Eating In Captivity: A Holiday Story

When I was young, food was mostly forbidden. My mother controlled what we ate diligently, determined her family would not get fat. She doled out glasses of nonfat milk, and diet Shasta Cherry Cola. She stir-fried leftover chicken with broccoli or cauliflower (ew!). For herself, there was always a bag of malted milk balls, hidden atop the fridge in a big wooden bowl. My primary form of exercise was climbing the counter to get to that bowl.

My mother also loved to entertain. Thanksgiving was a huge production with family and friends. The meal was channeled to my mother through Gourmet Magazine. In the living room before we ate, our guests were treated to room temperature Brie cheese and water crackers - things that were absent from our home the rest of the year. The turkey was served with chestnut stuffing, gravy made from the pan drippings and butter, potatoes whipped fluffy with cream and more butter. Vegetables were there too, though not my personal focus. And after the meal, my mother served her famous sinful chocolate cake - basically a cake-shaped disk of dark chocolate ganache covered in a shiny chocolate glaze.

My mother laughed with her guests and reveled in their compliments about her food, her table, her decor. But she kept a watchful eye on us too. A reach for seconds of those potatoes was sure to be met with a raised eyebrow, a nonverbal message which clearly said, "you don't need that."

It was torture to finally have access to really good food, and have to pretend not to want it. I learned from my older sisters to get around my mother's watchful eye by clearing the table. After dinner, one of us would clear the leftover brie from the living room, so the guests could retire there. In the kitchen my sisters and I would share slices of cheese, no matter how full we might be from dinner. When the guests left the dining room, we took the plates to the sink and then descended on the bowls of food. As we transferred their contents to tupperware, we had the seconds we craved. This was after all one of our only days of indulgence, a furlough from food jail.

The holidays are always a difficult time for emotional eaters. But they are that much worse for those of us who've endured tightly controlled eating or restrictive diets - whether it was our mothers, coaches, or ourselves who enforced the rules.

Ironically, the tighter the control, the more we eat. Like refugees, we grab every morsel we can during a binge or while "cheating," because the threat of going back into food jail looms large.

This holiday season, I invite you to do things differently. If it would feel good or be interesting, close down food jail. If restricting food makes you want (and eat) more when it's finally available, lift the restrictions and see what happens. If you love stuffing, start having stuffing now instead of waiting till turkey-day. And notice, if stuffing is no longer forbidden, do you overeat it?

After many years now of eating what I want, when I want, I am always tickled to find myself eating comfortably (instead of getting over-stuffed) at Thanksgiving. Without the watchful eye of my mother (or my inner critic) waiting to get me into trouble, I just eat what I want. And when I feel full I stop. If I want mashed potatoes with gravy again the next day, I have them. If I want turkey with cranberries and stuffing in July, I make it. When food is freely available, it all gets so much easier.

Holiday Eating

There's nothing like the holidays to tweak your eating. My early memories of holidays involve special foods that my mom only made once a year, and usually only for company. If it was my job to put out appetizers, then I would always sneak bites here and there, being careful to hide any evidence of my eating. What I liked even better was clearing the table after the meal. As I carried the last of the potatoes or chocolate cake back to the kitchen I would secretly eat more of these "bad" foods - dishes I had to take tiny portions of during the meal, under my mother's watchful eye.

Even long time followers of the mindful eating/non-diet approach often find this time of year particularly challenging. It's also a wonderful time to notice what comes up. Holiday foods can bring up feelings of deprivation (I can only have this at Thanksgiving or Christmas or Hanukah...). Stressful family dynamics that lay dormant from January 5th through November 20th can suddenly emerge. Holidays can bring up old, unresolved hurts. And often the new year can lead to fears about the future or regrets about the past.

All told, it's the perfect recipe for emotional eating.

If you've been using food to self-soothe or distract yourself from uncomfortable emotions this holiday season, please don't beat yourself up or promise to go on another punishing diet or exercise program. Instead, see what it would feel like to be as kind to yourself as you would be with a dear friend. There is a reason you've turned to food, even if you don't know exactly what that reason is. Punishing yourself will only make you hurt more - and need to reach to food again to feel better.

If possible, gently observe (or recall) the events and emotions that have been present for you during this time. What feelings, thoughts or words did you have to stuff? If you could have soothed yourself with words, hugs, or tenderness, what would have helped?