Feeding the Hungry Heart

The following is excerpted from Feeding the Hungry Heart by Geneen Roth.

Emotional eating is not about lack of willpower and will not be solved by dieting. While overeating (as well as under-eating) can become a life-threatening health concern, the roots of the problem are rarely physical. We eat when we are lonely. We eat when we are sad. We eat when we are bored. We eat when we are angry, grieving, frustrated, frightened, or even happy. We eat because we don’t know what to do with our feelings and food is here, there, everywhere. It’s cheap, tastes good, and doesn’t talk back. If we are ever going to solve the serious problems that result from emotional eating, including anorexia, bulimia, and obesity, we need to understand that the main reason people eat is to feed their hungry hearts.

Until the hunger of the heart itself is named and touched, no amount of advice—no matter how medically correct—will enable someone to stop eating destructively. If someone is using food [in a destructive way], giving her an exercise-and-food plan will not turn her around. …we need to see her eating as a way of expressing what she doesn’t know how to say any other way. We need to touch the ground of the pain, dissolve its roots. If you simply cut off a branch here and there, bringing about a quick fix—for six months or a year—the problem will only come back with renewed vengeance.

…We keep looking in the wrong places to solve the problem. If you want to find your keys, you need to look where you left them. If we want to solve our obsession with food and body size, we need to look at the longings, the desperation, the beliefs, and the images from which it grows.

When, for any number of reasons, we feel separated from ourselves and the life we know is possible, we feel hollow and empty. We feel lonely. We feel worthless. Those of us who are emotional eaters turn to food to anchor us and fill the empty spaces. After developing an eating problem, we then focus on dieting, food plans, elaborate schemes for losing weight and gaining the perfect body, a sense of meaning and a feeling of accomplishment. But no system built on deprivation….will ever work—and this includes diets—because it does not recognize the fundamental reasons behind emotional eating.

[But] change is possible when the truth of what you want to change is fully understood. It is possible.

Living the life you were given, feeling an internal freedom of movement, expressing your capacities without always keeping part of them bound in obsession—these are birthrights. These are what you deserve. … These are what feed the hungry heart.