The Food Voices

Dear Chad,  You always arrive after dinner. You burst through the front door without an invitation. I expect you, dread you, and yet even though I hate when I hear your voice in the front hallway, I almost always let you stay.  You never sit down, and you bring your own thirty pack of Miller Lite. You’ve been out all day, probably at a golf “fundraiser” at the wealthiest club in the area. You are in your early forties but you don’t have to work anymore. You’re loaded, always with money, and usually with booze, too.  I have a love-hate relationship with all the food voices, but my most extreme love and my most extreme hate may be for you. You can be so charming, handsome, adorably flirtatious. But 30 minutes later, you crush my soul.  No offense to lacrosse players, but you were the captain of your lacrosse team at Connecticut College. You aren’t very bright, but your family is old-money wealthy and you went to the best private schools growing up. You boarded in the p...

Dear Mona,  You are the first voice I hear every single morning, so we are going to start with you. When I first wake up, you are there sitting next to my bed, peering over your glasses. Of course you have a perfect body (everyone in your group does). You are one of those elegantly thin types. No muscle shows, but no bone does, either. You’re fair skinned — never a blemish — and you must have come from the 60s because your dress looked like the secretaries from Mad Men. Your hair is done up tight in a bun and your makeup is perfect. You look like you’ve been awake for hours. You have a clipboard and a pencil. And you’re ready to make the list.  “What did you eat last night?” you ask me without even saying hello.  For a split second, I can’t remember.  I grab my gut and it tells me.  So I will give you the list. I list the foods and the quantities that bring me shame. It’s almost always just anything I ate after dinner.  “How much?” you answer after every fo...

Food talks to me. It has talked to me at least since I was young enough to have memories. It talks to me all day every day. And I don’t talk back. Until now.  In these pages, I’m going to write to the food-related voices in my head. Over 30 years later, it’s time that I speak and they listen.  *   *   * Have you ever been punched in the face? Have you ever felt the right hook of a fist, straight into the side of your cheek bone? Did the punch knock you to the ground?  I haven’t actually experienced a punch like that, but I have had a doctor tell me that I had cancer. And I would definitely choose the punch in the face.  After the metaphoric punch right hook I took when I was 32, I wrote a book about my journey with breast cancer and titled it Hope Is a Good Breakfast. On the first page and at several pages within, I referenced my struggles with food. But I never went there on paper. Maybe I was scared. Maybe I just knew that I couldn’t digest both at once....

Maybe if I name you, you’ll finally go away. Maybe if I listen better, you’ll run out of things to say. Maybe if I write to you, you’ll acknowledge my existence. Maybe that acknowledgement will end your cruel persistence. So here, I’ll try, page by page, to finally make the choice to stop the never-ending battle and finally find my voice.