Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

You’d listen to your body. You’d eat to nourish yourself. You’d love yourself with food.

The biggest challenge at the naming-and-disengaging stage is that since you believe everything The Voice has said, you also believe that you need to hide your defects from other people lest they withdraw in abject horror.

Staying requires awareness of the desire to bolt. Of the stories you are telling yourself about the need to bolt. Staying means recognizing that when you want to bolt you are living in the past. You are taking yourself to be someone who no longer exists. Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don’t take yourself to be a

If we are interested in finding out what we actually believe—not what we think, not what we say, but what our souls are convinced is the bottom-line truth about life and afterlife—we need go no further than the food on our plates.

me. I remember what another vet once told me about pets: they take on diseases so that their owners can be healthy.

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself—but never quite believing it because you don’t sense yourself

between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you’d rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

There is something about accepting the unpredictable fragility of this life that is just too much. So the very minute they begin feeling or sensing or thinking something that is uncomfortable, they want to get out of Dodge.

It’s about your desire to flatten your life. It’s about the fact that you’ve given up without saying so.

One of their core beliefs is that less is more. If less of me shows, that’s less to get hurt. If I cut myself off at the knees, then I won’t have far to fall when someone else brings out their sword. Eating less—and therefore being thin—is equated with being safe.