When Food Is Love by Geneen Roth

The significance of giving up the obsession with food is not a thinner body, not a smaller pants size, but giving up your protection from pain, for whe you protect yourself from pain, your protect yourself from initimacy. When you allow your pain to be visible, you can give it a voice. And when you give it a voice, you can release yourself from it.

The significance of being intimate is not in finding a body to keep you warm at night or having a companion with whom to share your life; the significance is that in being close, you are thrown back to the time when you decided that being close was too scary, so you folded in on yourself. When you go back to that time, you give yourself the opportunity to be a child again, but this time with the power of an adult. You learn that you no longer have to hide your feelings to survive. And in so doing, you claim the precious parts of yourself--your trust, your faith, your honesty--that you locked away in a place where they would not be touched by the devestation in your family.

The problem with giving up drama--with food and in relationships--is that without it we don't know what to do. We're not sure we're really alive. We have to face something we never anticipated: the possibility of peace and contentment.

~~ by Geneen Roth, When Food Is Love