In her book, Women, Food and God, Geneen Roth has a chapter entitled, It's Not About the Weight, but It's Not Not About the Weight. I really enjoyed reading this chapter, and highly recommend the entire book to anyone struggling with weight, food, body image and just about any other problem. Geneen lays out a brilliant case in support of the idea that weight and food issues are elaborate smoke screens that we have constructed to hide painful situations, emotions and relationships that we do not want to deal with.
When we really take a look at how we handle food situations...walking past the chocolate cake and eating 15 paper thin slivers, avoiding birthday parties so we wont eat cupcakes, never allowing ice cream into the house because we can't control ourselves...we take advantage of a tremendous opportunity for self discovery.
- Perhaps we've made a habit of lying to ourselves about many things in our lives, not just the fact that we really want to eat the chocolate cake.
- Is it possible that the real reason we don't want to go to the birthday party is because our ex will be there?
- Maybe we are unable to exert self-control in any area of our life, so forcing specific food deprivations makes us feel successful in maintaining some control.
Take a look at how you handle food situations. What has food become in your life? I struggle with these questions every day. Am I hungry for food right now, standing in front of the fridge, or am I lonely? Does my body really crave chocolate chip cookies, or a nice fresh salad? If my body could talk, what would it say? Ohhhhhh....that's a good one!
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