Exiting The Cave

The stir that Oprah caused about Geneen Roth's latest book, Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, almost made me want to avoid reading it.

There is something ever so slightly irritating about jumping on the latest fad diet discussion because a celebrity has caused a hubbub.

Or is that just my perpetually stubborn streak talking?

In any case, I would have missed out on a fascinating read.  My husband spotted an article about the book and left it on my keyboard because he thought I'd find it interesting.   I did.  And then some.


Roth's thesis?

Unless you really see what your core beliefs are, what's making you overeat—beliefs like "I'm damaged; I don't deserve this; love is not for me; this will never work out; God is a ruse; goodness is not for me; I'll always be separated from what I love"—and until you name those beliefs, they will shape your life willy-nilly. You'll just keep on acting them out by punishing yourself with food. But if you can finally get to understanding the beliefs underneath, you can learn how to live....


I think we all have a hunger that's hard to name. A lot of people who come to my retreats have never named it before, or else they've named it in church, but they can't actually see the connection between what they're doing with food and this yearning. I call it "the flame" that they have: They yearn for big answers to live a big life. But they have to start with the most basic fears.

Like I said, fascinating stuff. 

For the past few years, I've struggled with my weight like a lot of folks -- go on a diet, do well for a while, blow it over a weekend when I'm too sick or too tired to really care about what I'm eating, and then not get back up on the healthier eating horse again for months so that I regain what I lost.  And then the cycle starts all over again.

When you are insanely busy or dealing with a chronic illness or raising a child or working a lot more than you probably should (or all of the above!), it can be incredibly easy to put your eating and, thus, your health on autopilot.  To fail to be conscious of what you are doing, though, can really get you into trouble as pound after pound begins to pile on from this lack of awareness.

It's awfully easy to just chalk this up to being too busy or too ill or whatever other "too" excuse you can muster for not taking care of yourself or living this part of your life on autopilot.

What I hadn't considered, though, was the why of all of this.

Roth's book asks some tough questions that I haven't even begun to answer, but that dig into the roots of this unconsciousness.

What I've noticed though?  Even just taking the steps to think about them has made me far more aware of what I'm really thinking and feeling as I take a bite of something.  And how I feel afterward.  Healthy food makes me feel more vibrant, and makes me feel great about taking good care of myself.

Bad food?  Makes me feel sluggish and never quite fills me up because it's just processed crap most of the time and, worse, makes me internally miserable which then propels me toward eating to suppress feeling badly about the bad eating and....

Well, you see how that can go wrong very quickly, don't you?

When I was in college, I had a wonderful political philosophy class in which one of the texts we studied was Plato's Republic.  In it, Socrates uses an allegory about the myth of a cave which hits Roth's book square in its gut level.  To paraphrase substantially, most people spend their lives staring at the shadows of images on a cave wall thinking that is all there is to life -- essentially believing in the whole reality of fleeting images that really only hint at what may be going on outside that sheltered, blocked cave.

It is the people who realize they are staring at these shadows, who get up and go outside to see what is at the root of them, who begin to glimpse reality.

In effect, Roth's call to look at the roots of our own issues with food and how they are intertwined with our past and our false perceptions of where we are currently as a result of being stuck in our learned behaviors and fears and whatever other baggage we carry from that past that holds us in the cave.  And it is the conflict between that past and what our present really is that leads to serious problems with eating and beyond.

Roth's bookreally is worth a read. 

If only to make you think about what shadows you've been boxing that have no basis in your current reality -- wearing you out before you ever get to see the real light of where you could be going.

(Photo via Eric Vondy.)