What I Ate When My Heart Was Broken

Many years ago, I went through a devasting breakup. I felt like my heart had been ripped out and drop-kicked to the moon.

I was flattened by a level of sadness and depression I had never experienced before. I cried for weeks. My body felt weighed down by grief.

As a result, I lost much of my appetite and my desire to cook. 

My partner and I loved cooking together and the thought of doing it solo was just too painful. 

Very little sounded appealing and I couldn’t stomach anything fresh. 

The only foods that felt tolerable and manageable were buttered pasta and peanut-butter toast, plus banana bread muffins and chocolate chip cookies from a local bakery.

For weeks, these foods comforted me when little else could. They helped me survive one of the hardest, darkest times of my life. 

What I Needed
Despite being deeply entrenched in diet culture and obsessed with controlling my weight at the time, which sadly played a role in the breakup, I’m grateful I let myself eat foods I typically restricted.

Of course, there was a part of me—my inner Food Police—that made me feel bad about my eating. However, it wasn’t as strong as the part of me that desperately wanted to ease my suffering. 

Although my chosen foods didn’t erase my sadness or grief, they did help sustain me. They gave me the emotional comfort and physical energy I needed to make it through each day. 

Demonized by Diet Culture
Despite its tremendous power to soothe, diet culture has demonized comfort food. 

It has taught us to feel bad, guilty, weak or ashamed when we turn to it to navigate tough times. 

As a result, we often feel we have to justify our desires, hide our eating, and make up for our “food sins.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Rightful Coping Tool
Turning to food to self-soothe is a natural human behavior, one we do from the day we’re born.

Its ability to soothe our mind, body, heart and soul is something to embrace and celebrate. 

Providing comfort is just one of the many roles it plays in our lives, one of the many ways it meets our needs, and one of the many gifts it gives us.

For many of us, food is an easily accessible coping mechanism—one that has a rightful place in our emotional coping toolkit.

Compassion and Curiosity
My “heartbreak diet” didn’t last forever. I eventually added in more foods and made my way back to cooking. 

I’ve had much tougher, sadder times since that breakup and it’s been interesting to see how each experience has impacted my eating.

Because I’ve worked hard to make peace with food and my body—something that was spurred on by that breakup—I’m now able to observe what I’m experiencing with compassion and curiosity rather than criticism and judgment.

And I appreciate all the more the power of food to comfort. 

I Have a Love-Hate Relationship With Food

How would you describe your relationship with food?

When I ask people this question, one of the most frequent answers I get is “I have a love-hate relationship with food.”

Some other common responses include:

• Bad

• Complicated

• Obsessive

• Unhealthy

• Stressful

• Guilt-ridden

• Difficult

• All-or-nothing

• Controlling

• Compulsive

• Anxiety-filled

• Unsatisfying

• Negative

• Judgmental

• Fearful

• Punitive

Do any of these descriptors resonate with you?

I See It Differently Now
Many years ago, when I was restricting my eating in an effort to lose weight and be a "clean eater," I probably would have described my relationship with food as good, healthy, disciplined. 

As I was so entrenched in diet and wellness cultures, I couldn’t see how disordered my eating had become. I thought I was being good, doing the right thing. 

This belief was often reinforced by many of the people around me, who often praised my eating. I don’t blame them; we live in a culture that normalizes and celebrates disordered eating. 

Ironically, I also considered myself to be a passionate foodie even though I rarely ate anything that wasn't on my diet-approved safe list. Instead, I took a lot of joy in watching others consume the foods I was excited about it.

Looking back now, I would describe my relationship with food as all-consuming, hypervigilant, calculated, rigid, black-and-white, moralistic, fraught, tense, isolating and utterly exhausting. 

I feel sad and regretful when I reflect on that time, and also incredibly grateful I got out of such an awful relationship.

Of course, some aspects of it were pleasurable, at least for brief moments until I reached the point of uncomfortable fullness (overeating is a natural response to food deprivation), and before my inner Food Police started shouting at me (“You were so bad! You need to make up for it!).

What Do You Want?
In addition to asking folks how they would describe their relationship with food, I also like to ask what type of relationship they would like to have.

Easy, guilt-free, peaceful, positive, pleasurable and neutral are just a few of the words that come to mind.

"I just want food to be food" is a common refrain.

When you reflect on this question, what comes up for you? 

And what’s standing in between where you are now and where you would like to be?

Every Weekend, I Binged On Cookies

Many years ago, when I worked in the corporate world, I had a weekend cookie ritual.

Every Friday morning, after getting off the train downtown, I would stop at my favorite cookie shop and pick out a bunch of cookies before going to my office.

The cookies were large, dense and utterly delicious. You could smell them baking from blocks away. The peanut-butter chocolate chip and wheat-germ chocolate chip cookies especially made my mouth water.

I liked to arrive at the bakery early so I could save money by purchasing the half-priced day-old cookies before they were sold out (these cookies weren’t cheap!). Sometimes I’d hit more than one location if the first shop I stopped at didn’t have enough cookies to meet my needs.

Before heading to work, I'd quickly hide the big, butter-stained bakery bag inside a darker bag as I feared my co-workers seeing me with such a “bad” food and potentially tarnishing my “healthy eater” reputation. 

I also worried my co-workers would smell the cookies in my office, so I’d bury the bag under my coat. 

Although secretly obtaining these cookies every Friday was a bit stressful, not getting them felt far more stressful. 

Weekends Nights Only
Late each weekend night, I would stuff myself with the cookies, first while sitting in front of my TV and then while standing in my dark kitchen after doing the dishes. 

I was determined to eat them all before the weekend ended, before my time was up.

You see, I had a rule that I could only eat cookies on weekend nights. They were my reward for eating “clean” during the week.

However, because I was restricting my eating throughout the week, including depriving myself of sweets (you know, being “good”), I had a scarcity mindset that drove me to binge on the cookies when I allowed myself to have them. 

What was supposed to be a yummy treat wasn’t so satisfying in the end. I went to bed uncomfortably full and full of guilt and shame. 

The physical discomfort and emotional distress my cookie binges caused convinced me all the more that I couldn’t be trusted with certain foods, that I had to get back on track on Monday, and that I needed a "no cookies ever" food rule.

Once again, I would be “good” during the week—and once again, I'd inevitably head to the bakery at the end of the week. I was obsessed with those cookies and stuck in a vicious restrict-binge cycle. 

Not About Willpower
While I sometimes binged on other forbidden foods, my weekend cookie binges bothered me the most. 

I tried to explain my anguish to my boyfriend who just laughed as he didn’t understand why I, the healthiest eater he knew, was so devastated by my behavior. 

To be fair, I hid a lot of the cookies and my cookie-eating from him, so he didn’t really have a full grasp of the situation. Plus, he had never dieted a day in his life, so he had no idea what it felt like to “fail” at eating.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that my cookie binges did not make me a failure and were not due to a lack of willpower, despite what diet culture had taught me to believe. 

My behavior was a natural human response to food deprivation. 

With the threat of scarcity just around the corner—that is, no more cookies come Monday—my very protective brain told me to eat all the cookies now before they were gone, even if I didn’t really want them or was uncomfortably full.

Plus, I feared if I didn’t eat them all on the weekend, I would be tempted to eat the leftovers on Monday. Doing so would ruin my good-eating plan and mean I wouldn't deserve to be rewarded with more cookies come Friday.

An Unimaginable Solution
At the time, I thought I needed to stop buying and eating cookies. I never imagined the solution was to freely eat cookies.

When I finally hit rock bottom with my disordered eating, I started challenging my food rules and giving myself unconditional permission to eat. 

This included eating cookies whenever I wanted, even on a Wednesday and even for breakfast. Loosening the reins was scary, but to my great surprise, my cookie binges eventually stopped.

Over time, I went from rigidly controlling my cookie consumption and then feeling shamefully out of control with them to freely eating cookies at any time and feeling neutral about it.

Now, I pretty much always have cookies on hand along with many other foods I had once made off-limits.

All these years later, I’m still sometimes astounded by how these foods are no longer a big deal.

The sense of ease and peace I now feel with food is something I wish for you, too.