Fantasy or Reality? Food & the Body Relationship

Remember when you were a kid and the best treat in the world was an ice-cream cone, or maybe a candy bar or even a Lifesaver? Sweets were often a reward for something. I remember a trip to the soda fountain following a particularly unpleasant trip to the doctor's office that involved a needle being stuck into my arm.

Those associations don't go away so easily. Tonight it's getting late, I'm home alone and I've spent the day catching up on things. I'm contemplating a trip to get some frozen yogurt.

Am I hungry? Not particularly. In fact, I'd say that my hunger on a scale of 1-10 is about a 1.5. But in my mind, the colors and flavors of that frozen yogurt seem bright and enticing. The whole thing seems to imply an escape, a trip somewhere, a sense of freedom--just like it did when I was a kid.

Recently I spoke with a colleague who also works with eating disorders about her love of the texture and warmth of oatmeal, how it says home to her and makes her feel like everything is going to be okay. She remembers her own mother serving it to her as a child. Now she sits in the kitchen in the morning, savoring a daily bowl of the gooey stuff, filled with oats and raisins and a bit of cinnamon, the steel cut oats thick and syrupy with heat.

Talking with her and reflecting on this tonight, I think about how much we imbue food with energy, with fantasy, with projection. It becomes so many things to us. It becomes whatever we want it to be, whatever we need it to be.

The problem, of course, comes when the fantasy food actually prevents us from facing what's happening in our lives; when the escape it provides means we're not listening to some inner stirring, restlessness or feeling trying to poke through into consciousness. A message from our bodies gets lost in translation: we're literally distracted from it by the compelling story we've created by food.

I wonder how our bodies feel about this: when food gets used to fill a need other than hunger, when the intellect or a knee-jerk need to flee from the present becomes the reason for a swirled cold cone or a piece of candy? My body probably tolerates it a bit, like any good partner would, the feeling of being ignored. But as this becomes habit, what happens next? Does the body shut down on us, feeling unheard? Does it scream louder, hoping we'll hear?

Perhaps this is what weight becomes: a message from our physical selves that our bodies are feeling ignored, that food is not being used to listen to and fuel our lives but to run away from them. Our bodies respond in kind with their own kind of distance: layers of flesh and softness that make us feel less alive in our own skin.

The next time you grab for that fantasy food, try checking in with the body and asking how it feels about going along for the ride. Is it willing to come? And if it's not, are you willing to put away the fantasy you believe that food will give you and sit with whatever feelings are really there right now, felt in your physical and emotional self?

Tonight for me there's a feeling of loneliness and quiet inside, the sense of wanting a break and a moment to breathe without pushing myself so hard. Sometimes for me that's the very function of the imagined food: it gives me a chance to slow down, to be out of my head and in my body. I have to ask myself, as we all do, if there are other ways to get there that still attend to what's happening in this moment, that don't ask my body to take on something it doesn't want.

That being said, there's a bath in the other room; there's a sky full of stars outside. There's music on the radio that might be calling us to dance. If you listened to your body and not your fantasy, what would might you reach for instead?

The One Diet Tip No One Ever Talks About: Healing The Body Relationship

Welcome to 2011! As promised, a blog to help you stay connected to your best vision of your body in the new year...

Most of us go through our lives constantly trying to lose weight, get healthier, make changes. At times it’s frustrating and feels like nothing’s working. We keep getting disappointed by ourselves and our bodies and repeat the vicious cycle of trying and failing.

We all know that any time we set goals, it’s hard—if not impossible-- to accomplish them through criticism, judgment and hopelessness. And yet, that’s often the state of mind we slip into with our bodies. We judge ourselves constantly and forever push ourselves to be something else.

What if we tried something different—something radical that asked us to think of our bodies more as partners and less as enemies or objects to be controlled? What if we tried befriending our bodies and letting ourselves work with our bodies instead of against them? The six steps listed below are some prime examples of how to do just that.

1) Listen.

Most of us have completely forgotten how to listen to our bodies, but if we did they’d have a whole lot to say. If we’re honest, we know the difference in our bodies between being hungry and being sad, tired or lonely. If we really listen to our bodies, we get clues about what we actually need. Instead of a pint of ice-cream, we might actually want to reach out to a friend, listen to music or take a nap. Reconnecting to our bodies means we owe them—like any friend—a good listen. It no longer serves us to ignore what they have to say.

2) Remember the good times.

Maybe it seems far away now, but there was probably a time when you felt great in your body—even if it’s just a moment. Think about what it felt like to be in your body in that moment and how you can bring more of that quality into your life now. That’s how you want to feel more of the time, and as you bring up that feeling you’ll find yourself making different choices right now from a place of connection rather than frustration.

3) Watch your language.

We can be our bodies’ harshest critics, constantly slamming them with negative judgments or frowning at them in the mirror for not being what we want. Think for a minute about the impact of this on your body and how it might feel about being in this relationship with you. Is this helpful or supportive? Think about ways that you can begin to talk to and appreciate your body for what it does do for you and think about working together rather than at odds with each other. You’ll notice a change almost immediately.

4) Forgive yourself.

Stepping into a healthier relationship means letting go of thoughts and behaviors in the past that may have held you back so that you can move into the future. If you have been judging and resenting your body, see if you can forgive it and forgive yourself and show up fresh, with a new willingness to have a positive, healthy relationship. You might even write a letter of declaration or forgiveness to your body as you commit to a new way of being together.

5) Enjoy each other.

Once you befriend your body, you can start thinking about ways you’d like to spend time together instead of dreading the ‘checklist’ of exercise or health goals. Maybe you’d like to spend more time outside? Put some music on and dance? As you think about it feeling good in your body rather than at odds with it, your choices start to change.

6) Create dreams together.

True friends help each other work toward their goals. Think about what it would feel like to be in your best possible body relationship and use that vision to motivate both you and your body toward greater health. When you feel like you could be sidetracked by an unhealthy choice or a distraction, go back to the vision of what you most want and see if that changes things. Holding a dream of your best, healthiest self and working with your body to accomplish it gives you the greatest chance of achieving your goals.

UPDATE: Want more inspiration for working with the body relationship? Listen to my interview with Eric Dye on EHealth Radio. The transcript is included too--

http://healthpodcast.podbean.com/2011/01/09/struggling-with-a-chronic-health-condition

Embodying Those Holiday Feelings

What is it about the holidays? They stir up all kinds of thoughts and feelings, tastier than a big bowl of egg nog and filled with equal parts bite and sweetness. It's not an easy time, one so many of us both embrace and dread.

If we pay attention, many of the feelings that move through us in our lives contain not only the 'story'--what we experience and talk about as the narrative of what's happening--but also a physical component. Every feeling we have can be located somewhere in the body, listened to, and moved through.

In fact, it can be freeing to realize that--although we may have infused them with drama, judgment and interpretation--our feelings are actually very simple when we pinpoint them in our bodies. Grief, for example, can show up as a heavy feeling in the heart or shoulders; a sense of our breath being constricted or our body weighed down. Anger can have a kind of heat and energy to it, a change of breath, a sense of restlessness in the limbs.

As we get curious about and explore our feelings through our bodies without judgment, something interesting begins to happen: they move through us. Like a child that has a temper tantrum and then is done, our feelings--when attended to in this most basic way--can work their way through us more easily when we allow ourselves to sit with them without judgment or story.

As feelings arise this holiday, I encourage you to get curious about where they live in your body and see if you can try also exploring them in this simple way. What do you notice about how each feeling affects your breathing, energy or sensations in the body? Let go of what you think happened or what you should or shouldn't be feeling and just notice what you experience right now in your physical self. Do things change as you bring your awareness and curiosity into this most basic and primitive place? The results may surprise you.

For those of you who find yourselves moving through difficult emotions this holiday, I also encourage you to listen to a radio series created by a colleague, Andrea Hylen--and in particular our interview on todays' show about how to work with grief in the body. We talked a lot about this way of working with emotions, learning to listen to the body's wisdom in order to let grief move through us, as well as speak to us in whatever way we most need to hear. You can find our show at the link:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/livingontheedge/2010/12/21/grief-transformation-guest-anna-stookey-using-the-bodys-wisdom-to-transform-grief

And I encourage you to listen to the whole series, many episodes of which will be available 'on demand.' Andrea--who has experienced the loss of her husband, son and brother and who knows a thing or two about working through and managing grief--answered a calling to create this series for listeners during the holidays. Her hope is that it will offer a helping hand and a feeling of support at a time that often causes us to reflect more deeply on loss and change.

I wish you all a delightful and healing holiday--and plan on writing my next blog on how to stay connected to the best vision for your body in 2011. Stay tuned!

All my love,

Anna

Whose Body Is it Anyway?

Why is it that many European languages don't use the possessive when referring to the body? In French it's 'les mains' or in Spanish 'los manos,' meaning 'the hands.' Of course in English, we speak about our bodies and their parts as 'mine.' I frequently lamented as a teenager about the state of 'my thighs' or 'my face.'

Recently I wondered about the effect of this languaging on how we feel and move in our bodies. Does it hurt us or help us to so personalize every part of our physical selves? Are we more likely to take personally how we look as a reflection of who we are?

Friends of mine have frequently commented on the ease that Europeans seem to have with their bodies that Americans don't always have. They seem less concerned about diet and yet overall have lower rates of obesity. They drink wine and eat chocolate without flagellating themselves about their caloric intake. Humorous diet books have been written citing French women as the model of elegance and natural self-care.

What might we have to learn if we let ourselves think of our bodies as a thing independent of us, rather than something that belongs to us? For one thing, we give them--as my work also does--an identity separate from us, something to relate to. We become better able to consult our bodies not just as an extension of us but as living, breathing beings with their own wisdom and perspective.

No healthy relationship can exist between two beings that are so fused they can't see the space between them. And yet I wonder sometimes if this isn't what we've done to our bodies: literally named them as belonging to us rather than free or separate. It might be interesting to reframe them as neutral, as beings to come back into relationship with rather than already being smushed against.

There's another benefit to this shift too. Often, when something is hurting or diseased, we're better able to care and acknowledge it when we don't take the symptoms personally, when we're not too attached to what it means about us. So many clients I've worked with who are ill struggle not only with their illness but also with the sense of personal affront they feel that their bodies that 'did this' to them. Their identities may be profoundly affected by a sense of being betrayed by their body. Creating space between us and our bodies affords us a new way of seeing what's happening; we step into relationship rather than feeling forced into it, conscious in our navigating of this tender interdependence rather than oppressed by a mandatory connection. We begin to be curious about what our bodies are trying to tell us rather than ashamed about what a symptom says about us as a person.

Ask yourself how personally you take your body and how much you let it be its own self, something you are in relationship to but not fused with. What can you do to begin to cultivate more space, to not take the movements and challenges of your body as personal attacks? How can you begin to understand it as you would anything outside of yourself, gently and with compassionate perspective?

Meditating On the Body

Have you ever tried to meditate? One of the first things they'll usually teach you is to follow your breath: breathe in and out, they say, and watch your breath moving in and out of your body. When your mind starts to wander, return to the simplicity of that task, watching again as your breath comes in and then out of your body.

It sounds easy, but of course it isn't. Our minds wander all over the place. We start thinking of what to make for dinner, the fight we got into a few hours ago, what to wear the next day. It takes discipline to return to the breath, find it again, and let the thoughts drop away.

A wise meditation teacher told me years ago not to worry so much about trying to get my thoughts to stop--a condition he said was practically impossible as a human being--but instead to just not get carried away by them. The key was to be able to watch them as an observer rather than investing them with drama and meaning. Then they could come and go without causing such stress or anxiety.

It's interesting to me, as someone who works to reconnect my clients and myself to the wisdom of our bodies, that something as simple as returning to our breath can begin to teach us this powerful lesson. Our bodies live in the here and now, and every moment our bodies function in incredibly intricate ways without our having to 'do' anything. We breathe, eat, digest food and eliminate waste without even thinking about it. Our bodies remind us how to be.

The other day I was meditating when the pulse of my wrist caught my attention. I could see my heart pulsing gently against my skin, steady and slow. I found myself drawn to just watching that pulse, in awe of the fact that my body knows how to do that about every second, and that my entire body is flushed with blood with every beat of my heart.

In a world that is often busy and hectic, our bodies--and their pulse and breath--provide a kind of metronome for our lives. At any moment, they provide us with a slow and steady consistency we can return to and remember the most basic and essential rhythm of our lives. That's another reason why reconnecting to our bodies is so important, and why we suffer when we get disconnected. Our bodies remind us of our simplicity, our essence. They bring us into the present moment of our lives.

The next time you find yourself spinning out of control with the gazillions of things you have to do, take a moment and consider your pulse. Or watch your breath as it moves in and out of your belly. Sometimes all it takes is a moment--that seemed to be all I needed. Remember the awe and the simple consistency of the bodily functions that make us human every day and every minute of our lives.

Meditation can take lifetimes (literally) to master, but the power of reconnecting to our body's purest rhythms can happen in a moment with conscious attention. Notice what happens in you as you reconnect to your breath moving in and out of your body, to the steady beat of your own heart.

Our bodies also remind us of the grand mystery of life, the miracle of being born with all of these functions interacting and moving through us. Let us remember them when we are most lost or stressed, when we think we must figure everything out with our minds or our 'doing' selves. Our bodies and their stalwart constancy have much to teach us about the wonder and presentness of simply being alive.

The Wisdom of Limits

"Why did you do it?" I remember asking a teen client of mine years ago who was a cutter. Like a growing number of teens, she cut herself on purpose. Although different from a suicide attempt, cutting is often a cry for help.

She thought for a moment and then said, her eyes welling up, " I think I just wanted to feel...something. I wanted to feel like I was alive."

Today, doing the work that I do with the body, I think cutting is also about something else: feeling our limits. Many of us--teens and adults--feel lost, overwhelmed and pushed in a society that's always demanding something else. By contrast, our bodies limit and confine us. If we cross their boundaries--as my client did--we pay in blood and very real scars. Our bodies tell us where we begin and end. They give us an identity, a shape, a form.

Many of the clients I work with who are sick or have chronic illness grapple with the same issue but in different ways: they know that even if their minds want to push them past the limits of their energy or health, their bodies will pull them back into the confines of rest or a resurgence of symptoms. "If I push too far, I'll pay for it later," a client recently admitted.

The limits of our bodies create a lot of different feelings: in the case of my cutter client, perhaps a momentary sense of relief that belies the need for deeper work. In clients with chronic or terminal illness, the body's limits create an often frustrating battle between desired outcomes and the need to take things one slow step at a time. And of course there are other limits that show up in our body relationships too: the desire to lose weight faster than our bodies can, or to be able to do the things physically that we did when we were younger--the things that have become more difficult as our bodies change and age.

It's an interesting set-up. And yet there's wisdom in it. Our bodies' limits teach us patience, boundaries, self-care. Our bodies create limits where we might not. We feel their pain, their stretch into new ground; we know when we've gone too far.

Too often in the rest of our lives we're missing this mirror. We try to do too much, shove in too much, think too much. As a teenager battling my own body and self-esteem issues I remember staying up late at night eating spoonfuls of peanut butter mixed with chocolate chips until my throat began to sting. My body knew it was too much. I just didn't want to listen.

In some Native American thinking, the place of our wound becomes the place of our power, and I wonder if the same isn't true with the limits the body gives us. Once we know and respect our limits, we move in the world differently. We have greater compassion and patience for ourselves and others. It's a constant, ongoing journey but one we take every day as we learn to be in a more intimate, listening relationship with our own bodies.

The cutter I worked with came to realize that she had pushed herself so hard through her young life that she sometimes didn't know who she was or what she felt. As she learned to do the work of listening to herself, she created healthy boundaries she could feel without taking a knife to her skin. For many of the clients I work with who have chronic illness, respecting limits means truly drawing boundaries around their judgmental, impatient minds and allowing themselves to be more lovingly right where they are. For those clients trying to lose weight like I once was, facing the body's limits often means facing deeply buried judgments that need to be healed before any real change on the outside is possible.

What do your bodies limits have to teach you about slowing down, self-care or self-love? How could you listen to those limits, allow them and stop fighting them? What is your body trying to tell you through its limits and what would it mean to your life if you listened?

Understanding our limits is part of the work of entering into a true relationship with our bodies, and it's one of the many gifts they have to give us. In any relationship we're in, we take on limits as part of the contract of being together. We agree not to see other people, for example, or to make time for each other to truly connect. It's an unspoken part of our body relationship that our bodies will also ask us to have limits. Much as we would like to push past them, believe we're immortal, they will often catch up with us. What they have to teach us about ourselves and our lives--despite the challenge or discomfort they may initially create-- may be their most important role in our lives.

Is It Love or Is it Obsession?

There's something else that can get in the way of a good relationship with our bodies and it might surprise you. It seems like a good thing, but it's actually not. It seems like you're being loving and attentive, but it's actually too much. What do I mean? I mean it's possible to be too obsessed with your body relationship.

A healthy relationship requires balance, give-and-take, a sense that both voices are heard. Often when we start to reconnect with our bodies, start to realize that we can work with them instead of against them, we'll over-compensate. Clients will sometimes go on fasts or diets, change their exercise to be more attentive and conscious of their bodies, take more naps and slow down the pace of their lives. Those changes are beautiful and important, but they can also become extreme.

In a healthy relationship, you can also tolerate times when it's not possible to be the perfect partner. In a busy life, one of the hardest things to do is, in fact, to find the right balance between the demands of life and the demands of a conscious relationship. We often need to pay attention to whether we might be sliding too far toward the relationship and away from the rest of our lives.

Seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? I mean, isn't it a good thing to be paying attention to our bodies, indulging newly perceived needs for sleep, exercise and good, healthy food? Yes. But watch for warning signs of whether or not the relationship to your body is becoming obsessive and not just loving. Does it, for example:

1)Create isolation rather than connection with others?
2)Become another thing you need to do perfectly rather than the best you can?
3)Affect your functioning by taking too much time away from things you need to do to survive, like work?
4)Interfere with balance in your life by taking most of your attention and energy?

Initially, reconnecting with our bodies may require a period of truly slowing down, listening, and retraining ourselves to do the right things for our bodies. But keep in mind that the best relationships--after the initial honeymoon period--should ultimately enhance our lives rather than interfering with them.

As you begin to gain better trust in your body relationship, it should allow you to be more involved in your life, lighter and more free and not constantly burdened and distracted by its needs. As your relationship with your body becomes more comfortable and dependable, you can and should sometimes make mistakes and have to reconnect; you still have learning and growing to do. As with any relationship, the most important quality for success is openness and honesty, not being perfect.

Watch for how this dynamic of perfection and obsession may come up in other relationships and see if you would be willing to let it go in the relationship you have with your body. How does it feel to let yourself be good enough instead of absolutely perfect? In conscious dialogue with your body, make sure that your needs get heard and expressed too. Allow the healthy relationship you have with your body to expand into a better sense of balance and trust in all aspects of your life.

Ironically, as with other relationships, our bodies prefer a healthy, balanced relationship with us. It's too much pressure to always be the center of attention! If you feel like your body has been asking this of you, be willing to say 'no' and ask for what you need in return. Make room for a life beyond your body relationship, even as you grow and strengthen it. Both you and your body will be happier for that choice.