Nicole Berrie - Body Harmony: Nourishing, Plant-Based Recipes for Intuitive Eating

Let the record show I took all the blows
And did it my way

My Way, lyrics by PAUL ANKA

Food and I go way back. Growing up with a father who had type 2 diabetes, I was always aware of how eating directly affected your health. Each morning, I would watch him meticulously measure half a cup of Grape-Nuts cereal and half a cup of skim milk, which he would have with half a grapefruit. This ritual not only comforted me but taught me lessonspositive and negativeabout restraint and consistency. There were Sugarless Wednesdays at my preschool filled with ants on a log (aka celery sticks with Skippy peanut butter and raisins), seaweed and rice kimbap rolls made lovingly by my Korean grandmother when I visited her in Seoul, and the occasional pastrami and rye jaunt to the Carnegie Deli with Dad. (Im being bad, he would grin as he took a big juicy bite of his towering sandwich.) Healthy or not, those were joyful memories. But it wasnt always a picture-perfect relationship with food. Something happened along the way so that I disconnected from that joy and began to fear food.

My first memory of detouring away from love and into fear (a phrase I learned from my mentor, Gabrielle Bernstein) might be when I began carrying a bag of Doritos into bed with me at the age of seven. Each night, I would secretly snack on the hazard-orange cheesy chips while devouring chapter after chapter of The Baby-Sitters Club, repressing the guilt that came along with no one knowing my dirty little secret. This was the same time my parents marriage began to unravel. I would clutch that foil bag like a security blanket as I crunched in the dark while my dad moved his things first into the guest room down the hall, then into a bachelor pad in the city, then into a different house altogether.

Beginning around the same time, I began to suffer verbal and emotional abuse from someone I loved and trusted who used that love and trust as a weapon, exploiting both at their whim and constantly telling me that I was unlovable, crazy, and no good. My heart was stubborn, refusing to believe in my unworthiness, but slowly it began to seep into my soul and I began to detach from my true, joyful self. I was constantly nervous that what I said, what I did, and who I was at my core would trigger the rage of someone I trusted and depended on. When the abuse continued long enough, I began to doubt my innate goodness.

As I grew into my early teens, I tried to bury these painful feelings in alcohol, drugs, and food. I dabbled in the usual teenage suburban extracurricular activitiessmoking weed, raiding the parents liquor cabinetand this rapidly progressed to going on Ecstasy-fueled benders, dropping tabs of acid at Starbucks, and doing cocaine and ketamine bumps in my high school bathroom. So long as it didnt involve a needle, I was up for it. By age sixteen, I was addicted to cocaine. Simultaneously, I picked up dieting habits from girlfriends and glossy magazines that included drinking shots of balsamic vinegar to speed metabolism, working out in garbage bags to sweat more, and simply not eating at all. This period of deprivation led to a separate period of bingeing and purging, which lasted through college. But I hid it well. From the outside, I was a functioning young woman, but behind closed doors, I was spiraling out of control.

At eighteen, through therapy, I quit using hard drugs but turned to another drug to anesthetize my painfood. Food had been my first drug of choice. I remember making the discovery, flashing back to those chips on late nights during my parents divorceOH! Food brings me comfort. Food makes me feel good. Food is always there. Food doesnt criticize, hurt, or scare you. What I didnt realize was that I was using it as a weapon against myself. A clear sign was that no matter what I ate, it was never enough. I was using food to fill a void that it never could, just as I was using alcohol and drugs to escape.

Weve all had moments where we have used food outside its first and foremost role of nourishing ourselves. In fact, food had taken on such a bastardized role, I became terrified of it. I was terrified to eat because of the boomerang effect. If it was deemed good, how long could I keep it up before an inevitable rebound? If it was deemed bad, how fast could I purge to get it out of me? Nowhere in this cycle was food my friend. It became an enemy. There were times where I would go weeks, months even, without a binge-and-purge cycle, but I felt it looming over me as a dark inevitability. Not once did I go deep enough to examine my feelings, or to examine the hurt girl who was chronically abused emotionally, verbally, and at times physically by someone whom I loved and who I know loved me but was broken themselves. I was a white-knuckled survivor. I kept going. I buried and moved on. Yet my pain and trauma kept me tethered to my past.

I was twenty when my fathermy rock, my hero, my best friendsuddenly passed away, from heart failure, in 2002. I had not yet healed from my childhood trauma, so grief was then heaped on top of someone who was already broken. But after a time, grief was the impetus for finally facing my demons. And to feel more connected to my father, I explored a more spiritual path.

It began through reading Thich Nhat Hanh, a gentle Vietnamese Buddhist monk who wrote extensively on anger, presence, and pain. Then I began to read Eckhart Tolle, who spoke of the pain-body and stillness. For the first time, I began to sense a presence deeper within. And what a relief that was. I flirted with meditating, bowing, and chanting, but I was still very much planted in the modern world and not quite ready to commit myself to full-time healing.

In my mid-twenties, I began an exciting career in glossy magazines where I assisted a photographer who took me under his wing and introduced me to the world of fashion. My life revolved around celebrity-studded photo shoots. It was exhilarating, but my colleagues were searching for the next cleanse or get-thin-quick scheme while peddling body image confidence and feminine empowerment to the masses. We were chain-smoking while downing kombucha. There was a disconnect.

One Sunday, I was home reading the New York Times Styles section and I came across a cover story describing women in wellness making a career out of healing people. Reading these womens stories lit a fire in me, and I called Gabrielle Bernstein, who was featured in the article as a self-help coach. My phone kept breaking up. Between spotty sentences, Come over, she said. I have a feeling we should meet in person. And we did.

We sat on her living room floor. She asked me to close my eyes and we began to meditate. During the session, she called in the terrified little girl who was denied love and tormented for so many years. I began to cry. Silently sob, actually.

She asked me to look at seven-year-old Nicole, to hold her, love her, embrace her, and tell her, Its going to be okay. She is taken care of now. She is loved. She is not responsible. Its not her fault.