Previous
Next

Today I finished reading a book that Joanna gave me last week, called When Food Is Love.

After spending about a month a while ago reading Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, and doing the self-hypnosis exercises, and the writing a letter to yourself with your non-dominant hand, and not finding any great traumas or even any ungrieved pain from my childhood lurking within me, I wasn't pleased to see this new book start right in on its thesis that compulsive overeating is generally hiding a fear of intimacy, a feeling that one is not worthy of being loved, stemming from the experiences of being beaten, raped, and abandoned as a child. (run-on sentence) I had gotten enough of that from the first book.

While various things in the book did strike a chord with me, like the fact that my compulsive eating occurs when I'm alone, and possibly depressed (or even angry at someone), and that there is a feeling that things would be better in my life if I weighed considerably less, I'm just not seeing the underlying reasons for these things that these books suggest.

While I acknowledge that these people have long studied these things, and claim therapeutic success, and thus substantiation, for their theories, and I don't want to sound arrogant by naysaying them without any evidence to refute them, the possibility is never lost on me that perhaps they're just quacks.

<RANT>
This all came about because my bad self-image based on my weight came up during the conversation, which I hadn't brought up with her before. She had the gall to say that I'm not fat. I don't understand why people feel the need to say that to people who know perfectly well that they are fat. Sure, I see people every day who are fatter than I am, and I see people ever day less so, and people who are not overweight at all. And some of those fat people are full of self-love, and some of self-loathing; how overweight they are, and how they feel about that, are not relevant to my weight and my feelings. And I'm not deluding myself that I need to lose three hundred pounds; I'm simply being honest with myself, on this issue anyway; and I'm the one who sees me naked in the mirror every day. I know I'm fat, and I wish people (funny how they're usually the nicely slender ones) would stop insisting that I'm not.
</RANT>

In case you're wondering, I'm:
5 feet, 9 inches tall
220 pounds

It being August 8 currently in the Pacific Time Zone, I'll wish my brother Jeff a Happy 44th Birthday, wherever he is.