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The through-line of my life is food. It's not fitness or losing weight.
Specifically, it's the pleasure and importance of food without compromising your health.
People often miss that because I spend a lot of time decrying industrial food processing. While that can feel adjacent to the eat less/move more evangelists (dressed up as keto or whatnot), it's light-years away from the restrictive practices that created the toxic mess of anxiety and weight gain I lived with since about fourteen.
I could tell you the part of my story where my Mom incessantly talked about my body and restricted my food, but instead, I'd like to tell you about the deep reverence she also held for it.
What can I say? People are complicated.
She was an immigrant who brought a real sense of culture to food. My parents met in Beirut, where I was born. My Dad worked for the American embassy, and they met on a university campus. For my Mom, food was as much a place as nourishment. I understand now why that matters so much. Taking food out of its cultural context and then reducing it to 'carbs' is a great way to gain weight and suck all the joy out of it. I'm thinking of pasta, which is eaten differently on Italian tables than in the giant, oversauced bowls in the US.
But I digress.
She was a wonderful home cook who made most of what we ate from scratch until she began working in my teenage years. That's when industrial food crept in. I started eating ultra-processed lunches at school and using my spare change to buy candy.
She cooked as a meditation and, as a result, preferred to be alone in the kitchen. Something I resented then but now understand. I have umpteen memories of my mom silently puttering around the kitchen with bluegrass on the radio. Today, I do the same with a podcast.
We ate stews, fresh labneh, real hummus (talk about a food out of its cultural context!), and her wildly delicious salads. I loved that she let us have the salad on the same plate as the main so I could eat the bits of dressing with my meal–something I still do.
I was curious about cooking, but my Mom was way too prickly to hang out with her in the kitchen. It wasn't until I got my first apartment at nineteen that I bought a cookbook (Verdura) and started roasting baby eggplants in my rickety kitchen. I knew what good food tasted like, even if I wasn't sure what to do with it.
I walked through farmers' markets, grabbing whatever I could, and roamed around ethnic grocery stores, buying interesting things. My cooking vastly improved over the next two decades, and I used it to feed my stepchildren, entertain, and embark on crazy projects like learning how to bake bread in a fireplace or make the most delicious pho broth that took 48 hours. My ex-husband later asked for my process on the broth, and I declined to share.
Always, always, always I loved eating, mealtime, and food in general right down to my bones.
In that span, I also opened a restaurant (I'm pictured below left) that, no surprise, focused on high-quality real food and handmade cocktails.
I lost fifty-five pounds while I owned this business, which surprises people but not me. Mealtime wasn't the source of my chronic weight gain. That's the one part that worked pretty well.
It was all the ways that industrial food (and alcohol) seeped into my eating: daily treats, intense self-soothing, and socializing with people who overconsumed as entertainment, which dysregulated my eating. I can think of a card game where packets of Oreos were continuously passed around as one glaring example, but lord, there were plenty more.
The old me thought that it was an individual choice to eat them or not. The new me understands that this is the direct opposite of how humans evolved.
Each time things got intolerable, I downloaded an app or bought a book and set about restricting my eating. By day three, I started feeling quite bad about what I was doing.
The calorie-counting schemes were the worst. The tipping point was having to quantify figs. Figs! Were those really the problem?
Sitting around trying to imagine the calories I was eating felt like a disrespect to food—the thing I loved so much. I couldn't help but notice that if I ate packaged foods, this would be so much easier.
I hated dieting so much that I did something about it.
I stopped for starters.
The other thing was that I began to explore what people were doing differently in countries where weight gain wasn't a problem. How did humans spend all this time on the planet and only in the last sixty years did systemic weight gain become a problem?
The answer had to do with food processing—not will, not toxins, not anything about me, really.
I didn't know then that my love of eating and real food would only deepen through this process. That I'd enjoy mealtime more when there was no emotional hangover.
Before I ever lost one pound, I had a simple idea:
I wanted to eat when I was hungry, stop when I'd had enough, and have that naturally produce a healthy weight.
In other words, peace. Living in flow happens when you make healthy weight practices central to your life. Cooking is obviously a big part of that, but keeping myself away from overconsumption is another. Relieving stress is yet another. Taming self-talk yet one more.
So is eating real food you absolutely love.
Food (the real kind) was never the issue. It was modern food, terrible ideas about individualism, and a bad habit of poor self-talk.
If I could return to 2008 Rebecca, who was exhausted, overweight, and sad, I would tell her to hang on. You can love food for the rest of your life and have the body you want.
This is what I now call food freedom. Eat when you're hungry, stop when you've had enough, and have that produce a healthy, stable weight.
What a joy.
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Yours in joyful eating and living,
Rebecca ✌️
