Food is Love; he said

I was sitting with a guy, having a cup of coffee.   He, who was at least thirty pounds overweight, was having a large piece of cheese cake.   When he finished he started doing most of the talking.

I knew his family. His mother was very thin, his father was well built, his elder brother was thin, in fact, everyone in his family, both sides, was not near ‘pudgy’. Yet he was fat.  He was fat in that funny way where one could see the up and down of his weight by his asymmetrical body shape.

His face, his hands, his legs, his belly, had blobs of fat.  He was puffy and it was clear he’d been stuffing for most of his life.   Stuffing, then dieting.

He had been talking about dieting.  Mentioning the various diets he had been on which didn’t work. Talking about how he goes for a colonic every three months. I was not saying anything, just listening.

And then he said the title of this article; ‘Food is Love.’

Now, to me, that was the weirdest thing I had heard for a very long time, and I jerked at that.   How does food equal love?   He elaborated on his statement.  Going into how when he is eating it feels like love.   He was saying things that blew my mind because they were so wierd.

I realised, rather simply, that with an outlook like that,   with a focus like that, he could never lose weight.  He had mixed up eating with love.   He could not view a plate of food as a meal, he saw it as some kind of affection, a serious pleasure, like maybe seeing your beloved across the room, or being in a bedroom with your spouse.

For others, most people,  when they are hungry, they eat.   They eat while they are working, watching television, talking, doing something.  Eating isn’t the centre of their existence.  Eating is staying alive, maybe a minor pleasure, but for him, a meal is on par with  making love.

So he will always be fat, he will always have this twisted view of life, and there is no diet that can work for him. He is one of those ‘orally fixated’ people who somehow got a crossed wire.