Joy, Longing, Food, Work

WARNING: LONG POST (I will use bullet points to help)

Geneen Roth is Oprah’s newest golden child (Oprah blessed her with the #1 spot on book lists). I felt “in the know” because I read Geneen Roth’s Feeding the Hungry Heart (and the now out-of-print but brilliant Thin Within) 20+ years ago. Geneen has written a new book Women, Food and God. I saw Oprah weeping all over Geneen because she finally “gets it” about food….blah blah blah. Next commercial break? TGI Fridays. I kid you not.

• I do agree with Geneen that often we all, including incredibly thin people, eat for reasons that don’t include hunger. In fact, I dare say 75% of the time ALL of us are eating from something other than hunger. Rampant food advertising could be a real part of that problem. (Imagine being a heroine addict and you open Oprah to read about kicking your addiction, turn the page, and voila! a recipe for cooking up the best smack evah! How’s that resolve NOW?). So, there is that.

• Secondly, we have no inherent hard work as part of our world anymore. We have to “make up” hard work (aka gym). We don’t beat rugs, we don’t plow fields, we don’t fix our own cards, hell we hardly even cook. Nearly all of our daily activities involve sitting on our ASSES. At the end of five days of ass-sitting at work, I can barely move. My fanny hurts and it has loads of padding.We don’t burn off our angst physically much anymore. We sit and stare at it…over and over again and we ask ourselves “where is the joy in this”?

That said. We are getting fat as a whole. Bur I don’t think it is all emotional.

Now I grew up with a (sometimes) fat mother. All we talked about was dieting. It was the single most boring part of her personality. I personally saw her as low as a size 4 (frightening) and as high as a 24 (frightening). Despite the relative safety of gastric bypass surgery, she refused because she knew she could lose the weight AGAIN. Fat? Mean as a snake. Lovely for us all. She had no control when “off the wagon”…sundaes were the largest, bowls of popcorn were troughs. No happy medium. For her it was truly feast or famine. She was not happy fat. And I swore I would never be like her.

In many ways, I’m not. I do not subscribe to diet magazines, books, blogs, etc. I do not buy the large size of any food item, not even a Coke (which I am truly and horribly addicted to), even when I am lonely and severely depressed. But, of course, I inherited some genes and strong opinions about what makes a woman beautiful. Ah. That. And now my body is aging and behaving in ways that surprise, scare, confuse and infuriate me all at once. I rarely diet. But I also rarely move. Not good.

I do think we seek out food for comfort and no place do I do it more than when I am “forced” to work a traditional job (vending machines be damned!). Looking for little spots of joy and attempting to defeat boredom during the work day,  the easiest and only one that seems accessible is food. And even on days off, it is easier to stop for fast food than take a class, dig in the yard, meet the new person. When so little of life is about real accomplishment, real satisfaction, let alone genuine joy, something like food is a cheap fast way to get pleasure. Or the hope of pleasure. And if you are stuck at work and unhappy, you can’t take a break to dig in the yard or cut flowers (one of my true sources of joy).

Food and work should not be this emotionally laden and complicated, but they are the real stuff of life. And much of the time, for many (most) people, life has lost much of its inherent meaning. How’re we gonna get that back without a little Taco Bell to buoy us? I am trying to find out…

I find this video embarrassing. Crying over food when there are people who are starving? It does seem we should be ashamed at being filled with such personal drama over a cupcake and should instead dig deeper for real things to work on. Honestly, if we are healthy, how much time are we spending obsessing over our weight and food that we could be spending on fixing the world?