Feeding Ourselves —A Paid Newsletter

When was the last time you felt really good in your body?

Not that you felt like you looked good. Not that you lost enough weight to fit into a certain size of clothing you believed you should be. Not that someone else told you congratulations for losing weight.

You. You felt good in your body. You were embodying your body. You felt fully alive in it from your heart all the way to the end of your fingertips and toes..

In fact you felt so good in your body that you didn't even think about how you looked. You were just existing in your body, swinging your arms, solid on your feet, feeling like you were walking on sunshine. Here.

What percentage of your life have you spent feeling like that?

90% 50% 20%?

If you're anything  like me — a Gen X woman, born in 1966, a teenager in the 80s — and grew up thinking you had to be smaller and smaller and smaller to be successful and loved, then that percentage of time you have spent in your body feeling good? It might be smaller than you can comprehend, looking back.

We were the girls of margarine tubs and Tab soda. Snackwell's cookies. Special K for dinner. Women who pinched the soft part of their stomachs in fluorescent dressing rooms and said, I have to lose weight. I'll start tomorrow.

Tomorrow has been going on for 40 years.

Here's what I have learned, at nearly 60, after decades of heroic inward journeys: the story about our bodies was never just about our bodies. It was one of many old stories we were handed — about how much space we were allowed to take up, about what made us worthy, about what we had to shrink and silence and suppress to be acceptable in a world that preferred us smaller.

Smaller. Smaller. Smaller.

That was the whole instruction.

I have a name for the women who are ready to stop following that loud instruction: tender-hearted warriors.

This newsletter is the chronicle of the journey it takes to let go of our old stories and fine our bittersweet wisdom— applied to food. To hunger. To the noise in our heads that has never once made us happy and has stolen decades of peace at the table.

Feeding Ourselves follows the path of changing our minds, step by step. I'm writing essays for each stage of the heroic inward journey — the call, the refusal, the crossing, the long middle where nothing is certain, and the slow return to ourselves.

I am writing my way through this story. Not as a guru. As a witness. As a tender-hearted warrior who is still on the path.

This is not a diet plan.

It's a crossing.

And it is a tender-hearted warrior journey.

I'm in it.

Writing my way through.

Come walk beside me.