Many of us use food to stuff or deny our feelings. Angry with our partner, we turn to chocolate rather than a heart-to-heart. Dismayed by a child’s behavior, we eat a second helping of dessert rather than set a boundary. Saddened by our aging mother’s fragility, we make a large batch of buttered popcorn or turn to Oreos. We turn to food for comfort, and we turn to food for denial. “It’s not really that bad,” our overeating tells us as we use calories like tiny sedatives to lull ourselves into a sense of peace.
“Hell, yes, I’m afraid to diet,” snaps Jennifer. “I’m hair-trigger enough. Take away my snacks and treats, and you’d have a wild woman on your hands. Who knows what kind of Pandora’s box you’d be opening?”
When we alter our relationship to food, we alter our relationship to everything. Sensing this, we are often afraid to diet—afraid to rock the boat no matter how cramped and uncomfortable it may have become. Our feelings are too intense, we tell ourselves. We cannot risk unleashing them.
“There’s no telling what I might do or say,” says Jennifer. “I get really, really angry and I’m afraid I might say something I’d regret. Isn’t it better to carry a few extra pounds and be nice?”
“Be nice” is a dictum many of us have taken too thoroughly to heart. We practice being nice rather than being authentic or honest. Our friends and families dimly sense the deception. “Tell me how you really feel,” they may prod, but we are afraid to tell them how we really feel.
Food is the buffer we use between us and honesty. We eat the extra piece of pecan pie rather than tell our partner he leaves the kitchen a mess. “Oh, what’s the big deal?” we ask ourselves as we live a tiny lie at a time. A life built on such dishonesty is a life built on mistrust. We do not trust our intimate others. We do not believe they are mature enough or strong enough to take the truth, and so we sugarcoat our dealings, falling back on Mary Poppins’s adage that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” We are often rewarded for this saccharine behavior.
“You’re so sweet; you’re so patient,” we are told, when we are feeling anything but sweet or patient. “If only you knew,” we catch ourselves thinking as we inwardly seethe with turbulent emotion. We are afraid to say how we feel. We are afraid that if we do, we will be abandoned, and so we abandon ourselves.
“My clients need to learn that unpleasant emotions are not the end of the world,” explains a savvy nutritionist. “But they also need to trust that I won’t give them a diet that makes them crazy with deprivation. What we are after is slow, gentle, sane weight loss. A diet of Clean Eating with sensible meals and sensible snacks actually regulates our mood swings as well.”
“When I first started trying to drop weight, it was pivotal that I did Morning Pages and used my food journal,” states Andrew, who often bribed himself with food when making difficult phone calls for work.
“I found I was afraid of my feelings of vulnerability. Food made me feel big and strong. I needed to learn that I could be strong without being big.”
Like many of us, Andrew needed to learn that he could “feel the fear and do it anyway.” In 12-step parlance, he needed to “feel everything and recover.”
“It took me a while to find myself verbally, but I discovered in myself a new candor, which actually worked better than my high-powered, food-fueled sales pitches had.” For many of us, Clean Eating leads the way to what might be called “clean living.” When we stop using food as a sedative, we become more straightforward in our emotional exchanges. At first this may be frightening. We soon learn, however, that honesty opens the door for more honesty. Our authenticity leads to increased authenticity on the part of our spouses, siblings, and children.
“I thought my husband would kill me the first time I needed to say I was angry,” relates Mary Ann. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought. He looked a little startled and said, ‘I didn’t know you felt that way.’ I was able to laugh and tell him, ‘Neither did I.’”
A day at a time, a disclosure at a time, Mary Ann shared her “new” self—the self that was soon spotted in her bedroom mirror.
“It was subtle,” Mary Ann explains. “It was as if each time I risked being honest I whittled away the tiniest bit of overweight. I didn’t look like those before-and-after pictures in the tabloids, but I did ever so gradually start to look different. A skirt that had been too small for me suddenly fit, a blouse that had been too tight for me slid on. ‘You look really nice,’ my husband told me as we dressed to go out for a business dinner. ‘I’ll take you up on that compliment,’ I flirted back. It had been years since I had made a sexual overture. Both of us were startled, but pleased.”
As we open the Pandora’s box of our forbidden feelings, we often move to a new level of intimacy with our significant others. Daring to reveal how we truly feel, we also dare to explore their feelings. It can be bumpy at first; it is as though we have jostled the mobile of our family dynamics. Everyone jiggles wildly before settling into a new position.
“‘This is going to take a little getting used to,’ my husband told me,” says Anita. “For twenty years we overate together, and when I started journaling, he felt more than a little threatened. ‘What’s the point of all those pages?’ he would poke at me, or ‘You are really going to skip dessert?’ A few weeks of this and I realized that for two decades he had been my enabler, encouraging me to overeat and ‘understanding’ my bad feelings when I did.”
“Give time time,” advises a wise nutritionist. “Dieting alters the family dynamic. But the family will adjust.”
“I was afraid I would go crazy,” explains Dottie, mother of a large brood. “What I didn’t expect was that I would go sane. My family was spoiled rotten. When I began to say no, they didn’t like it—not at first. When I stuck to my guns, they started to respect me. It showed in the way they started to help out around the house—folding their own laundry, doing their own dishes, picking up after themselves. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was actually a revolution. I dropped four dress sizes and traded in my martyred persona.”
Many of us experience a sharp rise in our self-worth as we succeed at weight loss. Whereas we once considered ourselves “losers,” we now find ourselves “winners.” Afraid to face our feelings, we discover a new sense of self-confidence when we do. Opening the Pandora’s box of our emotions, we discover that it is really a treasure chest holding lost talents and misplaced dreams.
TASK
Opening the Lid
Take pen in hand. Number from one to ten. Finish the following phrase ten times, filling in the blank:
If I’d let myself admit it, I secretly feel ________________ about ________________.
Doing this exercise, many of us discover that we have a vast array of emotions lurking just beneath the surface. For example:
Turn to your list and scan it carefully. With each entry, ask yourself, “Is there an action that I could take to remedy this situation?” Sometimes it is as simple as placing a long-delayed phone call. We discover that Laura is glad to hear from us. Sometimes there is no apparent action that can be taken to defuse our feelings. In those cases, we do well to practice the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
We discover that if we cannot any longer medicate our turbulent feelings, we can learn to live with them. Our Pandora’s box is not so dangerous after all.