From Your Minister
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“You were ravenous right from birth!” This is the story I was told through my whole childhood. It puzzled me as I began to spend time with babies, because it seemed to me that when they were hungry, all of them were ravenous. Which is to say that they turned purple and screamed till they were fed. And then they calmed down.
I don’t remember my babyhood, but I do remember a very complicated relationship with food and hunger from earliest childhood. When my parents told me that I was ravenous from birth, it always felt laced with shame and judgment. This, I think, was because of two factors—one, my gender, and two, more essentially, that I was always chubby. When I was young, just a little chubby. As I aged, and largely due to dieting and external controls on food, chubbiness turned to obesity.
As someone who has lived with “weight issues” my whole life, hunger is a complicated thing to talk about. I grew up in a household where there was enough food and we did not worry about where the next meal would come from, so there was never a question of physical hunger. Someone I know who had to live with hunger describes it thus: “I couldn’t focus, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t keep my energy up…at times I remember thinking about what it would be like to die of
starvation.”
This was never my experience, and I know from others who lived with it that the trauma that comes from genuine hunger, especially in childhood, never goes completely away, no matter how circumstances change. My experience was that there was food around, plenty of food, but that I was not supposed to eat it. That I was bad if I ate it. This led to a different kind of hunger, to a distrust of what my own body wanted and needed and an externalization of how I thought I “should” eat. That kind of hunger led to secret eating, shame about eating, and a sense that my hunger was insatiable.
Beginning when I was about seven or eight, and family photos show me on the chubby side of being normally sized, my parents locked the food in a closet. There was food in the refrigerator—things like condiments and leftovers—but other than that, food was impossible to get unless it was served. Mealtimes, however, were fraught with anxiety. We had to “clean up our plates,” whether we liked the food or hated it. Many nights ended with my father sitting at the kitchen table glowering at me while I sat defiantly by a half-eaten vegetable or half-drunk glass of milk, watching the hours tick away until bedtime. At breakfast, the same food, which had been on the table all night, would be served up as breakfast.
There is an insatiable hunger that arises from being out of sync with your own body, with your own rhythms and needs, likes and dislikes. Other female friends have told me how shame and hunger interacted for them, and I’ve heard a huge variety of stories about women told they were too thin, too fat, or simply hungry when they shouldn’t be—who also felt shamed about hunger or lack of hunger. I did not ask other genders but I suspect they also have complicated narratives to share. Thirty percent of the American people are obese. Depending on which study you believe, between 30 and 75% of American women have eating disorders of one kind of another. These numbers correlate, I think, to the quantity of processed food we consume, but also to some deeper hungers which are not being honored or addressed.
By now, I have engaged in so many forms of controlling what I eat that I couldn’t even begin to list them all. Diets, “food plans,” restrictions from certain processed foods, call them what you want. What I notice is that the times I am in best relationship with food and with my body are when I am eating with people I care about and we are eating food prepared with love and care, living a life where I am engaged with and connected to others.
I can’t get my childhood back, or re-do the shaming messages that permeated my relationship with food and hunger and my body. What I can do is refuse to pass that shame and judgment on to others. I refuse to judge anyone’s appetites or choices, to presume that I know what anyone else needs for their own body, to dictate when or what other people should eat. I refuse to participate in the shaming of anyone about their body or their appetite (or lack of appetite).
And I celebrate good food with friends and family, paying attention to how food makes me feel and honoring those feelings, trusting my own body. For me, it’s been the work of a lifetime, but I am grateful to have made some amount of peace with myself about it.
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