The Food Fight - part two

“The Food Fight” is a two-part entry about my on-going relationship with food and overeating. You can find part one here.


I don’t know what gives birth to an addict and I don’t know exactly when I became one myself. Even in childhood, I could tell that the way I turned to food was entirely different than the way most of my friends did. It didn’t take long before that difference showed in a physical way. The school year would begin and I’d be just a little bigger than most everyone I knew, then the next year, a little bigger than before and so on.

Those are already difficult years and a lot of women I know barely survived. They entered high school or college or young adulthood devastatingly scarred. Though I tended a few deep wounds, for the most part I escaped relatively intact. By weaving together odd layers of confidence and self-preservation, I managed to protect myself, but I also succeeded in burying the root of my addiction.

This week has been a tough one food-wise. It’s the kind of week that reminds me that peeling back those layers can be a dangerous process. It leaves the heart more exposed than it was before and I have to retrain myself to face those little hurts rather than ‘layer up’ again.

I’m a work in progress.

Luckily, there has actually been some progress. Since the start of the year, I’ve lost about 30 pounds. And I’ve welcomed glimpses of a newer, brighter, healthier version of myself.

This is not a piece about ‘dieting’ or ‘how to lose weight with five simple exercises’. I don’t know much about those things. All I can say is that the weight I’ve lost came off because I started making food with my own two hands and moving around with my own two feet. And little habits like drinking more water and walking after lunch. Surprisingly, those small things weren’t really hard at all. So why wasn’t I already doing them?

Well that is a little more difficult.

I am coming to believe that we make poor choices not because they are easier (which they sometimes are) but because we’ve programmed ourselves that way. I’ve put a picture in my mind of a person who has no time to make dinner, doesn’t know how to anyway, couldn’t ever ride a bicycle to work, and is, in general, too busy to change.

So the harder, every-day-I-have-to-remind-myself kind of change is in reforming that inner picture. It’s in realizing that in my life I need to be number one – which means I can’t let anything become more important or time-consuming than taking care of myself.

I can be a person who carries a water bottle, who joins a work-out class, who walks during her lunch break. I can also be a person who cries when she is upset and is angry when something goes wrong without having to drive to Dairy Queen or McDonalds. I can become a person who is able to make good decisions in bad situations without ordering pizza and cheesesticks.

These may seem like small, specific examples, but they’re the outer face of an inner change. In the process of dropping a few pounds, I’m realizing that it is actually possible to see myself as someone new, not only in the area of food and weight, but in every area. That darkness I mentioned last week had been filling my head with nonsense, taking mistakes I’d made and telling me it was who I am. Telling me it was all I’d ever be.

So the question becomes how do we learn, as a community and as individuals, to fill in our empty spaces with positive, nurturing, compassionate things instead of these destructive lies? How do we become new and better versions of ourselves with visions for the future and inner strength to get there?

My first step was brutal honesty. I tried to dig under every defense and identify all the ways I use food to hide from conflict, from pain, from my past, from my future. It requires me to be ruthless, to take stock of all the ways I’ve been reinforcing what the darkness has been whispering all along – that I’m not strong enough to handle this. The darkness lies.

With list in hand, I began to chip away, to analyze how I respond to anger, fear, loneliness and other all-around bad feelings. Where my instinct might be to crack open a pint of Haagen-Dazs, I’m learning to train myself in healthier responses. And by not covering the pain with food, I give myself space to identify what upset me to begin with, which helps stop the cycle from repeating.

Now to be truthful, this is pretty much as far as I’ve gotten. Because it’s really, really hard to be honest all the time. And it’s really, really tempting to say – next time. Next time I’ll make a better choice. Next time it will be easier.

And that’s why I do this.

I write and share and talk about how hard it is, because I’m afraid I might otherwise bury my head in the sand. I basically tell everyone:  my small group, my bosses, people who come in the coffee shop, singers in our band, strangers on the street.

So, this week? Not so good. Next week? Maybe better. When it comes to food, I might always be trying to balance the darkness, searching for a new beginning. I know food isn’t done fighting and I know I’ll always be deciding whether to give in or not. But now I’m holding on to hope and have no plans to let go. Not for food or fear or anything else that tries to take root.

Because I’ve had a taste of something new and no interest in losing it.


Your fight might not be with food, but I welcome your own stories of struggle and renewal. Are you seeking a new beginning?