Have you ever heard or read something that landed so densely in your body that you sprang up to a sitting position in bed because you were impaled by self revelation? This happened during quarantine while I was viewing a documentary, Eating. The storyline exposes a french photographer, grappling with body dysmorphia, filming a documentary about eating behaviors. The movie is a serious comedy, humorous enough, but sober subject matter. During taping, a woman responded that food to her was feast or famine, like all the other areas of her life including money and love. Up I sprang! This is me. This is me and likely every woman who resides with a familial, cultural belief of scarcity. When my exercise plan is activated, it's fierce, followed by periods of sloth-like exertion. Relationshps? I either revel wily in the indulgence of single-spoon desserts or I attract potential dating partners like love bugs to my windshield during mid-spring mating season. It's feast or famine. Same applies to my behaviors around money. The economic rollercoaster had me plummeted to depths of financial stress, fear, and hopelessness and also swept me up to high peaks waving my arms screaming with abundant glee.
Geneen Roth authored Women Food and God. I've re-read the book, listened to the audio version at least five times, and gifted many friend and clients with this insightful, funny, and delicate view of our relationship with food. She writes "The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The way we eat is the way we live." So, if our macrocosm exists as a magnified lens of a microcosmic schema of dietary choices, most of us would be living in a scene from the movie Last Night (1996) devouring intractable pleasures. Indeed, my eating follows the feast or famine mindset. Now that this all-or-nothing dichotomy was integrated in my conscious mind, albeit uninvited, I've been asking myself the big questions about causation. Why do I stop right before the apex? Do external obstacles prevent me from enjoying the feast I worked tirelessly to prepare? What are my limiting beliefs that hold me back from eating the juicy luxuriant fruits of my labor? Where did I learn about scarcity and living meagerly to leave bountiful resources for the people who truly deserve it? These aha moments propel me into self-examination. Now my plate's full of questions. A new feast for my mind to chew on during this pandemic of fear and scarcity.