Why We Use Food to Shame Ourselves

Geneen Roth—author of This Messy Magnificent Life—has explored our relationship with food, our bodies, weight, the way we eat, and our inner emotional lives for decades. “Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that, left to your real impulses, you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand,” says Roth. She believes that most of us sit with this sense that we’re always in the waiting room of our life. We’d rather want than have, and we rush through life as if there’s a big get at the end. Roth helps people stop, unpack their hang-ups around food, let go of shame and deprivation, and feel something much more pleasurable and long-lasting in their bodies. (For more, see The goop Podcast hub.)