An in-depth look at our relationship with food ... by a pioneering author (When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair and others), workshop and retreat leader who teaches what successful weight control really is.

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The Monthly Aspectarian: For years now, Geneen, you've been guiding people to get a handle on what eating really means to them ... particularly those who are unhappy with their body. How did you start out and get to where you are now?

Geneen Roth: I struggled with food for many, many years during which I gained and lost over a thousand pounds. I went on dozens of diets. Very radical diets from the prunes and meatballs, and the cream soda and coffee and cigarettes diet that I was on for three weeks to the just kind of normal, run of the mill sensible diets like Weight Watchers. Though I always lost weight on the diets, I always gained the weight back. After a period of being anorexic and weighing 82 pounds and then doubling my weight, gaining 80 pounds within two months after I stopped being anorexic, I finally realized that food was not the problem. I was eating emotionally and emotional eating was a symptom, not the problem. Because when I had been thin--and I had been thin dozens of times--nothing actually changed internally, in terms of my psyche or soul or outlook on life.

I had superficially better self-esteem, but the depth part of me was unchanged by losing weight. I still looked in the mirror and saw fat and didn't actually like myself very much.

TMA: It's interesting to see a formerly heavy person holding their body like they're still fat.

GR: If you don't actually work on change, or at the very least become aware of and curious about the reasons that you turn to food when you're not hungry, those reasons will still be there when you lose weight. It might be that there is a tendency toward loneliness or you don't really let yourself feel pain when you're in it. You might feel the need to distract yourself or avoid or numb loneliness, boredom, sadness, anger, grief, all of those feelings that are basically uncomfortable to feel.

Part of the path of breaking free from emotional eating is just simply learning how to be with your feelings and realizing that it's fearing pain, not feeling it, that drives people to eat emotionally. Most people don't know that a feeling won't kill them. Most of us believe if we let ourselves feel what's going on, we'll die, we'll break apart, we'll never get off the bed from crying. That if we let ourselves feel our anger, we'll kill somebody. We don't actually know that our feelings won't kill us ... and many people eat to avoid their feelings.

TMA: There are also people who eat for sport, for fun.

GR: Yes, there's a kind of celebratory activity of eating, a feeling of eating, also kind of community, breaking bread with people. A kind of communal spirit. But there are other ways to have that without eating, which isn't to say that eating together isn't a huge source of pleasure and fun and joy. My position has never been that that needs to stop. But if that's the only source, there is too much weight on food and you're asking food to do what it is not really meant to do. There is not enough development, or awareness or variety in the ways that you find pleasure.

TMA: So you've found that there are deep internal changes that one needs to make to break their self-destructive behaviors.

GR: The very first step is being aware that losing weight is not going to solve the problem. Most of us walk around believing that if we woke up thin tomorrow we would be happy people. That if we could take a magic pill and be rid of the weight and magically change body sizes, then everything would be fine ... and that's just simply a lie. In each of my workshops I ask who of the people there have lost weight. Almost everybody raises a hand. Then I ask, "Who was really happy when you lost weight?" and except for that momentary, "Gee, I can fit into a size ten instead of a size eighteen," they didn't feel like anything really shifted.

TMA: Because they're still the same people.

GR: That's right. I got a letter recently from somebody who had a banner from Weight Watchers. It said: I lost ten pounds. She had written under it, "and I still feel like crap." That says it all. I lost ten pounds and it didn't do what I thought it was going to do, I still don't feel very good about myself. My life is still basically the same, except for the fact that my body size has changed.

I think there's a need to look beneath appearances, not just actual physical body size appearances, but the assumption that we make, that what we see is really what is true. There is a lot beneath the surface that people can look at and find joy from besides the size of their bodies. What's also true is that when you break free from emotional eating by following simple guidelines, you do lose weight, so in some ways you get to do it all. But it is not by depriving yourself, punishing yourself, torturing yourself, loathing yourself, fearing yourself, or feeling ashamed of yourself.

TMA: You've said that there is a meditative approach.

GR: It's what I would call an inner approach, becoming aware of the life beneath the life or the life that's going on inside you that we don't usually pay attention to because we're paying so much attention to what's happening outside. Some people call it a spiritual approach. Regardless of the name you give it, it is actually looking deeper than what's on the surface.

TMA: A lot of people have confused themselves with their bodies, their emotions, and their minds. How then would you simply describe your approach for most people?

GR: There are two levels to it, and we work in three different areas of those two levels. There is the physical level and the emotional level of eating.

On the physical level, the concrete level, with food, I give people a set of eating guidelines. Very, very simple eating guidelines. Eat when you're hungry. Most people don't eat when they're hungry. Eat what your body wants instead of what your mind wants. Eat sitting down in a calm environment, which doesn't include the car, where most people do a lot of their eating. And stop when your body has had enough.

TMA: All of those require more awareness than most people apply to it.

GR: Right, and that's where the challenge is for people. Although we want to change how we eat, we don't particularly want to spend any time changing how we eat. Again, there is that drive for instant change. But this does take developing awareness. And there is huge satisfaction and gratification in developing awareness. Because it is not just of food. When you start becoming aware of how you eat, how you eat is also how you live and what you believe about food and about yourself and about what you deserve to have in your life. This is all actually threaded and reflected in the whole rest of your life. So if you don't believe to eat what you want, you actually don't believe to have what you want.

If you feel like you don't have the time to sit down in a calm environment and eat without distraction, you probably feel like you're rushing around all the time and you don't have any time for yourself. If you feel like you don't have the time to eat when you're hungry, you probably feel like you don't actually have the time to figure out what it is you really want in your life.

The emotional part of it is actually starting to become aware of how you react when you get to a place inside that feels scary or painful or tough. Most of us shut down or run away, and emotional eaters shut down and run away to food.

Once you start changing your habitual response to the things that you don't feel you're capable of feeling which you really are capable of feeling, then the need to eat shifts dramatically. Once you're no longer eating to avoid feeling discomfort, then you can actually begin eating when your body is hungry. You can start discriminating emotional hunger from physical hunger.

TMA: When people are into eating, especially when they have made an art form of avoiding pain by eating, they can spend long periods of time with their focus on their taste buds.

GR: Yes, but they're not really particularly enjoying it. My sense is that most emotional eaters don't taste their food. They're not into the taste of food. They don't taste it after the first two minutes of eating. I do a lot of work with people in terms of eating meditation, and taking time with food. In my workshops, we do an eating meditation, and I'd say 99% of the people in the room, being faced with eating food, have never actually tasted for instance, one raisin. Or, one man said recently, "I've consumed bags and bags of Hershey's kisses but I've never eaten one." So, many people do not actually taste their food. If you're not eating for the taste of food, if you are emotionally eating, you're eating for the effect that it is going to have on you, a kind of numbing, dazing feeling. For emotional eaters, food is their drug of choice.

We're talking about changing that, turning that around. First of all understanding why they believe they need to be drugged, and second of all to actually begin waking up to themselves.

TMA: Some people do the same thing with work or exercise and for the most part they get lauded for it. But it's the same mechanism. It's still avoidance.

GR: That's true. It's no different than what everybody else is trying to do. Emotional eaters get to do it with food, which I always think is a big bonus because the great thing about food versus other substances like alcohol and drugs and cigarettes and even coffee, is that you can't actually live without food. So emotional eaters still get to have the pleasure of eating while working on the ways they use it to numb their pain. They still get to have food in their lives which I think is a great thing, because food is fabulous and pleasurable. Eating food that you love and being present for it is really a big part of being alive.

TMA: I'm reminded of a time when one of my daughters was about five or six and we were in the living room and she was across the coffee table from me and just eating chocolate by the handful. I said "Annie, what are you doing?" She said, "I'm eating my Easter chocolate." I said, "Well, why do you like it? She looked at me like I was from Mars and said, "Because it tastes good." I said, 'Okay, it tastes good, that's right and that's why you like it ... so if you eat it real fast and then it's gone, how long do you get to taste it?" She said, "Well, not very long.' And I said, "If you eat it slowly, would you get to taste it for a much longer time?" The light went on, and she said, "Wow, yeah, you're right."

GR: Yes, that's what it's about. Definitely having pleasure and allowing it to be pleasurable.

TMA: It's not the quantity, it's the quality of the food and the attention that you put to it.

GR: Yes, that's true.

TMA: It's interesting that your initial quest to manage your weight and your food issues led to more or less a spiritual self-discovery.

GR: I think that is the fabulous thing, if you follow anything all the way it really leads you to everything else. That's why after 23 years of working with people, I'm still passionate about emotional eating and working with it and through it, because it can lead to the whole rest of your life.

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Geneen Roth is the author of When Food is Love, Feeding the Hungry Heart, Appetites, and When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair. She has been teaching and lecturing for 20 years, and is the president of her own company, Breaking Free. She has made guest appearances on television (including Good Morning America, 20/20 and Oprah) and articles about her work have been published in Cosmopolitan, Ms., The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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