My Mother, My Appetite - ThinnerTimes

MiladyB · 03-22-2008, 07:42 PM

This was another article I found and it really hit home for me. I know so much of my problems with weight and eating were intertwined with my relationship with my mother. This article really shed some light on the whole thing for me.

My Mother, My Appetite
Why does one so often seem related to the other?

By Geneen Roth , Geneen Roth is the author of six books about emotional eating, including When Food Is Love.

I have a friend who is not subject to emotional eating. Food has never been a problem for her. In fact, being skinny has been her problem. This was a major stumbling block for me when we met. It seemed like such a waste of my hard-earned insight to be friends with someone who couldn't appreciate a good binge or my extensive research on the best sweet potato pie in San Francisco. I soon realized, however, that while I was developing my food skills, she was developing her shopping skills, and that between the two, we pretty much had the world covered.

This friend recently uncovered some early feelings she had about her mother, who had been dead for 10 years. And what do you think my friend did? At one sitting, she ate a whole pie. At another, a pint of Ben & Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk. There was something about feeling the loss of that sweet, merging mother connection that made her want to eat. She gained 5 pounds in a week.

Sometimes I despair about getting caught in the same old mother-loss issues: the feelings of abandonment, the longing for unconditional love, the belief that I am damaged at my core, and the intense hunger they trigger for sweetness in the form of ice cream and chocolate. A spiritual teacher I know says: "Only people who are dead or enlightened are finished with the stuff with their mothers." And that always makes me feel better about myself.

Mother Equals Food

The way we first knew we were loved was by being held and fed by our mothers. In those days, food was love. Mother was love. Our whole life depended on one person and on her ability to feed us both love and sweetness.

So here we are, all grown up, with those same childhood hungers stored in our bodies and minds. We eat to feel and taste love and sweetness. We demand of our mothers love and sweetness. And the problems that plague us revolve around the many ways we experience, and are deprived of, those two things.

When I began working through my own food issues, and later while teaching workshops on emotional eating, I believed it was possible to cure emotional eating forever. I don't believe that anymore. Though my weight has only fluctuated 4 or 5 pounds in nearly 20 years, I've realized that I will probably use food in one way or another for love until I know for certain that I am inherently lovable. I hope this happens soon, but if it doesn't, I won't despair. I know that if I find myself eating when I'm not hungry--or when my hunger is not really for food but for love--then all I need to do is pay attention. I need to ask myself what is really going on and then do something about it.

The Teachable Moment

Every time you want to eat when you're not hungry is a teachable moment. Ask yourself what's happening inside that makes you crave a bar of intensely sweet chocolate or the luscious texture of cheesecake. Are you anxious? Sad? Depressed? Are these the times when you really want to be mothered? If so, you need to pay attention to how you mother yourself--how you treat yourself when, for example, you want to eat for some other reason than real hunger, and how you talk to yourself when you've done something you don't like (say, eaten when you weren't hungry).

You can scowl at yourself, become impatient, and always feel that you are doing it wrong. Or you can do it differently, lovingly, perhaps for the first time. By learning to be kind to yourself, you learn to nurture and mother yourself in a positive way--and the more you learn to give yourself what you need most, the less you will feel like a starving child, literally and figuratively.

My students often say, "I want to be done with this thing with food once and for all." But there is no place to get to, no end point. There is no rush. This is a process that takes time, not a race to the finish line. As the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says, you are arriving in every moment.

Take a wider view: Eating or thinking about eating will always be the way you alert yourself to changes in your inner world.

As long as you use turning to food as an opening to the corners of your soul, food is a gift. Wanting to eat when you are not hungry is a barometer of your feelings, a doorway into your heart. If what you want is to have She Was Thin engraved on your headstone, then I'm wrong. But if what you want is to know all the folded corners of yourself and to understand why you do the things you do, then it's okay to relax. You're on the right path, and that's all that matters.

Think You Don't Have Issues?

Everyone has issues. If we didn't, we'd all be perfect. Or dead. And because we all have mothers--and therefore have some sense of what mothering is--and need food to live, it's not unusual to have issues that involve them both. If you're used to emotional eating, take some time to explore the ways in which you've entwined the two. What was your relationship with your mother like growing up? How is it now? Do you often reach for food for comfort? How do you talk to yourself when you feel like you're inadequate or have failed in some way? The answers to those questions can help you break your unhealthy relationship with food--and create a healthy relationship with yourself and your mother.

Last Update: 05/31/2005

Andie · 03-22-2008, 08:10 PM

Great read...thanks Beth!

splendifor · 03-22-2008, 08:52 PM

I snagged this (with the author credit) and put it in my blog - I really love it... soooo much to think about

esp since my mom will be here Wednesday for my final pre-op all day class O.O yeah I got food/mother issues but this is a wonderfully gentle way to approach it - thanks!

MiladyB · 03-22-2008, 11:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by splendifor

I snagged this (with the author credit) and put it in my blog - I really love it... soooo much to think about

esp since my mom will be here Wednesday for my final pre-op all day class O.O yeah I got food/mother issues but this is a wonderfully gentle way to approach it - thanks!

Yes, I loved what this had to say too. It most certainly has given me some food for thought too. I've read several articles by this author tonight and with each one she approaches emotional eating in such a gently loving way.

Vim&Vigour · 03-23-2008, 05:59 AM

My Mother, My Appetite Such a good title!

By Geneen Roth , Geneen Roth is the author of six books about emotional eating, including When Food Is Love.

So here we are, all grown up, with those same childhood hungers stored in our bodies and minds. We eat to feel and taste love and sweetness. We demand of our mothers love and sweetness. And the problems that plague us revolve around the many ways we experience, and are deprived of, those two things.
See my response to eating to feel and taste love and sweetness in my thread Take a peach... Same situation, another approach!

I know that if I find myself eating when I'm not hungry--or when my hunger is not really for food but for love--then all I need to do is pay attention. I need to ask myself what is really going on and then do something about it.
She's got it in 1!

The Teachable Moment

Every time you want to eat when you're not hungry is a teachable moment. Ask yourself what's happening inside that makes you crave a bar of intensely sweet chocolate or the luscious texture of cheesecake. Are you anxious? Sad? Depressed? Are these the times when you really want to be mothered? If so, you need to pay attention to how you mother yourself--how you treat yourself when, for example, you want to eat for some other reason than real hunger, and how you talk to yourself when you've done something you don't like (say, eaten when you weren't hungry).
I had a moment like that last night when I was just nibbling berries and nuts, not because I was hungry but because it was 2 am and... Thanks for sending a healthier thought process! A really useful tip!

By learning to be kind to yourself, you learn to nurture and mother yourself in a positive way--and the more you learn to give yourself what you need most, the less you will feel like a starving child, literally and figuratively.
"See my new thread "Thinking in First Person" posted last night

Here is another variant? As kids we might have been given sweets for a reward for good grades at school or whatever - but who is going to give me a nice Easter Egg, filled to the brim with yummy chocolate? It is I who think of getting eggs for my husband, my children, my friends, the next door neighbours! And because I have had surgery I am not ALLOWED any chocolate? My surgeon said, indeed you are to have chocolate, just an incy teeny weeny bit so as to feel "normal", i.e. 3-5 brazil nut sized eggs, not a whole massive one. He has a very sociable and realistic point! The next question is to be disciplined and not to cross the boundary!

Excellent post, as always, Beth! Many thanks!
Vim

Persephone · 03-23-2008, 03:06 PM

This scares me. Terrifies me actually. I'm never going to come to terms with the effects my mother has on my life on a daily basis. I am in sooo much trouble

MiladyB · 03-23-2008, 03:14 PM

Vim, for myself I know I don't try to look at food as "good" or "bad". I feel it is how we "use" or "abuse" that food that is the good or bad. I don't believe in saying "I'll NEVER eat that again." Personally I feel that is only setting myself up for failure.

Finding that boundry is hard but if I can understand "why" I am eating I think it will help me define that boundry. It is the mindless eating that has gotten me into trouble in the past and for me that is what I have to conquer.

LizzieShell · 03-23-2008, 03:15 PM

I have read her books before.. What a powerful idea.

Thanks

MiladyB · 03-23-2008, 03:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LizzieShell

I have read her books before.. What a powerful idea.

Thanks

Lizzie, I was so totally impressed with her articles and what she expressed in several of them. It was almost like a light for me. It all made so much sense and confirmed for me much of what I have noticed within myself. I really think I should get some of her books and read them. I suspect they would be extremely enlightening.