When food is love

When food is love
- Geneen Roth

p.1 When I was 11, I began dieting, and for the next 17 years I spent the largest prt of every day thinking about what I wanted to eat that I shouldn't and what I should eat that I didn't want. .... By the time I was 28, mpthing mattered to me except being thin.

p.4 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 without relationship toeither.

p.10. Being thin meant being happy ...
But it was not politically correct to put one's life on hold and wait for the perfect partner, so I went about creating the kind of life I wanted without one.

p.19 Food was our love, eating was our way of being loved. Food was available when our parents weren't. Fodod didn't get up and walk away when out 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.

p.24 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 father is emotionally distant and we decide that we need too much. ... We make decisions based on our pain and the limited choices we had at that time. We make decisions based on how we made sense of the wounds and what we did to protect ouselves from being more wounded in that environment.
As children we have no resources, no power to make choices about our situations We nbeed our families for food, shelter, and love or else we will die. If we feel that the pain around us is too intense and we cannot leave or change it, we will shut it off. We will--and do--switch our pain to comething less threatening: a compulsion.
As adults, it becomes our task to examine the decisions we made long ago about our self-worth, our capacity to love, and our willingess to be loved, for it is from these ecisions that many of our beliefs about compulsion and love take root.


p.36-7 A 60-year-old woman.... "If I don't eat, I am going to perish." .. "I weigh 70 pounds." .. Her eyes are dark globes of misery, her cheekbones are flat planes of bones that extend so far from her face that they seem unrelted to her cheeks. "I stopped eating 20 yrs ago." "What happened 20 years ago?" I ask. "My daughter died of leukemia. I thought I would perish."

p.39 When the heart of a child is broken, something inexpressible--and up to that moment whole and unquestioned--snaps. And nothing is ever the same. We spend the rest of ourlives trying to minimise the hurt or pretend that it didn't happen, trying to protect ourselves from its happening again, trying to get someone to love us the way we , as that child, needed to be loved.

p.41. I was so alne. I thought my mother was going to die. I thought she was going to leave us, that she wanted to leave us and I couldn't stand how awful it was. I felt like my body was going to break in a million pieces. And I knew I had to go home and take care of the other kids, make supper.

p.61There is nothing boring about being a coimpulsive eater. .. Chaos, intensity, and drama are nbormal in the day-to-day life of a compulsive eater. Suffering is a way of bveing in the world.

It is not uncommon for someone who is not a compulsive eater to think it unfathomable to eat so much that she would be miserable. Why would anyone want to eat that much? What's the point? The point is not the taste or the texture or the smell of food; overwating is a means to give ourselves what we believe we deserve.

p.62 October 11, 1978, 3AM: I awaken with an image of myself slashing each organ in muy body to pieces. With each strike I say,"Good. Again. Harder." I want to destroy myself. I want to eat until I die. The pain seems so deserving/. It is the only way I cam comfortable. Nor sleeping, eating uncontrollably, driving myself to the edge, this feels right.

p.86 Children must deny and ignore what causes them pain. Children must cling lovingly to those who abuse them, because given the choice between an abusive person and no one at all, there is no choice. The difference between someone and no one is the difference between life and death. Children must be ever-faithful, patient, responsive, forgiving, and willing to take horrendous abuse without saying no. Children must build elaborate fantasies that turn the people who abuse and leave them to people who love and adore them. Because fo their ability to fantasize--and to actually believe that what they are fantasizing is or will someday be true--children can endure their suffering.

p.87 When we are children, our parents have cloudless eyes and creamy skin. They are big and strong, they know everything, they are perfect. Parents strengthen this perception by telling us that they are always right and that children should be seen and not heard. We learn to listen and obry. No one teaches us that parents are selfsish. No one teaches us that parents lie. No one teaches us that they need us to complete them as much as we need them to love us. W could not get angry at our parnts; we were not allowed. Instead, when they got drunk and blamed us for their behavior, told us it was because we didnot do the dieshes, we believed them. ...

Those of us who are compulsive eaters believe with a vengeance that if we were thin, our lives would be drastically different. Even those people who have lost weight and been thin six or seven times in their lives persist in believing that when they get thin again, one more thime--just give us one more chance, this time you'll see--they will once and for all be happy.

p.92 A pillocase of M&Ms. 8 days.

The fantasy of the taste of M&Ms is more enchanting thant the taste of M&Ms. The fantasy of being thin is more powerful than being thin. The fantasy of spending yourlife with a partner who is unavailable is more exciting than spending your life with someone who does not love you.
p.126 As adults, we still want what we didn't receive as children, and we want it in the form we didn't receive it it: another person who loves and chrishes us, someone who is completely responsible for our well-being.

Our parents were responsieble for us when we were children, but no one is responsible for u when we are adults. If they weren't there the first time around, no one can ever take their place. Not a lover, not a best friend, not a teacher, not a therapist, not a support group, not anyone. Only you. You are trhe only one who can provide yourself with unconditional love, safety, and constant attention. Only you.

\\p.131 GFriefing si a process that involves denial, blame, angher, loss, desolaton, exhaustion, and--ultimately--acceptance of the wounds, the betrayals, the fact that no one can kiss it and make it better. Griecing about the past is not something you do against your parents; it is something you do for youself, although confronting one's parents can be an essential part of healing for some people.

Nor is grieving to be confused with forgicing those who hurt you. Many people want to fly past grief into forgiverness because grief is so uncomfortable and forgieness is so sweet. ... bUT THERE IS NOTHING HOLY ABOUT FAKING YOUR FEELINGS, AND UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO GET ANGRY WITH THE PERSON OR PEOPLE WHO HURT YOU SO THAT YOU ABSOLUTELY KNOW YOU DID NOT DESERVE THEIR ABUSE, FORGIVENESS WILL BE A SHAM. You cannot forgiver anyone with whom you never got angry.

TYhe purpose of grieving is not just to heal. It is not just to understand the pain. It is not just to forgive or to accept it. Healing is the steo between grieving and growing.

p.134 "...that's my mother Im writing about. And I'm sorry if it's going to bring it all up again, but I'm writing about it because for me it never went away."
I don't want to hurt my parents. I want to be with them--and myself--in the fullness of the present. I want to let go of the suffering, not weat it as a banner ofr the rest of my life. But the omly way I know to do that is to acknowledge and grieve about the feelings I locked away the first time around. It seems to me that suffering becomes a banner when you spend you life reacting ot it instead of acknowledging it and letting it go.

p.139 ".... she is honoring her in the best way she knows how: by telling the truth. Her intention is not to hurt Ruth but to clear the way for thier relationship so that they can live in the present moment with each other instead of constantly reacting to the past."
p.145 We are not to blame for what happened to us as children, but we are responsible for what we do with our pain as adults. At sopme point in our lives, we've got to stop being sombody's neglected baby.

p.147 Breaking free from compulsive eating means going against a culture that enccourages us to define our self-worth according to eternals--what we look like, how much wqe weight, how uch money we make. A dres manufacturer said, "We're selling love, not dresses. If we can convincce the buyer that our merchandise will bring them love, we've done our job well." Fat is a multi-billion-dollar industry,. Diet centers and weight-loss programs are getting richer and fatter as they convince us that we should be thinner and thinnner. No one in the weight-loss industry wants to see us braking free.

p. 154 And the lesson fo Moodeul Muggin (self defense) is that we cannoy be kind enough or thin enough or generous engouh, we cannot be sucessful enough or atytractive enough for those who abuse us to stop abusing us. W e cannot make anyone love us. We canno change anyone. It is not our job to hurt someone who has hurt us, to change someone who is self-destructibve, to convinve someone who doesn't lovbe us to love us. As long as our well-being and self-worth are dependent on those around us, we are children hanging on our father's affection, waiting for our mothers to call us 'darling,' our teacchers to tell us we are smart, our friends to include us in their clubs, we are waiting, waiting for engough kindness ot break open the tight bud of our hearts.

p.156 Some people don't heal. They get stuck in one of the stages. It is too frightening to acknowledge what really happened or to connect the fellings with the events.

p.158 A friend of Matt's says that couples enter a relationship madly in love, carrying a suitcase filled with clothes form past relationships, adolescence, childhood. By the time they have been togeher for aouple of years, they have removed all the clothes from their respective suitcases, thrown them on each other, and in utter disbelief exclaimed, "You aren't the person I fell in love with. I hardly recognize you."
We can't look forward without looking back.
We can't have healing relationships in the present wihtout being willing to heal the pain of the past.

p.169 It is not the wound that determines the quality of your life, it's what you do with the wound--how you hold it, carry it, dance with it, or bury yourself under it.
No one knows where dreams are born. And what gives people the grit to follow them.. Lucille Ball's father died when she was 4. Her nmother remarried bur sent Lucille to live with relatives. They put a dog collar around her neck and tied her to a tree in the back yard to keep her from wandering. While her body was tied dow, her mind wandered. She xcreated a friend called Sassafras, who comforted her and told her she would be a famous movie star.
Life is what happens as you live eith the wounds. Life is not a matter of getting the wounds out of the way so that you can finally live. Wounds are never permanently erased. W e are faragile beings, and some days we btreak lall over again. [

p.171 The purpose of heailing is to be awake. And to live while you are alive instead of dying while you are alive. Healing is about being broken and whole at the same time.

p.188 When I was n high school, I looked aty thin girls who had acne or frizzy hair and thought, If I had your body or if you had my skin and straight hair, at least one of us would be pretty. I thought that the onlyu thing wrong with me was that I was fat and if, by some miracle (for which I prayed every single day), I could wake up thin, I would be stunning and happy for the rest of my life.

The way I ate and the way I loved stemmed from the same source: the models of love Iabsorbed from my parents, and the self-image I constructed based on that love.

p.200 The question is not when or if you will meet someone you love; nothing will change when you meet the love of your ilfe except that you will have mnet the love of your life. The work begins when the infatuation ends. And the question is not how glorious it will be to wake up with a warm body beside ou and have someone to go to the movbies with and celebrate holidays with and go to your parents' house with and be youself with. The question si what will you do when it gets hard. How can you trust someone when you've never learned to trust yourself?




Trust yourself.
Laugh easily.
Cry easily.
Be willing to be vulnerable.
When you notice that you are clinging to anything and it's causing trounble, drop it.
Be willing to fail.
Don't let fear stop you from leaping into the unknown..
No act of love is ever wasted.