Geneen Roth - When Food Is Love: Exploring the Relationship Between Eating and Intimacy

Table of Contents

A rare and special book that touches our inner selves with extraordinary courage, authenticity, and beauty. I have seen very few books with this kind of clarity and human depth. It will move you to tears and to joy. It will entertain and delight you, and it will make you a deeper and more compassionate human being.John Robbins, author of Diet for a New America

SPECTACULAR! I laughed and I cried... a tender and daring book that youll never forget.

Laura Davis, coauthor of The Courage to Heal

I SEE MIRACLES IN MY LIFE EVERY DAY, AND ROTH IS ONE OF THE PEOPLE WHO HELPED MAKE THAT

HAPPEN.Anne Lamott in Mademoiselle

When Food Is Love is Roths seminal work. This is a big, beautiful, and important book. I cannot say enough about it. I hope everyone reads it.Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones

She tells of her own experiences with a non-blink frankness cushioned by the gracefulness of her prose. Chicago Tribune

This book is A) good enough to eat, B) nourishing to the heart.

Jack Kornfield, Buddhist teacher,
coauthor of Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

GENEEN ROTH, the founder of the Breaking Free workshops, is a writer and teacher who has gained international prominence through her work with people who use food to cope with difficulties in their lives. She is the author of Feeding the Hungry Heart, Breaking Free from Emotional Eating, Appetites, and Why Weight? A frequent guest on television and radio programs, she has written for and been featured in Time, Ms., New Woman, Family Circle, and Cosmopolitan. She lives in California.

ALSO BY GENEEN ROTH

WORKSHOPS AND LECTURES

For a schedule of Geneen Roths workshops and lectures, or if you are interested in bringing one to your area, please write her at the address below.

She welcomes any feedback or responses to When Food Is Love, but regrets that she is unable to answer individual letters.

Geneen Roth
P.O. Box 2852
Santa Cruz, CA 95063

I am grateful to have friends who are willing to take the time to understand, question, and deepen my writing. For welcoming each chapter as I finished it and for gluing me to life, I thank Sara Friedlander. For her superb, insightful, and challenging reading of the manuscript, I thank Laura Davis. For offering her brilliance, her impeccable line editing, and the perspective of half a lifetime of friendship, I thank Jace. Schinderman. For providing a novelists perspective and a letter I will treasure always, I thank Eddie Lewis. For questioning and pushing me to rewrite more than a few chapters, I thank Cliff Friedlander. For supporting what I hoped was true, I thank Katy Hutchins. For the glorious pleasure of writing together and for seeing my writers soul, I thank Natalie Goldberg.

I would also like to thank:

Maggie Phillips, for teaching me about the content of the book by encouraging me to speak the unspeakable and by being a model of love that endures; Sil Reynolds, for giving herself to me as workshop assistant, teaching associate, and sister; Ruth Wiggs, my mother, for teaching me about courage, fortitude, and healing by flying to California to read the book with me; Karen Russell, for her willingness to share her joy and her sorrow, and for the example she sets of a life lived with passion and grace; Maureen Nemeth, for her efficiency in running the Breaking Free office and for the freedom to write it gives me; Nancy Wechsler, for her reassuring, wise counsel; Michaela Hamilton, Elaine Koster, Alexia Dorszynski, and the sales force at Dutton, for their confidence in me and their commitment to my work; Angela Miller, for persevering despite and because of everything weve been through together; the woman at the 1988 Omega workshop, for suggesting the title of this book; the participants in my workshops, for touching and inspiring me with their longing and their love; Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Stephen Levine, and Emmanuel, for blessing me with teachings that open my heart and remind me where home is.

Peg Parkinsonmy first editor, my friend, and my mentordied after editing the manuscript and before its publication. Her spirit is woven throughout the book and inside me.

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

When I was eleven, I began dieting, and for the next seventeen years I spent the largest part of every day thinking about what I wanted to eat that I shouldnt and what I should eat that I didnt want. As I began spinning a world in which there were only two players, food and me, my capacity to be affected by other people diminished greatly. By the time I was twenty-eight, nothing mattered to me except being thin.

After the publication of Feeding the Hungry Heart and Breaking Free, after I reached my natural weight and stayed there, I discovered that it wasnt being thin I wanted, it was getting thin.

As long as my attention was consumed by what I ate, what size clothes I wore, how much cellulite I had on the backs of my legs, and what my life would be like when I finally lost the weight, I could not be deeply hurt by another person. My obsession with weight was more dramatic and certainly more immediate than anything that happened between me and a friend or lover. When I did feel rejected by someone, I reasoned that she or he was rejecting my body, not me, and that when I got thin, things would be different.

I thought I wanted to be thin; I discovered that what I wanted was to be invulnerable.

Then I met Matt, a man with whom I wanted to spend my life. After the initial bliss of falling in love, I came face to face with myself and discovered I was like a child who spends her time in a fantasy world and doesnt know how to play with real children. I didnt know how to engage myself deeply with a person, only with food.

I had friends, good friends, a best friend. I had lovers; I had been in one relationship for seven years. But I am not speaking of friends or lovers. I am speaking of intimacy, of surrender, trust, and a willingness to face, rather than run from, the worst of myself.

The wonderful thing about food is that it doesnt leave, talk back, or have a mind of its own. The difficult thing about people is that they do. Food was my lover for seventeen years and demanded nothing of me. Which was exactly the way I wanted it.

A few years ago, Glamour magazine conducted a survey of 33,000 women called Feeling Fat in a Thin Society. Seventy-five percent of the respondents said they felt too fat. The women were asked if their weight affected their feelings about themselves; 96 percent said it did. Given the choice of losing weight, happiness in a relationship, success at work, or hearing from an old friend, nearly half the women said losing weight would make them happier than anything else.