Geneen Roth - Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

Previous Books by Geneen Roth

When Food Is Love

The Craggy Hole in My Heart and the Cat Who Fixed It

Breaking Free from Emotional Eating

Feeding the Hungry Heart

When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair

Appetites

Why Weight?

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Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roth, Geneen.

Women, food, and God / Geneen Roth.

p. cm.

1. Compulsive eatingPsychological aspects. 2. Food habitsPsychological aspects. 3. ObesityPsychological aspects. 4. Self-help techniques. I. Title.

RC552.C65R674 2010

616.85'26dc22 2009021071

ISBN 978-1-4165-4307-7

ISBN 978-1-4391-6738-0 (ebook)

The names and details of some individuals have been changed.

For those who despair that there is no way through.

And for my retreat students,

who are living testimony that there is.

This is for you.

PART ONE
PRINCIPLES

PART TWO
PRACTICES

PART THREE
EATING

Chapter Eleven: Those Who Have Fun
and Those Who Dont

Women, Food and God

Eighty hungry women are sitting in a circle with bowls of cold tomato vegetable soup; they are glowering at me, furious. It is lunchtime on the third day of the retreat. During these daily eating meditations each woman approaches the buffet table, lines up to be served, takes her seat in the circle, and waits until we all sit down to eat. The process is agonizingly slowfifteen minutes or soespecially if food is your drug of choice.

Although the retreat is going well and many people here have had life-changing insights, at this moment no one cares. They dont care about stunning breakthroughs or having ninety pounds to lose or whether God exists. They want to be left alone with their food, period. They want me to take my fancy ideas about the link between spirituality and compulsive eating and go away. It is one thing to be conscious about food in the meditation hall, and another to be sitting in the dining room, refraining from taking even one bite until the entire group has been served. Also, Ive asked that silence be observed, so there are no frissons of laughter or chatty how-are-yous to distract attention from hunger or lack of it, since not everyone is hungry.

The retreat is based on a philosophy Ive developed over the past thirty years: that our relationship to food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to life itself. I believe we are walking, talking expressions of our deepest convictions; everything we believe about love, fear, transformation and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat. When we inhale Reeses peanut butter cups when we are not hungry, we are acting out an entire world of hope or hopelessness, of faith or doubt, of love or fear. If we are interested in finding out what we actually believenot what we think, not what we say, but what our souls are convinced is the bottom-line truth about life and afterlifewe need go no further than the food on our plates. God is not just in the details; God is also in the muffins, the fried sweet potatoes and the tomato vegetable soup. Godhowever we define him or heris on our plates.

Which is why eighty women and I are sitting in a circle with cold vegetable soup. I look around the room. Photographs of flowersintricate close-ups of a red dahlia, the golden edges of a white roseare hung on the wall. A bouquet of peach gladiolas is splayed so extravagantly on a side table that it looks as if it is prancing at the prom in its finery. Then I begin noticing the faces of my students. Marjorie, a psychologist in her fifties, is playing with her spoon and doesnt meet my eyes. A twenty-year-old gymnast named Patricia is wearing black tights and a lemon-colored tank top. Her tiny body sits like an origami bird on her cushiondelicate, perfectly erect. On her plate is a handful of sprouts and a fistful of salad, thats all. I look to my right and see Anna, a surgeon from Mexico City, biting one of her lips and tapping her fork on the plate impatiently. There are three pieces of bread with thick slabs of butter on her plate, a bit of salad, no soup, no vegetables. Her food says, Fuck you, Geneen, I dont have to play this ridiculous game. Watch me binge the second I get the chance. I nod at her as if to say, Yup, I understand how hard it is to slow down. I take a quick glance around the rest of the room, at faces, at plates. The air is thick with resistance to this eating meditation, and since I am the one who makes the rules, I am also the one at whom the fury is directed. Getting between people and their food is like standing in front of a speeding train; the act of being stopped in compulsive behavior is not exactly met with good cheer.

Anyone want to say anything before we begin? I ask.

Silence.

Then, blessings on our food and all that made it possible. The rain, the sun, the people who grew it, brought it here, served it here, I say.

I can hear Amanda, who is sitting to my right, taking a deep breath at the sound of the prayer. Across the room Zoe nods her head, as if to say, Oh, right. The earth, the sun, the rain. Glad theyre there. But not everyone is grateful to take one more second to do anything but eat. Louisa in her bright red running suit sighs and grunts an almost indiscernible Oh for Gods sakes. Can we puh-leese get on with this?! She looks as if she is ready to kill me. Humanely, of course, and only with the slightest bit of suffering, but still.

Now, take some time and notice what you put on your plate, I say. Notice if you were hungry when you chose the food. If you werent physically hungry, was there another kind of hunger present?

And looking at your plates, decide what you want to eat first and take a few bites. Notice how the food feels in your mouth. If it tastes like you thought it would taste. If it does what you thought it would do.

Three, four minutes pass amid the symphony of eating sounds: rustling, chewing, swallowing, clinking. I notice that Izzy, a six-foot-two willowy woman from France, is looking out the window and seems to have forgotten that we are eating. But most people are holding the plates up to their mouths so they can get the bites in faster.