Love Your Inner Monster - Kerry

For most of my life, I've had a stilted or at best weird, relationship with food. According to various theories by experts and non-experts alike, I need to examine my feelings and feel them instead of distract/comfort myself with food.

It's a nice theory, anyway, but when those feelings come sometimes I am mad and hungry or sad but still hungry and really don't alot of emotions revolve around comfort food like cheese and wine anyway?

The French seem to have made a good run at it.

"The only way out is through it," said Winston Churchill.

According to New Age thought, running towards your enemy and getting to know it is the only way to appease it.

Yea, well maybe, but it still seems a bit ludicrous.

I've read alot about other people who have had bad relationships with food and tried just about every technique under the sun to make peace with this monster - except one.

Making peace with my inner monster, my war with food, by loving it to death, slowly, one bite at a time.

My colon therapist would be so pleased that I am chewing my food. I know I have reached a certain age when that actually means something to me. I am starting to approach my parent's concern for roughage. This is somewhat frightening.

Tentatively I'm making small frontal attacks in the war with slight forward momentum. I may win yet. Sitting on our deck in the late afternoon sunshine yesterday after I had made a meal from all fresh produce and local products that actually tasted interesting, I had an epiphany - maybe I was learning to love food instead of abuse it.

This comes after years of the opposite behavior, like a bad go of it in college in the cafeteria my freshman year, where I gained ten pounds and went from 129 to 139 pounds but it felt like 200 in my head. And that's where the monster grew.

Loving food seems so deceptively simple in hindsight. I mean really getting into the taste, smell and texture simply to nourish myself, instead of my monster.

At the writer's conference coming up at the end of July, I'm going to make a pitch about this inner journey to planet myself, or more aptly, how I learned to love my monster in only 10,223 easy steps.

Wish me luck.