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So many holidays revolve around food. Chanukah and Christmas carry the additional burden of a long party season culminating in the New Year, the national day of diet resolutions. Until the next time: Binge, remorse, repent, repeat.
But hey, that's most of us. What if you have an eating disorder? Can you even participate in the holidays?
My daughter, Lisa, remembers when Hanukah and her birthday were the most important holidays of the year. "They both involved lighting candles, eating delicious food and unwrapping presents, but Hanukah always had a special place in my heart as I loved gathering with family and friends, listening to our cassette of Hanukah songs and lighting the menorah. But, as the years went by, Hanukah became less of something to look forward to and more of something to dread."
That started in middle school, when Lisa became very conscious of appearance and, especially, weight. By high school she was rabidly counting calories and fat grams, and over-exercising. She became a vegetarian, kept adding foods she wouldn't eat, and then dropped off a cliff. Even when she achieved her goal, size double zero, she still felt fat.
Lisa and I wrote Hungry: A Mother and Daughter Fight Anorexia (Berkley Books, 2009) http://tinyurl.com/yar7x7u about the irony and heartache of my being a food writer, her dad being a great cook, our family spending much of our time in restaurants and kitchens - and Lisa's eight-year struggle with eating disorders. People often ask if the book was intended as a form of therapy. It has been a way to make something good out of something bad, but I have to say, No, as a mother-daughter bonding experience, writing a book together is not the way to go. Shopping would have been easier, and I am one of the world's worst shoppers.
Lisa and I still see the experience of the past eight years very differently, but we have learned that secrecy and denial don't help. They only worsen the misunderstanding. And that is where holidays can serve as reminders.
Hanukah celebrates a struggle for religious freedom. Jews mark the eight-night festival with meals including fried potato pancakes. It doesn't look remotely related to a reasonable body image.
But the miracle of Hanukah is about bringing light to darkness. Eating disorders are cloaked in shame, secrecy, denial and misunderstanding. Peeling away that heavy curtain might be just the thing.
I was happy to see the Jewish women's magazine Hadassah this month, in addition to the cover story, "Women of Hanukah: Breaking History's Glass Wall" has a story titled "Anorexia: It's Not About Food." But when I started reading, by the second paragraph of this story I was disappointed, because it said that many of the names had been changed "to protect privacy." The subjects don't want to be known.
Eating disorders are not about food, nor about being Jewish or Southern Baptist. One in ten college women "suffer significantly" from an eating disorder.
The response to our book has been amazing, sometimes overwhelming and often heartbreaking because so many people suffer alone. What we hear over and over is, "Thank you for writing. I had no idea that anyone else felt like this." If all the people who felt that way got together, it would be a very large group. (And if we hadn't given our real names, how would they ever be able to thank us?)
In the darkness and cold of this time of year, an uncertain year at best, a little Hanukah spirit might help.
