It's Not About The Chips
At a recent workshop, a participant was sharing her difficulty with potato chips. Coming from a perspective that refuses to vilify any food, I asked what was bad about eating the chips. Why did she feel badly about it? Upon reflection she admitted that it wasn’t about whether or not she should eat potato chips but what she was avoiding by eating the chips.
She recognized that the chips were simply a convenient cover, a buffer, a distraction from her discomfort and anxiety in certain social situations. She hadn’t wanted to face the feelings that arose in her when standing self-conscious and alone at the party by the snack table.
I was speaking with another client about the times she notices herself habitually going for the cookies on her work breaks. Initially she co-opted boredom as an excuse, but what she finally admitted to was her discomfort and unfamiliarity with being with herself when things slow down. She knows how to be when life is full, fast and busy, but her comfort level and repertoire for the quiet and slow moments of life were wanting. It was amazing how without judgment and with some awareness she recognized a desire to actually learn to develop her capacity to be with herself and to feel herself without food in those spaces.
What would you be left to feel and experience if you didn’t eat the chips at the party or hit the office cookie jar? Are you willing to find out what’s there? Are you interested in expanding your capacity to feel and experience more life? If we didn’t muzzle ourselves with food and its obsession imagine how much more of us would be present to connect, to create, to express our gifts and passions!
I was reading in Geneen Roth’s latest book, Women, Food and God about the phenomena of compulsive eating as “a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard…a way we distance ourselves from the way things are when they are not how we want them to be…ending the obsession with food is about the capacity to stay in the present moment. To not leave ourselves…compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive.”
In my life I’ve done my fair share of checking out, of leaving myself, of refusing my life by escaping into a pint of ice cream. In my own journey to make peace with food, to stop compulsive eating, the healing has been in the agreement to feel more life, to feel all of it! I invite my courageous clients also to stay present in those moments when they might otherwise check out. Feel the social discomfort and the desire to connect beyond it. Feel the emptiness and the appetite beyond that. Don't you think it’s time we let the chips off the hook?!
