A mother of an 8-year-old was desperate. “My daughter is gaining weight by the second,” she told me. “I am so afraid that I have passed on my troubles with food to her, and I don’t know whether to remove all candy from the house, take her to a doctor, or put her on a strict diet. Help!” […]
When my husband and I eat at an outdoor restaurant these days, his meal always looks better than mine. I’m not sure why, since we don’t usually like the same kinds of food — but within three minutes, my fork finds its way to his side of the table. …
When I first heard the Buddhist description of hungry ghosts — beings with stomachs as big as caves and throats as narrow as pins — I was positive I was going straight to hell as a hungry ghost. After all, this was an exact description of my experience with food. And not just with food, but also with life. […]
During the peak of my diet and binge days, hunger had nothing to do with how much I consumed — I ate because I was angry, sad, bored, lonely, or tired, or because I was celebrating, grieving, or getting ready to go on another diet. […]
My favorite bowl broke the other day. A friend was visiting and she mistakenly crashed into something which crashed into the bowl and that was that. After wanting (but deciding it was not a good idea) to blame her for being such a klutz — blame is always my first line of defense and a […]
It’s Christmas and I am 10 years old. I want a tree. I want the twinkling lights, the angel at the top, the presents at the bottom. But my mother say no. We are Jewish and Jewish people celebrate Hanukkah, not Christmas. […]
A reporter interviewed me recently about what people can do to end their obsession with food. “Do you still binge?” she asked. “No,” I answered. “Does your weight vacillate from season to season?” “No again,” I said. “I’ve been at my natural weight for a few decades.” “So let me see if I’ve got this […]
Until recently, I never used the word contentment; it seemed like asking too much. Also, the word itself seemed to imply smugness and being so satisfied with the way things were that there was no room for reaching or growing. Instead of contentment, I used the word happiness. But there was also a problem with […]
I have a friend who dreads summer because of what she calls the unveiling of her body. Peeling off her clothes, she says, reveals “the horror of it all.” The back fat. The cellulite. All the new cellulite that mysteriously appeared over the winter. The belly bulge that makes people ask, “Hey, are you pregnant?” […]
For many years, I was convinced that by changing my body, I would change my life. Because I was certain that my suffering was due to my size, I believed that when the weight disappeared, it would take old wounds, hurts, and rejections with it. I thought that changing the shape on the outside would alter the feelings on the inside. Silly me. […]
Every morning Matt, Izzy and I meet our next-door neighbors and their dog Happy for a walk. Izzy tears around, barks, puppy bows and takes a nip on Happy’s ears to entice him to play with her. No dice. Happy stands mute, unresponsive, looks at the grass. After the first ear nip, Happy runs to […]
There are so many new things to worry about these days that I can’t keep track of them (and I worry about that): worldwide financial collapse, dirty bombs, supergerms. And then there are the old fears: cancer, Alzheimer’s, what gravity will eventually do to my neck.
Back in the last century, I weighed almost twice as much as I do now—and I desperately wanted to be thin. So desperately that if a genie had appeared (and I’m not exactly proud of this fact) and offered me one wish, it would have been to wake up thin the next day.
Kate and her mother spent years dieting together. They joined Weight Watchers, went on Atkins, tried the Master Cleanse together. They suffered together over the size of their thighs. But six months ago, after Kate came to one of my retreats, she decided that she didn’t want to diet anymore, didn’t want to punish or deprive herself. […]
People usually come to my retreats because they want to lose weight. They want to stop suffering. They want to be happy. I talk to them about trusting themselves and about listening to their bodies. Once you do that, I say, everything — your relationship with food, yourself, your body — tends to fall into place. […]
When my friend Ed wanted to stop smoking, a Zen master told him that he needed to love smoking first. “Create a ritual each time you smoke,” the teacher said. “Take a cigarette and wrap it in a beautiful cloth.
A few years ago, I drove into a nine-story parking garage in San Francisco, and after I finished my errands, I couldn’t remember where I’d parked. My husband, who was in Antarctica at the time, had called just as I pulled into the space, and I was so happy to speak to him that I didn’t write down the floor or space number. […]
My friend Molly told me about a fifty-year-old friend of hers who’d been a member of a sewing circle for ten years and was now dying of brain cancer. “I labored and sweated over my crooked stitches,” the friend said. “And I always felt ashamed for not making the right-sized or shaped stitches. As if […]
I’ve been thinking about chocolate cake recently, even, maybe especially, during the pandemic. To be precise, I’ve been thinking about what happens when a piece of bittersweet flourless Chocolate Decadence Cake arrives at a table where a few friends and I have agreed to share the dense, sweet dessert. Eyes light up. […]
During an interview that lasted almost two weeks, Joan Brunwasser and I roamed the world of eating, writing, and living. During our conversation, we went back and forth, deeper and deeper into the heart of emotional eating and what prompts it. Take a look. […]
