One of my classmates and one of my clients highly recommended Geneen Roth's new book, Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, so I bought it, but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I was also aware that Roth had been on Oprah, but I didn't see that either.
So now Oprah is featuring Roth (again) in her magazine, which is available online.
Here is are a couple of brief excerpt from the book and some info about Roth, including her food and eating guidelines.
Why Are You Eating?
The Oprah Winfrey Show | May 12, 2010
Over the years, Oprah has been very open about her struggles with weight. "You all know my story—the highs and lows and ups and downs. My skinny self, my fat self," Oprah says. But after all these years, Oprah says she's finally found the answer. "I have come across something so profound that I think [to everybody] who's ever felt that it's a losing battle, here is an opportunity to win. This has literally broken me open when it comes to my relationship with food, because if you struggle with your weight, what we're about to share with you today might be actually the first time in your life that you begin to understand the real reasons you are fat and allow those reasons to be a miracle for your life."
The discovery in question is author Geneen Roth's new best-selling book, Women, Food, and God. Readers say it's helping to free them from the vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting by getting to the core of why they're overweight.
Geneen says she was a crash dieter herself for many years, gaining and losing more than 1,000 pounds, but after finding herself on the brink of suicide, she had a breakthrough. "First of all, not dieting. Dieting leads to self-hatred and self-loathing, making you feel crazy about yourself," she says. "The other breakthrough is that your relationship with food, rather than being the curse, and rather than being the thing that you want to get rid of, is, itself, the doorway to the life you most want."
Having issues with weight is always about more than the food, Geneen says. "Your beliefs show up in your relationship with food. So if I'm eating when I'm not hungry or bored, I'm basically saying I can't feel these feelings. 'Life is too much for me. There's no goodness in my life except for food right here, right now,'" she says. "You're basically eating because you've given up on something, some part of yourself."
Oprah says she had an aha! moment when reading about how people's relationships with food mirrors their belief systems. "I realized that is what I have done, and so many other people have done, for years. You think that, 'I am so small that the pain is going to overwhelm me,' but really the truth is you've already experienced that pain," she says.
"Yes, you have, and what food does at that point is it doubles your pain, rather than make it go away," Geneen says. "You're still in pain about what you were in pain about before you ate, but now you've added a whole level of more discomfort which is: 'Oh, I can't believe I ate this. What's wrong with me? Am I ever going to get my life together? Is it ever going to get better?' Then you're feeling like a failure on top of the discomfort you were feeling before."
Lots of people understand why women and food are mentioned in the title of Geneen's book, but why God? Geneen says she isn't talking about God in the religious sense. Instead, she's talking about what she calls the source. "We each have this longing—we've had moments of awe and wonder in our lives. A lot of us don't call that God, but we know that something is possible for every one of us besides our daily lives, the daily grind. The way we get caught with errands and emails and taking care of other people. We feel that this possibility exists," Geneen says. "I'm talking about wonder and mystery and possibility ... or the feeling you have in nature. The feeling that everything is possible."
Oprah says that in reading Women, Food, and God, she has learned that a woman's relationship with food is directly related to how close she is to the source. "That's really what this book is about," she says. "The issue isn't really the food. It is about your disconnection from that which is real which we call God."
In Women, Food, and God, Geneen delves into why women turn to food even when they aren't hungry. "Obsession gives you something to do besides have your heart shattered by heart-shattering events," she writes.
The emotional struggle that accompanies overeating is familiar, Geneen says, whereas the "heart-shattering events" are often new and raw. "People are afraid that the pain will destroy them. Or the heartbreak, or the discomfort even. ... We don't actually know that we can feel those feelings without being destroyed by them," she says. "Getting up and living day-to-day and going through the stuff of day-to-day, that's difficult. But somehow we believe that food is cushioning it."
Oprah says even she turns to food when life gets hard. "There's still anxiety when I have to say no to someone," she says. "I still worry, 'What are they going to think' ... [That happened to me recently and] I did not eat a pound of potato chips. I ate a pound of lettuce. But it's the same thing. I've switched the drug from potato chips to lettuce."
In that moment, Oprah says she started questioning her actions. After saying no and standing up for herself, why was she so anxiety-ridden that she had to eat a bowl of lettuce? "I went back to what you had said in the book,” she says. “What I'm really feeling is every time I have ever been beaten by my grandmother. ... What I recognize as I'm stuffing myself with the lettuce is I still have that feeling of if I don't do what pleased the other person, then somehow that person has the power to annihilate me."
Conquering issues with weight starts with learning to love yourself, Geneen says. "People say, 'I hate myself and I hate my thighs and how do I start looking at myself and loving myself?' And sometimes I'll say: 'How would you treat a child who needed your love? Would you just whack them around and just say: 'Wrong! Bad. Look at your thighs, look at your legs'? No. Kindness. Only kindness makes sense. Only kindness ever makes sense."
It's especially important to treat ourselves as we would our children, because our children mirror our actions, Geneen says. One audience member says she's terrified that she's passing on her own food issues to her child. "My daughter, who just turned 7 yesterday, she said, 'I want you to take me home so I can change my clothes before school because my thighs are too big,' and she's the tiniest little thing. It kills me that I've taught her in seven short years to hate herself," she says.
Geneen says this mother's attitude toward herself is rubbing off on her daughter. "She sees her mom not liking herself and she's thinking: 'I love my mommy. I want to be just like my mommy. I'm not going to like myself either, that way mommy and I are the same,'" Geneen says. "That's a really good motivation for you to start being kinder to yourself, because ... it's not too late. It's never too late."
Geneen has helped countless women conquer their battle with weight. Jennifer, who has struggled with being both over and underweight, says she hasn't fluctuated in weight or dieted since attending one of Geneen's seminars. "What mostly clicked was recognizing that going to the food wasn't working and that what I was looking for wasn't in the food. So what I was trying to get rid of and what I was trying to not feel, it didn't help to be eating over it," Jennifer says. "The other thing that clicked was that there was a whole lot of pain there to look at. I needed to look at some of the layers, recognizing some of the beliefs that were keeping me at the weight where I was." Those beliefs, Jennifer says, were that she wasn't good enough, that nobody liked her and that nobody would accept her the way she was.
Jennifer's beliefs are similar to so many women's. "We somehow believe that if we hate ourselves enough, if we shame ourselves enough, we'll end up thin, happy, peaceful people," she says. "Somehow if I torture myself enough, I'll end up feeling great about myself and about my life, as if hatred leads to love and torture leads to contentment."
One common problem women have with weight is the feeling that once they hit a certain number, their entire life will improve. Alexandria says this was her struggle before Geneen helped her conquer her food issues for good. "I lost that notion of dieting and counting calories to really questioning and looking at my believes about my life," she says. "I trust that the hunger that I have, that I can feel my feelings and be with them separately and I can nourish my body with what it wants and trust it."
Today, Alexandria says it feels as if someone turned up the volume on her life. "This work really helped me kind of click some of the pieces of the puzzle into place, and it was about a year ago when I first started doing this work with Geneen—that's when it really accelerated using this as a doorway into my deeper self," she says. “I know I don't have to be finished with this work. I'm not a project to be constantly fixed and worked on. I'm whole right now as I am and everything we have, we need, is right in front of us at this moment. “
To jump-start the change in your life, Geneen says there are seven principles that should guide you. However, Geneen warns against turning these into a diet. "I call them eating guidelines, but I also call them the 'if love speaks' instructions. Because people make them into rules right away, then they have to rebel against them and break them," she says. "So don't make them into a diet."
And here is a little more:In an excerpt from Women, Food, and God, Geneen Roth shares seven guidelines to eating more consciously.Have a question for Geneen about your food and dieting obsessions? Ask her now!
- Eat when you are hungry.
- Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not include the car.
- Eat without distractions. Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music.
- Eat what your body wants.
- Eat until you are satisfied.
- Eat (with the intention of being) in full view of others.
- Eat with enjoyment, gusto and pleasure.
Geneen Roth's books were among the first to link compulsive eating and perpetual dieting with deeply personal and spiritual issues that go far beyond food, weight and body image. She believes that we eat the way we live and that our relationships to food, money and love are exact reflections of our deeply held beliefs about ourselves and the amount of joy, abundance, pain and scarcity we believe we have (or are allowed) to have in our lives.
Roth has appeared on many national television shows, including The Oprah Winfrey Show, 20/20, The NBC Nightly News, The View and Good Morning America. Articles about Roth and her work have appeared in numerous publications, including O, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Time, Elle, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has written a monthly column in Good Housekeeping magazine since 2007. Roth is the author of eight books, including The New York Times best-seller When Food Is Love and a memoir about love and loss, The Craggy Hole in My Heart. Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything is her newest book.
For more information, visit www.GeneenRoth.com.
Explore More from Women, Food, and God:
Are you a permitter or a restrictor? Take the quiz!
What are you hungry for? Hint: It's not food
Read another excerpt from the book
Read more.
What are you hungry for? Hint: It's not food. In fact, it's everything but food. This provocative new book reveals the self-defeating truth about dieting, while lighting the path to a full and healthy life. Says Oprah, "This book is an opportunity to finally end the war with weight and unlock the door to freedom." Below, O's exclusive excerpt.
When I was in high school, I used to dream about having Melissa Morris's legs, Toni Oliver's eyes, and Amy Breyer's hair. I liked my skin, my breasts, and my lips, but everything else had to go. Then, in my 20s, I dreamed about slicing off pieces of my thighs and arms the way you carve a turkey, certain that if I could cut away what was wrong, only the good parts—the pretty parts, the thin parts—would be left. I believed there was an end goal, a place at which I would arrive and forevermore be at peace. And since I also believed that the way to get there was by judging and shaming and hating myself, I also believed in diets.
Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.
Although the very notion that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to relaxation is absolutely insane, we hypnotize ourselves into believing that the end justifies the means. We treat ourselves and the rest of the world as if deprivation, punishment, and shame lead to change. We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation. Our deeply ingrained belief is that hatred and torture work. And although I've never met anyone—not one person—for whom warring with their bodies led to long-lasting change, we continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we'll prevail.
But the truth is that kindness, not hatred, is the answer. The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value, and possibility. To change your body, you must first understand that which is shaping it. Not fight it. Not force it. Not deprive it. Not shame it. Not do anything but accept and—yes, Virginia—understand it. Because if you force and deprive and shame yourself into being thin, you end up a deprived, shamed, fearful person who will also be thin for ten minutes. When you abuse yourself (by taunting or threatening yourself), you become a bruised human being no matter how much you weigh. When you demonize yourself, when you pit one part of you against another—your ironclad will against your bottomless hunger—you end up feeling split and crazed and afraid that the part you locked away will, when you are least prepared, take over and ruin your life. Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand: Without a foundation, the new structure collapses.
Change, if it is to be long-lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first. With understanding, inquiry, openness. With the realization that you eat the way you do for lifesaving reasons. I tell my retreat students that there are always exquisitely good reasons why they turn to food.
Can you imagine how your life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid, an adult said to you, "Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it"? If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend's rejection, someone said to you, "Oh, darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I'm here to listen to you, hold you, be with you."
All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.
The path from obsession to feelings to presence is not about healing our "wounded children" or feeling every bit of rage or grief we never felt so that we can be successful, thin, and happy. We are not trying to put ourselves together. We are taking who we think we are apart. We feel the feelings not so that we can blame our parents for not saying, "Oh, darling," not so that we can express our anger to everyone we've never confronted, but because unmet feelings obscure our ability to know ourselves. As long as we take ourselves to be the child who was hurt by an unconscious parent, we will never grow up. We will never know who we actually are. We will keep looking for the parent who never showed up and forget to see that the one who is looking is no longer a child.
I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not. Inquiry—the feel-what-you-feel part—allows you to relate to your feelings instead of retreat from them.
"Notice whatever arises, even if it surprises you"
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