Confused about my purpose
Buddhists talk about the second arrow. The first arrow is the shit that happens to you in your life, and the second arrow is the “woe is me” some people indulge when that shit happens. I think there’s a third arrow too. It’s the one where you beat yourself up because you won’t stop stabbing yourself with the second arrow. The third arrow is self-hatred.
I’ve been drawn to coaching for the past 7 years. I love connecting with people, I’m an incredible listener and I’m insightful. I took coaching courses and learned the tools to help people uncover their inner workings and find the leverage points where they could have more agency and choice in their lives. When I went to start a coaching business, every resource said “find a niche, find a niche”. “Your deepest wound is your truest niche” says Tad Hargrave.
Well, my deepest wound is my binge eating. I was in a window of micro-recovery so I felt some competency around it, and it was definitely something there was a market for. So I got started building “Food Freedom Recovery”. But as that progressed, I found myself back in the thick of it. My insecurity crept in because I knew I didn’t have a real hold on this food thing yet.
It wasn’t so much that I had imposter syndrome (a feeling I was more than familiar with from my grad school days); it’s that I was recognizing the truth that I really wasn’t any kind of expert in actually achieving recovery; I was an expert in seeking recovery.
I’ve had days, even weeks, sometimes a few months, of drastically changing my food behaviours. Each time, I felt like I had cracked the nut and that phase of my life was well and truly over. And then something would happen and the binges would creep in again.
The food addiction industry is insane
When I was trying to find exactly what my message would be around food recovery, it dawned on me that the whole time, I had still been obsessed with food. If I wasn’t obsessed with what to eat – or what not to eat – then I was obsessed with building a food recovery business, or creating food recovery content, or reading food recovery books.
If I wasn’t consumed by my consumption, I was consumed by my recovery.
Each guru claims to have cracked the nut and have the answer; and yet so many of them are in direct contradiction to one another. Abstain from sugar. Deprivation causes binging. You’re eating to solve emotional problems. It’s just a biophysical process. Eat intuitively. Don’t trust yourself, trust God. OA. Smart Recovery. Eating disorder clinics. Whole food clinics. Rational modalities. Spiritual modalities. Emotional modalities. Psychological modalities.
My god, it’s enough to drive anyone mad.
A month in an eating disorder clinic convinced me that restricting food groups is the thing that causes binging. Sugar addiction professionals claim that giving up sugar removes cravings. Today I know they’re both right and neither is right for everyone.
My relationship to food became a prominent thing in 2016, when I had my whole food plant based phase. Before then I had dabbled with the occasional “new lifestyle” (because I had received the message that “dieting is bad”) and my weight had fluctuated up and down about 20-30lbs since adolescence. But with this WFPB thing, I’d found the holy grail to health and wellness. I became obsessed. A total religious zealot. The obnoxious vegan trope up to the hilt.
At the time I thought I was so healthy and that my weight struggles were over. And then it all came crashing down at a Halloween party where one “I’ve done really well, one little treat won’t kill me” vegan Oreo cheesecake turned into 12 and over the next few weeks, I was back to where I had started – living on fried food and ice cream.
For a long time, I still looked at those as my glory days with food. I was convinced that if I could just get back to that healthy diet, I could put this thing behind me and focus on more important issues like meaning and purpose and community.
My food relationship became obsessive about 4 years ago when I got sober from weed. When I was ready to quit weed, I just quit.
I didn’t go to therapy. I went to some 12 steps meetings but I didn’t take it seriously. I had been hating the experience of getting high more and more for the past couple years.
My last stand with weed was in an environment where I had an alternative to getting high. It dawned on me that what I wanted was connection, not weed. I reached out to a friend, we went for a walk, and the craving passed. By the end of that program (I was at yet another transformational retreat), I was just ready to let it go. I never seriously craved it again after that, and I didn’t obsess about it or even think about it at all unless I smelled it, and then I mostly noticed my surprise that I hadn’t thought of it in months and relief that I had no desire to partake.
I keep waiting for that to happen with binging. I do feel like I’m getting closer every time I get a little bit of space from it. But as to what the magic secret is for recovery? Today, I’m more confused than ever.
My superpower is loving myself enough to keep on trying
And yet through all that, I realized something really important. I was no longer beating myself up for not having a handle on my binging.
This morning, lying in bed, I realized what makes me different from many other people on this food recovery journey. My gift isn’t that I’ve figured out this food thing and that I can help you stop binging too. I don’t know if I can. Food is one of our most sacred, complicated, enmeshed relationships. It’s woven into the fabric of our cultures, our families, our friendships, our whole lives. It’s the one substance you can’t completely quit. Everyone has their own history with food and restriction and binging. For some it’s emotional. For others it’s physical. Because of that, there are hundreds of approaches to food recovery.
As I sit here this morning, having leapt out of bed struck by the muse, I realized something. I don’t have this food thing figured out. I’m still hopeful that I will. I’m still working really really hard at it. But I’m no recovery expert. It’s ludicrous and inauthentic for me to sit here and pretend I am.
But I realized something else. I’ve learned to love myself despite all that. I binged on junk food last night, drove to the convenience store for chips and then ate all the Christmas baking I had taken home from the community dinner on Sunday. Then I roasted some almonds and ate those too. I went to bed feeling sick and still have a food hangover as I write.
And yet despite all that, I don’t feel ashamed. I don’t feel like a piece of shit. I’m meeting myself with love and compassion.
I do feel sad and a bit bummed out that this is still a thing. But I’m not blaming myself for it anymore. I’m not seeing myself as weak and powerless and hopeless. I’m seeing myself as a tender human being who’s working through one of the trickiest things a person can work through. I’m seeing myself as someone who’s deserving of love and compassion and patience.
I now have understanding that this food thing is fucking hard. It’s complicated. It’s complex. It’s not one-size-fits-all (no matter what each of the gurus tries to claim). It’s biological. It’s social. It’s emotional. It’s psychological. There’s a trillion dollar industry committed to keeping us hooked, and that’s a hard thing to fight against. Maybe fighting isn’t the answer. Maybe it is. I still don’t know.
But what I do know is that I am worthy of love. I am not a bad person just because I can’t figure out how to stop binging. I am worthy of self-compassion, of connection. I am a child of the universe just doing the damned best she can.
Bashar said that being born on Earth is like going to grad school. It’s a hard curriculum down here. When I heard that, I thought “Cool! I loved grad school!” But then, I didn’t have the typical grad school experience. I had an incredible research group, I was good at the whole game of school and research, I got to travel all over the world, and I was married to a workaholic who was more than happy to pay my expenses while I lived my best life.
It doesn’t feel like that any more. I’m addicted to junk food, my life sometimes feels empty, I get lonely even though I have some amazing friends. This grad school curriculum is hard and I don’t feel competent at it all.
And yet, I still love myself. And where is food is concerned, I’m going to keep on trying until I get there.
I’m an expert in learning to love myself
I should state for the record, that wasn’t always the case. It was 2022 when I realized I hated myself. It took that long because my inner critic is subtle and manipulative. She doesn’t say “You’re a piece of shit.” She just subtly tsk-tsks every decision I make as ever-so-slightly inadequate. In 2022, I was in a convenience store in Austin TX buying chips, I got out to my car and felt helpless, hopeless, and full of self-loathing and shame.
It dawned on me in that moment… “I think I hate myself.” It was a realization that really caught me by surprise. I had been so identified with my inner critic that I was never actually hearing it speak, until that moment. I was in the middle of a Relateful immersion, and that 9-month training had really been teaching me about self-awareness and honesty.
So I brought that to my Level Up coach, who turned out to have known a thing or two about self-hatred herself, but who no longer felt that way. We spent months working through the beliefs I had about myself, and gradually it came together. I won’t claim that my self-hatred just vanished in the space of a few months. But what did happen was that I finally saw it clearly and could start to work with it.
I learned some other tools for engaging it instead of pushing it away, and gradually as it began to feel heard and not dismissed, it began to soften. It got to take on a more loving role where it could express the care and concern it had always felt for me, in a gentler softer way. It learned how to say what it really felt, because I learned to let it speak.
In the last couple years, I catch myself having the sweetest responses to my painful feelings. “Oh sweety, I know you’re hurting. That’s ok. I still love you.”
I still struggle with food. I still hope and pray that one day, I’ll feel qualified to write the book where I give an overview of all the different approaches to food recovery and help people uncover which ones feel right to them and which ones make them want to puke. I have so many ideas about that book, but it’s not ready to be written yet.
And that’s ok, because I know that in the meantime, what I’m really good at is loving people up and helping them see that their ashamed parts are just as lovable as their celebrated parts. And I’m good at helping people unravel the binds that are holding them back from loving themselves.
I don’t know for sure if loving myself is a pre-requisite for recovering from food addiction, but I do know that it makes the whole experience an order of magnitude less sufferable. The physical discomfort and mental confusion are bad enough without shame and self-hatred in the mix.