The Celebration of Food

One of the big things about physical transformation is how people feel about food.  People with weight issues often think that food is the enemy—and it isn't. There is no enemy. Food is good.

When you diet—in contrast to dealing with other addictions—you can’t just give up the source of your trouble. An alcoholic can give up drinking, a drug addict can stop using, but food is necessary. You can’t stop eating—though people try to in their desperation.

My weight loss journey started years ago and has been a long and tedious one with many wrong ways and twists and turns. Once, long ago, I found myself at a self-help group in a church on the Newport Peninsula. In this room were a variety of people all dealing with their own personal food crises. There were people with hundreds of pounds to lose and people with twenty or so pounds to lose, and then there were two poor teenage girls, starving themselves to the point that the layer of peach fuzz that grows as a body’s reaction to starvation stood up on their little tortured frames as they sat and talked about their enemy. Food.

In an effort to embrace the disease there is an extreme faction of sufferers of anorexia called “Pro-ana.” This movement creates “Ana” as their goddess of starvation and there is a sort of hidden underworld of websites all about no-nonsense approaches to outwitting your loved ones, disciplining yourself and finding better, more secretive ways to stop eating completely. Some of the sites give detailed recipes and directions—how to cut up a head of lettuce and pretend you are eating it at dinner, how to use laxatives and other drugs to lose weight, how to distract yourself from the physical pain of eating 200 calories a day. They have message boards and photos of women who are abnormally thin that pro-ana devotees idolize as perfect. It’s an unexpected response to the hard fight that most people have against the disease—but then, anorexia is a disease of the mind more than anything else. It’s a frightening world of control and strict discipline where the only peace an anorexic has is when she rejects food completely. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know these little girls—probably about sixteen or seventeen years old—were killing themselves. In fact they were close to death.

I felt pain in the room coming from every direction and it was palpable. It was inescapable. I couldn’t focus on my issues or anything healthy. I felt like I had entered a Sartre story, that I was sitting in a folding chair in a room with twenty other people who, while they were inside a place of God, were most certainly in hell.

I left the church that day knowing I had hit another dead end. That wasn’t the answer. I was frightened and depressed. I walked out into the late afternoon sun a block from the salt spray of the ocean feeling as hopeless and sad as those two little girls.

People are in crisis with food.

The diet industry and the fast food industry and the medical industry have taken the joy out of food. Watching The Food Channelâ is a guilty pleasure—especially for anyone dieting.

Lap band surgery seems to me to be the ultimate act of food crisis—altering one's body in an attempt to triumph over food. As a last ditch effort to lose weight people at hugely unhealthy sizes (far too heavy for any sort of surgery) have their stomachs reduced to make it more difficult, even life-threatening, to continue to pack themselves full of food.

Lap band surgery has always seemed like making your kitchen smaller with the thought in mind that less food can be stored in a smaller kitchen. Something is missing in the logic of a lap band even though the converted swear it works and it’s hard to argue with real weight loss success. For me, I always knew in my mind that no lap band would ever fix me—my inner-rebel would try to outsmart it. I needed a gentler, more life affirming, more loving way to treat my body and psyche.

The times when I have felt the most alienated and worried about food—the times when I have felt food was my biggest adversary—have not been the times that I prepared a beautiful dinner and shared it at a pretty table with people I love—but the times that I drove through a fast food restaurant or grabbed anything I could or found myself eating out of stress or emotion. Times when I used food as a drug or a friend. To those with weight control issues food becomes the Band-Aidâ and the wound.

Making peace with food—even celebrating food—is a healthier and a more long-lasting answer.

I am reminded of my mother's kitchen. It was the hub of our house. People congregated around the bar, sipping coffee and talking. My mother stood on one side cooking and when she was done sat with you and chatted. Many times in my teenage years I would walk in my door to find one of my friends already there—comfortably seated with my mother in long and in-depth conversations over coffee. My mother made that kitchen a place of love and acceptance where she dispensed not only amazing, loving meals, but friendship and advice too.

And even though she never made peace with her own health and fitness (which may be in part to the insane advice I found recently in one of her dated diet cookbooks that said "exercise is harmful for those trying to reduce") she definitely understood the beauty of food. She embraced the celebration of breaking bread with those in her circle of love. She made eating together an event—a celebration—a time to join in peace and even joy. And she taught me the beauty of that.

Once my brother told me that before he eats he takes a moment and thinks about where the food he is about to ingest comes from. I like this sort of grateful, Zen perspective. It’s very akin to the spiritual philosophy of the Native American about hunting. Thanking the source.

It makes sense. It’s sort of a Circle Of Life thing. You sit before a beautifully prepared and elegant, tasty meal and you think. Think about the fish and its struggle to live, swimming upstream, its surrounding natural environment, the light and color and sound of the swim. Or the grain or potato or vegetables and the sun shining on the tiny seeds. The small plant braving the elements and surviving a season to make it to the harvest. The exertion of human beings to hunt for the food or grow the food and effort over each bite you take—so you can eat. Then if you are lucky someone lovingly prepares the food for you and is happy you are there to eat it with them, or if you make it yourself hopefully you took a moment to feel the joy in creation, the moment of mastery, the act of being able to sustain yourself in an elegant and nourishing way. It’s a strange and wonderful symbiotic relationship we have to the food we eat.

And like my mother would have thought—food is for celebrating. Sitting at your table and eating nourishing food with people you love in the peace of the evening, with candlelight and music playing is one of life’s greatest blessings and pleasures.

Food isn’t the enemy—but the source and the celebration. We should make sure to attend this party.  I can almost smell my mother’s kitchen now…

In Memory of My Mother

September 10, 1930--April 7, 1999

So You Hate Me Because I'm Fat?

There is something weird about being fat that people don't talk about. It's that hush-hush world of size bias. "Size bias" (the polite term for those engaged in intellectual discussion on the subject) is really just hating fat people and treating them poorly--publicly.

I am reminded of that Lifetime for Womenâ movie from a few months ago, “To Be Fat Like Me.” In this movie a young and very attractive high school girl dons a fat suit and enters another high school to film her experience for a documentary. In her previous life she was popular and attractive and had a lot of friends—basically leading a charmed high school life. As soon as she took that same pretty face and nice personality and added a hundred pounds to it her experience became extremely negative. She experienced size bias.

This movie pointed out an important truth: People just don't like fat people.

For some reason our society allows size bias. It's an acceptable form of bias. It's culturally acceptable to treat fat people as second-class citizens--to mock them, to stare at them, to not hire them, to treat them with malice and disdain, or to treat them like they don't exist. Bigotry and hatred are complicated. It's a huge subject that I don't feel like handling here today, but what I do often wonder about is why people think fat people are fair game.

I have experienced the phenomenon myself. At various times in my "fat life" I have heard things said when I entered a room of strangers or a public place. I have been laughed at and ridiculed and treated meanly. I can't decide if this sort of public harassment is overt anger toward fat people, if it's just people being unbelievably rude, or if people find the spectacle of a fat person so exceptional that they have to say something aloud (really loud) to their friends. No clue.

To be fair, I notice morbidly obese people myself. When I was 80 pounds heavier I played the "Is she fatter than me?" game and now I still notice but it's with a greater sense of empathy and understanding about what their experience must be like. I think as humans it is natural to react to anyone who is different. However, I do think that people could use more empathy when they deal with those around them who are fat or are limited in any way.

I think a reason people feel fat people are fair game is the belief that a fat person chooses to be fat. While it's true that my life has been a series of choices and some very negative choices fueled my weight gain, I would offer to anyone thinking about a fat person's accountability that it is far more complicated than that.

I feel the same way about a homeless person on the street. That person is standing there not necessarily because they are irresponsible or bad but because of a series of reactions and decisions to their life--things that happened to them, misfortune, lack of coping skills, even tragedy.

My mother used to say every time she saw someone whose plight she pitied, "There but for fortune go I."  Each of us comes with his or her own set of life experiences and coping skills. I am pretty sure we shouldn't judge and convinced we should really ramp up the kindness with which we treat others--no matter what predicament they find themselves in.

One benefit of losing weight and something I have seen change with each pound of weight loss is that people are nicer to me. I am sure it's a combination of things--and trust me I have thought long and hard about this: First, people are nicer to people who are more attractive. That sounds like a generalization, but I am convinced of it. Secondly, people who feel good about themselves expect to be and are treated better than those who do not.

So no matter what your personal situation--thin, average, overweight or obese--think about a few things the next time you see a fat person. What are they facing? What sort of personal challenges do they deal with daily? How can you be a little kinder to them? How can you level their playing field in that moment and help them to feel like it's okay for them to be there?

Who knows, they may have just lost 80 pounds and are well on their way toward personal success.