What do women, food, and God have to do with each other? I asked the same thing before I read this book…and then I said, “Ohhhhhh….everything.” They have everything to do with each other. And that might sound a little melodramatic, but if you have ever used food for anything other than pure nourishment you will understand. I have always turned to food (among other things) for comfort and escape. I’m just now realizing how deep this business goes…I recommend reading the book yourself but want to share my own book review of Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything by Geneen Roth along with some amazing quotes…
Women Food and God is a book that goes so beyond eating. It is not a nutrition book, though it does offer eating guidelines. It’s not a weight loss book, though it does talk about how weight and our perception about it impacts our lives. This book goes deep about getting to the root cause of our struggle with weight gain, weight loss, dieting, body image, our relationships with ourselves. And just about all of what’s written could apply to other areas of life.
That said, it is focused around “our compulsions with food.” (For more on my compulsions with food you can read these posts: 5 Tips to Stop Emotional Eating and Eat Mindfully, Quit Binging.) It’s easy to read and easy to relate to. Geneen Roth centers a lot of the book around her work with clients, mostly at her retreats. But she talks about her own story as well. Some of the examples, the pain, and the behaviors around food might seem at the extreme end of the relationship-with-food spectrum. But if you’ve ever found yourself obsessing about losing weight, losing and gaining weight in a cycle, turning to or away from food in times of stress, or hating your body, this book has a ton of insight to offer…
Quotes from the book…
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.
When you believe without knowing you believe that you are damaged at your core, you also believe that you need to hide that damage for anyone to love you. You walk around ashamed of being yourself. You try hard to make up for the way you look, walk, feel. Decisions are agonizing because if you, the person who makes the decision, is damaged, then how can you trust what you decide? You doubt your own impulses so you become masterful at looking outside yourself for comfort. You become an expert at finding experts and programs, at striving and trying hard and then harder to change yourself, but this process only reaffirms what you already believe about yourself — that your needs and choices cannot be trusted, and left to your own devices you are out of control.
Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it.
All any feeling wants is be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.
Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, an state. Bigger than. Vaster than. That there is no reason to use drugs because anything a drug could do would pale in comparison to knowing who you are.
The exquisite paradox of this engagement is that when the suffering is fully allowed, it dissolves.
I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child’s hair, the silence of a forest, their lover’s crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it’s perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.
When you decide that you need to lose twenty pounds because you are disgusting at this weight or that you need to meditate every day or go to church on Sundays because you will go to hell if you don’t, you are making life decisions while you are being whipped with chains. The Voice-induced decisions—those made from shame and force, guilt or deprivation, cannot be trusted. They do not last because they are based on fear of consequences instead of longing for truth. Instead, ask yourself what you love. Without fear of consequences, without force or shame or guilt. What motivates you to be kind, to take care of your body, your spirit, others, the earth? Trust the longing, trust the love that can be translated into action without the threat of punishment. Trust that you will not destroy what matters most. Give yourself that much.
I tell them that if compulsive eating is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard. When we don’t want to notice what is going on. Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.
The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering…
If you think that your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.
Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion. You become unhinged, dependent on whether things are going well that day or not.
Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don’t take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don’t infer your existence form replaying what happened to you, when you don’t take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didn’t see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you?
Feel the feelings…
I think this book is important in more than just the emotional/compulsive eating realm. It encourages us to do two things I think we need to do more of: feel our feelings and talk about our feelings.
We can use anything in life or get caught up in anything that takes us away from our quiet center- food, exercise, sex, alcohol, work, gossip, scrolling, reading, gambling, drugs.
I don’t think we can ever really make lasting changes that feel good unless we do a little digging. Digging into the why; it often comes back to self-love, self-worth, patterns from childhood…the deep stuff that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, but can be life-changing and fulfilling and lead to more peace and happiness than you ever thought possible.
And at its heart this book can help us with anything we do compulsively and help us live a happier, more fulfilled, more meaningful, less-auto-pilot life.
Are you an emotional eater? Stress eater? Stuck in negative patterns when it comes to health and fitness? I’d love to hear from you! Comment here, email me at mary@stayathomefit.com, or connect with me on Facebook or Instagram.
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