Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

Mom. I am worth saving.” And somehow, by deciding that I was no longer going to collude with the belief in my own degradation, something I never would have called me showed up: the presence of loveliness, the awareness of kindness and the unmistakable knowledge that I belonged here.

It’s what you tell yourself about eating alone that is so painful. It’s the story you tell.

Instead of using food to avoid discomfort, they are going to learn how to tolerate what they believe is intolerable.

If you actually listen to what your body (not your mind) wants, you’ll discover that it doesn’t want three weeks of hot fudge sundaes despite the panting and salivating that is evoked at their very mention. In addition to your body’s need for foods other than cream and fudge, there is also the fact that the moment you tell yourself you can have it,

Overeating was my way to punish and shame myself; each time I gained weight, each time I failed at a diet, I proved to myself that my deepest fear was true: I was pathetic and doomed

simply feel the direct sensations as they arise in your body.

Eat fewer donuts. But staying with the emptiness—entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself—that’s radical.

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.

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.