Book Review: Women Food and God

After reading a sample chapter of Geneen Roth’s new book Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything my former therapist sent to me, I immediately went to Amazon, ordered the book, paid for upgraded overnight shipping, and waited impatiently for it to arrive while going back and rereading the sample chapter (which is Chapter 4, entitled “It’s Not About the Weight, but it’s Not Not About the Weight.” Saturday morning, I poured myself a cup of coffee, went out on my patio in the chilly morning spring air, and opened up the book. As I devoured page after page, tears streamed down my face as I felt both happiness and sadness with each sentence I read and identified so deeply with: happiness to realize how far I have come in my own journey to ending years of disordered eating habits and finally reaching levels of fulfillment I never thought possible, and sadness to recognize the isolation and emptiness so many around me feel and try to numb themselves from with food.

Let me preface this review by saying I am not a religious person, and when the book was first brought to my attention, I initially dismissed it, turned off by the title. I didn’t feel that God has anything to do with my relationship with food, and, I was guilty of judging a book by its cover (or in this case, the title). So, if you are inclined to dismiss it for those reasons, don’t. The book is less about God, and more about finding a space within ourselves — a space we often fill with food, rather than exploring to its depths. Some people, when they open themselves up to that space have a name for it in God. Others might define it in broader terms like spirituality. And some might simply feel it as being one with themselves and all around them. The point of the book is to demonstrate how the relationship so many people (or more specifically in this book, women) have with food keeps us from any of those things, and more importantly how to change that relationship.

In part one, Roth addresses the “God” part of the book and how God related to dieting for her in the past. “Dieting was like praying. It was a plaintive cry to whoever was listening: I know I am fat. I know I am ugly. I know I am undisciplined, but see how hard I try. See how violently I restrict myself, deprive myself, punish myself. Sure there must be a reward for those who know how horrible they are.” She talks about how dieting gave her a purpose — perhaps much in the same way religion might for some people, and then she goes on to say “bingeing gave me relief from the relentless attempt to be someone else.”

Roth has written many books (which I am sad to say I have not yet read) on the subject of emotional eating, but a realization she says she has only recently come to is that “the radical part of the tale is not that I stopped dieting; it’s that I stopped trying to fix myself.” This reminded me of a similar realization I came to and wrote about in the article Self Acceptance vs Body Acceptance in which I proclaimed to end the urge to fix myself.

And yet, it is often hard to imagine a world in which we are not constantly trying to fix ourselves, especially our bodies. For one, it’s how women have learned to relate to each other. As Roth points out, “we fit in by hating ourselves.” I’m sure from time to time you come across that person who seems to hold that secret to happiness and balance the rest of us struggle daily to find, and isn’t there just a tad of resentment towards them? Maybe you’re just waiting to see them fall in order to prove they too  are actually imperfect humans like you, which probably explains our obsession with celebrities and the great joy many find in seeing photos of their cellulite and jelly rolls as we go through the check out line with smirks on our faces. It’s almost as if there is something wrong with someone if they don’t hate themselves — or at least some part of themselves. And yet, the ability to see their imperfections and embrace them as part of a greater whole is what makes them happy, and it’s the lack of that ability that keeps others from achieving true happiness.

It’s also hard to let go of the belief that achieving weight loss will be accompanied with the answers to all of our problems. Though on a rational level, we can understand that a number on the scale won’t change the world, “the promise of weight loss is that it will allow [us] to live on a magical piece of earth from which everything else will be manageable … If I fix myself so that I am no longer myself, then everything will be fine. My feelings will be manageable.”

In the chapter entitled “Never Underestimate the Inclination to Bolt” Roth addresses head on why we might avoid overcoming compulsive eating (or dieting). She bluntly states it when she says “compulsive eaters wouldn’t have an obsession with food if we believed that life was tolerable without it … There is madness in obsession, yes, but its value is that it drowns out the madness of life.” This sentiment is followed by the chapter that hooked me on the book: It’s Not About the Weight, but It’s Not Not About the Weight. And that’s when Roth goes on to explain the conundrum of addressing the very real problems that are created by excess weight: diabetes, joint pain, shortness of breath, and for many, a general decrease in the quality of life due to health complications, while all the while trying to unsurface the deeper issues which are being covered up by the weight problems. Here is a very poignant passage from the chapter:

“The bottom line, whether you weight 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug, grappling with boredom, or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejection. Food is only the middleman, the means to the end. Of altering your emotions. Of making yourself numb. Of creating a secondary problem when the original problem becomes too uncomfortable. Of dying slowly rather than coming to terms with your messy, magnificent and very, very short — even at a hundred years old — life. The means to these ends happens to be food, but it could be alcohol, it could be work, it could be sex, it could be cocaine. Surfing the Internet. Talking on the phone … Weight (too much or too little) is a by product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life.”

And, if you’re thinking your compulsive eating stems from a simple case of too much love for food, Roth has an answer for that too: “When you like something — love something, you take time with it you want to be present for every second of the rapture … Overeating does not lead to rapture. It leads to burping and farting and being so sick that you can’t think of anything but how full you are. That’s not love; that’s suffering.” How can you love something that makes you sick over and over again? It’s like returning to an abusive partner every time they say they are sorry, and really, they do love you, and really, it won’t happen again. But like so many women who are abused and feel that they somehow deserve the abuse — as if they brought it on themselves, compulsive eaters and dieters continue to punish themselves through their relationship with food because they don’t feel worthy of something better.

Like most other books that address emotional eating, Women Food and God is for those ready to do some serious work and reflection on their lives. Roth challenges the reader to face head on the pain and uncomfortable feelings that drive them to eat when they’re bodies are telling them not to. What she reminds the reader over and over throughout the book is that the very feelings they feel will destroy them are the same feelings that allow us — everyone of us to feel alive. If you are ready to top numbing yourself with food and dieting, start feeling alive, this beautiful written, incredibly powerful book is for you.