Familiar and dependable foods that pretend to make life ok
Food.
My family was all about food. Shopping for it, cooking it, eating it and before any meal was finished, talking about what we’d have for the next meal. Whew.
“Gher” was my father’s favorite word at dinner… it means EAT in Armenian, and yes, I mean that with capital letters. It was usually uttered near the end of a meal when everyone was already full. My ears received “Gher” somewhere between a request and a demand. I was a fat kid. (Photo: Me in the 8th grade)
None of us had any idea what the food did to our bodies. Meat, bread, butter, vegetables, cookies… for all the understanding we had they could have all been put into a blender together. Except for the cookies. I always had some hidden in my t-shirt drawer, no blender for them.
Numb and Dumber
Somehow in this mix of “blenderized” foods I picked out the ones that gave me the most comfort and made them my favorites. In case you wanted a description of comfort foods, they’re the ones that numb you to the world and do it by-passing your brain’s satisfaction center finally landing in some dumb spot in your body. You know the place – it doesn’t have an “off” switch. Sometimes comfort foods put you to sleep too, just like potatoes and gravy at Thanksgiving, another numb-you-dumb.
My first experience with changing eating habits was at 18, my freshman year in college. I wanted to row with my University crew team and had to drop 12 pounds. Intuitively I knew that the foods I loved the most I’d have to give up. But I wanted to crew more than eating those Oreos, so I left them along with my big bag of chips with other guys in the dorm.
Otis Redding had just released “Sitting on the dock of the Bay” and since we were rowing on the San Francisco Bay, I made it my theme song. I talked to the food service director who took a liking to me and she came up with some low calorie meals (Jello was the linch-pin to her planning – go figure, what did I know?). I got up and ran the foothills before class every morning, and after classes in the afternoon we sprinted laps up and down the stadium stairs. Plus, we rowed an hour every other day. I got into really good shape, I actually got abs, my self-confidence changed and I got to row. We won our first time out and I thought that I’d died and gone to heaven. But I still didn’t know much in the way of how food really works. I just knew that some foods were only supposed to be sidebars on my eating list. (Photo, Stanford University freshman crew 1968, that's me, fourth back on the right side)
Hot Stuff
Later on in my college career I got to study in Germany for six months. The first three of which I forgot everything about food and lived on what seemed like a Bavarian sugar and carb fest. My body was run down and I ended up with Scarlet Fever. I discovered what I had while in Rome, after trying to escape the fever by laying down on the Sistine Chapel floor to cool off. The guards weren’t happy about me doing that and kicked me out, but it had turned out to be a great place to look at the ceiling. My skin peeled off in big sheets from the heat of the fever, I lost half of my hair and my eyes couldn’t focus to read more than two lines of text at a time, my muscle tone was gone along with my abs. The doctor was concerned that I’d have heart and other organ problems… from all that internal cooking going on. It was a pretty low spot. On top of it all, I ended up quarantined with my two best friends and my German teacher. Now, they weren’t happy.
After recovering and returning to the states I worked myself back to health. My eyes were goofy for quite a while (I re-trained them using a prism) but the worst was my thin hair and now delicate skin. Everything made it break out in a rash, similar to psoriasis. I had a vanity attack. When an allergy test showed that I was allergic to almost all of my art supplies I knew that was not going to fly. I’d have to do a healing that my doctor couldn’t help me with. Getting back to exercising and returning (most of the time) to a healthier version of my freshman eating patterns helped me feel and look better. I moved off campus and got a place for free as a live-in pool boy. I swam every day and biked to school, my diet was pretty simple most of the time. Once again my body started to change and become more healthy. It took at least six years for the outward symptoms to disappear. I still didn’t know much more about how food really worked, I just knew that if I kept working at it, I’d learn. Meanwhile, whenever I felt sad, scared or rejected, I’d head right back to those comfort foods.
All these years later, I get to guide clients on food as part of their training program. I’m still learning. I don’t crave some foods at all any more, and some foods are still real challenges. It takes time to understand food and then to accept and live by really healthy eating habits. If you have someone to help coach you through a progressive diet change, you’re lucky. If you don't, the information and support available now is amazing. The key to modifying our relationship to comfort food is through our commitment to making a change. Sometimes it has to be motivated by an outside source or goal, like getting on the crew team or addressing a major health issue like it was for me.
Everything Changes
Changing any part of our life – whether it is changing our body, changing a relationship, changing our understanding of something specific to our life (like food), or really committing to something you want – changes our relationship to every other part of our life. We just can’t be the same. Like wearing a new pair of glasses, our vision suddenly becomes crystal clear. That’s one reason we re-bound to comfort foods, they’re dependable. They're from the past and they're familiar and unchanging. Leaving comfort foods behind, especially sugary comfort foods, is as tough and emotional as the final scene in “Where the Wild Things Are” where Max leaves Carol on the shore and sails off alone.
So if you want to start planning for a change, train your mind. Learn everything you can about what you put in your mouth. Develop an exercise program and stick to it. Mind, mouth, body. Connect the dots and you win.
Be proactive. Make only one change in your food habits at a time. Be fearless with your changes. Take the time to enjoy life, laugh and be with your family and friends. I invite you to share your comfort food stories with me – not keeping them a secret is the first step to letting them go.
Train your Body. Train your Mind. Tame your Tongue.
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Information on this site is not a substitute for consulting a licensed medial professional. You should never begin an exercise or nutritional regime without consulting your physician.
