The Aunties...

I am currently re-reading a book that I have come to love called "traveling mercies" by anne lammot.
she is a funny author - and the book has a lot of good insight
in one chapter, she talks about having an eating disorder (bulemia) and talks about how she never knew what hunger felt like and had to learn in her late 30's...
before her "small miracle" as she calls it, she had a love/hate relationship with food. she would "be good" and eat healthily and then binge terribly "being bad" -- after which she would purge....
Sounds like me except for the purging part that I don't do....
Finally, she got help...
she states, "all of the sudden I was Hellen Keller after she breaks the code for 'water'...only in my case, I was discovering which foods I was hungry for...I'd ask myself, in a deeply maternal way, what I felt like eating....it is, finally, so wonderful to have learned to eat, to taste and love what slips down my throat."

The next chapter in her book she talks about body image. This is also something that I think many people struggle with, including myself. She travels to Mexico on vacation. she states, "I started off in heavy Butt Mind on the plane." she then explains that is where you are comparing your butt to everyone else's... :) She talks about her great big old thighs and going to the beach - I chuckled when reading thinking that this is my exact same worry -- anyway, this is what she decides:
"I had decided I was going to take my thighs and butt with me proudly wherever I went. I decided, in fact, on the way to the beach that I would treat them as if they were beloved elderly aunties, the kind who did embarrassing things at the beach, like roll their stockings into tubes around their ankles, but whom I was proud of because they were so great in every real and important way. So we walked along, the three of us, the aunties and I...I imagined that I could feel the aunties beaming, as if they had been held captive in a dark closet too long.."