I recently finished reading Geneen Roth’s Breaking Free from Emotional Eating. I found it in a very serendipitous way: I was curious about ultramarathons run in the Netherlands (where I live), and I came across Andrew Dasselaar. I found his magnificent book, Letting Go, where he details his journey of emotional healing and how we lost his excess weight while working through his emotional issues. As someone who always struggled with food and weight, I immediately got hooked by his journey. It also allowed me to understand that my struggles with food were not just about better dietary choices, a better eating system, or more willpower; rather, they reveal deeper emotional and spiritual issues that can only be worked directly. Food can be an addiction, a distraction, and also a way of giving ourselves comfort in the face of pain. His book, and Geneen Roth’s, put me on a path to work on my emotions, not just on a dietary plan.

It seems that Andrew was highly influenced by Geneen Roth’s book, so I turned to it. I found this book extremely eye opening and touching. If you also have issues with weight and are looking for something better than a new diet or plan, I highly, highly recommend you pick this book.

Here are my notes on the book:

• “When you want food and you’re not hungry, it’s a good indicator that you want something less tangible but don’t know what it is or else feel that you might not be able to get it. So while it’s true that if you eat when you’re hungry, you won’t always eat when you want, it is also true that you can use the desire to eat when you are not hungry as an indicator that you need something less material than food and that until you stop eating, you cannot discover what that might be.”
• “When you don’t allow yourself hunger, you don’t allow yourself satisfaction.”
• “A balance exists, however, between not depriving yourself of the food you want when you are hungry and using food to make up for all the other ways you feel deprived.”
• “Trust develops and builds when I am given a choice (and not, as in dieting, denied it). Trust develops when I choose to make myself comfortable, not miserable, to take care of myself rather than hurt myself.”
• “Diets exclude our psychological and emotional needs by assuming that we are going to feel the same way about ourselves, our relationships, our lives, on day one as on day six. Diets exclude all feelings except for those of wanting to be thin. Diets remove from us one of the few characteristics that distinguishes us from other animals—choice.”
• “There is nothing you can’t have tomorrow so there is no reason to eat it all today.”
• “When you want to escape from a feeling, you will often do so by breaking a restriction you have imposed upon yourself. When you are in pain and want release, any kind of release will do, even when the release (breaking your diet) and the feeling you want release from (frustration or sadness) are unrelated.”
• Eating must take our full attention: no reading, no TV, no emotional conversations. Sit down, not while doing something else. Focus on the food. Awareness.
• Eating also fulfills emotional needs. So eat what you feel like eating, physically and emotionally.
• Judgement doesn’t create change.
• “Awareness and compulsion cannot possibly exist together in the same moment.”
• “as soon as you are aware that you are bingeing, it is no longer a binge.”
• “Emotional behavior is marked by an awful absence of self.”
• “Negative judgement assumes that you do not have the desire or sufficient motivation to get off the ground. It assumes that given large spaces, you will grovel, you will waste time, you will crumple. Doesn’t it know that wild elephants walk softly in open fields?”
• “Feeling fat is a mask; it enables me to hide behind a well-worn problem while preventing me from discovering the source of the current and less familiar pain. Next time be more specific.”
• “Until recently, when a friend pointed out that I’d been writing the way I encourage people not to eat.”
• “What’s more important, losing weight or your feelings about yourself while you are losing it?”
• “What would happen if you relaxed now?”
• “We embrace anything that helps us lose our appetites. Even death.”
• “The only thing stronger than fear was the desire not to live in fear for the rest of my life.”
• “You’ve got to want to trust yourself more than you want to be thin. Because there are no guarantees. This isn’t a diet; this is life.”
• “I used to think was so wild that if I ever listened to it, if I ever let myself do what I wanted, I would never work. I would sleep until one in the afternoon, I’d read magazines, I’d go out to lunch, I’d winter in Greece and summer in Maine. Then I wrote a book. And now I’m writing another.”
• “When you ask, you have decided that you are good enough to ask.”
• “And I say it because for seventeen years of my life I loathed myself because I wasn’t thin. Except that during many of those years, I was thin. And it made no difference.”
• “The glory of others, and the worthlessness of ourselves, are relative. They are usually decided upon in comparison with someone whose struggle is not apparent.”
• A compulsion is defined as an irresistible impulse to do something irrational. But the author says that compulsions serve a purpose: they are a defense mechanism against fear; they are also a rebellion of an internal voice that has been silenced by ourselves and others. While compulsions can go away, the triumph is not their repression, but facing our deep seated fears, our dark side, and embracing it through vulnerability.
• The point is not to become thin. The point is to become whole. Healthy eating arises from there, and can only arise from there.

I took a few (very few) notes while reading Andrew’s book. Here they are:

• “Food is the most popular drug of the 21st Century.”
• “People overeat not because they lack discipline, but rather the contrary: because they want one area of their lives in which they don’t have to march in step, where they are in control rather than external powers.”
• “The cure for pain is to simply feel it, and to find out that amidst the pain, you are still there.”
• “Walking the path away from addiction isn’t easy, but it is simple. All it requires is that you accept that holding on in the past is no longer an option.”
• “Moreover, you would be aware that you have time to think, so there would be even less room for self-deception. This would create a problem, as addictions are all about pretending not to have control.”
• “(…) I was deliberately working up my hunger to intolerably high levels just to give myself an excuse to indulge later on.”
• “Being aware gives you a choice.”
• “Genes may determine in which direction you are likely to fall if life makes you stumble. However, they do not determine whether you will decide to try and get up. And they sure as hell don’t have the final verdict on whether you’ll succeed.”