The Pure Joy of Eating
Food should be made with butter and love (unknown)
When you were a child I’ll wager you had no issue with food whatsoever. You ate whatever you wanted, when you were hungry and stopped when you were full. When you look back at pictures of yourself, you were a normal weight.  It was only when this was disrupted by either parental input or society’s mirroring that your reality was contaminated by the introduction of the mind into this very intimate personal body issue.
I became an expert calorie counter by the age of 13. I would stuff myself, then starve myself. It only got worse as I got older. By the time I was in my 20’s I was eating bags of cookies and running 5 miles then returning home and eating another bag and going back out to run again. It seemed I could never catch up with myself. Truly I was literally and figuratively running.
Even a simple meal was fraught with difficulty. I rarely ate in front of other people (especially men), only late at night or when I was alone. During my starvation periods I was so thin my periods stopped (aka anorexic); during my binge periods I ballooned up 30 pounds. I never enjoyed a single thing I ate but was always weighing, measuring, evaluating, fearing, thinking of the next item I would consume without even, barely tasting the item at hand (or in mouth!)
Deprivation kept this cycle alive.  Every Sunday night I would binge because on Monday I would be restricting fat or carbs or sugar forever. By Wednesday, whatever new fad diet I was on had gone belly up(and out!) and I was lost in the wake of the remains.  I didn’t eat a piece of bread for 17 years but I had thousands of candy bars.
Weighing myself every day, sometimes four or five times was my daily indictment.  During my first pregnancy I gained 32 pounds, never enjoying a meal, always on the scale, swimming, walking, and yes, even running, to keep the pounds off. Because I was not living in my body but in my mind, my body was like a foreign country to me. I didn’t know what my real cravings were as they were overshadowed by my compulsive eating, fueled by scarcity, and the fear that I would never again get to taste this or that so why not stock up now?
After my daughter’s birth things remained problematic. I watched her eat and enjoy her food so much while I was at war with food. I couldn’t even keep a jar of peanut butter in the house!!!
A light emerged at the end of the tunnel shortly after I conceived my second child. A friend told me about an interview she had read with Lillian Pearson in the book, Getting Clear (circa 1976). In it a simple diet called The Psychologists Eat Anything Diet was presented.
Ms. Pearson made a distinction between having a love affair with food or raping it. She taught me the difference between a humming food and a beckoning food. A humming food is something you are craving from inside while a beckoning food is one that you might see as you walk by a bakery. If you don’t have a beckoning food, you won’t feel deprived but if you don’t have your humming food, you will. If you are careful to listen to what your body really wants and supply it, whatever it is, your need to binge and stock up is rendered obsolete!!!
She stressed the importance of figuring out where you feel hunger. Her place, I remember, was between her shoulder blades. I realized that I hadn’t been hungry in at least five years!!! I began to zero in on my hunger which I felt in my solar plexus area, not fearing hunger, but rather seeing hunger as the venue that would take me where I wanted and needed to be. Hunger doesn’t lie.
Last but not least she strongly suggested throwing your scale in the garbage which I gratefully did the next day. Something about this program felt simple and right to me and a whole lot like when I was a kid.
It turned out that pregnancy was actually a good time to try this out as my cravings were strong once I let myself be hungry. I discovered I got hungry about three hours after waking up.  I remember the first sandwich I had, tuna, with chips. It was so delicious and I found that I actually couldn’t finish it. I bought a carton of Milk Chocolate chip ice cream and found that one tablespoon was delicious and best of all, enough. I knew I was onto something when that half gallon carton lasted three weeks. I knew I could have it tomorrow and the next day forever more so why would I need to eat it all in one day? or flush it down the garbage disposal like so many cartons before.
I was feeling freer. Yoga and deep breathing kept me centered  Aerobic exercise became an optional part of my day, something I enjoyed. It wasn’t a punishment for some infraction in the diet department.  The pregnancy was smooth.. When I went to the doctor I told him I didn’t want to know my weight, only if it was a problem. On the delivery table I asked how much I’d gained less than 20 pounds eating everything I could have ever wanted.
That was the clearest answer I could have gotten.  Now 47 years later my relationship with food remains a love affair. My weight has been stable (the exact same weight for 38 years!!! The only time I weigh myself is once a year at my yearly checkup.) It’s all true and it can be true for you too.