Eating Desire
One woman's reflection on the wisdom of appetite.
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Formats
Softcover
£16.95
Softcover
£16.95
Book Details
Language :
Publication Date :
10/02/2006
Format :
Softcover
Dimensions :
5.5x8.5
Page Count :
149
ISBN :
9781413490510
About the Book
If you are an overeater, then indulge.
That’s right. Go ahead.
Figure out what you really want and have it.
Chances are it’s not really chocolate cake,
Chances are it’s something else–and it’s not food.
Many women, like myself, have been taught to deny desire. Diets are a metaphor for this refusal. Anorexia is symptom of it. We have spent so much of our lives afraid of gaining weight, that our entire mentality is centered around denying what we really want. We have learned to refuse our hunger and don’t even know when we are hungry or what we really crave. Don’t eat this. Don’t eat that. Watch out you might get fat. We learn to control out appetites, but the secret to losing weight is giving into our hunger. The key is to trust the wisdom of our wanting. If we listen to our deepest desires, we will have the perfect diet for a happy heart.
This is what I have learned as I have maintained a sixty-pound weight loss,. The more I find out what I really hunger, the more I live and the less I overeat. The happier I am.
Eating Desire: Food, Sex, and the Wisdom of Appetite celebrates women’s appetite for living–from the bedroom to the boardroom, from the pulpit to the dance floor. What do women really want? In most cases, it’s not ice cream, cookies or French fries.
It’s a fuller life.
Eating Desire focuses on overeating less and living more. I explore eight profound appetites that I discovered in my life; I share these with readers as I embark on a shared exploration. These desires are for transcendence, transformation, witness, connection, power and protection, comfort, sexual pleasure, and personal fulfillment. In the 250-page self-help memoir, I chronicle my transformation from self-contempt to self-love, a journey that began with the first time I obsessed over food minutes after being paid for sex when I was seven-years old. “I take the money he gives me ,and I buy chocolate and spread it against my teeth and gums to sweeten me. I hide all the shame and terror with the numbing goodness of candy.”
In Eating Desire, I invite other women to reflect upon their eating histories to discover the role overeating has played in the their lives. For many of us, our relationship to food involves not only a series of diets and binges, but a series of love lost, hearts broken, wishes unfulfilled. Our relationship to food often reflects our struggle to fulfill ourselves emotionally, spiritually, and sexually. Once we learn to identify our real appetites, our eating becomes less compulsive, and our lives become more nourishing.
In Eating Desire, I write about childhood abuse, overeating, the perpetual diet, and the wisdom made from wounds. I talk about pornography and love, midnight bingeing, self-acceptance and the tantalizing call of forbidden cravings. In Eating Desire: Food, Sex, and the Wisdom of Appetite, I wave a tapestry of tales and truths abut satisfying our deepest desires. Eating Desire invites women who are struggling with weight to fully appreciate their appetite and to discover that overeating is often a metaphor for more profound needs. Eating Desire offers alternatives to overeating, showing how life can be more fulfilling when we create the lives we were meant to lead . Our hunger for food is often calling us to listen to what we truly want from ourselves and the world. If we trust the desire instead of stuffing it down with cookies and cake, we can begin to construct a new happiness based on getting what we really want... and we can lose weight and live life more fully.
About the Author
Lisa Derr received an M.A. in English from San Francisco State University. She authored the books Eating Desire, A Song Between Lives, and And Sometimes I Forget and is published in magazines ranging from Seventeen to American Poetry Review. Lisa has won several awards for her writing. Her work is featured in City of Buds and Flowers, Between the Survivors & the Stars and Skins of Change. A community college instructor and owner of The Writing Workshop (thewritingworkshop.com), she inspires others as an instructor, book coach, and editor. She loves dancing, laughing with her daughter, writing, and savoring life’s everyday delights.