Geneen Roth: This Messy Magnificent Life

Transcript

[0:00:54] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Geneen Roth, author of This Messy Magnificent Life. If you are a woman who has ever struggled with gaining or losing weight or you’re just someone who’s felt trapped by food then you’ve probably heard of Geneen’s work. She’s written several books on this topic including the number one New York Times bestseller, Women, Food and God. Geneen’s work has been endorsed by Oprah, Eckart Tolle and her book was on the bestseller list for several months and sold more than a million copies. We talk about what it’s like to achieve success as an author later on in the episode but this conversation is really about freeing ourselves from our own personal prisons. Geneen and I explore some of our deepest and most painful beliefs, the effects of hidden traumas and the social pressures that shape our confidence and our relationships. This episode is your spiritual dose of self-love for this week so get ready to be more in touch with your life. Now, here is our conversation with Geneen Roth.

[0:02:34] Geneen Roth: It was an evening in my 20’s, my late 20’s, I was sitting on the floor of the book depot bookstore in Mill valley, looking for ways, this is before the internet, looking for books that gave you the easiest way to kill yourself. I was just looking up guns and drugs and things like that obviously, there was no book called “How to Kill Yourself in Five Easy Lessons,” but I was desperate and suicidal and filled with self-loathing, disgust, I don’t know if I can use any stronger word to describe how I felt about myself and the despair of continuing to live the way I had been living which was in such acrimonious, warring relationship with my body, the size of my thighs, my appetite, the feeling of being utterly out of control with food. And having tried for the past 17 years before this moment to get it under control. Since I had been 11 and started my first diet. And 100% believed doing every single one of those years, every single day of every single week and month and year, believed that if I could only fix this thing with food then everything else that was wrong in my life would be right. I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t do it. I tried every diet there was, the most insane diets, my favorite, of course I did have some favorites and my most favorite diet was the All Brown Diet, it was of my own making. For three weeks, I ate nothing but diet, just the cream soda, drank coffee, you can’t really call. This eating of course, coffee, diet cream soda and cigarettes. That was my diet for three weeks. I lost an amazing amount of weight on that diet, I lost one Sunday, one hot fudge Sunday a day diet thinking, in those days, it was calories, thinking if I just ate the calories in a hot fudge Sunday but didn’t eat breakfast and didn’t eat dinner, I’d be fine. I’d been addicted to diet pills, amphetamines for four years, I had pretty much stopped sleeping and with every single pound lost, I gained twice as much in poundage on my body. It would be diet and binge. You know, I used to say, when I was talking only about food for every diet, there was an equal and opposite binge. That was true, that was the law of the universe, I never went on a diet for which I didn’t go on a binge or after which I didn’t binge. Never. Of course I got better and better at restricting myself, I was anorexic for a while, I limited myself to 150 calories a day for a year and a half, right? I jogged four miles a day, it was sheer willpower, weighed 82 pounds and then after that, I couldn’t stand it one more second, not one more second. I just went on a binge to end all binges. By that I mean, I never stopped eating except when I was eating. And if I woke up in the middle of the night, I started eating again. There was such thrust to eating and feeling like I deserved to. I remember in those days that I would eat and I would feel like you deserve this, there was this mean, harsh, verbally abusive voice in my head that felt like because I could not get it together with food, I just didn’t deserve to live. Believe me, I didn’t see how it was possible to get it together with food. Because I had tried, I had really tried. So, that was the lowest moment and it’s there in the bookstore, I saw a book by Susie Orbach called Fat is a Feminist Issue. I leafed through a couple of pages of it and I felt like I had an epiphany and that was that, although I didn’t subscribe to everything she said, something she said made me realize that I had been trying to get rid of this thing with food, thinking it was crazy and self-destructive without ever considering not once what I was trying to express or get through to myself via my relationship with food. That food was just the most outward expression of a much more significant inner process and so in other words, it was a language that I was using and I wasn’t interested in learning the language, all I wanted to do was cut it out of me and so sitting on the floor of that bookstore that night, I realized, okay, well I have nothing to lose here. Because I am ready to kill myself and I had decided that all of those message were just too gory, I was just going to drive off the cliff of a highway on in Big Sierra, I’ve lived there for a while, I wasn’t living there then but anybody who drove off the cliff died because it’s a big drop so that was easy, I could do that. Or, I could give myself a couple of weeks to investigate, inquire, look inside myself and find out what was going on with me and food. And literally, by that point, I forgot to say, had gone from 82 pounds to 160 pounds, effectively doubling my weight in two months.

[0:09:03] Charlie Hoehn: Two months?

[0:09:05] Geneen Roth: Yup. Anybody can do that if they just do what I did. You know, I must have been eating 15, 20,000 calories a day.

[0:09:15] Charlie Hoehn: Holy cow.

[0:09:17] Geneen Roth: So, I had nothing to lose, I was the fattest I’d ever been and I’m little, you know, not even five two. You know, I know some people listening to this, well I’m 160 pounds is a big deal, for me it was but in any case, I had nothing to lose really since I was ready to lose my life. I decided that I would start that process and a requirement for that process was to stop dieting because I understood that that voice in my head which I now call the crazy aunt in the attic, that voice in my head was not my friend and was you know, a big part of that voice was shame, depravation, guilt, fear and punishment. Dieting was the vehicle through which I got to do that to myself. I just stopped. I stopped dieting and I’ve never been on another diet again and I started becoming interested in what is the language it was sort of like braille and I didn’t know braille. Could I find out what braille was. Could I learn that language and what did my relationship with food have something to say to me? Was it a doorway into some pattern? Some beliefs, some feelings that I had about myself, about being alive, about what I was allowed to have and not allowed to have in terms of joy, nourishment, love, pleasure, delight that I didn’t even realize I had because I was so busy dieting and binging?

[0:10:56] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, playing by the rules, yeah.

[0:11:02] Geneen Roth: I did stop dieting, I did become quite interested in what was going on beneath the food, I just started seeing as food as not the problem. Eat and my weight is not the problem even though everybody else thought it was the problem. When I stopped dieting, my friends thought I was insane because at the beginning when I stopped dieting. It looked like I was binging because I told myself, I could eat whatever I wanted to eat, I have refined that greatly since then. Didn’t occur to me to eat what my body wanted but when you say to yourself after you’ve been on diet for a long time, you can eat whatever you want to eat, you know, your mind here is that and goes, “Good, I can go binge.” I did eat a lot of pumpkin ice cream for those first couple of weeks in addition to raw chocolate chip cookie dough for a while. I gained a little bit more weight but not a lot. I was firm in my resolve and so I became interested, I started asking myself, “Hey, l what’s really going on here?” First of all, not dieting after so many years, 17 years of dieting was being let out of prison. It was like having been locked up in a prison cell for 17 years and never seeing the sky and suddenly, I opened the door, there was no key, I could do it myself. I opened the door and I went outside and I saw the sky for the first time. That’s what being released from the shame and depravation and punishment and force of dieting, because at that point, that’s what dieting represented to me. That allowed me, and the fact that I realized, you know, I wasn’t fooling, I wasn’t kidding around, having a couple of days of eating pumpkin ice cream was not going to send me on another starvation diet, forget it, that was over, done. Then I started looking and I started realizing how I felt about myself and the amount of internal loathing there was. Not about food, this started way before food and about my belief, about that I wasn’t allowed to take up space here. Ironically, of course I was always losing and gaining weight but the food and the weight was more of a protection, whenever I was fat, I felt like that was on the inside of the fatness, not my body itself. People couldn’t see me by looking at my body because I knew I was hidden but what was I hiding, was the question for me. What was this whole thing about and it turned out to be about my own lack of value, self-worth, feeling like what I deserved, you know, of course, I had mirrored in my relationship with food, a lot of the abuse I had grown up with in my family. I had to start working my way through that, it’s not as intense as it sounded but it allowed me to realize, “When I’m feeling, when I feel like I want to eat and I’m not hungry, what simple questions, what am I hungry for here? What do I actually want?” You know, “Do I believe that a feeling like loneliness or sadness or rejection is going to destroy me and therefore I need to turn to food or drugs or alcohol.” I mean, any number of things that many of us turn to or you know, “Can I let myself just feel the sadness for a couple of minutes? Will rejection kill me or is it okay? What do I believe that person is saying about me when they’ve told me no, I don’t want you to come to this.” I started looking quite deeply. Soon after that, I realized, I started developing a set of eating guidelines, you know, just about a sort of intuitive eating and then also, a process that went along with it that I was working with myself. I remember one time in particular, I wrote a dialogue with fat. You know, where I had fat, it was an old [inaudible] technique I learned where I had fat, I had me asking fat, this is all written down, “What’s the purpose of you in my life, you know, if you’re serving a good purpose, what is that purpose?” And the bottom line was that I saw that every single time I was thin, I would throw myself at unavailable men. Men who didn’t want me and that would become my creative project. I would try to get them to want and love me and what I wanted to do in those days was write and I was scared of writing. I wanted to give myself to that. I’d been wanting to be a writer since fifth grade. I finally decided this was it, I was going to write and I was scared, I was really scared and so when I was using food, I ever had to think about it because I was so obsessed with self-loathing that there was no time to write, except in my journal, and when I wasn’t using food, all that energy that would have gone into writing went into the creative project of trying to get men who didn’t love me to love me. I stopped that too. Soon after that, I realized, “Wow, I think I’m on to something here because if this is working for me after a couple of weeks with food,” I started eating what my body actually wanted, I started losing weight, I start, not a lot but you know, it wasn’t a never ending cascade of more weight gain so I decide to put an ad in the paper. One of the local paper saying compulsive eating support group, a dollar a night. If you want to join me, come, I just want to charge a dollar for the Xeroxing of you know, these guidelines that I’d come up with and some questions that I had come up with and many women, it was for women, many women, although men are invited too. Many women responded and I’ll tell you one last story and then we can move on from the early days. Because I had no money and I didn’t have a job. I was working as a nanny and my friend Harry and Sue’s basement. I was living in their basement and working as a nanny to their two year old. They were very kind. He had been my organic chemistry professor when I was doing pre-med courses. There I was and I asked them if I could do this first group at their house and they said “Fine,” and they lived out in very windy dark country road. I had to have everybody meet me in front of the only place that was well lit in their town which was the liquor store in a tiny little shopping center that was there, it was very well lit so I made a day to meet everybody in front of the liquor store at 6:30. The day before I decided, I was still probably maybe 150 pounds by then. Still, much bigger than my natural weight and I wanted to spruce myself up, I only had one dress, it was a summer dress with elastic waist. The only thing I could do to look presentable as a group leader was to get a permanent for my hair because I figured, I needed to look presentable, I went to get a permanent, in those days, it was called the air dry permanent. Had to leave in the rollers in overnight. I was going to get them out on the day the group started. Went back to get them out and there was a sign on the saloon door saying, “I’m sorry, I’ve had a medical emergency, I can’t take your rollers out today, do not remove them yourself, your hair will fall out.” I started my very first group, 40 pounds overweight, in a summer dress with rollers in my hair in the middle of the winter, standing in front of a liquor store, waving to everybody saying, “I’m your group leader, I’m going to tell you how to break free from compulsive eating.” The took one look at me, two thirds of them did and went tearing away as fast as they could. Because who would want to learn from somebody who was standing there in a summer dress who is obviously well over her natural weight with rollers in her hair. The ones who stayed with me, stayed with me. We met every week for a couple of years and they were the first contributors to my first book Feeding the Hungry Heart.

[0:19:25] Charlie Hoehn: Wow.

[0:19:26] Geneen Roth: That was the beginning.

[0:19:28] Charlie Hoehn: That’s a phenomenal origin story, first of all, that’s amazing. I’ve got a few questions that I was just kind of jotting down as you were recounting those stories. I was curious, were your friends and your peers, when you were going through this yoyo dieting and binge stage, were they doing the same thing, were they reinforcing it or were they coming to you and saying Geneen, this is unhealthy, what was your social group doing at that time?

[0:19:59] Geneen Roth: Well, they were noticing my weight gain and loss. When I was anorexic, the people around me were aghast. They tried not to show their concern but they were really concerned because I was getting littler and littler and I wasn’t eating anything. Also, I was fasting at every change in the season on water for 10 days, I couldn’t get out of that, I was actually with a man then who would bribe me, you know, “If you eat a sweet potato,” that was one of his favorite foods too, “Let’s go to this lovely bed and breakfast inn for the weekend but only if you eat.” I think people were actively concerned about me then, it’s hard to know what to say to somebody who is gaining weight by the second as I was. Any kind of judgment didn’t ever help. The first night I went out with some friends after I made the decision not to diet and to eat anything I wanted, it was probably 7:00 at night, we had dinner and then I had an ice-cream Sunday after that and one of the women at the table said, “You shouldn’t be eating that, you can’t afford to eat that, what’s wrong with you?” I did get a lot of – well, actually not a lot of, you know, to tell you the truth, I think people knew what to make of me, no, my friends were not following me into the extremes, I took it to the extreme and they were not following me into that. You know, occasionally they’d go on like I went on weight watchers for a while and a friend went with me on weight watchers and like that. Mostly no, I felt pretty lonely in there.

[0:21:46] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, what’s amazing, I mean, the way you tell the story, it seems like overnight you developed mindfulness for eating and like this self-inquiry side to you that hadn’t existed for 17 years but I imagine it was a much more gradual process that finally, when you had that breaking point, you allowed it to happen in the big area of your life that you were really focused on. Was this all rooted, do you feel, in problems that sort of began in your formative years when you were growing up as a kid or did this come from numerous sources, the core issue of shame and self-loathing?

[0:22:34] Geneen Roth: Well, let me just address the first thing you said, which is that I believe, except for a few very rare individuals who seem to make changes overnight, mostly you’ll hear this from spiritual teachers that there is no such thing as overnight, it’s an ongoing process, it still is, Charlie.

[0:22:55] Charlie Hoehn: It’s forever, yeah.

[0:22:58] Geneen Roth: This did not happen overnight, I had lived in India for a while before this whole thing, I had developed – I wouldn’t say an actively engaged spiritual process but I had already turned toward realizing, there was more to life than appearances, than what could be seen. The problem for me was that I thought the food thing, as I’ll call it, was utterly separated from everything else. I could sit for half an hour meditating but I thought the food thing was keeping me from everything else, not an expression of everything else. What changed overnight and this did change overnight was me realizing that I was a sane human being. That’s what changed. It was, “My god, I have been trying to take care of myself through this, I have been trying to get through to myself.” This was ultimately sanity itself, parading in the guise of utter insanity and so I changed, it sort of slipped on its head overnight. That’s what changed overnight. The process of me investigating and the tools that I developed and that I’m still developing for that kind of inner inquiry, that, I mean, I’ve been you know – that was over 30 years ago. Nothing was overnight, I remember though, first couple of groups I did, I had, there was one group where I had people come dressed as their mothers. You know, for us to see what would it be like when you’re your mother and relay to each other as their mothers, I was trying everything I knew, I didn’t have a toolbox. I just kept on trying whatever I could think of.

[0:24:58] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I love that.

[0:25:01] Geneen Roth: Yeah, that was the first part of your question and the second part of your question was what?

[0:25:07] Charlie Hoehn: Was basically – Yeah, the second part was basically after you really dug deep and questioned yourself on a lot of this stuff, did you find that it was ultimately rooted in the shame and self-loathing that you experienced during your childhood or was it a number of other things?

[0:25:26] Geneen Roth: I wouldn’t say ultimately rooted but I would definitely say, that had a big influence on me, that growing up, well, I’m going to say what I’m going to say and then I’m going to give you the caveat to what I’m going to say or what I just said. I grew up in a family that had drug addiction, a bit of alcoholism and I know that’s sort of odd thing to say but you know, a drink or two every single night can’t really live without the alcohol, like that. Very unhappy parents who were cruel to each other and I felt like I was born into the wrong family and I was born as the wrong person. But I know having now worked with tens of thousands of people that many people feel like this and now, they might not have had – there was the physical abuse part that was also very difficult for me. Just being hit a lot and there was also, I’ve written about this, having a covert sexually distorted relationship with my dad. I had a lot of – I wasn’t playing with the full deck so to speak, there was a lot of healing that needed to happen for me and I subsequently spent – you know, a huge amount of time and many different kinds of therapy. Aside from that though, because I have worked with so many people, many of whom have come from loving families and they have food issues and their issues and or are obsessed about distracting themselves from themselves, not believing it’s possible to be themselves. Not even knowing what themselves, you know, what being myself actually looks like, feeling like feelings are intolerable, constantly being at war with themselves. That’s partly the culture we live in, I mean, you can’t help but be affected by the images, the commercials, do this, fix this, happiness this, mindfulness this. I’m leading the wrong life but if only I was doing those things, then I’d be leading the right life and then you feel like you’re always coming up short because you’re not doing all these things or all running around just trying to do so many things with the belief that who we are is not right. If only we could do those things then we would be right but we can never do them well enough and so we always feel like we’re not enough. There’s this constant push pull going on with people and some of the ways that that expresses itself is through the relationship with food. It’s teachers, it’s peers, it’s being bullied. I remember, you know, I think it was in my ninth grade class, I had a round face and that I was new to this school and people would make fun of my round face, I would look at people and they would blow up their cheeks every time I look at them and they called me pregnant faced cow. That was what the boys in the school called me. That and they pursued me and they did bully me, now, nobody had a name for bullying. They contributed hugely and I don’t mean to laugh about that because it was such a shameful name that even I, who writes about almost everything and writes it in uncensored way could barely get those words out for the longest time because I was so ashamed. I believed that I was a pregnant faced cow.

[0:29:24] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. I always love talking with you because you’re so open and transparent and honest about even the painful stuff, this is the stuff personally that I crave in conversation with people, it’s my favorite type of conversation I have. One, thank you again for being always open about this stuff and talking about difficult things that happen and it’s so important. Two, I also wanted to say while you were recounting this story, I’m so glad that you didn’t drive your car off the highway and that you’re still here because you ended up helping so many people, because of your story and your work so you ended up healing so many others and I just wanted to say that. You mentioned –

[0:30:53] Geneen Roth: Well, let me respond by saying thank you to both because it’s you know, I love talking to you too Charlie, even though we hardly know each other and we hardly talked, always active and engaging and wonderful and I too am glad I didn’t drive my car off the cliff. You know, from that perfect 20/20 hindsight and believe me, I am not a polyene, you know, give me lemonades and I can turn them back into lemons in about 30 seconds, so from the lack of polyene place, I can say that the suffering and I don’t know what to – any other name to call it that I felt being myself for so many years that I do still feel at times, you know, I don’t feel like I’ve arrived at all but then it was constant, that if, it was sort of my two choices, well no, I mean, there were many choices, I could have gotten addicted to drugs, I could have started stealing things, you know, a lot of different ways to mess up my life besides my relationship with food and or killing myself. You know, I can see that all of that really gave me the impetus, the flame to work it through, to see what was on the other side of it was very strong. That those horrendous, painful and I’d never choose them. If I had to choose the life for anybody, or my life, you know, before I was born, check this box, check that box, check this box. Being physically hit, addicted parents, cool and abusive to each other, being bullied in school. I never would check those boxes but given that those were the boxes that I got. I can see that having had those served me well.

[0:32:49] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, this is a good point that you’re making. I have found consistently and maybe I’ve got a small sample size so this is not like fact by any means but, and certainly, suffering to the extent that you did and many other people do as well, can absolutely break you. I find that the people who make it through are the most amazing individuals, the most caring, the most empathetic, compassionate individuals that end up helping so many others that that trial by fire, the intense suffering that they go through, like you said, really does end observing you and giving you this super power that helps other people and while you wouldn’t wish it upon anybody, it ends up being a very useful thing.

[0:33:44] Geneen Roth: Yes.

[0:33:45] Charlie Hoehn: I mean, for instance, the CEO of our company, he went through a horrific childhood himself but he’s talked about how a lot of the CEO’s and the most successful companies out there went through such intensely stressful situations growing up that anything they deal with during their work is sort of a walk in the park. It doesn’t trigger these intense stress responses that it would for a normal person who goes through a fairly happy childhood.

[0:34:20] Geneen Roth: Yes, right.

[0:34:22] Charlie Hoehn: If it doesn’t destroy you, it definitely can make you stronger.

[0:34:27] Geneen Roth: Yes, right.

[0:34:28] Charlie Hoehn: I’m curious, you mentioned when you hit the point where you're done eating the pumpkin ice cream for you know, that period and you started eating, you said, what your body wanted to eat. What did that look like? What did those days start to look like for you?

[0:34:47] Geneen Roth: I just started eating regular food. I started eating food that other people would consider food. I was really going for the sweets because those were the foods I was not supposed to have growing up. My brother was skinny and I wasn’t. He could have chocolate milk and donuts and you know, cookies and he could eat a whole row of fig newtons at one time and I wasn’t supposed to have any of it. I wanted what he had and so I started eating those things. After a while, I stopped, it took me a while to ween myself of thinking that that was the prize, getting to the point where I could eat as much of the sweets as I wanted. I just started eating regular food. Eggs and vegetables and –

[0:35:38] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, normal stuff.

[0:35:40] Geneen Roth: Yeah, I’ve been a vegetarian for quite a long time and I stopped being a vegetarian, sometimes maybe five or six years into this because I wasn’t doing so well on it. You know, just like regular food, a couple of times a day and going by eating when I was hungry, eating what my body wanted, paying attention to the food, not doing other things while I was eating. It was really sort of some practices that I developed and then. Then, if I wanted to eat when I wasn’t hungry to really take a moment, take a breath and ask myself what was going on, didn’t have to be a big thing, it could be – I’m reacting to the fact that my friend didn’t call me back. I feel rejected and its hard to feel rejected and just having a little kindness for myself, so yeah.

[0:36:32] Charlie Hoehn: That’s great. Out of this period, you developed a guidelines that ended up teaching. Man, I love that story of your first group session, that’s such an amazing visual of you standing in front of the liquor store. What were the guidelines that you first started teaching people?

[0:36:52] Geneen Roth: They were mostly what I just told you. They were eat what your body wants, when you’re hungry and until your body has had enough. Eat without distractions sitting down and eat with enjoyment, let yourself have the food. What I find so often Charlie is that many people don’t let themselves have what they have. When they’re eating, they’re thinking about the next thing and then they’d miss the meal.

[0:37:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it’s true, even the next bite.

[0:37:24] Geneen Roth: The next bite, it’s true. A lot of my work now with people who aren’t actually dealing with food is just to have them slow down and let them have what they already have because most of us take it away from ourselves before it hits, before the next bite hits your mouth or even if you're sitting with a friend and I see this – you know, when I’m walking, when I’m hiking and I’m in a park. I’m walking on a trail and it’s absolutely gorgeous and people are walking next to me, a couple. You know, let’s say it’s two friends walking next to me and they’re talking and I know they’re not seeing the trees, or hearing the birds and me too. You know, if I’m walking with my husband or a friend and so this is what happened yesterday and this is what’s going to go on tomorrow and this is it. We miss the gloriousness or the magnificence, so to speak of our lives as they are, and we keep being hungry for more without letting ourselves have what we already have.

[0:38:36] Charlie Hoehn: It seems like –

[0:38:37] Geneen Roth: I do that all the time.

[0:38:38] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I mean, how do you practice mindfulness now? Is it just – have you trained yourself over the years to just take breath, to be aware of what’s going on in the moment, how do you snap yourself back into it?

[0:38:57] Geneen Roth: Well, every morning when I first wake up, when I open my eyes, I spend maybe anywhere from 20 minutes to 40 or 45 minutes just breathing, sensing my body. First I open my eyes, I look around the room, I actually orient myself. “Wow, I woke up today, it’s another day on planet earth. Yay! You know, I didn’t die overnight, isn’t it great?” You know, because for me Charlie, I had such a pull to the negative, I mean, really, it’s like magnet to steel. Give me something to coagulate around that’s negative and I will go there. I will dismiss what’s good. Of course, the brain as we now know form all the neural scientist, the brain has I think the last statistic I heard was a nine to one negativity bias.

[0:40:03] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah it does. It’s crazy high.

[0:40:07] Geneen Roth: Yeah. I get that and I am – once I caught on to this, part of this that I do is a result of having watched my mind enough to see that I am so drawn to the negative. You know, I will tell you, if you say to me, “How is your day Geneen?” And five lovely things happened and one thing happened that was uncomfortable, I will tell you the uncomfortable thing. I now have trained myself and it is hard. I mean, it is like chewing nails. Not to tell you the negative thing because it’s like an itch that I need to scratch and usually, the negative thing is a way of complaining. Here’s what happened. Because the underlying thing about telling you the negative thing is here’s what happened Charlie, that shouldn’t have happened that I was a victim too because, you can hear it in people’s language, “Can you believe she did that? Who does that? What kind of person?” And you know that language that we all use is basically a complaint. My purpose would be to get you to align with me on how horrible it all is, how awful that person is and what a victim I am. Now that’s making very raw language out of what I just said, that’s just taking it down to the bones but that’s essentially what it is and so what I do in that first half hour or 40 minutes or sometimes it’s only 10, is bring myself into the present moment and believe me, I think I am an awful meditator. So I tried a lot of meditation stuff when I was in India and then I did 10 day Buddhist meditation retreats, many of them and did long periods of meditation. 40 minutes in the morning, 40 minutes at night, I was awful at meditation. I consider myself a meditation failure seriously. I just didn’t like it. Anytime you give me something to do, an accomplishment and I get a gold star for doing it, I’ll do it for a while because I am such an overachiever. I got straight A’s, graduated Phi Beta Kappa, blah-blah-blah but I don’t feel like I learned very much during that time because I was so intent on achieving and succeeding. And that’s what started happening to me with meditation. I felt like this isn’t working, all I’m doing it for is to say I meditated for 40 minutes and then I’d go and I’d live my life and my life would be the same intent on the negative life and so, I sit, I lay down now, I just sense my body. It’s my own, it’s what I’ve made up to bring myself into the present moment which I guess you could say is meditation. I don’t actually call it meditation but because I actually don’t like that word. Because it had so many years of negative connotations because I felt like I was failing at it. So I sense my body, I breathe, after I have oriented myself and in that breathing and orienting, I also ask myself what’s not wrong to get my mind off its track because even in breathing and sensing, even after that, “Huh it’s another day I woke up, I can see, I can feel, I can do this!” My mind will go, “Wait here’s what I have to do, here’s what I’m overwhelmed by, here’s what I don’t really want to do. Who do they think I am? You know my husband did this yesterday, you know I forgot to do this.” You know then the whole thing begins. The barrage begins so then it’s about catching my mind and in that time, in the 40 minutes I do my best to let that drop. I do my best to say, “Sweetheart,” and I would say that’s my main, if I want to call it practice. is kindness towards myself, my thoughts, my beliefs, the different parts of my body that ache the amount of cruelty that I’ve showed to myself. And therefore, to other people in a subtle way. I don’t think anybody would ever call me cruel but as you are with yourself there is some little bit of it that leaks out. So the kindness part of just every time my mind wanders during that 40 minutes or 10 minutes say, “Okay come on back,” and if I start thinking again, I’m in the middle of a story and I know this sounds very much like meditation but still then I just say, “Honey you don’t have to do anything about this now.” You know you could do it when you get up and I know myself well enough to say, “No forget it. You have to get up, you have to write it down.” That’s also what happens to me when I start writing. I will start writing and all of a sudden it will be, “Oh I forgot to do this. Oh my god, I have to look up that thing on the New York Times,” there’s, “Oh I have to take care of this” and then I’m not writing anymore. So it’s a practice. And the thing is and I guess I want to say this the most that the reason I stopped the formal kinds of meditation I was doing is that I found that when I got up from my meditation cushion my life had not changed. How I was living was exactly the same and so all of those years of meditation, formal meditation were not somehow being integrated into how I talk to myself, how I treated myself, how I talk to other people. There was still a basic dissatisfaction and discontent with myself, with my life. You know you would never have looked at my life and thought this but it was there. And I wanted to work on that. That was the whole reason I started in my relationship with food, thinking that that was the major thing and if I fix that so to speak, it would fix everything but it didn’t and so then I found myself many years later no longer having a food shtick and I don’t. You know I am at my natural weight now, just cooking along here with food and I changed what I eat according to the information that I am getting from my body and my health and what I am learning from the medical people I am working with but it was the most basic fundamental levels of what being alive, what it was like to be me in this form right now and how mean or harsh I was to myself and how that somehow filtered out to other people around me. How could I talk to myself in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep, when I was sick, when I was holding grudges? When I tripped, when a friend said no to me, how can all this translate to daily life? How can what I learned about food translate to my day to day non-food life? That’s what I became really interested in and I would say that’s my practice now.

[0:47:41] Charlie Hoehn: Thank you for sharing that and breaking it down. That seems like a really healthy routine and one worth practicing because so many right now are drawn to meditation for getting some balance with all the distractions that they’re dealing with throughout the day, all the notifications and everything and it’s in vogue now but having that permission to create your own routine and understanding why you’re doing it in the first place I think is – yeah.

[0:48:13] Geneen Roth: Yes. I find that you are doing it and a lot of my students do and I encourage them to keep with their practices whichever working but if you are doing it to get somewhere, if you have an agenda, if your goal is, “I’ll do it to be more productive at work”.

[0:48:32] Charlie Hoehn: You’re going to get enlightened, yeah.

[0:48:34] Geneen Roth: And to get enlightened then what’s happening is that you are putting, you’re already telling yourself, “In this moment I am not okay and if only I could do that then it would be okay.” And so you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage right there and not letting yourself see the ways in which you are okay. Because unless you are taking that in, my experience is there is no ground of goodness. There is no foundation. Why do you even want to do everything you want to do? I mean think of that, all the things you’ve done to fix yourself and at least for me, none of them actually worked in the long run.

[0:49:23] Charlie Hoehn: Right, ironically the harder you aim for that goal the more you miss it in a way. Like at least in your mind, your mind prevents you from hitting it. It’s weird.

[0:49:33] Geneen Roth: Yes.

[0:49:34] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, well Geneen I could talk to you about this topic for a long time. You certainly know more about this than pretty much anybody I know I think and at this point, I want to talk about your writing career though. You started with, which book did you say was your first?

[0:49:53] Geneen Roth: Feeding the Hungry Heart.

[0:49:55] Charlie Hoehn: Feeding the Hungry Heart and –

[0:49:58] Geneen Roth: 1982.

[0:49:59] Charlie Hoehn: Wow so -

[0:50:00] Geneen Roth: Long time.

[0:50:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so you published your first book and that had to have felt like a tremendous weight, I’m sure and also terrifying because you weren’t sure if you were showing the world what you are made of for the first time, right?

[0:50:20] Geneen Roth: Yes.

[0:50:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah and on the terms that you really wanted. So how did that go? How did the first and how many books have you published actually since then?

[0:50:29] Geneen Roth: Ten.

[0:50:30] Charlie Hoehn: Ten okay, This Messy Magnificent Life that’s going to be the 11th or the 10th?

[0:50:35] Geneen Roth: No that’s going to be the 10th, that’s going to be the 10th book.

[0:50:38] Charlie Hoehn: Awesome, you’re going to be in double digits.

[0:50:39] Geneen Roth: That’s right, at one point I thought, “Okay when I hit nine books,” because I love the number nine, you know that will be it. Well I’ve done what I came to do and that would be it but I find that I love writing so much that I didn’t want it to stop and I have still apparently a lot to say. How that first book went Charlie, I’ll give you a very short little backup story about that, I wanted to write as I think I mentioned this since I had been in fifth grade. Nobody actually encouraged me to write. When I was in 5th grade, I wrote a story about this little girl being in a flight and the pilot and the stewardesses, which was they were called then, getting sick and she had to take over. Of course that was me and I remember the freedom I felt when I wrote that inside myself. It was something else happened, I wasn’t that unhappy kid and since then, I had always wanted to write. I tried again, I didn’t try when I was in high school. I tried again when I was in college, my teacher did not actually encourage me. I took a couple of writing classes, nobody really liked my writing very much. Nonetheless, I decided at some point just in that time that we were talking about me deciding not to diet anymore that’s when I have committed myself to writing. It was that moment, it sort of came along at the same time and so I modeled myself on my then writing teacher, Ellen Bass, who is now a pretty well-known poet. I was in a group with her for a couple of years, a weekly group, it was called writing about our lives. Again, she felt like there were two or three other writers in there who were stellar writers. I was not amongst them but I loved it and I kept going at it because of what it did for me in me and because I kept feeling like I had something to say. She wrote an anthology at that point. It was a poetry anthology and so I did everything Ellen did. It’s really important to have models. Ellen wrote an anthology, I decided I could write an anthology. Ellen led the weekly groups, I decided I could lead weekly groups. That’s how my groups got started so I put together this anthology, somebody in my group helped me put it together. Her name was Lucy Diggs and anyway, we had a lot of submissions and I wrote to 26 New York publishers – 27 New York Publishers, got 26 rejections. One wrote back and said, Peg Parkinson of Bob’s Narrow, “I’d love to see your book.” And I didn’t have a book at that point. I just had a lot of pieces of paper with people’s individual stories but I was going to New York the next week because my family is there and I somehow bamboozled my way into seeing her. I don’t remember how, I just remember calling her secretary who’s name was Mercedes and saying, “I’m going to be there just 10 minutes, I’d love to meet Peg.” And so I bought my first suit at Sims Department Store. I think it was $25, my father lent me his briefcase into which I put nothing but a brush and I showed up at Peg’s office. I thought this narrow, we had a wonderful meeting. She had a stuffed pencil over her desk, we had a fabulous meeting, went home and she said, “Okay” and I lied through my teeth and said, “I have the book” and she said, “Good, send it to me next week”. Next week I got home and, oh because at that point she said to me, “You need to write half this book. Anthologies don’t work.” “No, problem. I already did that.” Lied again. Got home, tried to do it, didn’t seem very hard. I could not write a word. She called me. She sent me snail mail letter, she called me the next week, “It’s coming, it’s coming. It’s almost done.” After a month of that I thought, “No, done. I am never going to be a writer, can’t stand the pressure, this is not worth it.” I called Peg on the phone and said, “I’ve been lying to you this entire time. I don’t have a book, I don’t care if I ever have a book. I am not living with this kind of pressure. Goodbye.” And she said to me, “I believe in you.” She was the angel of my writing life, “I believe in you. You could do this, here’s my home number. Call if you need help.” And I didn’t need help as it turned out. Not the kind of help she was offering when she gave me her home number. Because what I did was without that pressure, see I told you if somebody tells me what to do I do the opposite, I don’t like being told what to do and then I sat down and I wrote my part of it in three weeks and I sent it to her and she loved it. And so that was that and she accepted it and it was wonderful and then she called me a couple of weeks after that book came out and said, “Okay, it’s time for you to write your next book and I want you to write a book prescriptive book about people’s relationship with food. You wrote a descriptive book,” and I said, “No I’m done. I’m a poet. I want to write poetry. I want to write fiction.” And she said, “You’re not done. You need to write this book.” And then she called me every other day and just badgered me and badgered me and badgered me and I saw myself as this very esoteric mystical poet just like Ellen and finally a friend of mine said, “Look if Michelangelo can be commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel, you can be commissioned to write a book.” And so I did. I sat down and wrote that in very short order. It usually takes me five or six years to do a book but this book I knew so well because I had been teaching that material for six years by then and so I wrote that book.

[0:56:31] Charlie Hoehn: And was that book, Why Weight?

[0:56:35] Geneen Roth: No, that book was Breaking Free from Compulsive Eating now called Breaking Free from Emotional Eating.

[0:56:41] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. Okay, so you had written two books at that point and when did your break out bestseller, Women, Food and God, came out? How many years have you’ve been writing then?

[0:56:54] Geneen Roth: I wrote that – actually that was another book and I know I’m just going to contradict myself. I dragged, that book was due in 2007 and I was two and a half years late on that book. Maybe it was due in 2006, I can’t remember. I was like, getting blood from a stone to get me to write that book because again, unlike the process of writing Breaking Free, I’ve been teaching, this was about the retreat work I do and I have been teaching those retreats for a while. And I wanted to write about what I didn’t know not what I did know and I knew a lot because I have been teaching this material although every writing venture takes me into what I don’t know because the act of writing itself is letting go of who I think I am and giving myself over to the process. It took me a long time to get myself over to the process of that book but when I did do that, it took maybe six months and then by that time, at the end of that six months we had lost all of our money to Bernie Madoff. And at the very tail end of I was putting the last period on that sentence on the lessons when I found out that we had now no money and so, I sent the book in and then I went through my own process with having no money which was terrifying. People think that only rich people could have invested in Madoff, that wasn’t true. Actually in our case and all of our friend’s cases because we had a friend who was very generous and was willing to take anywhere from $2,000 to $20,000. And then it kept making money and you could keep using it as a bank and that’s basically what my husband and I did. We used Madoff as our retirement savings account and then it was gone. Completely gone and so I had to come to terms with that and when I did, I wrote a piece for Salon which became number one on there and it was called, “What Bernie Madoff Couldn’t Steal from Me,” and so a publisher wanted a book about that and so Woman, Food and God hadn’t come out yet and then I started writing another book and you know, that’s how the process went.

[0:59:21] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, wow so the Madoff thing is the story in it of itself but I know we are limited on time here. So what I really like to dive into for I don’t know, the next several minutes is what happened after Woman, Food and God? Because part of the reason I wanted to do this interview as I mentioned to you Geneen is I get a lot of authors telling me, “I don’t have any big major goals of becoming a bestseller but boy, it would be nice to hit number one on the New York Times. And to sell a million copies and to sit on Oprah’s couch.” And on and on and on and they have all these lofty goals and I have to reel them in and say like, what is actually going to happen. You had all those things happen, all of them. You hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, I believe you sold over a million copies of Women, Food and God, you can correct me if I am wrong, and you were on the bestseller list for six months and you are now friends with Oprah from what I understand. You’ve been on her show and I think she told your publisher, “You need to get ready to sell a ton of books because this is going to sell like gangbusters.” Can you described what happened after Women, Food and God came out. I know I gave an overview but what was that like to go from loving the process and exploring your career as a writer to hitting mega success, what was that like?

[1:01:04] Geneen Roth: Well first of all it was wonderful. It was deeply, deeply satisfying. I’ll tell you the good parts first and then I’ll let my trend towards the negative mind tell you what the shadow side of that is. The good parts were the thrill of it. The thrill of being called on the phone by Oprah, the thrill of hanging out with her for a couple of hours for, to do, she had a radio show then, and to do a couple of radio interviews with her. Her and a little tiny studio of talking to her, of meeting this icon. Of falling in love with her and you know aside from anything else, that was a pleasure of being picked as my publicist said to me, “It was like being kissed by the Pope.” You know it was the stuff that a writer’s dreams are made of and there I was with the brass ring and it was thrilling before one book got sold. You know it didn’t even occur to me in those early days that this was going to translate into making money. I mean it was just the thrill of it for me because that had been a dream and then of course -

[1:02:21] Charlie Hoehn: And that’s where the best work comes from by the way.

[1:02:25] Geneen Roth: Yes. Yes so it was to feel like I really had something to say and Oprah had me on her show before. This wasn’t the first time. I was on for When Food is Love, one of my books in 1992 and that was wonderful too. It was out in paperback by that time and so it was a different kind of – it wasn’t the brass ring experience. It wasn’t Oprah calling this book a hymnal, it wasn’t the amount of email she sent out every week. When she gets behind something, she gets behind it and is absolutely generous about it. I wouldn’t call us friends by the way, I would call us acquaintances, you know? Very sweet, you know she’s got friends, lots of friends, I wouldn’t say that she’d counts me as amongst her friends and I count her as just one of the blessings of my life. So it was just unbelievable that it was after my main image, one the things that I write about in my new book, This Messy Magnificent Life, is that we all have about three things that we keep going back to in our lives. Three main things or identities or self-images and one of my main images is of being the little match girl and I don’t know if you know who she is but you know, there is old stories about this. It started a long time ago, of course as they talked about it a lot, people talk about a little match girl as an archetype of this girl standing out in this cold, bare feet, ragged clothes on, looking at a family on the other side of a picture window, loving each other, kissing each other, dressed in little velvet dresses. It’s Christmas time, gorgeous tree in the back, roasting turkey and all loving each other and I am on the outside all the time. There is the sense of I don’t belong, I am not lovable, I’m never going to make it, I did it wrong but you know that has been a seem in my life and so there was no way that I could be – well of course there was a way, you know Peter Meyer called me. He wanted to do a film about Women, Food and God and then he didn’t called me back. Okay, so up comes the little match girl, “Oh he didn’t go with it.” But for the most part, I was astonished and thrilled and it was gloriously happy. What I then started seeing was that I had wanted to be on the Times list and had wanted to be on besides the thrill of it, meeting Oprah and this is a big besides because this is the main thing that I wanted to set my personality and ego got very involved in this, the main thing I wanted was for more and more people to read what I was saying and for their lives to be affected by it so that they too could be kind to themselves. They too didn’t have to live in the hell realm of their relationship with food or addiction any longer. That was the truest form of that longing. The material part that came along with it is what I thought that being on the New York Times list for six months, many of those months that number one was going to give me what I thought it was going to give me was value. I thought the places in me that were still shaky and doubtful of my value, I thought those would get filled by that because it couldn’t have been any better. Nobody could have asked for more than what I got. Nobody could have asked for it and I got it. It didn’t touched those places. Not even touched them, you can’t – something from the outside is never and this was the big learning is going to fix that what’s on the inside. It’s impossible. It’s like sticking ice cream on your arm. You’re not going to taste it or it’s like hearing about what honey tastes like but not tasting it. You can’t do it by thinking about it or putting it, adding it to you. That’s internal work or internal questioning and I just didn’t get it and Charlie, I’m telling you I am going through it again because of having already had it that kind of major success and being in the eyes of most people in the world very successful. I mean there are different levels of success and I can always compare myself to more successful people than me. You know I personally know many of them who are much more successful than me. So if I want to go there I can easily go there and sometimes I can’t help myself to go there. I didn’t do it right, I wrote the wrong book, I’m not as successful as you name it, Brene Brown, Annie Lamont who is a close friend of mine, you know Elizabeth Gilbert. Just name it, there are 1200 people more successful than me and then I get on that train and it is a bad train to get on because I only go there because I think that if I had that success then I’d feel differently inside and what’s so amazing to me now is that I’ve already had that success and I still get caught in the jaws of that false wanting of something that I think is going to fix what isn’t even wrong.

[1:08:42] Charlie Hoehn: I want that to sink in more than anything else because it’s so true. It’s so true and whoever you are this applies though 100% of all human beings. Especially Americans I would say is just that cycle of getting to the next level is ever present unless you are able to pull yourself back in and recognize it when it’s happening.

[1:09:07] Geneen Roth: Yes and that’s the hard part Charlie. I think, to the extent that there’s any maturity in this form right now in me, it is to be aware when I start going there. It’s not that I don’t go there because I do and I still go there, anywhere from a couple of times a day, to if it’s in the middle of the night and I am not sleeping well, the inside of my mind looks like a rat’s nest. But now I have gotten to the point where I’m able to be aware, most of the time, not all the time. But most of the time be aware, “Oh I am going there again” do not believe this. This is not your friend. This is not true. Stop. And that’s what I think has changed the most. When I hear myself complaining, when I hear other people complaining, I recognize it’s a chance to align with the dark side, so to speak. It’s a chance to get on the train of being a victim and getting other people on my side and getting them to agree with me, ain’t it awful, and I stop. I will stop in mid-sentence or I will say to my husband, “This is me just being in bitterness, rage, hatred and envy sweetheart. Forgive me for one moment.” So I’ll be aware of it and as far as I can tell right now, that’s the most I can do and then start questioning, like draw it back to the question. “What do I think this is going to give me? Oh I think this is going to give me what I’ve already had. Sweetheart,” and I try to talk to myself in very kind terms otherwise I am just beating myself up all the time. “You know, you already had that. Did it give that to you? No. Do you think more of that,” because you know I had a lot of that with those six months, “Do you think actually having a week or two or three or four on the New York Times list is going to give you that? No, is that what you want the most?” What I want the most is to become comfortable in my own skin. What I want is peace and clarity and sanity and a big open heart and that is not going to give that to me. So I have to keep saying to myself and asking myself, “What really matters?”

[1:11:59] Charlie Hoehn: That’s absolutely beautiful Geneen and thank you so much for doing this interview. I wanted to talk a bit more about your new book, This Messy Magnificent Life but I mean anybody who makes it through this interview is going to know that you’re the type of person that they’re going to want to go on their next book journey with someone like yourself. So, I know at the time of this recording you’re a couple of months away from it being released. What would you say is the main problem that This Messy Magnificent Life helps with, or solves for the reader?

[1:12:41] Geneen Roth: You know the last part of our conversation Charlie is really about This Messy Magnificent Life. I started writing it after the success of Women, Food and God when I realized that all the things I believed were going to do it for me didn’t do it for me in a loving fabulous relationship with a man, we’ve been together now for 31 years. I couldn’t be happier. I am doing work that I love, I’ve had success. I have everything a girl could want, basically. We have enough financial security now for me to know that our house isn’t going to get taken away for us which I thought was going to happen after we lost our money. So I started writing this book because I realized that what I thought was going to give me that, give me what mattered most was not going to give that to me and so I wanted to get into the day to day nitty-gritty of how a mind works and what trips me up on a daily basis. The common things that people just say, “Well of course that’s the way it is. Of course you feel like that.” No, that wasn’t good enough for me. When I was sick for four months during the process of writing this book and everybody was like, “Oh I’m so sorry. That must be so terrible.” Now I wasn’t in a lot of physical pain there so that’s a different category of being sick but I had to contend with cancelling the things that I was supposed to teach, my trips, pretty much anything external and man, did I go through a lot of stuff for that. Inner complaints and then there was a sense of, “Okay, here it is. What am I going to do? Am I going to rail against this or not?” I just came back from being in Hawaii. I was the wife in a conference with my husband and it rained every single day and everybody was complaining about the weather and every time I heard them I would think, I would say, I wouldn’t respond because I wasn’t thrilled about the weather either. It wouldn’t have been my preference but on the other hand it was the way it was. What was there to do about it? Align in the complaining or not. Now it’s nice to know every once in a while that we have friends and we are bonded in our wounds or in our lack of preferences but it doesn’t help you come to, “Okay here I am.” And so when I got sick and I was so sick, I really had to come terms with it and have it be okay, and have it be, “This is how it is.” And I use that time instead because I saw that there was a long list of complaints that I had and a long list of people against whom I have been holding grudges for years because they’ve done me wrong. I wanted to go into this whole pattern and I did and it was beautiful. I just started using it to come to terms with this heaviness in my heart and so I did that in the writing with sleeplessness with sickness with grudges, with blame, with the tilt towards negativity, with how to train my mind to really focus on what wasn’t wrong instead of what was wrong. I did that with aging and you know the fact that gravity is having its way with my face and having to come to terms with, what do I want to do about it, do I want to look in the mirror every day and say, “Oh my god look at how awful that is” or what, what’s the option here?

[1:16:44] Charlie Hoehn: Aging is a beautiful thing too.

[1:16:47] Geneen Roth: Well it’s hard to change that route.

[1:16:48] Charlie Hoehn: Society says anti-aging but –