The premise of the book is that you are what you eat. Whatever you tend to eat, where you eat it, and the triggers that caused you to eat it are all clues to your relationship with others, yourself and God. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger and God.
I was skeptical at first, but after reading about Ms. Roth's retreat students, thinking about her examples of when she cut off parts of herself because of pain, I became a believer. Gently, by use of metaphor and stories, she leads you to that place you knew of all along -- your bigger self.
Not the physical self that may have become large from poor eating habits. But your bigger self - the one you were born with and the one you are meant to show to the world. That part of you that knows you are bigger than your pain, or your loneliness or your depression, and she waits for you to see her.
Ms. Roth has walked the path of obsessive compulsive eating. Since she was a teenager, she has lost and gained over one thousand pounds! It was only when she was on the verge of suicide that she did something totally radical: she dropped the struggle, ended the war with herself, and began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs. The beauty of the process that Ms. Roth experienced shines on every page of this book.
Let me leave you with this quote from the book. If it resonates with you, then please buy and read this book (You can order it from Amazon for $13.00). If this statement does nothing for you, then don't bother. Here goes:
"It has never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehilces to get around. When we state defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels.
"We don't want to eat hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves. We want to know wonder and delight and passion, and if instead we've given up on ourselves, if we've vacated our longings, if we've left possibility behind, we will feel an emptiness we can't name. We will feel as if something is missing because something is missing - the connection to the source of all sweetness, all love, all power, all peace, all joy, all stillness. Since we had it once - we were born with it - it can't help but haunt us. It is as if our cells remember that home is a jeweled palace but we've been living as beggars for so long that we are no longer certain if the palace was a dream. And if it was a dream, then at least we can eat the memory of it." -- Geneen Roth, Women Food and God
Interesting thoughts!
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