Reflections Part 2

Women, Food, and God by Geneen Roth

I've had this book pretty much since it came out.  I started reading it, but, like so many others, never finished.  (What, me?  Not finish a book?  It happens...)

Last night, I decided it was time to get to reading in it, although I will admit that I did more skimming than actual reading.

The author does retreats for women in which you go off for at least a weekend to learn about how to get over your obsession with food.  (That's the short version, at least.)  In this book, she starts off talking about one such retreat.  She also spends a lot of time talking about her own experiences with food.

Some people will likely feel better knowing that she was fat herself and did spend a large chunk of her life yo-yo dieting before she finally learned how to get past the dieting stage.  She gives a lot of personal anecdotes that I really mostly just skimmed through (although, I did read the cat story, and it was pretty cute.)

Roth seems to deal mostly in emotional eating.  You eat because you have a void in your life, and somewhere along the way you've learned that you can fill that void with food.  Then, beyond the emotional, we eat often when we are not hungry, because the food is there, because in our minds it's sinful to waste food.

Admit it.  We've all been there.  Whether it's the old "children are starving in Africa" routine that TV moms promote or just that thought of "I paid so much for this, I'm not going to let it go to waste."  Or even, "This is just soooo good....I can't stop eating it!"

The point that the book is trying to make is that we have to head off that relationship with our food.  Break it.  It's okay if we don't eat everything on our plates.  If it's not okay, maybe we need smaller plates and smaller servings.  (More about that, perhaps, later.)

We need to heal our relationships with God.  Stop questioning what happens and accept it.  It's in God's plan.  Roth portrays this with the story about her cat.  She was mean to it one day (or felt she was excessively mean) and tossed it out into the yard.  After a couple of hours, they tried to find the cat and could never get him to come in the way they usually did.  The next morning, they found the poor kitty dead under one of the bushes in the yard.  She felt guilt -- it's my fault the cat has died.  They took the cat to the vet for an autopsy to find out why/how he really died, and it was an undiagnosed heart defect.  She continued to feel guilty until a friend helped her realize that it wasn't her fault.  The cat died because it was the cat's time to die.  He'd had a good life, and he lived as long as he should have lived.

We do this a lot.  We stress over things that we have no control over.  I think it may be a large part of what makes us human.  We know that, eventually, something is going to happen, and we have to trust in God that He's the one in control and things will go the way He wants them to go.  We have to stop relying on food to calm us in our stress or to be our comfort.  We have to have faith that things are happening the way they are meant to happen.  (That doesn't mean take a passive approach to things we can change, but if you know you can't change it, if you know there's nothing you can do to make it different, accept that it's happened the way it was supposed to happen and move forward.)

Roth also suggests meditation, which is something that Jillian Michaels suggested in her book.  (And for some insight on meditation, read Eat, Pray, Love.)  She says that it helps, once you learn to mediate, to calm you down and change your focus.

Meditation in hard.  Your goal is to focus on a single thing or to completely clear your mind.  Sit quietly for a moment.  Go on, close your eyes and breathe slowly for two minutes.  I'll wait.

Okay, how many things crossed your mind during those two minutes?  Did you think about all the things that usually stress you out (what should I fix for dinner tonight?  I wish my husband would stop doing that thing that's so stupid.  I need to schedule this appointment, make a shopping list, etc.)  That's why the Hindu meditate using a repeated word.  (Yeah, think "Ohm.....ohm.....ohm...")  You focus on the word instead of all the stresses of the day.  Yeah, I haven't mastered that, either, but I haven't tried.