I am reading a book called, “Woman Food and God” by Geneen Roth, and in Chapter Two she opens with this.
“On the first morning of my retreats, I tell my students that the greatest blessing in their lives is their relationship with food. They look at me rather quizzically, but the sentiment sounds so lovely that they are willing to hear me out. Then I say that we are not going to fix their relationship with food; we are actually going to walk through the door of their eating problem and see what’s behind it. Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.
They stare. They scowl. They whisper to one another.
Why would any sane person believe that tolerating the intolerable is a worthy endeavor?
Mayhem is five minutes away.
Then, because it seems like the thing to do, I tell them the struggling, suffering, hellish part of my story. Over the last few decades I’ve discovered that stories of personal hell, sprinkled with intense and hostile moments, go a long way in diffusing bitterness. I describe the years of gaining and losing a thousand pounds, loathing myself, being suicidal. Then I talk about the switch to not diet and eating what I want to eat.
I’ve told this story for many more years than I have lived it, but it only recently became clear to me that the radical part of the tale is not that I stopped dieting; it’s that I stopped trying to fix myself. I stopped fighting with myself, stopped blaming myself, my mother, my latest boyfriend for my weight. And since diets were my most flagrant attempts at fixing myself, I stopped them as well. I didn’t care anymore that I was fat that I could only fit into summer dresses in November; I had reached the threshold of struggling and figured I had two choices: Stop dieting or kill myself.
Most of my students can’t imagine a world in which they would stop dieting or trying to fix the size of their thighs. It is easier to imagine people coming back from the dead or Brad Pitt asking them to get married than to imagine themselves dropping the war with their bodies. They have whole relationships built on commiserating about the twenty pounds they have to lose and the jeans that are too tight and the latest greatest diets. They fit in by hating themselves. By trying hard and then harder to lose that last twenty, fifty, eighty pounds- and never being able to do it. The never being able to do it is necessary if they want to fit in. The constant war on food and body size is important if they want to be loved. They are like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain and almost getting there but never actually arriving.
The great thing about being Sisyphus is that you have your work cut out for you. You always have something to do. As long as you are striving and pushing and trying hard to do something that can never be done, you know who you are; someone with a weight problem who is working hard to be thin. You don’t have to feel lost or helpless because you have a goal and that goal can never be reached.
In an April 2007 UCLA Study of the effectiveness of dieting, researchers found that one of the best predictions of weight gain was having lost weight on a diet at some point during the years before the study started. Among those who were followed for fewer than two years, 83 percent gained back more weight than they had lost. Another study found that people who went on diets were worse off than people who didn’t.
Failing is built into the weight game. There is no way to play and win.” Geneen Roth.
