Food & Intimacy
/“But food is how we’ve always bonded.”
My client whispered this realization as she reconciled her desire to improve her health and be happy in her marriage.
“We love spending time together and food has always played a central role:
Sharing the excitement of going to a new restaurant…A road trip to get a specialty dessert…The pride and joy I feel when I cook his favorite meals.”
She shared about the changes she wanted to make for her health, and the struggle she was facing with her husband—who could eat anything he wanted with seemingly no side effects (don’t we all know and loathe those people?!).
The focus on food, whether in relationship with others or ourselves, provides a distraction from underlying issues of trust and intimacy.
And no wonder. Food is fun. It makes us feel good. It’s not as emotionally messy. It doesn’t reject you. It’s simple. It’s safer. And best of all: We’re in control.
Our eating behaviors go beyond nutrition and simply alleviating hunger; family, friends, and religious and cultural heritage shape our food preferences. While food offering can be used to show affection to loved ones, the problem arises when food becomes a replacement for other support behaviors that come with intimacy.
Some of the same parameters that enable us to break free from compulsive behavior—learning to stay in the present, valuing ourselves, setting healthy boundaries, giving ourselves a voice—enable us to be intimate with another person and ourselves.
Too often people approach losing weight or making changes in their health as though it’s something they can fix with the “perfect meal plan” or willpower to “just be more strict and disciplined with myself.”
Peep this out, y’all:
Diets don’t work. Food and weight are merely the symptoms, not the problems. The focus on weight provides a very convenient—and a culturally reinforced—DISTRACTION from the reasons why so many people use food when they aren’t even hungry (for food, anyways). These reasons are more complex than, and will never be solved with a strong will, counting calories, and exercise.
The reasons have to do with neglect of oneself, lack of trust, lack of love, grief, anger, being the object of discrimination, trauma, and protection from getting hurt again.
Our patterns of eating were formed by early patterns of loving, therefore I believe it is necessary to understand and work with both food and love to feel satisfied with our relationship to either.
If you’re wanting to make any sort of changes or improvements in your health, I encourage you to first examine your relationship with food through the lens of intimacy.
Ask, are you ready to:
Commit yourself?
Tell the truth?
Trust yourself?
Laugh with ease?
Cry easily?
Be willing to fail?
Have patience?
Be vulnerable?
And most importantly, are you able to stay when it gets hard? Making a commitment to a way of eating or to a relationship is the same: the commitment is a way of living in the world. The commitment is to staying with yourself, not another person, not a diet plan.
My prayer for anyone (still!) reading is that you treat yourself with kindness, gentleness, and compassion. I hope you find intimacy with yourself, that you trust your intuition, and live your fullest, most liberated life.
Live well,
Gigi Gibbs