When you Love Food, but You Also Like it When Your Pants Zip

“He’s fat. He’s a fatty.” – Tom Hanks, You’ve Got Mail

It’s the age-old problem.

Food is delicious.

Your clothes fitting, also good.

I have fought the battle of the bulge for what seems like my whole life — and though the battle has changed it still rages on.

Mom Genes

My dad’s side of the family has made chocolate for over 100 years. So, there was always a good quantity of high-quality chocolate in our home.

On my mom’s side, my grandmother was AMAZING at making desserts. So, it’s no surprise my mom carried the torch and was known as the cake lady at church.

We’re a people well versed in deliciousness, but our family line simultaneously has genes floating around prone to tightening paints and stretch marks.

How’s a girl supposed to stay skinny with that kind of set up?

Some can, but I didn’t.

It’s Complicated

All of us have relationships with food. 🥓

But, when food is no longer just food — and shame, identity, joy or pain are added to the mix — things get complicated.

People overeat for all sorts of emotional and physical reasons — using food for something other than it’s meant to be.

For me food has been a comfort in pain, a friend in loneliness and the building blocks for a wall to keep others at bay.

That is a lot to put on some frosting and sprinkles that won’t love you back. 🍩

A woman who mentored me in my faith in my twenties encouraged me to get counseling. Through that, good friends holding me accountable and my relationship with God, I was able to start to deal with some of the reasons I wasn’t using food as food.

Soon after, I set out on a massive weight loss journey and lost 140 lbs.

Now, that’s great, but, in all that time and the years that followed, I never learned how to have a “normal” relationship with food. My identity and my view of how God felt about me became almost compulsively tied to what I was eating and how much I weighed.

After like three years of living like that, I was exhausted. So, when life got really hard, I gave up and ran back to my old “friend.” 🍕

Feasting and “Fasting”

Shauna Niequist is one, my favorite authors.

In one of her books, she talks about the concept of intentionally practicing seasons of feasting — these aren’t hard to come by — and fasting — not a “no food” kind of fast, but a fast from seasons of overindulgence in multiple areas of life.

Using food to celebrate and indulging once in a while isn’t the problem — that’s even Biblical — it’s when that becomes the norm rather than the exception.

This concept really resonates with me since I also got the baking gene from my family and I love to throw a good party.

So, I’m currently toying with the idea of what adding intentional seasons of “leanness” could look like in my life — because I love food, but I also like it when my pants zip.

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Can you relate?

Have you ever tried setting up intentional seasons of “leanness” in your life?