Geneen Roth - When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair: 50 Ways to Feel Thin, Gorgeous, and Happy (When You Feel Anything But)

Fifty Ways to Feel

Thin, Gorgeous,

and Happy

(When You Feel

Anything But)

Geneen Roths books amaze me, this new one maybe even more than the others, and thats saying quite a lot. Before I read Geneens first book, Feeding the Hungry Heart , I spent a quarter of a century either on a diet and being good, or falling off the diet and eating my body weight in fats and sugars and carcinogens. I loved being too thin. I loved having people worry about me. Weve got to put a little meat on those bones, theyd say with concern. Words like these made my heart soar. Unfortunately, after a number of years my heart really was soaringlike someone about to have a heart attack as the result of grave electrolytic imbalance.

The madness did not begin to come to an end until February 13, 1987, when I ate three gigantic meals and chased down each with a glass of Epsom salts. Epsom salts were my purging drug of choicetheyre the all-time greatest laxative, although there are several unpleasant little side effects: muscle cramps, heart arrhythmia, death. Shaking and totally out of control, I realized I was in serious danger. The next day, I met for the first time with a therapist named Rita who had been reading Geneens books. I never purged again.

Im not sure why I want to begin this Foreword to Geneens deeply nourishing new book with secrets about how damaged I am about food. Maybe so that you will know that I qualify to write food miraclesthat I am one of you. That you are one of us. Maybe so that you will believe that if Geneens gentle birth-coaching can help me break through, it can help anyone.

Geneens writing has helped me change my life dramatically, helped me find my way home after a lifetime lost on the highways and byways of food obsession. Her books have helped me find freedom after being held hostage by a distorted body image and the values of a culture that I dont actually buy. She takes one of the most complicated and confusing and antagonistic parts of my lifemy body and me, my body and food, my weight, my heart, my beingand she renders it clear and compassionate. She gently throws the lights on for me.

I love this new book especially because it is so distilled, so essential. I love it also because it came along during one of the rockiest emotional times of my life. I had just ended a romance with someone I thought I might marry, gone through a gigantic amount of pain and loss, and then found myself crushed because through it all, my weight stayed the same. I felt so ripped off! Usually if I hurt enough emotionally, I drop a few pounds, and then I look gaunt and needy, and everyone feels more tenderly toward me. But I didnt lose any weight when my romance ended, and when I saw how sad this made me, I realized once again that this food thingthis body thingis so tough.

Until I encountered Geneens work, I had no sense that I deserved all the miracles that food can be aboutnourishment, deliciousness, health. I just thought that if I lost a few more pounds, and maybe started jogging, everything would fall into place. I was convinced that I needed to resist food, that doing so would prove that I was a strong person. I felt that if I tasted and loved the food that went slipping down my throat, then I would be vulnerable to all manners of terrible desire. Also, that I would end up weighing well over 1,200 pounds.

Its been a long roadthree steps forward, two steps back. From time to time, I still slip into my old patterns. I wake up some mornings and decide that I absolutely must lose a few pounds, begin a new diet, join a health club, and make an appointment in Rio for a little liposuction. Once a year, I sneak off to the local drug store andwith the furtiveness of someone buying the rankest pornographybuy a cheap bathroom scale. Then, several days later, when the trance has broken, I slink down to the Salvation Army collection center and hand my contraband to the puzzled Asian volunteer who works the collection bin. Heres another scale, I always say cheerfully. After a long moment, he always replies, Thanks.

Wherever you are on the path toward health and balance, whether you have just begun the process or are many years along, these essays will guide you, feed you, make you laugh, and provide some light for each days healing. They will help you understand or remember that everything you need for self-acceptance and joy is inside you now, like seeds already planted in the moist ground of a garden. All it takes for them to grow is a little water, a little time, a little attention, a little love.

The gift of this book is that the pieces are so small and perfectly self-contained. Geneens richness and wisdom and deep compassion and wonderful humor come to us on such exquisite little plates this time.

So, make yourself a lovely cup of tea, put on your favorite soft pants, wrap yourself in a blanket given to you by someone who loves you, and breathe.

Come join us on the road back.

Anne Lamott

Throughout the book, I have used feelings of being fat interchangeably with feelings of being incompetent, unattractive, unworthy, out of control, valueless, invisible. Our culture links fatness with an entire world of undesirable qualities, and unfortunately, women who struggle with their weight do the same.

If you do not identify with the issue of fatness per se, you can substitute anything you dont want to be or feel in its place. Although I am most familiar with feelings of unworthiness as they translate through body size, issues of the heart are universal.

And despite all rumors to the contrary, if you are the kind of person who cannot gain weight no matter what you eat, and who looks at other women in amazement when they talk about sacrificing their firstborn for caramel custard, you are written into these pages just the same.

My loosest jeans are tight on me today. This is not a good sign.

Last week was Passover, the holiday that celebrates the liberation of the Jews from slavery and their exodus from Egypt. We acknowledge this freedom by telling the Passover story at ritual gatherings called seders. We also acknowledge it by consuming astonishing amounts of food that people who are trying to free themselves from strokes and heart attacks wouldnt consider eating.

Last week, I ate matzoh balls made with chicken fat, fruit compote made with pineapples dipped in heavy syrup, and noodle pudding made with butter, brown sugar, and sour cream. For dessert, I ate cheesecake and two kinds of flourless chocolate cake.

Every night for five nights.

During the day, I ate leftovers from the night before.

Although I make it a practice not to weigh myself, my fat jeans tell me Ive gained weight, possibly four or five pounds, and, for the umpteenth time, Im convinced that my brain has truly snapped and I am five minutes away from being as big as a house. Or at least a small cottage.

The way I see it today, I have a few options: liposuction, buying bigger jeans, or flailing myself. Of the three, the only one that is completely out of the question is bigger jeans. (My husband, Matt, suggested the jeans option. He thought it was reasonable. I told him I would rather get a root canal without Novocain. That ended the discussion.) The problem with liposuction is that it goes against every principle I have. Also, besides being costly, it is terribly inefficient as it doesnt account for future Passovers, Thanksgivings, or trips to Bettes Bakeshop for Death-by-Chocolate cake. This leaves flailing myself about being a hypocrite who has written five books on eating disorders, worked with over forty thousand people during the twenty years Ive been teaching Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating workshops, and can now only fit into oversized green flannel pajamas.