“Now, take some time and notice what you put on your plate,” I say. “Notice if you were hungry when you chose the food. If you weren’t physically hungry, was there another kind of hunger present?

Now, in the dining room, Marie says, “It just occurred to me that everything we believe about our lives is right here. The whole world is on these plates.”

There is nothing like having chocolate cake three inches away to reveal your fear of chaos or your desire to melt into it.

It marks the moment when we gave up on ourselves, on change, on life. It marks the place where we are afraid. It marks the feelings we won’t allow ourselves to feel, and in so doing, keeps our lives constricted and dry and stale. In that isolated place, it is a short step to the conclusion that God—where goodness and healing and love exist—abandone

I needed to prove to myself that what I wanted most was not forbidden, but what I didn’t understand was that I didn’t want the cookies; I wanted the way being allowed to have them made me feel: welcomed, deserving, adored.

if you are willing to refrain from dieting and needing an instant solution, and if you want to use your relationship with food as the unexpected path, you will discover that God has been here all along.

the sadness is already present and that the only thing that eating does is add yet another source of sadness: after the food is gone, the original source of sadness is still there except that now they have topped it with the sadness or frustration or hopelessness about their conflicted relationship with food.

Is it a young child who believes that she needs to manage her environment so that everyone will be happy and she will be safe?

This body loved being alive. Loved moving with some measure of ease. Loved being able to see, hear, touch, smell, taste—and food was a big part of how I could do that. The way I ate was another way to soar.