Food Is My Toxic Girlfriend
My yoga studio, Khali Yoga Center, recently did a 3 day juice fast. I learned a lot, like the connection between my mind and my body and how community can strengthen you through difficult challenges. But ironically, here’s the biggest lesson:
I.
FUCKING.
LOVE.
FOOD.
I love looking at it when it’s perfectly plated. Love shopping for it, especially when you can smell the aromas floating through the air. And I especially love cooking it — after a long, hard day at work, the physical act of mixing, kneading, chopping and seasoning food relaxes my body and settles my spirit. When I’m in a good place, food can be like like communion with my family through a hot, tasty meal.
When I’m in a bad place? When I’m stressed? Or depressed? Or emotionally depleted? My relationship with food becomes needy and toxic. I get wild and unrestrained and food is like that person who brings out the worst in you, but who you can’t leave alone. And by the time you figure out how harmful they are, it’s too late. You’re addicted and you can’t let go.
Do you have a toxic ex? Was it Pete, always calling at two in the morning —knowing you would drop everything, wash up, grab a tooth brush and come see him, no questions asked? What about Jenny, the one you run into right when you finally get a good woman with good credit and no kids. She blew up your life and left nothing but rubble and trauma…but you text her back anyway. Why? Maybe they were your ‘type’, people with traits you simply could not resist.
I have foods like that. Mix sweet, salt and crunch and watch dopamine flood through my brain and drown every neuron. Add tasty alcohol and the flood becomes a hurricane.
Dark chocolate with sea salt and a smokey red wine?
Salty, perfectly fried chicken with immaculate crust and a sip of ice cold rosè?
Pizza with gooey layers of cheese heaped over tangy tomato sauce and gamey prosciutto? With a light, silky pinot noir?
I would bathe in it if I could. An amazing meal was like a lover who took you to a place you’d never been before. The one who made you feel alive and powerful and safe and who told you that without them, you would never feel that way again.
But then I did my fast.
I broke up with my food for three days. Kicked them out, changed the locks, blocked their numbers, updated my passwords and now I know —
Food lies.
And if you can’t master it, food kills.
Our love affair started down South, where I‘m from. For Black folks, a meal is not just an activity, it’s a triumph, survival snatched from dead ground White folks didn’t want or the animal remains they wouldn’t eat. Our cooking is magic, arcane spices sprinkled over bubbling pots and church songs hummed all day like incantations. It’s a Black sorceress shuffling around the kitchen in a big ass house coat, finally emerging with a love offering that turns White trash into Black delicacy.
The plate hits the table. We hold back just long enough to bend over the food and thank our God. We dive in and we don’t just eat with our mouths — we eat with our whole bodies. Grunt, sighs, praise and exclamations float up from the table. If the food is really good, somebody might do a quick little shimmy between bites. We’re not just consuming calories to stay alive.
We’re celebratin’ up in here!
Even today, I bring that spirit of open abandon to every meal. A salted caramel brownie is not just a dessert — it’s a four way between me, the salty chocolate, the sugary caramel and the decadent crunch. One bite is ecstasy and one sip of wine will send my head rolling back in pure bliss. Back in my 20’s it was nothing to have an orgy all over the kitchen table, me and a whole box of sweets and a whole bottle of wine, getting it in all night long.
But there is always a price and the bill always comes due. 50 is around the corner and my body has all the receipts — too many years of sweets, salt and alcohol left me weaker and less hardy, left my blood sugar and blood pressure higher. But despite the damage and the warnings from my doctor, food still had a grip on me. I needed a way to break loose, so when my yoga studio offered the juice fast, I jumped at the chance.
Here’s what I learned:
I Am Not My Body
Habits program you. After decades of eating a certain way, I accidentally trained my body to crave certain foods at certain intervals at certain times of the day — no matter what. Hunger didn’t drive me to the pantry after a full dinner and a glass of wine (or three). It’s habit, pulling my body along like strings on a dummy, pushing it to chase that chemical release. Habits too powerful to ignore, like someone texting over and over until you have to answer.
But then we broke up for three days. No sugar, beyond those found in juice. No salt. no sweets. No meat. No bread.
And I felt great.
The first day I had some slight withdrawal. Minor headaches, irritability, hunger pains. But by day two I couldn’t wait for my juices. (I had seven per day, about one every two hours or so.) I practiced yoga comfortably and my body still had great energy. By day three, I cooked linguini and shrimp for my family and drank a bottle of green juice with a smile on my face. I was back in my good place, mastering food to serve others.
I could block the bio chemical texts from my belly, delete the emotional voice mails telling me I would starve, ignore the psychological tantrums from my brain. I was not just mastering food, I was mastering my body. We broke up for three days and neither one of us died. Matter of fact, we both felt better than ever.
I was free.
You Need a Good Crew
When you finally left your shitty ex, who had your back? Who let you crash on their couch, gave you money, maybe watched your dog while you took some time to get yourself together?
Your crew.
If you came back from a set back, you probably had great support. Folks who don’t judge you, who created a safe space for you to work through your mess and who held you accountable with love.
Lindsey Crisp, who runs the studio and organized the fast, understood that. So she created a community for us and set expectations from the beginning — if you eat, you haven’t failed, you’ve just learned. If you don’t eat, you haven’t won, you’ve just learned. And whatever you learn, when you come back to the group, you share.
And that’s what we did. Every day, we practice some light yoga, journaled and talked about our struggles. One friend had a shitty day at work and drank wine. We understood. One was so irritable, she yelled at her dog and snatched the leash. Made sense.
“I know I look very zen,” I told them on that first day. “But I’m hungry as fuck right now.” They all laughed. But they got it.
Struggle is a lot easier if you share it.
TRUTH # 3 — Your Always Want That Old Thing Back
Human beings are never satisfied. We could have the perfect marriage, the perfect kids, the whatever. And we still wonder — ’What if — ?’
You get a 6% raise and you wonder ‘What ifTom got 7%?”
You get a new granite countertop in the kitchen and wonder ‘But what if I got marble?”
Or you finally break up with your no good ex, finally get free of their manipulation and neglect, finally create a space of your own to grow and explore — and the minute you feel lonely, you start to wonder:
“What if I call them again?”
“What if they changed?”
“What if I can handle it THIS time?”
Deep down, you KNOW it’s bullshit. They haven’t changed, they still got the same issues, but here you are, all in their DM’s, talkin’ ‘bout:
‘Hey, big head! LOL!”
“WYD?”
Finger on standby.
Text ready to send.
That’s me when my fast ended.
Oh for a few days, my body ran free, limbs energetic, steps light, mind clear. But I’m human. After a while, you miss your old boo and a lonely mind only knows the good times. Forgets when they played you, mistreated you, disrespected you, called you fat, weak, ugly or dumb. Instead it says:
“Some chocolate would be great right now. Especially with a nice glass of Pinot. Just a little piece. And maybe a quick sip.”
And now I’m standing in the pantry, staring at my ‘corner of snacks’, trying to decide HOW MANY pieces to eat. I’ve called my ex, the voicemail beeped, the phone is recording and I’m about to leave a message and start the whole sick process all over again.
I know it’s wrong. I know I just did all this work to get free.
And I do it anyway.
I broke off three huge chunks of Divine Dark Chocolate with Mint Crisp (70% Cocoa)…
I filled my wine glass with a big ol’ country pour of Three Henrys Pinot Noir (Produit De France)…
Then I sat in my beat up Lay Z Boy, ate every last piece of chocolate, chased it down with glorious sips of complex red wine and licked my fingers to make sure I didn’t waste a drop.
I broke up with my ex, got free of all her bullshit, but a week hadn’t passed and I was hooking up with her all over again.
And in the moment, it was fucking fantastic.
Not because my ex changed. She didn’t. Not because the cleanse didn’t work. It did.
Because I’m human. And after all this the time maybe I don’t have a toxic relationship with food. Maybe I have a toxic relationship with my own body.
With myself.
And maybe that’s the big lesson from the cleanse. And the question I really need to answer is not ‘How can I avoid toxic things?”
It’s ‘How can I be satisfied with whatever I have.”
Even myself. Even my own body. How can I love it enough to take care of it and start the work of reprogramming it for better things.
So yeah. Me and my body ‘bout to go to couple’s counseling. My yoga studio has another juice cleanse in March.
Pretty sure I’m gonna be the first one there.
