I recently read Year of Yes, by Shonda Rhimes. She is fabulous and I highly recommend the book. I especially loved her chapter “Yes to My Body.”
She says, “The food created a nice topcoat. It helped to smooth down the raged bits. Sealed off the parts of me that were broken. It filled in all the holes. Covered up the cracks. Yep, I just put some food on top of any and everything that bothered me. The food just speckled right on in there.
“Food does work. Food feels so good when you put it on top of all the stuff you don’t want to deal with or know how to deal with. It even works on stuff you don’t even recognize as worth of dealing with.
“Food works.
There’s the rub.
There’s the trouble.
It works.”
She goes on to say that the problem is that it also made her dead inside. From not dealing with all the things that food numbed for her. When she makes this realization she is mad!
“I no longer can deal with numb. Now numb feels creepy to me.
The food doesn’t spackle anymore–it suffocates.
The universe has ruined the comfort of my brownies and my wine. Because now I know the truth about them.”
Do you want to know the truth about food? It’s fuel, not entertainment. The truth is that when we use food (or any other buffer like social media, netflix or shopping) to avoid the feeling we are feeling, we don’t reach our highest results in our life. Whether that’s a weight loss goal or a personal achievement goal or a business goal.
The truth about food is it only truly solves one problem–hunger. When we use it to solve for boredom, loneliness, or sadness, we don’t actually solve for those emotions in our body. We just push them down. When the eating is over, those emotions creep right back up.
Say YES to you body and health as Shonda did!
“I can say yes, I want to be successful at this. I want to be healthy. I want to live a long life for myself for my children. I want to feel good. And once I say that, I have to buckle down and do the work and not complain and accept that the work is going to be hard. Because that is what it is. Work. Hard work.”
Learning not to just “spackle on the food” is a challenge. It takes time and it takes work.
This is what I’m good at. I’m not really sure if Shonda did it on her own. But if you don’t feel equipped to take on this work, let me help!
