I always had a fairly tepid relationship with food. I was a chubby baby, moved off the breast to drink synthetic milk because the doctors were worried that I was so bouncy. I put on a bit extra starting from the age of seven. I look at pictures now and see that I was not a fat kid, but in the 70’s when other kids were stringy, I was padded. I always felt BIG. My two adorable sisters were 4 and 5 years younger than me, and my largeness in comparison was a source of distress for my parents. I was told often that I “didn’t NEED” to eat that. It seemed like there was quite a lot that I “didn’t need” but none of it could be determined by me. And yes, everything on the plate had to end up in me at every meal. I did not taste two thirds of it, but it had to be put somewhere.
It’s interesting. Michael, my dear lovefriend, is a dog whisperer. He is an expert on dogs, he knows dogmind. He says when a dog isn’t allowed to eat, or play with, or try, or smell something, that repressed desire will always seek release at some point: often crazily, irrepressibly, fanatically. The problem is, for dogs that are not allowed to play with other dogs, or snuffle to their own contentment, or walk a long, long way—they tend to overdo it when they finally get the freedom to experience life, so they must be lovingly guided and allowed to experience what they want, without being dominated.
Every starved beast goes through a period of gluttony, in reaction to repression. A dog has to experience the fulfilment of its hungers and desires, in order to recognize its boundaries. The key is to not develop the gluttony itself into a way of life, but to cultivate understanding of one’s own rhythms and tastes and hungers. There is wisdom there for anyone who does anything to excess, and it has helped me seeing it through the eyes of a dog whisperer. Doctors Munter and Hirschman begin with the knowledge that diets cause compulsive eating, and that food is the solution to cure it. Their work at Overcoming Overeating is a revelation.
I used food as a comfort, and a nervous release, but I didn’t LOVE food. That heavy people LOVE food more than everyone else is a myth. We use food to distract ourselves, we use it to sensually overload other feelings. It is purely utilitarian. You might sit alongside a heavy person during a meal and realize they are barely tasting what they are eating. The chewing, the swallowing, is often a nervous action, it’s exercise. I know this because I've been heavier most of my adult life. Heavy folks aren’t ‘more’enslaved by their tastebuds than anyone else. In fact, they are generally less so.
Pop culture stereotypes of fat people are so irritating, so unimaginative. We don’t think about food all the time, we don’t stuff our faces gleefully in front of other people, we would usually never go on and on about food in front of thin people. Fat people do most of their eating alone. Wendy McClure’s blog talks about pop culture stereotypes of the fat to very great effect, and she’s written the book about it, too.
I don’t experience my body as being “fat,” and it usually surprises me when others react to me as if I am, glancing at my plate to see how much is on it. I used to be a great deal bigger. When I moved to Europe, I lost about 60 pounds over the course of three years, without necessarily trying. I just changed my lifestyle. Maybe I’ll tell you about it, sometime.
I was a stay-at-home-mom for most of my marriage. I have cooked or prepared something for my family to eat every day for the last nineteen years. This is not something that I have cultivated or enjoyed in myself, not a skill that I would have put on a resume. It was just part of my contract. But along the way, I think I got good at it.
Two things happened. One, led by some mysterious force that I didn’t know I had access to, I made enchanted cookies for a group of friends, food shamanically filled with LOVE, intentionally created with a specific energetic signature. I shared the recipe and the response was: When’s the book coming out? I had been making enchanted food for holidays for years, but I hadn’t noticed how rare it is.
Most people cannot handle the fullness of truly enchanted food: the intimacy of it, the richness of it, the soulfulness of it. For every fat person who uses food to numb out, there are ten thin people who refuse to participate in true nourishment. You can identify a person with food issues: they hate certain foods, they don’t eat many things, they fetishize gourmet food in order to make it abstract, they turn restaurant-going into ego drama, they build elaborate allergy histories, they cultivate intricate vegan/no wheat/no sugar diets to distance themselves from sharing and soulful nourishment even more.
Folks who are extremely picky about what will enter them likewise turn fullness and beauty and love and surprise and delight away at the door. Food is intimacy: the ability to truly TASTE the sun on the wheat and the rain in the apple can make you cry if will feel it. It is the first way that the spirits of the land entered us: through our mouths we take them in.
And then I met Michael, a man who has not been married, who has made his own sparse meals for decades. His enjoyment of the food I cook opened my eyes. Remember, he is part dog. He actually growls with pleasure when food pleases him; his eyes sparkle. His appreciation made my own children value it, as well, and it got me interested in cooking really good food. Food filled with love, with nutrition for the soul.
So with this I’m doing what I normally would never have done: talking about food. I wouldn’t have talked about food when I was of fatmind, because it would have drawn attention to my body, and I would have worried that thin people thought I was obsessed with food, which is what “they” tend to believe about fat people. I was never obsessed with food. I ignored food and I used it to temporarily put all the attention in my mouth so that everything else was numbed. But now I am finally tasting. I am repairing an impulse that was numbed a long time ago. I am repairing it, scrumptiously.
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