Food Revelations

Last week I read Women Food and God. Have you read? Seriously, it changed my life. I LOVE Geneen Roth as if she were one of my people. After the first few chapters, when I sat down to graze in front of the kids’ snack cupboard as is my habit, I literally stopped and thought, “Wait, am I hungry?” It was revolutionary.

For those of you who are wondering, it’s a lot about Women and Food, but not a lot about God. The God part is more light spirituality and less Bible-based eating plan, but it forced me to sit down and have a long overdue discussion with myself about why and how I eat.

If you ever saw my mom and sister, you’d understand some of my food issues. They are tiny little waifs. So is my daughter. I am not a particularly big person, but they are really, really small. My mom always told me that I was big-boned and didn’t “have the eating habits of a thin person,” and I have always held a pretty distorted image of my 5′ 2″ 125 pound self. Yep, I just said my weight out loud to the whole internet. The absolute true weight I saw on that dang-blasted scale this morning. Have I mentioned how much this book helped me?

So one of my biggest food issues is that when I was growing up, food was my mom’s main expression of love. Whatever was going on, good or bad, could be remedied with food. Sick? Chicken soup. Sad? Cookies. Celebrating? Cake. And since that was pretty much my mom’s only expression of love, when she cooked for you, you ate. And the more you ate, the more you were loved. To this day, her favorite people in life are the people she can control with cookies. I’m kidding. A little.

Additionally, I realized that my happiest memories were wrapped up with food. Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, milestones celebrated by going out to dinner, goals met and rewarded with food. In many ways, I had grown to equate food with happiness. Unfortunately, in many other ways, I also equated skinniness with happiness. That crazy combination cannot possibly add up to happiness. I mean maybe when I was 20 and had a pretty fast metabolism, but now it is kind of a problem.

So for the past few weeks, I’ve had a lot of conversations with myself about food, why I’m eating, when I’m eating, what I’m eating and so forth. Turns out it’s not particularly healthy to sit on the floor and eat from the snack cupboard at 10:30 p.m. Huh. Also turns out that eating an m&m every time you walk past the m&m jar until it’s empty is not a great habit. Go figure. And one of the most important lessons I learned is that I really didn’t even know how hungry felt anymore.

In all this dialoguing about why I’m really eating and what I really want, I haven’t lost one pound–in case you wondered. But, I’ve been eating much healthier foods and much less and I haven’t really had any junk. While I have a long way to go, I have been able to pinpoint some serious issues I have to come to terms with:

• I am almost 40, not 20, so my 20-year-old weight probably shouldn’t be my goal weight. 
• Being skinny doesn’t necessarily make you happy or signify you’re happy.
• Not being skinny doesn’t necessarily make you unhappy or signify that you’re unhappy.
• I have a bread addiction, similar to my nicotine addiction. I cannot eat just one piece of bread.
• Just like my husband is as hot to me today as he was 20 years ago, he looks at me and sees the girl he fell in love with (who was skinny, btw). He literally judges my weight by the size of my boobs, so you can probably guess when he’s happiest.
• Food is an idol, and when I give it this much power in my life, I am putting it before God; that is unacceptable.
• My mom lives with me. I don’t eat her cookies. She still loves me.

 So, if you have a messed up relationship with food, I highly recommend this book. If not? Well, you are a rare breed of fabulosity, and I admire you greatly.

The dead horse called…

I didn’t want to write any more about smoking. But that’s really been all that’s on my mind. Not smoking affords you a lot of extra time. Time that you can use to think–or write–about smoking. I used to think if only the day had a few extra hours: My floors would be spotless, my laundry clean and folded, each child satisfied from “quality one-on-one” time.

Since I have had enough spare time to figure out just how much time I spent smoking (approximately 2 hours a day, in case you were wondering), my day now has a couple extra hours. Still, my floors are dirty. My laundry is in piles and hampers. I have eaten nearly all the kids’ Halloween candy. But since I did it while they were at school, I don’t think that counts as quality time.

However, I have analyzed a lot of things, made a lot of lists, and followed lots of scents around the house with my newly discovered bloodhound sense of smell. My mom told me, “That’s why people gain weight when they quit smoking, because they can smell so much better.” I nodded politely and muttered under my breath. Mostly I’ve been on the trail of phantom vile smells that don’t make me hungry. And mostly I’ve been eating because the pantry is on the way to the garage. Since I can’t go to the garage and smoke, I stop at the pantry and eat.

I didn’t think too much about all that pantry eating until two days ago when I put on a pair of jeans that were too tight. They’ve never fit right, but I hold on to them. And they’re not the kind of jeans that would fit right even if I lost 10 pounds. They are just not designed for my body type. So I don’t really know why I keep them. It is not as if my body is going to change that much. At the very best shape of my adult life, after 90 days of Tony Horton hell, they still didn’t fit right. “THROW THEM AWAY!!!” But I keep them. Put them on occasionally so they can kick me when I’m all ready down. Wow, there’s a whole case study worth of issues going on in those jeans!

But that wasn’t the point. Yesterday, I put on a pair of my regular comfortable jeans, and they were tight and uncomfortable. First thought: a dryer conspiracy. Then I stepped on the scale to see a number 5 pounds higher than the number I normally see. Shit. I guess my body did register those 800 mini chocolate bars even though I was standing up when I was ate them and barely chewed.

So, I guess there are pros and cons like everything else. Everyone says there are no cons to quitting smoking, but this growing-bigger-by-the-day ass of mine begs to differ. Yes, I’m being vain and trivial, but it’s my ass. I put a lot of stipulations on this whole quitting smoking thing, so I have high hopes. I still can’t run without getting winded; I had expected that within a week. I still have wrinkles; I was expecting them to vanish. I can still see my pores; I had expected them to shrink.

Yet I plug away. Because I am so happy that I can smell Chloe’s perfume lingering in the air after she leaves for school. Comforted by the shampoo and toothpaste smell of freshly showered P, when he snuggles up with me. Grateful for Lily’s warm milk and sleep smell, when she first wakes up. Coffee brewing…well, I could always smell that, but now it almost reaches into my bed with it’s warm fragrant arm–like that old commercial?–and lifts me out. Not happy about all the stinky things I was blissfully unaware of before. But the good definitely outweighs the bad.

And today, this minute, the good outweighing the bad, is enough to keep me from smoking.