The Hidden Link Between Mothers, Daughters & Food Struggles | Geneen Roth on Emotional Eating

Today it is a true honor to be joined by Geneen Roth, a bestselling author and a true pioneer in spirituality, food, and dieting. Geneen has sold millions of copies of her 11 books, including several number one New York Times bestsellers like Women, Food, and God. She's been a trusted voice guiding women to give up perpetual dieting and compulsive eating by taking a more spiritual approach. And in her new book, Love Finally: Untangling the Knots Between Mothers, Daughters, and Food, she dives further into her work of helping women understand their relationship with food. Today we'll discuss how to break free of the perpetual dieting cycle, how your mother's relationship with food and body impact yours so deeply, and how to develop a healthy relationship with food. Janine, I am so honored to have you here. Your work has been so impactful to me personally and also as a dietitian who's helping other women with their diets.

Oh, thanks, Brigid. I'm really happy. To be here, and it always does my heart good to hear that it's reaching people because I write in my writing studio alone, and then hearing that other people read it, but also that their lives are touched really means something to me. Thank you.

You have touched a lot of lives, that is for sure. So I would love to start out with the first time that I experienced you, which was in 2018 or 2019 at Dr. Hyman's Feel Good Summit. I was working for Dr. Hyman at the time, and you led an in-person retreat exercise that you've been doing for 40 years in your retreats that you've led women through, thousands and thousands of women through. And I'd love for you to describe how you lead those and what the, what the intention is behind it.

That was an eating meditation, uh, that I've been doing for the last about 15 years at my retreats. I didn't start doing those. Because they were quite out there, as you experienced, as you and I talked about. And you'll tell people a little bit about that. It's really to really give people permission to see the food on their plate and to question who actually took that food, because often we just pile our plates with food. Without considering why, if we like it, or if this is revenge eating, basically, if we're doing this to make up for when we couldn't do it. Also, with eating, we get quite involved in talking to other people, as we do at conferences, and don't actually focus on the food in our mouths and allow ourselves to have what we have, what's already in our mouths. And as a result, we keep eating and eating and eating to get to the feeling we're never going to get to because we're not taking in what we're actually taking in. What we're really hungry for is not just food, but it's also satisfaction, nourishment, pleasure, beauty, all of that which we do not get when we are just hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth. Many people at my retreats where I have been teaching this for, as I said, the last many years, when they do their first eating meditation with me, they are ready to kill me. Basically, I've had one woman, a 6-foot-2 woman, who the second day of the retreat came over to me and said, "If we don't eat soon, I'm gonna pick you up and throw you against the wall." I am not against killing you. And that's how much the thing with food and hunger and I have to have it now and it's my nourishment, it's my pleasure, it's the way I give to myself. When we're asked to just pay attention to it, people don't like it very much.

It is uncomfortable. And I imagine because I feel like I pride myself on having a very healthy relationship with food and that's the reason that I integrated into all of the work that I do with other women. But I imagine that especially when you are— it was uncomfortable for me, so I can imagine that it, you know, it brings up a lot of emotions for people as they're sitting there. So you're sitting there and you're just looking at the food. The room was silent. We weren't allowed to talk and we had to smell the food. And how long was it that you typically have people wait before they can start serving? Putting food on their plates.

I'm in it. Or two.

Oh, that's not very long.

It seems like—

I recall it to be like 10 minutes. That's how it felt. Although I did share with you before, I was so hungry because I had only had a protein bar for breakfast. So I didn't realize that the exercise, you know, just involved us like sitting there in silence and waiting. And I just remember that feeling like an eternity.

Yes, that's what it often feels like. We're so used to an automatic— there's an automaticity about the way that we eat, and we don't question either the way or why. And I'm not talking about the why being hunger. I'm talking about other reasons why we eat.

Which you obviously cover a lot in your work. And I think before we go into those, those aspects, I did wanna just reflect on, on my takeaways from sitting there, which were one, that You had us pause in between bites, correct?

Yes.

If I'm remembering correctly.

Well, I had people actually chew what was in their mouths and swallow it before they took the next bite. Now, most people consider that a pause. That would actually be, when you think about it, yeah, I'm eating. I think I'll actually chew what's in my mouth and swallow it. Before I take the next bite. But most of us do hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth, hand to mouth. We pick up the food, we put it in our mouths, then the silverware is down on the plate and we're picking up the next bite. We're not even halfway done with this bite before here comes the next bite.

It's so true. And it's so funny because I talk about this in relationship to people's gut health where, you know, often I'll recommend before jumping to a ton of gut health supplements that you just focus on slowing down and chewing your food because of the ability for you to actually assimilate the nutrients and help to support your digestive enzyme secretion. But you're talking about it even in the sense of feeling the connection between the, the presence of food. And I remember going from being so unbelievably hungry to being so unbelievably satisfied with half of my plate still full and thinking to myself, wow, I typically would finish this plate, but because of how slow I've eaten, I actually can, can recognize these internal satiety cues that are telling me that I don't need to continue to eat.

It's also the attention you're giving to yourself. You know, what I often say is that attention is the way you bless yourself with love. And so if you're not really giving yourself attention, it's not really— I mean, yeah, it's giving the food attention, but what you're really doing is giving yourself attention in the act of eating food. And we are so externally driven and externally focused. Our attention is out there on the next person, on what we have to do, on our email, on the text, on the task, on our kids, on our partners, on wherever we are that needs to be done, the to-do list that we're not actually checking in. There's no sense of being present. I'm here now. I'm settled. Now, I'm not talking about taking half an hour to do this. I'm talking about taking a minute, 2 minutes. Everybody's got 2 minutes to do this. But somehow we resist it because we're living in this adrenalized world right now where everything is happening so quickly and we're in response mode. We're not actually in, huh? What's going on for me? Am I here? Am I showing up for myself? When you're actually here, usually at the beginning, I don't know if I did it then. I probably didn't because I knew I was taking my life in my hands with 500 people sitting around many, many tables in a conference room without silverware. That's what I ask people to do. Don't give people silverware. Till we have a chance to look at the food. And I remember just getting looks of pure hate. Hate.

It was a huge room there. Like the conference. I feel like a conference room makes it sound small. It was huge. There were so many people that were sitting there in silence.

Furious with me, I might add.

Furious with you.

So it was taking my life in my hands, but I am quite committed to the work I am doing. So, you know, I loved it. But after it was over, I thought, oh, I'm never doing that again. In a room of 1,000, 500 or 1,000 people, maybe there were more than 500 people, but I thought, nah, not doing this one again.

So a second thing that you had us do was feed the person that was sitting next to us. And I remember the other takeaway was that as we went around the room, we, we fed the woman next to us and then Um, that person fed us and at my table, the reflection was that it's easier to feed someone else than it is for to be fed by a stranger. And cuz we were sitting with people that we didn't know, and it was such an interesting lesson for me about the difficulty of receiving for women, especially that we have a difficult time with is, is receiving the help, the attention, the whatever it is that we're in need of. And it's so easy for us to just give and to feed other people.

But the corollary of that is then we end up hungry for our own attention and eat and eat and eat because we've overgiven. So then we turn to food. I mean, I often hear this from students when I say to them, okay, what's going on? And we start looking at their relationship with food? Well, it's the way I give to myself. It's the pleasure that I give to myself. It's what I know I can do. Even with 3 young kids, I can go into a bathroom and close the door and sit on the toilet for 2 minutes eating. It's just because food doesn't talk back and it doesn't go away and it's always available. It's relatively, if you can afford it, of of course, it's relatively cheap and it's just right there. So we have that tendency to overgive without actually tuning in to ourselves. One thing I say in my new book, all you ever experience is who you're being to yourself. All you ever experience is who you're being to yourself. So if you are feeling like everyone around you is clamoring for your attention, take one step back and see what's going on with you. Are you being kind to yourself? Are you showing up for yourself? Are you feeding yourself, so to speak?

So beautiful. So beautiful. So let's talk about the premise of your new book is how our mother's relationship with food and dieting impacts us as women. And there's actually themes even within Women, Food, and God where you talk about this throughout. I, I reread Women, Food, and God in this past week. And, um, cuz it had been a few years since I had read it. And you talk about this, you know, that, that mothering is the first proverbial templates for an existence which we feel welcome or rejected, loved or abandoned. And many of us have fused our relationship with our mothers with our concepts of God. And that our mother's relationship with food impacts us so closely. Can you deepen on the premise of the book and this concept?

Well, I'll back up for a little bit and tell you why I wrote Love Finally, which is the name of my new book. I wrote the book because I didn't want to die being angry with my mother, and I had been angry and resentful at her and with her for my entire life. Part of that, a lot of that, of course, which is what this book is about, or half of what this book is about, is my relationship with my body and food and her relationship with her body and food, which was just awful. She never liked her body. She never liked her breasts. She put me on a diet, my first diet, when I was 11. And I know that there are young girls now who are being put on diets younger than 11. I was standing outside the Good Humor— at the Good Humor truck with my brother and my friend Sharon and Linda, and I went to reach for a second creamsicle. It was the second of the day because he came around with his jingle on his truck way back in the last century. And I went to report, and my mother grabbed my hand and said, you cannot, you cannot have that. You're getting fat. And I remember, first of all, being shocked because I hadn't ever thought I was getting fat or that I was fat, and then being humiliated and ashamed. That she thought I was fat. And now everybody else thought and/or knew I was fat. And I ran inside the house, I grabbed 3 frozen Milky Ways from the freezer, I stuck them in my pants, I ran up the steps, and I sat over my garbage pail in my room facing the door in case my mother walked in, eating those frozen Milky Ways, eating and crying, eating and crying, eating and crying, eating and crying. Because I was humiliated, ashamed, and also I just— I don't even know what to say— just collapsed. I would say paralyzed because I felt terrible about myself. I felt like I was bad, I was wrong, I was worthless. And unless I lost weight, my mother wouldn't love me. And that sort of continued. Now, I talk about a lot of other episodes in there, how she stood beside me or in back of me when I was eating yogurt and telling me that yogurt is fattening too, and also telling me that my ankles look like piano stools. My thighs were thunder thighs. And, you know, just that ongoing litany of judgments that she also had about her body. As a kid, of course, it didn't occur to me that she hated her body and didn't want me to be fat. And this was the best way she thought she could help me from being fat because she was a fat kid. Her mother took her shopping in the chubby section of Macy's and got angry with her for her thighs being so big. And she had to put cream on her thighs because they rubbed together. And she was determined that I not follow in those footsteps. So my relationship with food was patterned on my mother's relationship with food and my mother's response to me about my relationship with food and I started dieting then when I was age 11, got addicted to amphetamines for 4 years from 15 to 19, stayed insane with food, insane about it, gained and lost what I realized recently was the equivalent of a small horse or of a baby grand piano. That's how many pounds I gained and lost over the years by starving myself, then binging. I I could lose and gain 20 pounds in a couple of weeks, gain 20 pounds in the next couple of weeks. It was a hell realm. I'd say it was a hell realm. And my mother was kind of at the back of it all, her relationship with her own body and her relationship with herself. And so I decided to really delve into this. Because she's now 97. And before writing this book, it took me 4 years to write the book. I started it 5 or 6 years ago. And before that, just the sound of her voice would grate me. I would just feel something in me just mad at her. I was just mad at her. And I think it was from feeling unloved. So I started working on what I believed about myself in terms of my mother and my relationship with food. The very deepest conclusions I had, the way I interpreted what she did to mean something about my value or worth. Does that answer your question, Brigid Titgemeier?

Yes, it does. And I think that the experience that you've had is unfortunately the experience that so many women have. And don't have the level of intuition and self-awareness that you do. And so they, they can't understand or differentiate between the anger that they have towards their mom and then the anger that they have towards themselves that leads to this cycle of self-loathing. And as you've talked about in your work, this, you know, like perpetual dieting because it makes you feel like you're being productive, that it helps you numb the feelings. That you otherwise— that then you don't have to feel if you're always on a pursuit of dieting or trying to fix yourself instead of just being with yourself is what you've written in the past. Is that a similar trend that carries through?

Yes. What I did in this book was I looked at the root, and this is what I curt and take everybody through in the process of the book, look at the root of what we actually— what I call the true but unavoidable conclusions that we've made about ourselves. Because everybody is operating from mostly unconscious conclusions they've made about themselves. Or another way of saying that is interpretations. They have— they take— so one of my retreat students' mothers didn't pick her up from kindergarten on time quite a few times. And her takeaway from that— and so this happens very young, 3 or 4— her takeaway from that is, I don't matter. I'm not worth it. Something's wrong with me, I don't belong, my mother abandoned me. I mean, there are iterations of that. What we don't realize is that those conclusions or interpretations, those meanings we took— now, her mother might have gotten stuck in traffic, might have been in an emergency meeting, might have had a health issue, might have had to take another friend to a hospital. We don't know what's happening out there, nor do we ever know what's happening out there. In fact, I was just talking to a friend yesterday who had applied to rent a house a week ago, and she hadn't heard from the, uh, person who was the owner of the house, and she had decided that her application was rejected, something was wrong with her, she wasn't gonna get the house. And finally, she just decided to do the simplest thing. I'll get back to the woman in kindergarten in a moment, and call the owner of the house. And it turned out the owner of the house had lost her cell phone and, uh, never even got the application because it came through on her cell phone. That's the kind of misconnect we have about our mothers. Now, we don't know why this woman's mother didn't pick her up from kindergarten, but what we do know and I'll call her Rebecca, is that Rebecca decided very, very early on, I don't matter. Something's wrong with me. I don't belong. And that is the kind of seed of a conclusion. Think of ourselves, or I often think of myself and I think of my students. You know those Russian dolls, how one little doll is nested in the very bottom, a teeny, teeny, teeny little doll. And then there are many, many, many, many, many, many, many dolls on top of that one. Well, if you just keep taking away the dolls and taking away the dolls, you'll get back to— and you can start with— I have one of these really big ones in my house, and I got it especially to remind me of this. When you get down to the teeniest little doll, there's the conclusion you have about yourself. I don't matter. And then what you do is you project that conclusion onto everything. So those become— and this is the analogy I use in Love Finally, my book— those become the lens. So if you wore a pair of yellow glasses, you'd see the world as yellow. So you see everything that comes to you through the lens of I don't matter. The person didn't return my text. I don't matter. A friend rejected me. I don't matter. Something's wrong with me. I felt with me, I felt like the damage at the core of me, I was deeply ashamed of. I felt like something was really wrong with me. In fact, I also tell the story in the— in Love Finally, in the chapter called Girlfriends, of my best friend on the day I got back from radiation from breast cancer, stopped talking to me and pretty much ended our relationship. She didn't tell me why. She ghosted me. And I remember feeling so deeply ashamed and humiliated by that, that that, oh, she— so we'd been friends for 20 years. She saw what was true about me. She saw that I was really bad or selfish. I didn't even tell my husband about this, even though I had been with him for 30 years. I didn't tell him because I was worried that he would now see me the way she saw me and that that would be the truth. And so I had to really question. And it was at that moment that I started questioning. And I met Coco, who's the teacher that I talk about in Love Finally, who really started teaching me about conclusions and helping me see that I was seeing the world through lies, through these true but unavoidable conclusions. But they were lies I had made them up. I made them up. I made them up from how my mother treated me, and now they were still affecting everything I saw.

Yeah. And how often do we do that? And the fact that you were able to pull it back to the origin. So for women who are going through something similar where they're listening to this and it's just bringing up a lot for them because of similar narratives that they've heard from their mom and diets that they've been put on and watching their mom have an unhealthy relationship with food. How do you get to the point of forgiveness?

Well, one thing is you realize that it's not about what happened then. Yes, you have to name it, or as they say, you have to feel it to heal it. And I would say name it to heal it. You name it. But you realize— and Gabor Maté said this in his work on trauma— that it's not what happened, it's how you interpreted what happened. It's the meaning you give to what happened. And so that's where we start. We start by realizing— and this was really hard for me— I loved my mother, but I hated my mother. And I realized when I first started this work, I didn't want to stop hating my mother. My abusive and horrendous relationship with my mother was in many ways the calling card that I had. It was what made me special. Oh, I mean, I didn't— it wouldn't be like I'd meet you, Brigid, and I'd shake your hand and I'd say to you, hi, my name is Janine, and I had a horrible relationship with my mother. What's your name? And what's your relationship with your mother? So it wasn't like that, but it was just kind of right behind there. So I loved her and I hated her and I loved hating her. I know that sounds really odd and I never would've said that before I started writing this book, 'cause it actually was in the process of writing this book that that whole pattern unwound. And by the way, just for anybody who's listening, The most miraculous thing is that in the process of doing what I did in the writing of Love Finally, which I recommend everybody do and take them through it, my relationship with my mother healed. And it is clear, it is loving. I mean, seriously, it is miraculous and unbelievable because if anybody had ever told me that I would be alive for one day in this life and have a clear and loving relationship with my mother, I would have said no. In fact, a couple of therapists had said to me, forget it, just stop talking to your mother. And I know there's a pattern now and a new whole mode of estrangement where people stop talking to their parents. As a way of disidentifying from what they've been told and as a way of getting some distance from those wounds. For me, I, first of all, wasn't around during this time. And second of all, I didn't want to do that. I really wanted to look at what was going on, what was my part. It wa— and I started realizing it wasn't about what she did. It was about how I interpreted what she did. And that was mine. Not hers.

Yes.

So then there's a process that I take people through. There's a process of seeing what triggers you, of realizing it's about you, not them. It's called the 6-step process. I didn't originate it. A lovely man named Diedrich Wolszak originated it. Again, I talk about that in Love Finally. And then You look at what your feelings are and the conclusion you made about yourself or the interpretation, and you start questioning it then. And through the questioning of the lie that you believed about yourself, through really questioning it and seeing that it could have never been true. Who doesn't matter? Just the fact that you breathe and you're alive and you exist. That actually matters. And so you start questioning these things you've never questioned that you've seen your whole life through. And as you do, it starts opening and opening and opening. And there's a lightness and a sweetness and a clarity to being alive that I feel like it's everybody's birthright.

Yeah. And so beautiful that you were able to get to that point.

And anybody can, not just me. Anybody can do this. There's nothing special about me. I just decided I didn't want to die being angry with my mother, but mostly I didn't want to die being angry with myself because the self-judgment— this is the part that I really want people to hear. All judgment that you have about anybody else is self-judgment. It's because you judge yourself. It's because there's something that you believe is wrong about you that you believe need to be fixed, that you are a mistake, that if only you could fix this, then you would be fine. At the beginning, it's, if only I had, then I'd be happy. If I had the right job, if I had if I had the right relationship, I lived in the right place, if I, if I, you know, had the right body, then I would be happy. And then as more and more people know now, in part because of the GLP-1 drugs, but also because each of us has at least gotten one thing we always wanted and we've seen, oh, It didn't fix everything. I thought it was going to give me value. I thought— I remember meeting my husband 40 years ago, and he said to me, I'm going to love you like nobody has ever loved you in your life. And that was lovely. And I thought, wow, I've met the man of my dreams. And it turned out I did meet the man of my dreams. But no matter how much he loved me, it didn't help me love myself. That place in me that was shut off from my own heart, it didn't help. I had to do that myself.

Wow. So powerful. And yeah, I think that the self-love, like, we're seeking it from so many places. And I know that in past work of yours that I've read that, you know, we go to Actually, I wanna just, um, say the quote really quickly. Women turn to food when they're not hungry because they're hungry for something that they cannot name. And then you equate it to when you are lacking, you know, these aspects that you're talking about. The double stuffed Oreos is like giving a glass of sand to a person dying of thirst. It creates more thirst, more panic. And what you're talking about is that like you can look for these for love and other things in other places, but that unless you're able to really create it for yourself, it doesn't matter how much it's coming from, from other places.

Right. And it's not like you— I want to say this. It's not like you have to create it. It's already there. We don't need it to come from somebody else. We don't need to create love. You know, if you look at a newborn baby, then you'll see they are just full of themselves. They, you know, they're just looking around and they're full of themselves. And there's no doubt about the fact I'm here. I exist. When I'm hungry, I deserve to get fed. When I cry, you know, there's just no doubt in there. We learn that. We take it on. We're so dependent on other people that we monitor our internal states according to— and these are called adaptive behaviors. We adapt ourselves according to what we believe we can get from the environment so that we survive. It's a very good thing. And I do talk about that with food in my other books, that we always eat for exquisitely good reasons. And these are the reasons. These are some of them. It's how we learn to survive. I mean, I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't turned to food during those horrendous years of being in my family. So what I'm talking about is a process of subtraction here. I'm not talking about addition. I'm not talking about, and you have to do this and you have to do that and you have to do this and you have to do these affirmations and you have to you know, do this. Do I believe that certain things facilitate and energize you? Yes, I do. But they're very simple things like walking outside in the morning, getting some sunlight in your eyes, you know, walking, being in nature, things like that. I'm not talking about instilling love. I'm talking about really understanding that why you don't so-called love yourself is because you've taken on things that aren't true. And when you let those go through this process that I talk about in Love Finally, then what comes up is what's always been there, an ease, a clarity, a joy. It's what all the wisdom teachers talk about, and it's there.

And it seems like there's so many women given— actually, when I had polled my community before coming on to interview you, someone in my community, Kristen, had said, I'm curious about her take on forgiveness and understanding when it comes to thinking about how our moms handled food when we were growing up, when they didn't have the same access to food choices and to the information that we have now. And someone else, Kathy, in my community had said that she watched her mom go from diet pills to controlling her weight to severely restricting herself. And so it seems like what, what you're saying, or maybe even be— before I say what I think you're saying, for an entire generation of women who have been brought up by an entire generation of women who were sold the diet marketing and the billion-plus dollar industry that it was. How do we heal that by tapping into what you're speaking of?

Yes. The first thing is, I'm going to say this off the cuff, but I don't mean it to sound as clichéd as it does sound. That if you keep blaming your mother for this, then you keep being a victim. And when you keep being a victim, then you're not in control of your own healing. That's what victims are. They're dependent on the outside changing so that they can change. So at some point, it's a decision. Okay, how am I gonna proceed? In fact, my mother and I were texting yesterday, because you and I talked for a moment about this. There was a lovely People.com article, an excerpt from Love Finally that came out a couple of days ago. And I haven't shown my mother my book yet because I've been afraid. I mean, really, I've been afraid. I just go into the— what happened between us and what she said and what I said. I talk about the time she went through through my diaries when I was a junior in high school. And she wrote in the column, she answered everything I said about her, and she refuted every single thing in my diary. And the violation that that felt was beyond, like, you know, that she was going through that. And that was just one of many things that I wrote about her teaching me how to store things because catastrophe is coming. There was one time she took me downstairs to the cedar closet downstairs, and there was a whole row of clothes that had price tags on it and about 25 pair of shoes. There were 6 black pants and 8 jackets and multiple blouses. And I said, oh my God, Mom, what is this? And she said, Take what you can get whenever you can get it. Catastrophe is coming. It doesn't matter whether you want it or not. Take it. Now, this was from my father, but I wanna, I wanna say two things. One is people learn that about food. They eat for the hunger to come. They eat in case they gonna be hungry in 2 hours. Like, I'm sure that time at Mark Hyman's, you were saying to yourself, why on earth did I just eat a protein bar for breakfast? If I had known this was coming, I would have eaten for the hunger to come 2 hours ago. And so we store. We store for the hunger to come. Catastrophe is coming. Oh my God, what's going to happen to me? So the patterns that I learned in relationship to my mother, catastrophe is coming. I still have that. That's a really tough one because, boy, what a world we're living in now. If you look out there, it looks like complete chaos. And it looks like catastrophe is not only coming, but catastrophe has actually happened. So how do you stay here? How do you unlearn and stay in this moment? I used to have a therapist. I loved her so much. She would say to me when I talked to her about this pattern, it's not here now. What is it now? Look around. Be in your body now. It's just one step and the next step and the next step, and you'll know what to do. So for my mother and food, part of it was sort of, if you can imagine, a caboose. I don't know if people still know what cabooses are at the end of train. There's, when I was growing up, we had a book called The Little Red Caboose. And you had to detach, you know, and the red caboose would say, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can." And so if you imagine detaching the caboose from the rest of the train, you detach the caboose from what your mother said to you because it is not about your mother. You know, I work with somebody who's 86 years old who is still mad at her mother. Think about that. I want everybody listening to think about that. Her mother's been dead now. Her mother died very early. Her mother died when she was 46 years old. So her mother's now been dead for 40 years, and she's still carrying around the fury, the resentment, but more than that, the self-hatred that she has having inherited that from her mother. In order to stop that, there is a detaching, like the little red caboose, from what your mother said and did, because that happened then. That is not happening now. This woman is 86 years old. When I went into— now, I think this was the one, but I can't remember— an eating meditation like the one you mentioned, Brigid, And she raised her hand and I started working with her and I noticed she had 8 or 10 pancakes on her plate. And I said to her, do you like pancakes? And she said, no, I hate pancakes. And I said, then why do you have 10 pancakes on your plate? And she said, because my mother told me I couldn't have them. And so this play is revenge eating to say, go to hell, mom. And her mother had been dead for 40 years, and she had so internalized the judgment, what wasn't okay to do, that she wasn't okay, that she was still abusing her body with things she didn't want and didn't like as a way of telling her mother to go to hell. Wow. So detaching from that, really, and realizing this is about my experience now. This is not about my mother anymore. Yes, it's about the imprint, the impressions, the associations, the identity, and the wounds that happen in relationship to my mother. But at this point, they're mine. They have nothing to do with her. This is a hard one. I told you I loved hating my mother. I really loved hating my mother. So I had to look at, okay, am I willing? Who am I going to be if I stop hating my mother? It felt like I was going to dissolve. My whole life was built. I had written many books about my relationship with my mother. Not like this book, Love Finally, nothing like this book. This book goes for it. Those books I kind of skirted around. Even when Food Is Love, this book does not skirt around. This book goes straight for it. Because, you know, if you're gonna deal with it and stop it, you gotta tell the truth about it, period. And when I started realizing this was no longer about her, It was about me. It was about what I believed. And I started doing those steps that I talked to you about, about the feelings and the conclusions and the interpretations. And then comes the forgiveness. It's, I forgive myself for believing the lies that I have guarded with me for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60. And this woman's case, 80 years.

Does it allow for you to get to the point where you can see that they're coming from such a broken place that you have empathy?

Yes, it does. Because when you release yourself of the judgment and the way you are harsh with yourself and you turn on yourself and that voice, you did that wrong and you did this wrong and you shouldn't have eaten that. And if only you had done that. And if you had said that and you hadn't said that. And how come you did that, when that starts dissolving and letting go, then the judgment about other people stops as well or starts dissolving as well. Because like attracts like. And we see Wayne Dyer said a great thing years ago. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

Change. Yes. Yes.

And so it's good also to realize that it's not that you believe what you see, but that you see what you believe. So if I believe that I am a worthless piece of poop on the ground, then that's how people are going to treat me, because that's what I'm putting out. That's what I'm putting out.

Yeah, it's so, I mean, you, you're so wise in, in so many ways. Obviously you've been doing this work for 40 years and being able to just continue to add so much, so many enlightening thoughts that help women see where they're at and some of the contributors. And then like you said, stepping away from victim mode to saying, I, I can take control. And, and when you just said the fact that you creating that separation from it being about your mom to then it being about you, it makes me think as a mother of it also being about our children. And so I'm wondering what advice you have for moms who are trying to prevent so much anger and so much resentment towards. Because I feel like I am doing the best that I can as a mom, right? With the information that I have. And I, I do believe that that is the case for, for everyone, that we are all trying the best that we can with the, the highest level of enlightenment that we are at and the information that we have in the circumstances, um, in our lives. And so what advice do you have for mothers?

I have two things. Also, there is the very last piece of Love Finally is If I had a daughter. And so I wrote a whole piece about if I had a daughter, this is what I would say. And I'll give you the gist of it. Maybe. I'm not exactly sure. I haven't read it in the last couple of weeks, so I don't know what the gist of it actually is. But number one, nobody's perfect. You're going to mess up. And that's how it's gonna be. I always mess up. I got really mad at my husband this morning, and he is such a good guy, and I got so mad at him. And as I was mad at him, I thought, you know, uh, this is how it goes. This is what being in Earth School is like. We mess up. That's how it is. And he really did. I won't go into the story, but, um, You know, that's number one. That's the first thing. The second thing I would say is it starts with you. It starts with you. Do you first, because kids pick up what you're emanating, what you're doing. They watch you. They model their lives on you. You know, my mother hated her hair her entire life. She had thin hair. We'd go up in escalators in department stores stores, and she would be like, her neck would be craned around looking at the person's hair that was going up the escalator on the other side. And the other, the other day she said to me, I love my hair. And I said, really? And it, because it's all white now. She said, yeah, I feel like I'm walking under a cloud now every day. And I thought, wow, this is a change. This is really a change. And then I started realizing, oh, Maybe I, I could start thinking that about my hair because I started not liking my hair very, very, very young. So the imprint from our mothers is strong, but also it starts with you and you being aware of your own self-judgment, you being aware of how harsh you are with yourself, you being aware of what you really, truly believe about yourself. Which is those interpretations and those true but unavoidable conclusions that you've made. I'm unworthy. I don't belong. I don't matter. I've been abandoned. I'm damaged. To really question those.

And then when it ties to food, Angela from my community had said that she struggled with anorexia as a teen due to feeling judgment from her mom about her weight and needing to look a certain way. And that she's scared about unconsciously creating self-esteem issues for her own teenage daughter trying to lead by example. But how do we teach our kids about limiting processed foods without potentially adding to the mindset or self-esteem issues that our mothers created for us while growing up?

Yeah, that's a hard one. So I would say, Angela, are you eating processed foods? You know, that's the first question. What are you eating? What are you modeling? And how do you feel about what you're eating and modeling? Because it's not exactly what you're eating. It's also about how you feel about it. If there is a sort of adversarial, warlike relationship with food and the body that she has or that any of us has, that's going to come across. Whatever you say, that's going to be picked up. That will— oh, something's wrong with me. Something's wrong with my body. I will mess up on this. So that's what I would say. It starts with you. Be kind to yourself. Be aware of yourself. You know, awareness is a lot of this process, is being aware, not judging, but being aware of what you're doing, being present, showing up for yourself. How do you do that? You feel your feet on the floor, the butt in the chair. You breathe at any given moment. You take two breaths and you arrive back here and you kind of let your mind drop into your heart. You become heart-focused and you feel, oh, okay. So if you start with should, shouldn't, right, wrong, good, bad, then you're on a polarity stick, so to speak. And then what happens is what happened with me. You diet and you binge, you comply, and then you rebel. And then it becomes, I'm good, I'm bad, I should, I shouldn't. And something I want to say, Brigid, I didn't have the worst mother in the world. As I was writing this book, I looked up, like, who are the worst mothers in the world? I googled that. Because I was kind of convinced that I had one of the worst mothers in the world. Well, it turned out that Charles Manson's mother, the serial killer, traded him for a bottle of beer. And I realized, okay, well, my mother was a better mother than that. So, um, what I want to say to everybody is, given the amount— I mean, my mother is the one that took me to the diet doctor, she's the one who encouraged me to get hooked on amphetamines for 4 years. So there was that whole mother food thing, but there was also— she screamed, she hit, she left, she didn't come back for hours at a time. Am I okay now? So I want people to take a meta perspective here. It's not the end of the world. Yes. You know, sometimes I'll say to my mother, well, because of you, I ended up having to work through all this stuff and writing 11 books. So, you know, I'm having an issue with food. My brother always said— my brother says to me a lot, you made a career out of your suffering, Jeanine. And it's true, I did. But more than that, my work became unlocking it, undoing it, understanding it, healing it, and really going beyond it to what's there without the wounds. And many of us are very attached to being victims, and we're attached to our wounds. I'm remembering One of my students told me that when her mother was dying, she wouldn't let herself eat mint chocolate chip ice cream because she didn't want to die with fat thighs. So that's— that has to do, of course. I mean, we hear that and we think, well, you're going to be dead soon and you're going to have to leave those thighs behind. Of course, I want to say that to everybody. We end up having to leave these bodies behind. And so we spend so much work on making these bodies like as thin as, or good or muscular or buff as they possibly can be. And then what happens? We drop them. So spend your life on what matters now, but feel good, feel healthy. Know what that is so that you don't get to the end of your life and say, I will not let myself eat mint chocolate chip ice cream because I don't want to die with fat thighs. Or as Nina Riggs said, and I also quoted this in the book, her mother said when she was dying, I am so fucking fat. That's what her mother— her mother's last words. I am so fucking fat. So I haven't said this yet. How we eat is how we live. Our relationship with food is an exact microcosm of our relationship to being alive. The reason I adore working with issues of food and doing those eating meditations that you did, Brigid Titgemeier, is because it's a snapshot. It's like a Rorschach test. Of our relationship to being alive. Do I nourish myself? Do I believe I'm allowed to take pleasure in this? Do I believe I'm allowed to have joy? Do I believe I'm allowed to take up space and actually spend time on myself? Or do I need to hurry up, hurry up, hurry up? Marion Woodman, the Jungian psychologist, talked about going at soul speed. Doing your life at soul speed, just slowing down. And if you can't do that all the time, you do it for 10 minutes a day.

I have one final question, which is based on your cancer journey that you have been on. A lot of women in my community, they're using functional medicine. They're trying to work on using nutrition to improve various conditions. Insulin resistance, menopausal symptoms. They're in pursuit of feeling good and using food as an avenue to, to get there. But I wonder what advice you have, or, or the approach that you took in trying to use food and nutrition from a nourishment standpoint and fueling yourselves with the vitamins and minerals and phytonutrients and limiting ingredients that we know can be potentially more problematic or harmful while still maintaining a healthy relationship with food?

Yeah, and that's a good question. I worked with a functional medicine doctor and also a functional medicine oncologist, as well as my regular oncologist. So I, I, I assembled the team. An acupuncturist who worked almost only with cancer. He's the one that told me, and I write about this in Love Finally, that I should be taking 3-minute cold showers every day to upregulate my immune system. This was before the Wim Hof, you know, submerge in Arctic water every day. And that was actually a good idea. It took me a while. So I was willing, because there's nothing like a cancer diagnosis, to have the rubber meet the road, so to speak, and to look at again. And I have examined my relationship with food so many times over the years and refined it and refined it and refined it and refined it over the years. I stopped eating sugar. I just stopped. Both the acupuncturist, the functional medicine doctor, the alternative oncologist, everybody told me to stop eating sugar. And I thought, okay, I love sugar. I mean, I gotta say, those frozen Milky Ways, those were the beginning. But I'm telling you, if suddenly we found out that everybody was wrong and sugar was really good for you, I would eat nothing but sugar. But I don't, and I haven't eaten it for 6 years because when they said to me, and I have read articles that refute this, but they said to me, cancer likes sugar. It's like, okay, fine, let me see what it's like not to eat sugar. I'd been eating it forever. Up until 6 years ago, pretty much every day, or, you know, was sort of like things with honey or maple syrup or, you know, whatever it was. I just stopped because I thought, let me see what this body feels like when I'm not eating sugar. I felt much better. That was a good touchstone for me. It was really a good touchstone. And to eat foods that, you know, as my functional medicine doctor said to me, that look like them. Themselves instead of the foods that you're eating, Janine, which don't look like themselves. Bread. And I mean, yeah, I was eating gluten-free bread because a wonderful nutritionist had told me 25 years ago something about my blood work and gliadin that I shouldn't have gluten anymore. And I was quite rebellious about that. I was on my way to Greece. I had baklava every single day when I was there for 3 weeks. It's like, I'm not, I'm not, forget this. I'm not gonna stop eating gluten. That's ridiculous. But you know, I've lived without gluten. So when the functional medicine doctor told me that again, stop eating gluten, stop, based on all my blood work, I just thought, okay, I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to do this. And so I started eating differently again for the 900,000th time in my life. I'd been a vegan, a macrobiotic, a vegetarian, a pescatarian. I even tried to be a breatharian once, which was ridiculous because breatharians don't eat anything. They drink light and they eat silence. And I thought, what a great way to be thin. And so I did try that for a little while on my way to becoming quite anorexic, which I did become, as anybody would. So I've done everything and I thought, okay, this will just be one more thing I'll do. And I'll see if I feel good, it's worth it. If I don't feel good, it's not. Because I really do believe in pleasure and joy and pleasure and joy with food. Uh, that's one of the funs of being alive is to love what you eat. Um, but not at the expense of not feeling good.

Mm-hmm. I love that you said that because I do think, you know, that, that you can have both, that you can have a diet that helps to support and optimize your health, makes you feel good, makes you feel alive, more alive than a lot of people feel when they're eating a ton of ultra-processed food. And I think sometimes people confuse the intuitive eating movement with just like all foods fit or eat all foods in moderation. And maybe some do believe in that, but in the experience that I've had and seeing how horrible that approach can make women feel or people feel, that, uh, being able to do it in a loving, compassionate way while you're also examining your relationship with food can be really empowering.

There's a chapter in Love Finally called Eating My Words. And the first sentence— and it's all about intuitive eating— and the first sentence is, if words were birds and could fly back in my mouth, I would eat the ones I wrote about intuitive eating. Because what I want to say about that now is that Unless an adult is present when you ask yourself what you want to eat, which is what I proposed in my first many books, the 3-year-old answers, the 8-year-old answers. Me, for instance, me, when I first started this intuitive eating whole Movement, I ate nothing but chocolate chip cookie dough for 2 weeks. Nothing. Because I kept saying to myself, what do you want to eat? And what I wanted was chocolate chip cookie batter dough balls. And it was like, okay, I'll eat a couple of them now, and then I'll eat some more for lunch and some more for dinner. What I didn't realize, and I do write about this in this chapter called Eating My Words, I didn't realize that unless there was an adult present, unless somebody in here was present, not the 3, 5, 8, 11, 15, 25-year-old who felt deprived and was using food to fill herself and modulate emotional hunger, then the answer will be foods that you weren't allowed to have, processed foods, sugar, things like that. So having an adult present when you ask that question really is important. Otherwise, the whole intuitive eating thing is for the birds, as I wrote in this chapter, because you're asking the wrong person what they want to eat. You're asking an 8-year-old, a deprived 11-year-old, a shamed 15-year-old. I mean, I spent years in college. I went to college in New Orleans. And I spent my first year there. There's something called Dobash cake there. I think I— oh, that was— those were the years that I went on the 1,000-calorie-a-day sugar diet because that's what I wanted to eat, sugar. And then I just went on the one hot fudge sundae a day diet because that's what I wanted to eat. I didn't do that when I started intuitive eating. It was that chocolate chip cookie batter dough ball thing that I did. But I— and without guilt. That was the great thing about it, how I made up intuitive eating when I first started thinking of it. Oh, now I get to eat what I want to eat without guilt. Yay! But I didn't actually clue in to how it felt in my body. Now, of course, I was much younger then, so it's possible in your 20s to do something that in your 40s, 50s, 60s, or as I am right now in my 70s, the body really takes the hit. The body takes it.

Yeah.

Wow.

I mean, I think that is actually so enlightening coming from you as one of the originators of the intuitive eating movement, to be able to have those reflections and insights 40 years later from your own personal experiences and then to be able to say like, this is where I would adjust, you know, the, the messaging, I think is actually so profound.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Good.

Janine, I cannot thank you enough.

All right. I want everybody to see my book again.

Yes. I cannot thank you enough for all of your work. The book comes out on April 21st, Love Finally. You can also preorder the book, which also always helps book sales. So we'll include all of the links for people to do that, to be able to pick up a copy and work on healing their relationship with food even deeper. Where else do we want to point people to in order to benefit from all of your amazing work?

My website, janineroth.com. I'm doing a retreat in Maui in July that is open to the public, and I'm doing an online retreat in November, um, or maybe before. I, I've kind of lost track of the time. But anyway, in a couple months I'm doing an in-person retreat and then I'm doing an online retreat. So my website, janineroth.com, is where you can find out all that information. Plus I've recently started a Substack, uh, newsletter, which I'm having great fun doing, and they can go to that. As well. And also amazing, you know, uh, join my email list and we send out articles and all kinds of things.

We'll be sure to include all those links in the show notes so that people can find them.

That's great. That's good.

Janine, congratulations on your new book and thank you so much for being part of the Being Brigid Show. Thank you for all the work that you've put out. I can speak on behalf of myself and also many of the women that are in my programs who have benefited so much from all of the amazing knowledge that you have poured out and given so graciously over the last 40 years.

Such a joy to talk to you, Brigid. Really a joy. Thank you. And thank you for doing the work you do. Yeah.

And thank you for listening to the Being Brigid Show. I will see you soon.