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Women, Food, and God Conversation Starters

When you eat, are you aware of what you're eating? When you're eating? How you're eating? Women, Food, and God author Geneen Roth offers 15 ideas to help you start a dialog with yourself and become more conscious of your eating habits. Also, try keeping a journal to explore what your habits are now and how you'll transform them.

By Geneen Roth

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Everything we believe about love, fear, transformation and God is revealed in how, when and what we eat.

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Our daily lives, from the mundane to the sublime, from our reactions to sitting in traffic to our responses to the death of someone we love, are expressions of our deepest beliefs.

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Women turn to food when they are not hungry because they are hungry for something they cannot name: a connection to what is beyond the concerns of daily life. Something deathless, something sacred.

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Relentless attempts to be thin take you father and farther away from what could actually end your suffering: getting back in touch with who you really are.

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Ending the obsession with food is all about the capacity to stay in the present moment.

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There are worse things in life than a broken heart.

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Even with aching joints, diabetes, high blood pressure, it's not about food; it's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way—and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.

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What if what you needed was right in front of you but you kept missing it because you were looking for something else?

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The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life.

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You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved.

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When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart.

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Goodness and loveliness are possible, even in something as mundane as what you put in your mouth for breakfast. Beginning now.

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Meditation helps you discover what you love that you didn't know you loved because you were so caught up in your mind that you didn't realize anything else was there.

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The moment you distinguish between acting out the impulse to eat and the awareness of the impulse to eat you are no longer captive by your past.

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Food is the direct connection between the physical and the spiritual, between what we put in our mouths and what we feel in our hearts. Passion, strength, joy cannot take place in exhausted, burdened, half-dead bodies.

Do you have a question for Roth about your dieting and food obsessions? Ask her now!

Find out more about Women, Food, and God
Are you a permitter or a restrictor? Take the quiz!
How to truly get to know yourself
Try Roth's 7 eating guidelines
What are you hungry for? Hint: It's not food
Read another excerpt from the book

Published 05/12/2010