Beyond the Emptiness

Chapter 4: Loving the Enemy And God said, love your enemy, and I obeyed him and loved myself. - Gibran Khalil Gibran I had been eating three chocolate bars a day for months. I worked at a chocolate factory, and there was chocolate at every meeting, lounge, and desk. After six months of Thetahealing, I began to question my relationship with food. God sensed my readiness and made me bump into Nadia. Her weight-loss transformation gave me the push to stop body aggression and begin applying body kindness and support. The food addiction recovery program was my new-year gift. Nadia had explained that it was a special program with a two-day kick off workshop, weekly meetings, and a WhatsApp group. It sounded like the kind of support I needed. The facilitator for the program, Dara El Ayed, was not a dietician. She was a recovering food addict. I was attracted by this concept of being guided through a process by someone who had experienced it. That was quite a contrast from dieticians who were never fat, too perfect, and seemed to be condescending in their treatment of any transgression. During the kickoff weekend, I started to understand the nature of my food addiction disease. Unlike emotional eaters, my brain had a chemical dependency to food, particularly sugar and flour. I was now getting to understand that I had an irritated nervous system that demanded instant comfort. I had a mental obsession with food and an incessant urge to eat. My brain triggered a false hunger. Food would come to its rescue providing the immediate high it needed. I was addicted to food the same way an alcoholic is addicted to booze. For all those years, I thought I lacked a strong will. I now realized I was like a car with dysfunctional breaks: when I started eating, I just could not stop. The food addiction recovery model gave me hope as it addressed physical, emotional and spiritual aspects while mending the disconnectedness of the mind, body and soul. Traditional diets focusing on eating discipline and routine had failed me. I was now eager to approach my relationship with food differently by working through this program. A fellow recovering food addict, Aya, inspired me to put myself first. Indeed, I was fueling myself with food to take care of everyone. I was now placing myself first because in all honesty that was the only thing within my span of control. … Anchored in self-love, I was now going to remove sugar and flour from my life, not forever though, just one day at a time. Each meal, I will choose not to eat them. I started having four portion-controlled meals a day. I would eat home-prepared unprocessed foods and fast in-between meals. Unknowingly, I was embarking on a radical lifestyle change, where food will no longer be my go-to tranquilizer. … As my body cleared of sugar and flour, I began to have less food thoughts. My mind was no longer consumed with the constant inner fight of I want to eat!, No, Yes, I am going to eat now! NO! I loved this peace of mind. My body became more communicative. I could feel the impact of the food I was consuming. … This food program was much more than a diet. I was relearning how to understand my body. Whenever I was hungry, I began exploring the emotions behind my false hunger: Am I tired? Have I been resting enough? How was my sleep the night before? Am I spending too much time outside of the house? I would check my answers, and identify the reason behind my anger. Had anyone upset me? Had anything happened over the past days that I had ignored? Many times, within forty-eight hours, I would remember an incident that had annoyed me in the past day or so. These are typically events that I tended to unconsciously hide underneath the rug and erase from my awareness. Fear is another important emotion that I would scan for. I felt like the mother of a newborn baby learning to understand the needs of her infant and exploring what brings her child to a happily contented rhythm. … I lost thirty kilograms (sixty-three pounds) within eighteen months. My body just kept melting. At the time, I would look at my body and not recognize that it was mine. Sometimes, I would be terrified. My mind would play games: What if you were sick and dying? However, I was mostly ecstatic. Here I was, at the age of fort-one, thinner than my teenage years. I felt good being in this new body. I enjoyed not having to squeeze myself into socially acceptable clothes that locked me up. I could now take as much space as I wanted. That’s quite a relief. Forty years of squeezing made me feel restless, depressed, and imprisoned in this human body. I now felt as light as a bird. … While I had reached the target of being thin, this was in no way a finish line. This was the beginning of a long life journey of inner connection and alignment with my body and soul’s rhythm. This is where I had failed in the past: taking my excess weight for its face value and consequently needing to diet. Unfortunately, this is where dieticians fail today. Many overeaters resort to surgery in the hope of rationing food only to slowly gain it again over the period of five years. It all starts with self-love and what we are willing to do out of love. Unfortunately, overeaters are obsessed with food and associate it with love. They are terrified of loosing their abusive lover.