Geneen Roth - Women, Food, and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

For years I've been concerned about my best friend since kindergarten. She was very overweight then, lost it all in high school and kept it off through college, then started gaining a lot with her second pregnancy when her only brother was killed in an accident. She lost one hundred pounds a few years ago, but has regained it all and then some while her mother was slipping away and died recently. I've never had a weight problem, except brief periods in college that I learned from, and so it's hard for me to understand how a person becomes so obese. Specifically I don't understand compulsive eating. Food has always been a source of nourishment as well as pleasure and I only eat when I'm hungry until I'm comfortably satisfied. So I picked up Geneen Roth's latest non-fiction book, Women, Food And God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything.

Roth has, like my friend, been unable to maintain a normal weight for most of her life, not only becoming obese but anorexic too. Since adolescence she's gained and lost over a thousand pounds through an addiction to every kind of diet that came along, but at the point of becoming suicidal she decided to stop the struggle of dieting and trying to fix herself through deprivation and shaming herself. Instead she would learn to trust her body and examine her beliefs about herself.

There's a great deal of hard-fought and observed wisdom in this 2010 book that is the result of thirty years of studying, teaching and writing about what drives people, especially women like herself, to compulsively eat. It's my first time reading Roth, but it sounds like the most psychologically/spiritually helpful one she's written. This time she tells people to look at what's on their plates and it'll show you how you feel about yourself, life, love, even God. Because awareness and compulsion can't exist at the same time, our compulsions reveal a lack of awareness as we binge: awareness of the food, our behavior, our hunger/satiety level. More than that, though, it's a lack of awareness of who we really are under the layers of conditioning by others and/or the nasty voice in our heads deprecating us.

The compulsive eaters in Roth's life-changing retreats glower at her during mealtimes as she patiently helps them to begin a new relationship with food and themselves, which they stubbornly resist out of fear. They'll soon realize that they've been using food to deny that they feel unloved, lonely, worthless or damaged beyond repair and using diets to punish themselves, although they may feel it's the only way to stay in the illusion of control. She will teach them her seven eating guidelines to start restoring their healthy relationship with food, the doorway or path to being able to relate to themselves and God who is their true, undamaged nature.

Her Eating Guidelines, found in the very back of this book, are:

Eat when you are hungry.
Eat sitting down in a calm environment. This does not mean the car.
Eat without distractions. Distractions include radio, television, newspapers, books, intense or anxiety-producing conversations or music. (where's the computer?)
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.

What Roth discovered to her amazement was that by following these guidelines as best as she could, she lost her compulsions with food over time and became aware of what she really wanted to eat, what gave her pleasure. She also helps her reluctant retreaters or readers to become aware of how their body feels so that they're no longer ignoring them and encourages eating meditations and other meditations. Women, Food And God consists of three sections and fourteen, titled chapters where she engagingly and helpfully explains the wisdom behind her guidelines, body inquiry method and beliefs. A quick summary of it is this: the way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive and you'll only get rid of your compulsive eating by becoming aware of what's behind it.

I'm certain my friend could really benefit from reading this book, but I don't think sending her a copy is a good idea since I sent her a similar book for Christmas and she hasn't mentioned that she's read it. Roth doesn't make the point in this book that you must choose to change your bad habits for yourself when you're ready, but maybe in the earlier ones she does. She also doesn't get into what are the most nutritious foods, but again she probably covered that in another book. I still think she could've been more helpful that way for us first-time readers.

If you've been yo-yoing with your weight and trying diets that only backfire, you should find Women, Food And God well worth your while. It may change your life for the better.