyone’s only real problem—is a separation from your divine Source and thus separation from who you really are. Every step taken in love is a step back to your true self.
This course aims to put genuine love back into your relationship with food: not counterfeit love, not substitute love, but genuine love. Love and gratitude that food nourishes and sustains you. Love and gratitude that meals can build bonds among families and friends. Love and gratitude that food is something you have the right to enjoy, once you learn to relate to it with divine detachment.
Detachment means that you can take it or leave it; you can enjoy food if you’re hungry, but you can leave it alone if you’re not. Love, as always, is the key to making things right. By learning to love food, you will stop obsessing about it. And the obsession, not the food, is your actual problem. Obsession, whether toward a substance or a person, occurs when you’re open to give and yet don’t know how to receive. You keep grasping for more because you’re not feeling what’s coming in. As a child, perhaps, nothing was coming back, so now you keep trying to get more of something you’re already convinced isn’t really there. As you build a relationship with food that does give back, you’ll begin to experience a relationship in which love has replaced obsession.
The only way to attain healthy neutrality toward food is by learning to love it, and the only food you can really love is food that loves you back.
I agree totally, we try to fill the empty void with food, when only God can fill that spot with His LOVE. Appreciating food and being grateful and loving it really is the only way to put it in its right place. Run to Divine Love instead of to food! Eat when hungry and savor every moment of it girls!