Addiction + Compulsion = Love Letter?

Look how excited I am about the impending food!

I love food. I love pretty much everything about it (except for the calories, which we'll get to later.) I love eating food. Exploring it creatively with new recipes. Talking ideas with fellow foodies. Embarrassing friends by taking pictures of food in fancy restaurants. I feel cheated if a friend’s Facebook photos of a vacation doesn’t include a good gallery of food.

But when is a good pleasure too much? I love food...a little too much. Planning what I’m going to eat next. Obsessing and feeling guilty about what I’ve already eaten. Mindless binge eating to cope with stress or find comfort in sadness. I can secretly scarf down an entire box of ___ (insert whatever I’m eating, mostly junky, sometimes healthy but still in excess).

I have for years identified as a food addict. When I openly confess it, most laugh it off and chalk it up to my foodie-ness. But I don’t use the word “addiction” lightly. This isn't a laughing a matter for me. The role that food plays in my life and just how extensively it controls me is no joke. When I do experience small victories of resisting temptation, I’m amazed at just how much intentionality, prayer, and planning it takes to win one small resistance. It feels like a constant war.

I’ve warded off the consequences of my binges with another compulsive behaviour – what I’ve now come to recognize as exercise bulimia. As a teen taking in a steady diet of fashion magazines, I did read the occasional article on eating disorders. I knew I wasn’t anorexic. And I wasn’t bulimic, because I had clearly never made myself throw up to reverse a binge. Instead I would wake at 6am to exercise secretly in the basement to purge the calories. To this day I still work to be aware of my motivations before working out.

The war between the binging and purging takes its toll on my body. I trash talk my body all the time. Mostly my criticism is heavy with “you’re not good enough,” which is a broken record that plays in other areas too.

I know that one of the steps to lasting change is to replace the old with the new. And while I’m still primarily in the stage of weeding out the roots of my food habits, I know I must also begin visualizing a different way of thinking.

I started journaling some thoughts to my body awhile ago. Then SheLoves challenged us with a writing prompt to write a love letter to your body. And another blog I read today dared us to take more risks. Well this qualifies as scary for me. 


But after reading all the bold honesty in the flood of blog posts of beautiful, breath-taking, inspiring love letters, I can't not do it. These women from all ends of the spectrum (from “Body, I still hate you,” to “Body, I love and embrace you,”) give me courage and hope for the journey ahead.


So let’s start the conversation, shall we? "Dear Body of mine..."

Love Letter to (Three Parts of) My Body

Sorry for the harshness I've put you through

I started journaling some thoughts to my body awhile ago. Then SheLoves challenged us with a writing prompt to write a love letter to your body. And another blog I read today dared us to take more risks. Well this qualifies as scary for me. 


But after reading all the bold honesty in the flood of blog posts of beautiful, breath-taking, inspiring love letters, I can't not do it. These women from all seasons of life and both ends of the spectrum (from “Body, I still hate you,” to “Body, I love and embrace you,”) give me courage and hope for the journey ahead. So let’s start the conversation, shall we? 

Dear body of mine,

Where do I start? It’s such a foreign language. You know I’m not used to speaking kindly with you. Though I know I haven’t typically been gentle with you, I ask you to be gentle with me as I try to form a new habit in the way I talk to you. I’m sorry it is taking me so long to awaken to just how much I need to change how I see you. 


I knew there was something twisted with the way I thought about you when I put on jeans that felt a little too tight, two weeks before I was about to run you through a full marathon. I knew the ridiculousness of feeling depressed about feeling fat from freshly-shrunken-jeans-from-the-dryer, when instead, I should be amazed at your strength to be able to do such silly physical feats. 

While there are a lot of little things I could more easily thank you for (and I promise to get to that later, now that we’ve got this conversation in the open...), but I want to start this new dialogue by speaking to where I have criticized you the most harshly. Because I know that the years of negativity (for as long as I can remember) will take more time to melt and change.


To my lower limbs: You know I’ve struggled with you being a “pear” shaped body, where the weight never seems to come off your butt and thighs. I’m grateful for all the strength you contain. You’re not flimsy by any stretch. You’re muscular. And all the fat that I resent you holding onto? This is the extra glycogen reserves you’re capable of storing. This is what carries me through a long run and makes me a better long distance runner. 

And to my belly: Every morning I look at you in the mirror first. You get a lot of attention from me, but mostly negative. But you are the gut that takes all that good food and digests it, translating it to energy to fuel all of life’s adventures. You are the part that hurts (in a good way) when I get into a rare uncontrollable laughing fit. While I do not know if you’ll ever carry life in your womb in our time on earth, the fact that you were created with the ability to conceive and give life is pretty miraculous and amazing.

And finally, ending on the toughest-on-the-outside, yet most-tender-on-the-inside part that I’ve cursed my whole life: my skin. You are my largest organ, which is a bragging right in itself. Yet you have taken the most time and energy, because of your rough eczema since the day I was born. You know I hate the countless hours and sleepless nights I’ve spent scratching, moisturizing, soaking in long showers to exfoliate layer after layer. I've probably given you years, if not decades of my time and energy. 


I’ve used you as an excuse to not go out because I feel you’re making me too ugly on a rougher day. I have resented you for being such a visible part of my physical appearance that people can’t help but notice right away. I've given death-stares to innocently curious children on the skytrain who sneak peeks at my skin. I despised being the child that the adults would talk about. Even though I knew it was concern that they spoke about the condition of my skin at every social gathering, I hated feeling singled out. I just wanted to be a kid with normal skin and fit in.

Yet you amaze me, that you regenerate so quickly. I can go to bed one night with an open crack in my finger joint, yet I can awake with the crack healed and sealed over miraculously after a good night of rest. And you have been making a slow but certain journey of healing. Though you will probably always be on the dry side, many of the major patches of eczema of childhood you have healed, even without my intentional attention or effort. You keep me accountable for what I eat by reacting after I feed you junky or allergic foods. You don’t let me get away with it. And you respond to my better choices with further progress in healing when I aim to take better care of you, inside and out.

And most of all, you are the part of this physical body I’ve been given for my time on earth, that acts as a “thorn in my flesh” for my good. This physical weakness makes me all the more dependent on God’s grace to be sufficient. I am thankful for the countless times I have heard and felt God draw near in my struggle. You've made me stronger in God's view of me; for better or worse, because of you, I've developed an "I don't care what others think of how it looks, I'm going to go ahead and live my life anyway" attitude.

How was that? I feel like that’s a good enough of a start. In many ways, there are multiple layers to shed in this conversation about how I see you, about how I want to see you more compassionately. It’s going to take a lot more dialogue, growth, and grace to get me to the place where I truly can say, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” But hear me loud and clear, I want to go there with you. Hold that thought... until the next time we talk very soon.


Thanks for listening. I'll do my best to listen better to you too.


Miss J. 

I'm back...

Well, it's been a long time, but I'm back. A lot has changed since my last post 3.5 years ago. It's difficult to articulate it all as I'm still processing the major changes that have happened deep within me -- changes which are still incrementally working their way out into my outer habits and behaviours.

Suffice it to say that in the last 3.5 years, Jesus brought me through a complete system reboot. I'm still going through the process of deciding what needs to be installed on the new system -- some good old programs and systems need to be reinstalled, but there are far more that need to be left behind for good. I'm still figuring out how to run within the new operating system, learning lots as I go on in learning new ways.

The reboot and "comeback" was long overdue. It was three years ago I came to a point of total give-up surrender. I had just completed working on the final project for a counselling course which involved letting Jesus walk you through your own "stuff" (the premise being if you don't know personally to have Jesus rescue you through your own messy wounds and issues, it's difficult to help anyone else through their own baggage).

For that assignment I decided to be brave and work on my addiction to work and productivity. Literally at the start of the project I felt like I had to "work" on it myself and muster up enough effort to overcome my life-long problem of letting my identity be chained to my career or what I was able to produce or do.

Well by the time I was ushered through the process of understanding the entangled roots of my problem, my eyes were necessarily opened to how I was in way over my head. I was overcome by my sense of helplessness and powerlessness to change anything -- especially matters of the heart which all my external actions flow out of.

And so I gave up -- "Jesus! Understanding my problems and knowing what the right thing to do from here on, does not give me the actual power to do anything differently. I need you to do it. Because I just can't."

And that was the simple, yet difficult, point of turning my way of being into a new direction. I was experiencing the counterintuitive, yet powerful truths of AA's first 3 steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over (our addictions), that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him.

It's counterintuitive that giving up my own self-effort will help me move forward. I'm realizing more and more how Jesus' ways of governing are so entirely opposite of human wisdom. In my mind it doesn't make sense that dying to myself would be the way to finding new life. But that's exactly how I found my way back to myself -- or rather, to my new self.

Shortly after I waved the white flag of surrender, every area of my life (professional, personal family, relationships, spiritual, emotional) surfaced multiple crises that ran me over like several trucks. I crashed.

My old house was demolished. The foundation was brought to the ground. Only then was there possibility for a new foundation to be laid.

With my work addiction slain, I didn't define myself anymore by what I could do. I actually swung to the other extreme where I was repulsed by questions of, "so, what do you do?" or comments of, "wow, you did such a great job on..."

In the demolishing, I had lost all my passions, drives, and dreams -- both good and bad ones. I felt like the North point of my compass was removed completely. And I had little clue as to what my new North should be or look like.

During the time I was a bit befuddled about who I was anymore, I had the amazing opportunity to go visit my friend and her husband who were doctors in Sudan at the time. The town where they lived had only one paved road. The rest were a muddy mess of jeeps, motorbikes, bicycles, pedestrians, and corrupt soldiers and police fining foreigners willy nilly. My friend's husband was helping the government form a primary health care system. It was eye opening to see how much we take for granted in our civilized existence.

The image was loud and clear to me -- it's messy to create a new society. Really messy. It's messy to learn a new way of life. Really messy.

Since then, I've been journeying along to discover the new ways of being, thinking and doing that I feel called to. Some days I'm taking steps forward. Other days I stumble and fall and lose my way, finding myself trying to live by the old ways in the new land.

But I'm back. I may be walking in a different land, but I am slowly learning to walk differently.