Breaking the Chains of My Relationship with Food

And Silencing the Voice

By Dixie Diamanti –

In breaking the stronghold of food over my life it was not about just being instantly delivered from the desire to eat. It was not about just losing weight either.  I knew that losing weight would be a by-product of an even deeper healing. It became a quest of understanding how it unravels the tentacles of the relationship I had with food. As I began to understand more of why I struggled so, the entrance of that light brought healing in increments and slowly I emerged from the darkness of desperation.

fall scents for your home

I began to look at my relationship with food. Because I was so miserable as a child living with a Dad who physically abused me until I was 12, and then emotionally until I left home, I found comfort in the foods I could get my hands on. My Mom was constantly rationing food out to me, not because she was mean, but because she wanted to save money and needed to be in control of how much food was eaten in the house. She was raised during the depression and was very poor as a child. Money greatly impressed her and as a result, I always felt like I didn’t get enough.

I have come to understand, however, that what was really going on is that I really desired to get what I needed from my mother emotionally. 

When she offered no comfort or affection, I turned to food. And because she always saw me as fat, being larger than her 5 foot frame, she wanted me to not eat. So, I would sneak food and find every opportunity to comfort myself with it.

If you just approach weight loss from what you are eating and going on diets it is just an endless cycle. If you never get to the deeper issues of why you eat and the way you eat, it is like putting a temporary band aid on to only have it ripped off again and again. Then you eat more to comfort yourself.

It is time to get off the merry-go-round.

It has never been truth that the value of a person, spirit, soul, and body, is dependent on a number on a scale. When we start defining ourselves by what we weigh, deep in our minds, we rebel.

We were created to be balanced in all of our being to fully enjoy Kingdom living in all of its wonder and passion. If we leave the possibility behind that we will never get to experience that in our lives because we will never measure up to our own expectations of being thin, we will always have this underlying feeling that something is missing.

When I began to release myself from “The Voice” and all those things that were said to me about my largeness growing up, I suddenly realized how long I had been mistaking its death grip on my life. I could then ask myself honestly if I was comfortable at this weight.

Uhhh, NO!
I was not comfortable.
My health was failing.
wordofmouthThe weight was making me old and sluggish.

I realized that listening to and engaging in the chatter of “The Voice” kept me outside myself. It kept me bound up in the box of my stronghold. Those words shamed me and made me embarrassed of how I looked. I would feel a sense of panic when I saw a picture of myself.

Releasing myself from the grip of The Voice, that felt so much like me, felt like ripping something from my psychic; separating my body from my mind. Yet, for so many years I equated most everything I did with how I looked doing it. It seemed I was always standing outside myself watching myself, not in a loving accepting way, but in a critical way, hating what I was seeing.

Funny, too, that I always saw my mom standing there talking into my ear telling me I was unacceptable and didn’t measure up.

Revelation: Could it be that part of me didn’t want to get rid of The Voice because it somehow kept me close to the mother I so longed for?

I was not aware of how much I was under the influence of the Voice until I began to eradicate it from my mind. And with its departure I felt weak at first and diminished, somehow. When I was in total agreement with The Voice I had convinced myself that my only recourse is to be ashamed of myself and to continually try harder to get it right. I didn’t realize that the only way to get it right is to get rid of The Voice and crawl out of the yo-yo box of dieting to try to get it right.

When The Voice left in increments as I grew into a mindfulness and awareness of who I really was outside of my distorted image of myself, it was like breathing for the first time in my life free of all pollutants. I knew my accuser, satan, had no more of a foothold into my head, and I could now separate from that which is not me.

I could separate from:

My story of how unredeemable I was.
My shame at how many years it has taken me to finally get it.
And I could now learn to love life without the familiar record playing in my mind of my past.
And I was less willing to endure suffering as a result of my compulsive eating.
I chose freedom over familiarity.

 

Originally posted on Dixie’s Blog.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Breaking the Chains of My Relationship with Food
Scroll to Top