Dear Tom,
Thank you for your comment. Developing conscious awareness is the way to make better choices in food selection. I do strongly feel that diets and deprivation leave no room for tapping into your own innate wisdom and listening to what your body is needing. Since all food addiction is caused by emotional pain, the first step is to become aware of what you are feeling and needing right before you make a choice to eat something. A person must develop a way to connect with the part of themswelves that is feeling inadequate and send that part love and nurturing. That is the real food they are needing. When they get that love, then they can see what kind of food might give them more energy and aliveness and have more conscious awareness to make better choices.

Dear Ivy,
Thanks for your comment. I do think that parents believing in their own body’s capacity to heal would help their children. Children are so impressionable. They are open and really believe so much of what their parents tell them. I have had parents turn around a child’s weight with a simple thought they tell them like “It is common for children to lose weight when they get older. The weight just seems to go away.” You can suggest that they will probably start seeing it come off soon within this year or something like that. It is certainly better than telling them all the time that the food they eat is going to make them fat.

I imagine childhood obesity is cultural, that the United States is perhaps one of the few countries with this problem? That it is related to consumerism, commercialism, conspicuous consumption?

The topic leads me to reflect upon my own childhood. When I was 8 people began commenting on my getting chubby. At that point it was considered ‘cute’ by the adults. I didn’t think it cute at all as I saw the image of beauty, of thin models, flashing by on the billboards, television screens, in the pages of magazines.

It became very clear very quickly that beauty and a thin figure were one and the same.

The messages around food were confusing and conflicting. As my father’s rage began to scorch into my 8 year old soul I found food a comfort and a refuge. I saw the seductive photos of food in the media, along with the thin beautiful women, and soon embodied the message that to be happy I needed both: food for comfort and a thin body for acceptance, approval and love.

I countered the bitterness of my father’s words with the sweetness of candy. Ice cream soothed my fear. Sneaking food out of the kitchen felt empowering. I could control nothing except what went into my mouth. But after a time I couldn’t even control that, or so it seemed.

I’m deeply sad for today’s children who have no adults to nurture them, who need to resort to other means, especially since in today’s world, at least in the U.S., so many children watch television or play computer games instead of riding bikes and playing outside. Especially since so much of the food has become synthetic, devoid of nutrients of any kind, has become more of a drug than in my day, where at least the cream in ice cream was real cream, not a chemical substitute.

Since the age of 8 I’ve always been ‘chubby’, ‘plump’, ‘full-figured’ but I’ve thought of myself as obese, and have developed a hatred of my body. I’ve been brain-washed into equating a flat stomach with happiness. And I am not alone. While my friends are educated, progressive women I know of none who are freed from the cultural chains around food and body image.

Until my generation, the adults, are free from the messages around food and body image there is little hope for the children. The problem of childhood obesity is clearly a problem of the adults who need to model nurturing, caring for, indeed, celebrating, the beauty of diversity and being human in all it’s forms. We need to see that over-consumption of anything is but a tragic solution to a very real problem: finding and creating love, nurturing and authentic connection in a culture that worships and idealizes money and power.

Thanks,
-Tom

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