Geneen Roth's Story—
The Search For True Nourishment

By Geneen Roth

When I stopped dieting, it was because I glimpsed the possibility that my crazy eating was the sanest thing I'd ever done. If I didn't reject it, try to be good or measure up to an external standard of right eating or right body size, if I was curious and open about each part of it — what I was eating, how I felt while I was eating, what happened in the moments before I suddenly found myself hacking away at frozen cake in an attempt to get the whole thing into my mouth ten minutes ago — the eating itself would lead me back to the feelings, beliefs, fears that created the addiction. Once I understood what I was using food to do, I could ask myself if there was a more direct way to have what I wanted without hurting myself in the process.

One night after I ate an entire pizza, three pieces of cheesecake, a bag of potato chips and a pint of pumpkin ice cream, I sat down to write instead of going into my usual whirl of "I can't believe I did that. I am a pig, out of control, hopeless." After about half an hour of writing into the center of the feelings (using a method I've since called "writing inquiry"), I realized I believed that being thin meant being in relationships, and given my history of picking "projects" instead of people — men who, like broken cars, needed years of tuning up, then left and gave someone else the benefit of all my hard labor — I wanted to be alone. But since being thin and being in exhausting relationships were synonymous in my mind, I kept eating to protect myself, believing that being fat made me so unattractive, no one, not even a battered VW bug would want me. When I understood the connection I was making between being fat and being alone, I didn't have to force myself to eat less; awareness and clear seeing did it for me. Eating whole pizzas and stuffing myself with ten thousand calories at a time no longer seemed exciting. I didn't have to use willpower. I didn't have to shame myself. I didn't have to lock the cookies in cabinets and give the key to my neighbor. I didn't have to throw my pizza in the garbage and cover it with moldy cottage cheese. Once I saw the tangled wisdom in my eating, it began to unravel itself. Without dieting, without force. It was as if I'd been living in a dark, stale room for thirty years and someone switched on the light. I couldn't go back to believing that light didn't exist. No one was more surprised than the me I'd taken myself to be: someone who was destined to trudge through life with fat thighs and an appetite she couldn't control.

The real miracle wasn't that I lost weight or that the biggest problem of my life was no longer a problem, it was that all this time, my longing — which expressed itself in distorted eating — was for the right thing but I didn't know how to listen, to be attentive. All this time, my self-destructive eating was a valiant though misguided attempt at being fully alive. Like a plant naturally curves to the light, I could trust the curves of my heart. I could trust that what I wanted most was to be whole. I was too busy pushing myself, driving myself, judging myself, hating myself, thinking I knew what I was supposed to change into and how to do it. I was like a caterpillar who spent seventeen years shaming myself for not being a better, stronger, thinner caterpillar without ever once considering that being a butterfly was possible. In the end, breaking free from emotional eating is about finally trusting that something else exists besides pain, sorrow, hatred, suffering, and that there is a rhythm, an order, and a natural push for light in every single one of us.

FEEDBACK: CLICK HERE to email comments and feedback. Please note the title of the article or the author's name. Include your own name or type "name withheld" by request. Thoughtful responses will be published in our next edition.