Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything
No matter how sophisticated or wealthy or broke or enlightened you are, how you eat tells all.
If you suffer about your relationship with food -- you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all -- you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don't run. Look. Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.
Since adolescence, Geneen Roth has gained and lost more than a thousand pounds. She has been dangerously overweight and dangerously underweight. She has been plagued by feelings of shame and self-hatred and she has felt euphoric after losing a quick few pounds on a fad diet. Then one day, on the verge of suicide, she did something radical: She dropped the struggle, ended the war, stopped trying to fix, deprive and shame herself. She began trusting her body and questioning her beliefs.
It worked. And losing weight was only the beginning.
She wrote about her discoveries in When Food Is Love, her first New York Times bestseller. She gave huge numbers of women their first insights into compulsive eating and she changed huge numbers of lives for the better.
Now, after more than three decades of studying, teaching and writing about what drives our compul-sions with food, Geneen adds a profound new dimension to her work in Women, Food and God. She begins with her most basic concept: The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning, transformation and, yes, even God. But it doesn't stop there. Geneen shows how going beyond both the food and feelings takes you deeper into realms of spirit and soul to the bright center of your own life.
With penetrating insight and irreverent humor, Roth traces food compulsions from subtle beginnings to unexpected ends. She teaches personal examination, showing readers how to use their relationship with food to discover the fulfillment they long for.
Your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom, says Roth. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call "God."
Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body...and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life.
Reviews
After being on the library wait list for months, I was so excited to see this book come in for me yesterday ... but I was SO disappointed to see that within the first few pages, the "f" word was used several times along with other profanity. It spoiled the read for me & I didn't go beyond those first few pages. An intelligent, articulate woman can communicate without stooping to shock-talk. I'm sure she probably had some great points to make...how unfortunate that it was presented in a way that offends the reader who does revere & reverence God. I never anticipated that a book that included God in the "formula" would contain the "f" word repeatedly. It will go back to the library today...unread.
This book is excellent for anyone who struggles with weight. What makes the book so great is it will be a great read for anyone who has a friend or loved one who is obese and wants to try and understand the problem.
Thank you Geneen Roth for recognizing that eating only cabbage soup, cutting out all carbs, and all of the other fad diets are just that---fads. Instead she offers a healthy approach which can result in weight loss. She encourages the reader and members of her retreats to learn to feel what is really inside, emphasizing that it is critical to feel what is inside when they are tempted to eat altho not hungry. There are many examples and discussions of the import of the tapes one plays in the mind....the ongoing story of how things should/could be if only. The reader is encouraged to see what the mirror, and life, really shows...time to leave the negative feelings and thoughts behind. Roth does a wonderful job of using real life scenarios, including her personal experiences, to make the book relevant to the reader. If you have struggled with your self image, with your weight, or just life issues in general, this is the read for you. It is worth reading several times to reinforce the concepts in your mind. A real book, not another fad.
I've been resisting Geneen Roth books for years. I knew all about *her*. She's this skinny blonde idiot who somehow doesn't have to diet anymore and makes her clients eat *chocolate*. Eat what you want? Are you kidding me?
Still not sure why I picked up the book, but the phrase that grabbed hold of me was this:
"Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being."
Sounds obvious in print like that, but yes, I did/do think that way--and wasn't really aware of it. Also, it's easy for a lot of compulsive eaters (like yours truly) to hear "eat what you want" as "eat everything you're craving until you physically cannot eat any more." There's a difference, and she actually does address that specifically at one point. Others have accused her of not including nutritional information or diet plans, but I suspect she is deliberately vague on nutrition because most chronic dieters are already experts on that subject, and know almost every plan out there (though we're always looking for new ones). Every body has different needs, so one person may have to cut out sugar, or wheat, or keep a food diary, or engage in suspiciously diet-sounding activities to best support his or her own health. That's up to the individual; Roth seems more worried about the mentality that drives those choices. She tries to dispense as little actual advice as possible, even couching that advice as "if love speaks" guidelines, trying to avoid anything that sounds like a hard-and-fast rule to be rigidly followed or rebelliously broken.
The book has issues, no question. Roth is an upper-middle class professional woman writing for people who are more or less like her, and that is likely the crowd with whom she is most successful (case in point: Oprah). At times it reads like a long, beautifully printed ad for one of her seminars (which I can't afford) or her personal coaching (ditto). A lot of what she said was clearly not directed at me, yet since I read the book, I've been eating more thoughtfully and binging less, and staying off the scale. I haven't found nirvana or anything, but life is a little more peaceful on the food front, so I'm grateful for that.
Oh, and also--if you're looking for the path to the Judeo-Christian God in this book, it's not here. Her concept of God is quite different and much more broad, which could be a relief to some and offensive to others. Still, her emphasis on honesty, kindness, non-judgmental listening and noticing what's going on in one's mind, body and life is spot-on, and frankly can't be repeated enough.
I was very disappointed in this book. There was terrible language used in the book and that was totally unnecessary to the content and very offensive. Also, I had no idea what the author was talking about, it made no sense at all to me. I would not recommend this book to anyone!!