Major a-ha! book: Women Food and God

When a book not only turns on a light bulb but shines a spotlight onto the way you feel about food, it's hard to begin to write about it in the usual pithy blog ways. The internet isn't all that well-suited to dramatic proclamations, but with a book with a title as heavy as Women Food and God, it seems we have no choice. So here goes: If you've ever been on a diet, hated your thighs, zoned out with a bag of potato chips, or felt that you could get your life clicking along if you could only lose 5, 50, or 100 pounds, you have to read this book. And given those parameters, that should pretty much mean all of you.

I first read an excerpt of Women Food and God in a magazine. And for as many times as you've heard that your issues with food aren't really about food, this was the first time that someone could articulate these ideas in a way that made me go whoa. It's not just because you had a crappy childhood or because you have low self-esteem (all those things usually play a part, too). Food---or for that matter gambling, drugs, sex, overspending, any activity that you do to compulsion, to escape---writes Roth, is about a hunger for something else, "a yearning to know what is beyond the world of appearances."

Okay, let's pause. Maybe you're thinking nuh-uh: My relationship with food is about pleasure, or lack of self-discipline, or just really loving ice cream. But consider this: if you have gone on a diet as a way to solve your problems, or looked at yourself in the mirror with a fair bit of disgust, or cried when you couldn't fit into your favorite pair of jeans that fit only last year, are you willing to admit that something else could be going on? That if your relationship to food were as simple as calories in-calories out or steely willpower, that you wouldn't be running into the same issues, again and again?

"We want to know wonder and delight and passion" writes Roth, "and if instead we've given up on ourselves, if we've vacated our longings, if we've left possibility behind we will feel an emptiness we can't name. We will feel as if something is missing because something is missing---the connection to the source of all sweetness, all love, all power, all peace, all joy, all stillness."

And this brings us to God. Roth isn't telling us to go to church or start reading the Bible. Roth's vision of "God" is about the world beyond the material world: kindness, beauty, love; it's world of vast expanse accessible through silence, meditation, or poetry.

What she is telling us, though, is to get to know ourselves in a way that is deeper than our understanding of our personality, our likes, our preferences, and certainly more meaningful than the way we look in leggings. To reevaulate that voice that speaks to us constantly in mean, belittling tones (writer Anne Lamott calls it Radio Station KFKD). To reconsider the stories we've told ourselves for years about who we are and what we're capable of. And that doing so can heal our relationship with food, which is really just a displaced relationship to something bigger.

A weight problem can be a cover for another problem. It's a tangible problem on top of layer of something else. The work of self-loathing or counting calories or both, keeps us endlessly busy on the surface level so that we never have to dig down to what's underneath. "As long as you are striving and pushing and trying hard to do something that can never be done," writes Roth, "you don't have to feel lost or helpless because you always have a goal and that goal can never be reached."

But that goal can be reached! you say. I can in fact lose 5, 50, or 100 pounds. And yes, you can lose that weight, and you know you can because you've probably done it before. "Something is wrong," Roth tells the women who come to her retreats, experiences she writes about extensively in the book, "but it will not be fixed through losing weight."

The most challenging part of any system that addresses weight-related issues is that unless it also addresses the part of you that wants something you can't name--the heart of your heart, not the size of your thighs---it won't work. We don't want to be thin because thinness is inherently life-affirming or lovable or healthy. [...] We want to be thin because thinness is the purported currency of happiness and peace and contentment in our time. And although the currency is a lie---the tabloids are filled with miserable skinny celebrities---most systems of weight loss fail because they don't live up to their promise: weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Or content. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart. Spiritual hunger can never be solved on the physical level.
This is a complex, dense book, the kind you have to read more than once. But I'll leave it at this: for any woman who has struggled with her weight, or had moments of self-loathing, or looked around at her life and wondered, "Is this it?" it's an absolute must read.

Did any of this resonate with you? Could your relationship with food be about a hunger for something else?

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