I’ve been thinking about chocolate cake recently. 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. […]
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. […]
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. …
One of the hardest things I’ve had to accept is that when I chose one thing, I didn’t choose another. When I chose to get a mammogram, I didn’t choose the thermogram route. When I chose Matt, I didn’t choose Rob, who was an avid meditator. When I chose to write (and keep writing) about compulsive eating, I didn’t choose to write a novel. […]
Night comes swiftly like “a great, dark, soft thing,” and for most of my life I’ve greeted it reluctantly, as if behind the darkness lurked terror and shattered hearts. My mother says, “You were a fast napper from the day you were born. Other kids went down for two hours. You slept for twenty minutes and were up for the rest of the day.” Even as an infant, I didn’t want to surrender to that dark, soft thing. […]
I am sitting at the kitchen table enraptured with a bowl of tomato soup. Not just any tomato soup: mine has crushed tomatoes, coconut milk, sea salt, parsley, a dash of coconut oil, and honey. (If you try it at home, blend to a thick consistency, add some thyme, pepper, and cloves.) I look down at the bowl: a nip, not even a spoonful, is left. Although I’m no longer hungry, I still want more. […]
Recently I was walking by a store in San Rafael and saw coasters of hearts with wings in the window. I’ve always been crazy about heart-anything. When I rented my first apartment in Santa Cruz, my friend Lennie helped me decorate my bathroom wall in dozens of heart-shaped boxes. […]
A few years ago, my therapist of ten years said, “I think you’re done, Geneen. You’ve worked hard, and you can continue, but I think you’re done.” Done? I sputtered and spit up the spiced tea I was drinking on my new mustard-colored sweater. […]
I was twenty-five, dressed in a tiered hippie skirt and sky-blue Capezio leotard when I snuck backstage to meet Joni Mitchell. It was two hours before her Buffalo concert, and Joni’s dressing room was awash in lilies. When she walked in shimmering and golden, I was speechless. […]
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!” […]
Part 61: When I was growing up, both shopping and eating were equal parts thrilling and shaming. I looked forward to them the way a lover anticipates a forbidden and clandestine meeting: heart pounding with the soon-to-be dive into a world of adrenaline and sensory delights. My entire life has come down to this, only this. This bowl of ice cream, this striped sweater. […]
I’m thinking of cupcakes and friendship and wanting a friend who is no longer a friend to give me cupcakes I won’t eat because cancer and sugar don’t mix and the truth is we were friends but not close friends because I was never truly myself with her although when I heard this friend was giving cupcakes to people it made me feel left out and […]
Part 125: I was just about to write a Cancer Chronicle today, as I get ready for the third-year post-lumpectomy mammogram, and then I found this, that I wrote exactly a year ago, when I was getting ready for the second mammogram. I’d been noticing this week that fear has come up, what if there is recurrence, what if I need more surgery (a radical mastectomy), what if what if what if. […]
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. […]
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. […]
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 […]
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. […]
