Eat your heart out.

Dieting talk amongst friends has got me sitting here thinking of my own profound relationship with food over the course of my lifetime. I can say that from the time I was a child to now, I have experienced so many complex phases related to food and life that it really boggles my mind to fathom it all.
From sustenance to happiness, and pleasure brought from eating, to self-induced deprivation and control and discipline, it's as though an entire "secret" language has been expressed through my eating habits. There have been times in my life when I didn't think about food, didn't care about it; and other times when food was all I could think of. As a child, I happily ran around and meals were on the periphery of my focus. As a teen, I struggled throughout my formative years to be heard, and have my ideas and intellect taken seriously, rather than garnering attention for my figure -- always the breasts! So I didn't eat for a while. Adulthood and more confidence came, and then the years saw me bouncing back and forth, discovering food, needing to lose weight to fit into a dress or combat weekends of indulgence in Napa Valley and a thousand other places in the foodie heaven that is California. Yet I still remember feeling genuinely panicky a couple times when I lost enough weight to feel tiny, and physically insignificant. That is indeed a crazy, mixed-up predicament.
Panic and fear have, at times, been palpably driven home as I dieted and then would suddenly think back to two people I loved who wasted away from cancer. Their bodies failed them. My step-dad, a Greek-American so full of life, reduced to a skinny man having Ensure poured into his stomach through a tube. Not being able to taste wine because his tastebuds had been radiated off. It was a tragedy to behold. Our friend, Debbi was always a big girl. Overweight. Then she started working out, and lost about 50 lbs., and she looked great! But then she kept losing weight, and discovered she had cancer. Eventually, she could only manage to eat tiny mouthfuls of food, and when she died she was little more than a skeleton.
That connection of food to life and death feels like it's imprinted upon my cells. It's no secret to those who know me that death has been a major preoccupation to me for years, and so why should it be any surprise that I might feel like banking pounds as insurance against some possible future catastrophe? And yet, ironically, you bank too much weight, and you're risking your life! Especially with my family history of heart disease and diabetes.
I never had glamorous pregnancies, and the weight gained has stuck to me like glue. I have absolutely no regrets about the way my body has changed from having children. I have not worked hard to become Skinny Mom, the fashionable thing to do, but rather, have tried to focus upon nourishing myself. And that is what food is about to me now: nourishing my body and soul. If that means eating for comfort sometimes, I accept that. I'm slowly working towards being able to strike that elusive balance, and feel more understanding of myself.
Be kind to yourselves, and good luck to us all, towards health and feeling good despite the reading on the scale.