Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

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.

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

Compulsive eating is a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be.

You become curious about that belief. How old were you when you first learned that? And what were your feelings at the time that never got noticed or felt or understood?

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.

It’s as if the knowledge of the expanse beyond the concerns of the personal is already there and they are using food to access it. Which—no surprise—leads to more pain.

When you stay, you question what you’ve never questioned: the you you take yourself to be. The you who is not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. Anything becomes possible. Even living through extraordinary pain.

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

that my resistance to the pain was worse than the pain.