End the War with Food - Interview with Geneen Roth

Foreign.

Hello and welcome. I'm Alexandra J. Johnson. And today we have an extraordinary guest, Janine Roth. She is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Women, Food and God. And she has appeared on many national television shows, including The Oprah Show, 2020, the NBC Nightly News, the View, CBS Early show, the Dr. Oz, and Good Morning America. Good Morning America. Articles about Janine and her work have appeared in numerous publications, including the Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Time, Elle, the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. And she has written monthly columns in Good Housekeeping magazine and Prevention magazine. And she is the author of nine books, including bestsellers Lost and Found and When Food is Love. Welcome, Janine.

Thank you, Alexandra.

It is so. It's such an honor to talk with you, and I so appreciate your work. And I found your work probably like 15 years ago when I was in college struggling with food and overeating. And on my mom's bookshelf was your book, why Wait? And I got it and I read it, and I have read almost all of your books, and I'm just super, super grateful for all the work that you do for all of us.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Yeah, it's awesome. I have the picture of the book right here. So thank you to my mom for introducing me to you. So I would love to. I think I'd love to start with your story, just you sharing some of your story, because I think it's so beautiful, your heroine's journey of how you've navigated your relationship with food over these years. So could you just share how you've gotten to the point where you are now with food?

Sure, I can. And, you know, as a context, I want to say that for me, food and my relationship with it has truly been a portal through which I've learned so much. Almost not, I wouldn't say everything I know, but so, so much of what I know about myself, my feelings, my experiences, how I relate to myself and other people. So it's been one of the greatest teachers of my life. And I think it really can be that for those of us who struggle with food, of course, anything we struggle with and suffer about can be exactly that, because we're motivated to stop the suffering and end the struggle. And because of that, we're willing to look and see what's going on. For myself, I had dieted and binged for many, many years until I got to a place where I didn't want to live anymore. I would say that I hit the bottom. It was that place that they talk about in the anonymous programs where life had become unmanageable for me and I didn't want to live anymore. And so at that point, I felt like I had two choices. Either kill myself, which was a viable choice for me because I was living in such hell, which I thought was actually caused by the fact that I was quite fat at the time, but I had been underweight and overweight for 17 years. So I had been struggling with it for all that time. And I wasn't overweight that whole time, But I nonetheless loathed myself because of what I looked like, or it seemed like because of what I looked like. And so my choice at that time, when I was 28, was either stop the struggle by ending my life and I had started researching how to do that, or stop the struggle by stopping the struggle by dropping it. Dropping what I call in women's food and God, ending dropping the war, or ending the war. And instead of resisting and fighting against and trying to change and improve and avoid and fix what I thought were all of my problems and lose weight as quick as I could on yet another diet, which I would then gain back on yet another binge, I decided to be interested in my relationship with food and see what it could teach me and see what I was trying to say with and through food. And that, for me, was the beginning of all of this. I mean, it was certainly the beginning of my work with food, other people, although that didn't happen for a while later. It was the beginning of me understanding that it could be a portal and that I was using food as a way of both avoiding, but also expressing the things that I didn't want to or somehow felt like I wasn't allowed to feel.

That's amazing. So I love this idea that you decided to end the struggle and you just declared essentially right to stop dieting like you just stopped.

I did. Because dieting and its partner binging, because they absolutely go together. You don't have one without the other. I think we all believe that somehow the next, greatest, newest, most fabulously nutritional diet will be the diet end all diets, after which there will be no binge. But that is just simply not true. And so I realized that dieting was the main way that the war within myself got expressed, because foods were good, bad, right, wrong, should, shouldn't. And I was good, bad, right, wrong. And I saw that that whole polarity was causing so much pain. I don't think I understood at that point that it wasn't true that the belief I had in myself as being damaged and damaged at the core and bad in my very essence wasn't true at that moment. It was mostly that I felt that all of my beliefs were expressing themselves through my relationship with food. Food was the vehicle or the portal, as I said before. And so it wasn't food's fault, so to speak. But. And I needed to. I did need to stop dieting because I felt so horrible about myself when I binged that I wanted to stop that immediately, and so I did.

And I'm curious, like, what's your definition of dieting, just so people have, like, an understanding of what diet is?

Yes, that's a good question. Thank you, Alexandra, for asking that question. The way that I define dieting is when you deprive or shame or punish or fear yourself through eating what you eat or you're afraid of yourself. I mean, I said fear, but it's based in a lack of trust of yourself. It's based in this belief that if you don't truly watch every bite you put in your mouth, that there is a monster lurking the basement of your psyche that will break out and eat everything in sight, that you're. You have a basic belief that your appetites and your hungers are bottomless and you must cage yourself. And dieting is the way that you do that. Dieting and restricting your food intake is the way you do that.

And I'm curious on, like you just said, we cage ourselves. Do you think that, like, as you also said, avoiding and expressing, like, we use food in a way to not express ourselves, to not feel ourselves, to not be with ourselves, and we think that we're too much or we're not good enough. Like, can you talk about that?

They're the same in a way. You know, it's a misperception and. And it's a result of beliefs that we have swallowed, so to speak, we've taken in from the people around us, our environments, our parents, our different members of our family, our siblings, the culture, friends, peer groups that we have gotten somehow either the feedback or been told not directly, that who we are is either too much or not enough, but basically the bottom line there is who you are is no good. You've got to be different in order to. Well, I'll put it in very sort of bare terms, in order to take up space here on this earth, you have to be different than you are. You have to change. You have to fix yourself. You have to turn yourself inside out and upside down, improve yourself, and then maybe you will be lovable. Right.

And then we have. I was just thinking about when I was in college and when the food issues became an issue for me was in college and just this feeling of, you know, eating whole boxes of cereal, like, feeling out of control. And that was also a strong point in my life where I did feel that, like, I wasn't good enough and the relationship didn't work out. And, you know, I was just stressed in college. And you don't feel. I mean, I was going to the food because I wasn't feeling good enough. And, like, to stop the voices in my head of not being good enough, it was just easier just to eat a whole box of cereal.

Yes. And so in an environment where you already felt out of control, because going to college is such a transition and a change, you can see how you would switch those feelings of being out of control to being out of control about food, because at least then you're out of control about something that ultimately you are in control of. Whereas just entering college and being there and being thrown into that situation is truly a feeling of being out of control, and it is being out of control of your environment. And I think we don't know how to. Because we're not taught how to be with that kind of uncertainty, how to somehow ground ourselves in. You know, I teach my students, my retreat students a lot, how to orient, ground, and sense themselves and so how to be grounded in themselves and be with themselves no matter what is going on. And so if they're feeling out of control, okay, well, what does feeling out of control feel like then? And that's a catchphrase in a way, for many different feelings. Out of control. I feel like, well, you said the relationship didn't work out, or you have suddenly you have new friends and the mores or the values are very different perhaps, than the ones you've had. And you don't fit in. So you feel awkward, or you feel, as you said, not good enough or whatever. And rather than. And this is where the change comes for all of us, not just those of us in college, but all of us, that when we're feeling something, we don't know that there's a way to be with that without taking it out on ourselves, without hurting ourselves in the process. So you're already feeling out of control, and then you feel even more out of control because you're eating boxes of cookies. But at least, as I said, you're feeling out of control of what you are in control of, which is the fact that you're putting the food into your mouth instead of the fact that your relationship didn't work. But would it have been like to either have been taught or to learn at that moment? Well, okay, the relationship didn't work out. I feel so sad, or I feel grief stricken or I feel lonely. So lonely here. What would it be like to know that it would be possible to have those feelings, feel those feelings, but also be with those feelings in a tender and kind way instead of doubling the pain and. Or suffering by taking what could be a feeling of loneliness or sadness or grief, taking it out on yourself and making it much worse.

Yeah. Amazing. And do you think the. That we. Because I know for me, this has been a part of my process. Like, I would look around and I think that nobody else would have anger or fear or sadness or feel out of control or not know what the hell they're doing. And I would feel isolated, you know, and there would be a level of shame. But the more that I've talked about it with a lot of women, I realize we all have that. But why is it that so. So many of us women are kind of like hiding about our true feelings and like feeling bad that we feel anger and we feel sadness and frustration and all of these emotions?

Well, I have a two pronged answer to that question. One is it's not only women who are feeling not good enough, ashamed of themselves, who are hiding their feelings about either of those things or all of them. You know, I'm feeling like I should be able to do more, mother. And I work and I'm not doing either job good enough or well enough or, you know, I've just gotten demoted at work or whatever it is that I think women tend to titrate, so to speak, or regulate their moods when they don't know how to do it any other way through food. And men have a different way of doing that men have. And there are many men who use food to do that, as evidenced by the amount of letters I get from men who say to me, how come your book is called Women, Food and God? And how come there are, you know, only women at your retreats? Men are invited to my workshops, but at my retreats, there are only women. Because men also don't know how and probably even worse, don't know how to be with their feelings. And we all have feelings of shame and not being good enough. It's just that men hide those, avoid those, try to fix those, regulate those in a different way most of the time, through working harder, through sports not that women don't play sports, but through exerting themselves in a different way. Still avoidance, though, right?

And I love that you're saying too.

That.

You'Ve gotten that food as a portal for you and like your greatest teacher, and I remember, I think you've talked about it numerous of your books, but that we eat the way we live. Can you talk more about that? Can we look at our relationship with food in a different way as a teacher and as a way of guiding us and as just like shining a spotlight of how we actually live our life?

Yes, you can. Everybody can. But what comes before that, the pre step, before that step is actually wanting to do that. And I think, and I was just writing about this today, I think for so many people, we just really want the fix and we want it now. And it doesn't occur to us, we're not particularly interested in, partly because it doesn't occur to us, but partly because we still believe that the answer is is out there. It is in something we can do or buy or achieve. The answer is out there, and if only we could find the right answer, then we could fix this. And the answer isn't in here. And so we don't even bother to look because we're so convinced. And partly that's cultural, but of course, the culture is made up of each of us. And so the cultural mindset of it's out there in the next nice sweater or pair of boots or the next job or in making more money getting famous, which a lot of kids now believe will do it and which we're getting more and more evidence that it doesn't work, it doesn't do it. I mean, you know, all we have to look at is Robin Williams or the latest spate of news about Beyonce and her husband possibly getting divorced. Who knows if that's celebrity gossip or not. Certainly Robin Williams must have felt devastated, and all the fame and money he had didn't make it better. And so I think we are so set in a particular mindset that it's out there and that money and fame and having more than enough of whatever it is we want is going to do it, that it doesn't occur to us to look here instead of out there. And that gets reinforced and exacerbated and exaggerated by the culture we live in. And so the pre step is to realize that we're being sold a bill of goods and that the culture we're living in is somewhat insane. And so if you're going to look out there for the Answer. You're not going to find it. You're just going to feel crazed and you're going to feel more and more crazed and it's not going to make you happy. And, you know, and I will often say to a room of 500 women, okay, let's take a look at how happy you are. Given the amount of weight you've lost, did it make you happy? And people say no. And how many of you think it's going to make you happy the next time? And practically everybody says yes, totally. So the pre step to that step that you just spoke of, Alexandra, is to first realize or be willing to at least acknowledge that the way you're doing it isn't working. You know, I noticed the other day on my Facebook page that somebody wrote, I posted something about this about looking inside. And somebody wrote, I was on. I weighed 175 pounds and I was on eight different medications. And she listed them and they were for arthritis and anxiety and high blood pressure. And I think one of them had to do with sleep. And she just went on and on and on. She got to a place where she realized it wasn't working anymore. And sometimes it takes getting to that place where you suddenly realize you're knee deep in a life you don't want and in a life that feels dead to you and you need eight medications just to make it through the day. And at that point, you're willing to stop and you're. And what she said, which I found so touching, was that she is now on only one of those eight medications. She's lost 11 pounds in the last month or so, maybe two months without making weight loss a priority. But what was a priority to her was realizing that what she craved was much bigger than sugar and was never going to be solved by sugar, but was going to be solved or at least entered into by her willingness to sit with discomfort. And I think that's what we're talking about here. We've become so averse to feeling any kind of discomfort. And truthfully, and I'm not what I'm about to say, it's not the best advertisement for my work right now. But, you know, the way through this is to be willing to at least acknowledge that it's an up and down process. Being alive is up and down. People we love get sick, they die, we get sick. You know, we get older. Our kids leave for college. You know, we go through things that are painful and not to be willing to feel, feel that and to have no trust that it's Possible to be with that and get to the other side of it. Perpetuates the compulsion to eat and any compulsion to shop, to take drugs, to drink, to work, 18 hour days. It's not just eating we're talking about.

Right? It's that compulsive kind of addiction, feeling or that addictive behavior.

Yes.

Like we can't stop whatever it is.

And you know what I feel the addiction is too, is not actually allowing yourself to feel what you feel and using some kind of external means, whether it's food or drugs or alcohol or shopping or work or exercising or sex, to avoid that discomfort. Avoid the discomfort really of just being alive. You know, I think it's a relief to finally admit that at some point you're going to be, if you haven't already experienced this, you're going to be in pain about something. And of course many people have been in a lot of pain about a lot of things. So it's not like this is new news, it's just that we spend so much effort trying to avoid it that often, you know, when I'm working with somebody, I'll say, she'll say, well, I feel sad, but if I let myself feel the sadness, I'll drown, never come out of it, it's so dark. And I will say to her, okay, so how about, how about if we take the next two minutes, I'll time it for you to feel the sadness and tell me where you feel it, what it feels like inside your body. Does it have a color? Does it have a shape, does it have a sensation? You know, tell me about this. And then she'll get interested in it. And two minutes will be nowhere near enough. Because the second that you stop trying to avoid it and you allow yourself to have changes, I mean really, the second that you do that. Now what I'm talking about often needs to happen with support. It's not something that I would recommend that people do on their own at the beginning because we don't know how to inquire. And that's what this is. It's a process of inquiry. And most of us don't know how to do this on our own. And what we think of as feeling sadness is just going around on a hamster wheel of more and more and more horrible thoughts. But that's not feeling that thinking. So it's very different.

Right, right. Ooh, can you just talk a little bit about that too? Of like the stories that we're telling ourselves and our thinking versus feeling like, how do we know when we're truly feeling something. And how do we know when we're spinning a hamster wheel in our head?

Well, most of us have. And Steven Levine, the Buddhist teacher, said this probably 30 years ago, but I've never forgotten it, that we all have our top five themes. They are the. In those years, of course, it was records, but it was the top five tunes that we play all the time, over and over in our minds. I wasn't loved enough. This always happens to me. I'm never going to get what I want, whatever those things are. I'm always the victim. I'm always left. I'm always abandoned. I haven't found my true meaning in life. Those are stories that we tell ourselves. You know, I can give you a very concrete example about the difference between fact and an interpretation or a story of a fact. And I will. This won't be emotional at all, but I'll, you know, I'll give you an example. My husband doesn't call me when I thought he was going to call me. That's a fact. That's just the plain fact. My story of it, which can make me hysterical and anxious, is something happened to him. He's lying on the side of the road dead. I knew that men died before women. I knew I was going to be left alone in my life at a very early age. What am I going to do now? Will I ever meet anybody else again? You start spinning out into a story that has little to do with what's actually going on. Or I'm feeling sad in this moment and rather than let myself feel it, what does sadness feel like in my body? Oh, it feels like I'm wrapped in sort of wet felt. I feel a heaviness in my chest and it feels like there's a sort of dark cloud in the middle of my chest. And what does that dark cloud feel like? What is it made of, that dark cloud that's different from I'm feeling sad. And if I don't get out of this sadness, I'll never be able to get up. I'll never be able to get to work today. If everybody knows that I'm feeling sad, they'll take me as a loser like that. That's the difference between a fact and an interpretation of a fact, which is a story. Or I'm sick and I've been sick for a week. Oh, my God. What happens if I don't get well before I'm supposed to go to New York? I'll be dragging on that plane. Then I'll be Around all of those germs with people coughing and sneezing on the plane. I'll get work. Oh, my God. What if somebody with the Ebola virus is traveling from. From Africa on the same plane and it suddenly become contagious through the air? What's going. Like that. That. Those are. Those are spinning stories.

That is awesome. One thing that I love about you, Janine, is that you're, like, so just real and honest and in your books, like, you just tell it like it is. Like, we all have those. We all have those crazy spinning thoughts, but you're just so great at, like, just pulling them out, you know, just saying, okay, I know you're probably thinking this, and we've all had those experiences, so I just love that. Thank you.

Right. But. But, you know, what's great is in the moment to catch it. So it's to catch yourself telling stories over and over and over again and to bring yourself back to, well, what's true now and what can I do about it now? Because this doesn't mean that you never take action. You know, for instance, I live in California, and there's. There's a drought here. And I live out in the boondocks, basically, you know, surrounded by wilderness. And so I can make myself crazy by worrying about a wildfire coming through. And what am I going to do and how do I get out of here? Am I live at the end of the road and am I going to make it? Or I can also take the action that's possible for me to take, which is, how do I do what, you know, what we call defensible space here? Make sure, to the best of my ability that if there is a fire, my house has defensible space. There's X amount of feet from the house to foliage. And then. Do I know the escape route? Yes, I do. Do I have a plan? Yes, I do. And. Okay. And also, there's a drought. So what do we do about the drought? Well, we save water in a drought. And so I can make myself crazy about this, or I can say at this moment, this is what I can do, and this is the best I can do. And the rest is out of my control.

Right. I love that. And do you think that when we start spinning in those stories of not just taking action and stating the facts, we start spinning into the stories? What if. What if that. Those are the moments when we. I think you say, like, we leave ourselves when things get difficult or we're just. We just kind of bolt. We want to go to food or we want to go to somewhere else because it feels too overwhelming.

Yes, those are exactly those moments.

So then one way that if we start noticing it, we just come back to the facts and what we can actually do in this moment, which is.

That'S one way and another way. There are a couple of practices, practices that I really recommend to people that they do in the rest of their lives. And they're not difficult practices at all. They take a couple minutes a day. But it's good to counteract that feeling that many of us have that something's wrong with us. Or as a friend of mine says, he wakes up in the morning and he says something's wrong and who's to blame. And many of us feel that something's wrong and I'm to blame. So a couple of things that I recommend that people do besides using, not using, but eating when they're hungry and what their bodies want and stopping when their bodies have had enough. So on the food level, it's actually eating with respect for your body, being tender and kind to this precious body you have that schleps you around all the time and you know to be kind to it. And so that's what we're talking about on the food level. We're also talking about a level of kindness on other levels. On the non food level, for instance, every day, for a minute at a time, maybe three times a day, look around you and see what you already have. That's enough. See what enough is to you. Sometimes it's, oh, I'm drinking my favorite cup of tea right now. But are you tasting it? Because most of us are not present. We're only noticing the things that are wrong, not the things that are right. And if you don't, if you don't notice and you're not grounded in some kind of enoughness, then you also will be looking to food to fill that up. What seems like a perpetual emptiness. But if you start noticing that what you have five things right now that you have enough of. Five things. Everybody's got five things. I mean, in, in our western world, everybody who's listening to this has five things that they have enough of now. And to start focusing on that, to start taking that in and allowing yourself to experience the goodness that's already present in your life. That happened to me when we lost all of our money a couple of years ago in a Ponzi scheme. The only way for me to get through the night, my husband was gone for two more weeks and I was left with that information. And the terror and the shame, because we had invested it all in one place. And so the terror and the shame and the shock was so intense for me that the only way I realized, and this was with a lot of help from friends, and I can't overemphasize the need for support here, was to start focusing on what I hadn't lost. Not what I had to, what I had enough of, not what I didn't. And at that moment, I didn't have enough money because we had lost everything. 30 years of life savings were gone. And I wrote about that in my book, Lost and Found. The experience was so stunning for me to see that my mind ran away with me. And it was a stunning stories that I was telling myself about being homeless on the street that were causing me such shame and terror. But when I brought myself, which meant bringing my attention back to this moment, only this exact moment, in this moment, the sun was still shining, I still had a shelter, a roof over my head, I still had food to eat in this exact moment when I didn't recall the dumb thing that I had done, in this moment, nothing was wrong. And as soon as I could gain some kind of equilibrium, which I had to do hundreds of times a day, probably thousands of times in the night, because those were the worst, the night times, then I could make an objective decision about what to do next. But it was only then because when our systems go into what's called sympathetic mode, which is the fight or flight syndrome, we can't make good decisions at all. You never make good decisions when you're hysterical and anxious. So bringing yourself back to what you do have, not what you don't have a couple of times a day, seeing what you have enough of constantly having, that really truly be a practice. The other thing I would recommend to people in terms of their relationship with food, and this is really important, is to stop blaming themselves or anybody else. Stop blaming that voice, that which is Simon Legree of our psyches and our souls, which is always telling us you're not good enough. This isn't right. If you do this differently, then you will be perfect. And then no matter what you do, it's never enough or you didn't do it good enough. That voice that's always willing to make you wrong no matter what you do. And if you do what it says, then it makes you wrong for that too. That voice needs to be stopped. And you just have to see that voice for what it is, which was originally a protective mechanism. I do write about this in Women, Food, and God in the chapter called the Voice. Because unless somebody can differentiate themselves from that voice, they are always under the influence, so to speak, of a dictator, of somebody who's making them wrong all the time. You don't have freedom of movement there. You don't have space. And I do give a lot of suggestions for how to do that. But the easiest and the quickest thing I can say about that, and this is the one that I use all the time, it never fails. When I hear that voice, which is sometimes called the superego, the inner critic, the judge telling me, you're so bad, then I will often say, if I'm so bad, go bother somebody else. Don't hang around here. You just have to separate from it. Right.

And it's always a negative. It's not. I mean, we know that it's.

Sometimes it builds you up that's really fabulous. You're better than anybody else. But, you know, isn't that great? But, you know, for every rise, there is a fall, and that doesn't last very long. So, yeah, sometimes it tells you how great you are. Or sometimes what that voice does is make other people wrong.

Right, right. Right. And so what if. What do you do you, you know, tell them to go bother someone else. And then how do you tell your voice. That's what I meant, your voice to do that. And then how do you. And then does your, like, true self just naturally come up from there, like when the voice isn't there, like your authentic self?

Well, this is a practice. This is. But everybody needs to do this. As far as I'm concerned. This is a essential, because we're not free otherwise. And when you free yourself from this voice, what I see in my retreat students. So I can tell you what I experience in myself and also in my retreat students, what I experience is, oh, wow. I can make a decision based on an objective impulse. Now, I know that doesn't. That sounds like they don't belong together, objective and impulse. But I don't want to go to that party tonight. I don't want to go. So if I free myself or stop the voice that says, you're so antisocial, you're so introvert, if you keep saying no to these parties, you're not going to have any friends left. Then you're going to die alone with, you know, hairs growing out of your chin and a big mole on your face. And so it just takes it to the nth degree. And if I stop the story, but also that voice, because they're Mixed up with each other in that particular example I gave you, then I can make a decision in that case about what I actually want to do. And so, yes, in that way, I am staying true to an authenticity that's there, which isn't possible when you're always trying to please the big. You know, when the voice is around, there's usually a big one and a little one present, the big one telling you you should, you shouldn't, you're bad, you're terrible, you're wrong. And in order to survive, you have to listen to me. But that voice originally developed as a kid. I mean, it was a protective mechanism and everybody's got one and we need to have one. For a healthy process of ego development. We had to say, somehow incorporate, you know, not putting our hands into fire, not running across the street, having table manners and not throwing food at people when we sat down to dinner. So it had a function. It just doesn't have a function now. It's become maladaptive.

And how does this voice, like, impact? Well, I'm just wondering how do we know when it's when we truly want something? You know, I think for me and for just women that I talk with too, there's like, how do I know if my desires are true and real and this is what I should do? You know, in all areas of our life, I know that a lot of women kind of have that questioning and not questioning their desires and their wants.

Well, let's bring it back to food because it's very easy to. Which is the reason that I'm still so compelled by and passionate about using the relationship with food as a portal to all of this. So I'll tell my students, go to the grocery store and take some time. This can't be a five minute shop. I'm running in to get this and then I'm running out. But walk up and down the aisles and stand in front of different sections of food and ask yourself, does my body want this? Does my mind want this? How do I feel or how will my body feel when I eat this? How will my body feel if I don't eat this? So you've got to come back to some sense inside yourself or what we're calling inside yourself, Some sense of do I move towards that or not towards that? Does that. And if I eat it anyway, If I have 12 cookies or a dozen donuts or three donuts or a pint of ice cream, it's not a cause to shame yourself, but it is a chance to see wow how does my body feel when I ate that? Do I feel tired, sluggish, depressed? Do I feel energized? Do I feel happy? Do I feel ready to go on and do the next thing that I'm scheduled to do today? Or do I feel like I just have to go to sleep right now? And that's the same on a moment to moment level with anything with food. I'm talking about food now. Moment to moment with anything you eat with a plate of food in front of you. Which gets back to that question that you asked me about how food is the doorway. How can we use food as the doorway? I said, I talked about the pre step to that is wanting to do that and being interested in that. But the other thing is to as you're eating, pay attention. Attention is primary here most of the time and particularly now in our scattered over stimuli world and with digital devices. And I, you know, I can usually tell when somebody's talking to me or if I'm on a call, a teaching call. I can tell when somebody's also checking their Facebook page or reading their email or texting because suddenly they say, huh, what? And that has become the norm, that kind of scattered attention. The amount of demand and the amount of input and pressure coming at us. I mean, I remember before I could check my email on my phone, it wasn't that long ago where I had to come home and check my email. I didn't check it at a stoplight and then didn't feel like I had to write back right away because you know, now you get an email and you feel like you have to write or text, particularly because hardly anybody's using email anymore. Now everybody's just texting. So attention where you are coming back to what you're doing in this moment when you drive, drive when you eat, eat. You know, somebody once asked a Zen master, it was another Zen student who said, I just was with a teacher who said he could walk on water. What do you do that's so special? And he said, I eat when I'm hungry and I sleep when I'm tired. And hardly any do that. Doing one thing at a time, that is so rare now. And therefore being where we are is so rare. We, we could be walking in your woods and ancient redwood trees and thinking about an email that we forgot to write and totally miss the life that we have at that moment. Totally miss it. And so we end up constantly thinking that our fulfillment is in the future. And yet when that thing comes, if we're lucky enough to have any dream come true when it does come true, in this moment, we are so habituated to not being in the moment that we miss it. And so what I often say to my students is, most of us will die waiting for our lives to begin because we keep thinking it's in the future. But if we would allow ourselves to be where we are sitting with this plate of food in front of me right now, looking at it, seeing what I took, is the amount of vegetables or meat or salad or cheese or avocado that I took, when I look down on it and I actually pay attention to it, is this what I want? And when I eat it, if I'm present, And I think these are the most stunning moments at our retreat, when we eat together and I ask people to actually pay attention to the food in their mouths instead of the food that's yet to come, and they are stunned. This is universal, unilateral, 100% of the time at how much less food they need to feel satisfied than what they thought they needed. Because they. Although they couldn't wait to eat, and, you know, eating is the big major event of the day, the second they started eating, they were gone. And so they miss it. And when you miss it, there's no way to tell when you've had enough because there's nobody home to tell you. And that's how we go through most of our lives. We miss our lives because we're always waiting for the next big thing or for the thing we think will fulfill us. And yet, at the end of our lives, when, you know, in all those many articles about the five things that people regret most when they get to the end of their lives, they. There are different versions of this, but they most always say, I regret missing the ordinary moment because if I could only have one more time to look at my child's face, to smell my child's hair, to smell the air, to walk across the floor, to drink a cup of tea, then I would feel like I had everything. But why not have everything now? Because you do. Even if you already are 40 pounds over your natural weight, still, when you allow yourselves to have the food that's on your plate, you will eat less. And when you allow yourself to have the goodness that you undoubtedly have in your life, you will also eat less and even greater when you allow yourself to pay attention to moment by moment. And so another practice that I recommend that people do, and this is recommended by Eckhart Tolle, this is where I heard it from, first is the three conscious Breaths. Practice. A couple times a day, you just stop what you're doing and you take three breaths. And that helps you land in the present moment. And even if you forget about it the next second, which most people usually do, at least you've spent one minute a day where you are. And that will change everything. Because the more you see that it's possible to show up where you are, the less you'll want to keep disappearing. Because goodness and presence. And that's what it is, presence, you know, your present that only begets more. Presence. Why, when you have a taste of fulfillment in this moment, would you not want more of that? Because you can have more of that. It's free. Anybody can have that. Who doesn't want more of that, right?

Amazing. There's so many things that are just so great. I love what you said. The kind of. There's the extraordinary in the ordinary. And I know for me, I've definitely spent a lot of my twenties, very much chasing things that I thought was gonna make me happy, and it didn't, you know, and it's just very interesting. And now that I'm. As you were talking about, just appreciating it, I'm. I'm now a mother. My son's 2. And just, like, you feel that, like, preciousness of life, and you watch him grow, like, literally, he wakes up and he's bigger the next day, and you're like, wow, I don't want to miss this running and chasing something else. Like. And it is simple. It is so simple. Like, you said, the tea and, like, these simple things give us such joy, yet we are running for other things. So I love that you said that, of just reminding us to come back to the present again and again and.

Again, again and again. All the time. I hear from my retreat students, I've eaten dozens and dozens of strawberries, but I've never eaten just one. And so when you come back to this one, because all you can ever have is one at a time anyway. I mean, you could put five in your mouth, too, but I mean, all you can ever have is this bite now. That's all you ever have. I mean, there is no future, because when the future comes, it's now. And so nobody's ever tasted or been to or experienced the future, because it's only now. I mean, we can see the effects of the future on our bodies, certainly. And, you know, we can see the effects of it, but nobody ever experiences it directly, because in this moment, there's only this strawberry. And so if you Let yourself have what you have, what's in your mouth. It's from there that goes back to your question about, well, how can we tell what we really want? Well, first let yourself have what you already have and then see.

So I have one more question for you. I am wondering because there's so many ideologies, food philosophies, there's so much science on nutrition and you should eat that and you shouldn't eat that. And for so many people nowadays, they're having some sort of issue. Gluten or candida or diabetes, there's some underlying health issue. How does somebody navigate eating? Like, where does the nutrition and the science of nutrition and like what's good for our bodies come into play with this? Do you know what I'm asking?

Yeah. Yes, I do know what you're asking. And I think it's a fabulous question because it does, because what you eat affects you. It affects your energy, it affects your body, it affects your feeling of well being or lack of it. And so I think it's very important to know that. When I first started, I didn't know that, and I know that sounds sort of silly, but I really didn't. I thought, and the operating credo of the day then was just calories. It was the amount of calories you could eat and still lose weight, which in those days was between. I don't know what it is these days because I don't follow this anymore, between 1,000 and 1,200 calories a day. And it didn't. In those days, it didn't matter where the calories came from. Nobody was really talking nutrition. And so I ate just sugar pretty much. But I had grown up on eating very, very, very badly. So I ate what I always wanted to eat, but I ate it without shame in the first couple of weeks of doing this. And then I started realizing I didn't feel so well. And then I started getting quite interested in nutrition. And what I want to say. I want to say two somewhat contradictory things about that. Unless and until you acknowledge the emotional reasons you eat, all the nutritional information in the world doesn't help. Because when you turn to food, it's not the adult who's turning to food. It's not the one who hears and knows that avocados are good fat, but partially hydrogenated oils are not. In the moment that you turn to food, you don't really care about that because it seems like a matter of life or death in that moment. And if you have to choose between drowning and sadness, or eating deep fried, whatever it is you will choose deep fried over drowning and sadness because you believe in that moment that that's what it comes down to. So it's important to work on both levels to understand that. Most of us think, wow, if we only knew our blood type or we only followed the Paleo diet or the Mediterranean diet, or, you know, went back to Dean Ornish, who's still proposing what he proposes, which is a lot of complex carbohydrates and things like that, we'd be fine. If only we pack in enough information, consume, so to speak, enough nutritional information, then somehow that will change us. And I don't believe that, number one, because I think that when it gets down, down to it, as I just said, it doesn't matter when we're between a rock and a hard place. The one who turns to food is not the one who knows that avocados are good for you. So that's number one. You must, in order to really cure this or resolve this, I should say resolve this because, you know, there is no cure for being alive really, except for dying. And so resolving this so that you're not suffering about. The issue with food begins with acknowledging what you are suffering about, which is not only what you're putting in your mouth and the fact that it's not invitalizing and does not really support your well being, but you've got to acknowledge the emotional component of it because the people who don't end up going back and forth many, many times, oh, I'm on eat right for your type, I'm a typo and therefore I should eat a lot of meat. Or I'm on the paleo diet and I'm doing great. And I've cut out gluten and now I've cut out all complex carbohydrates even, or toast and rice and things like that. And that's the newest wave. And I'm fine except for the moment that I feel rejected or get sad. And maybe it's possible, I don't know, but maybe it's possible that somebody can really find the diet that really is supportive for their bodies and feel so good that they will not want to go back, but I just don't know about that. The jury's out on that. I haven't worked with anybody like that. I'm not saying it's not possible, but I haven't worked with anybody like that. The next part is nutritional, which it's really important to figure out what your body wants. Not your mind, your Mind wants everything. Mine wants all the things you think you're not supposed to eat. Your mind wants what looks good, what tastes good. You know, I've been eating a piece of chocolate every day. I don't even know how long. I have a chapter in my book, when you eat the refrigerator, pull up a chair called Carry a Chunk of Chocolate Everywhere, which I've been doing for the longest time. But just the other day, I realized I ate a piece of chocolate. And I realized I had a headache very soon after. And I thought to myself, no, that can't. It can't be from chocolate. I don't want it to be from chocolate. So the next day I didn't eat chocolate, which was difficult because I really like chocolate a lot, but I thought I would test it out. And then the next day I ate another piece and the same exact thing happened. And this is a piece of dark chocolate, which is supposed to be so great for you. And I realized, wow, my body doesn't seem to want or like chocolate right now. So if I want to feel good, if I really want to feel as best as I can feel, then I'm going to stay away from chocolate for a while and see what happens. That did not make me happy. You know, it didn't make my mind happy.

Right.

But I have also seen a couple of different nutritionists over the years, consulted a lot of different healthcare professionals. Because I ate so badly at the beginning of my life, you know, for the first 28 years, my mother didn't cook. My brother and I were mostly left on our own. And we ate TV dinners and Oreos and ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. So I didn't have a good start. And then I dieted and binged and went on very crazy diets. And so my body really went through a lot of difficult times. And I consulted a lot of different people about it. There were times where I thought, wow, I'm not gonna make it. I'm just. And I got a lot of different advice. The best advice I ever got was when a doctor said to me, you're not eating enough. I was a vegetarian macrobiotic for a long time, though. I didn't eat fish. And she said, you're not getting it. You just not getting enough protein or fat. You have got to start eating more. And I was loathe to do that. I also wrote about that in that same book, when youn Eat the Refrigerator. But it changed my life. And over the years, I have read the new stuff that comes out. I'm always Interested in the newest nutritional research and what people are saying about this or that. And I have realized how important it is to figure out what your particular body wants and needs. My husband's body wants and needs completely different things than mine. What I thrive on, he doesn't. What he thrives on makes me sick. So do I think that part is important? Yes. Do I think that's the only thing that's important? Absolutely. Absolutely not. Because even if, let's say, and I think this is possible, and this might be all anybody ever wants, even if your weight stabilizes and you get to your natural weight by finding the perfect combination of foods for you to eat, you will still have many feelings in your life that it would be very, very helpful to learn how to be with, as well as helpful for you to learn how to be exactly where you are in this moment and to pay attention. So the skills that I'm talking about that help you work with your relationship with food, help you work and be in your life, whether you have difficulty or challenges in your relationship with food or not.

Brilliant. Brilliant. I love that. It's so amazing and so true. And that's coming from somebody who studied nutrition for 20 years, who's also had issues with emotional eating. And it's. Yeah. I mean, even if you try to follow the right nutrition, you'll end up. For me, there was overeating of whatever it was, the raw chocolate, or overeating on avocados, or overeating just in general. Even if it was super nutrient dense, there's still those emotions that you're eating, and you can't avoid those.

No, you can't. And so it's good to learn that no situation is unworkable. And it's not feeling your feelings that destroys you. It's not feeling them. It's pushing them away and feeling like, you know, they're scary and they're bad and they're bigger than you. You know, paying attention and being present allows you to sense the part of yourself that's bigger than your feelings and bigger than your thoughts. The stillness that's always accessible and available to you. And the more you sense that and the more you sense that as you. Because that is you. Because that's always been with you. No matter what situation you've ever been in your life, you know, whether you've been little or big, going through a big drama or not, there's been something that's been witnessing it and noticing it. Otherwise, you know, you couldn't function. You'd never. You'd Never see what a color is. You see the color blue, you have to notice. There has to be something that's noticing the difference between blue and green. And that noticer is very helpful to pay attention to, which is what you're paying attention to when you pay attention. And the more you pay attention to that which notices as well as that which is noticing, the more you recognize that you are that that's the one constant that's been there throughout your entire life.

Amazing. Thank you. I so appreciate your work and your wisdom and this is amazing. And. Oh, I just. I'm so, so grateful for you. Can you please share where people can find more about you and your workshops and your books and coming to one of your retreats?

Yes, I think the first thing they can do is go to my website, which has all that information. It's JeanIneroth.com and my name is spelled with a G G E N e e n Roth R-O-T h.com I. I would urge everybody to as a way of getting support. I mean, there are obviously there are a lot of different ways of getting support. Not just with me, through me, through my books, with something that I'm doing. Any way that works for you that makes you feel very supportive. I mean, supported is supportive for me with my work. If you want to do more of what I've been talking about with the approach that I've been talking about, there are two main ways to do that. One is through the online course, which you can do immediately today and start taking that in the comfort of your own home. The other is to come to a live event at my retreats, which meet twice a year. And I would say out of about 150 people who come, half of them are people who have been coming for years, who no longer have issues with food, but come because it's where they feel that they are at home. It's what they call coming home to themselves. So coming to a live event amongst many other people who all have that same longing to not only free themselves from the suffering around their relationship with food, but to be comfortable in their own skins and to live their lives fully while they're still alive. Coming to an event, it just can't be replaced. It can be added to. And certainly right now the way to start is with an online course. But if you can make it to a retreat or a workshop. I don't do many workshops. I do two a year. One on the east coast at the Kripalu center in the Berkshires, which is coming up in the fall and the other in San Francisco in March of 2015. And the next retreat will be in May of 2015, because this retreat that's coming up in November is actually already filled. I do want to say something, one more thing about support, because I see that support is so crucial at the retreats. We offer ongoing support that we speak to people. I teach with a couple of different people, but we do monthly calls with the retreat group. We do small groups with the retreat group. We do two very small workshops, or I do two small workshops a year, only open to retreat students. I do a monthly meditation with everybody who wants to like that. And we divide people up into buddies so that they have support as much as they want it, which could be every day or every other day or twice a week. So we give them a structure which they seem to love, and it seems to be working really well. So I think no matter what, people need support, and that's the kind of support that I offer. And I hope everybody listening to this will come and join me in one way or another. Oh, the other thing is they could join the Facebook page, which is facebook.com maybe. Anyway, Janine Roth.

I think it's Janine Roth, right?

Yeah. Yes, it is Janine Roth. We're clear about that one.

That's awesome. Amazing. So wonderful. And again, so, so grateful. And thank you for sharing all of your wisdom with us today.

Today. Thank you, Alexandra. It's been a joy.

Thank you. Thank you. Have a great day.

Okay? You too.

Thank you. Take care.

Bye. Bye.

Bye.