Happy Meals

Basic:
Say food is your drug of choice. It's not uncommon to have learned to turn to food for (immediate) comfort (out of desperation), or to simply distract you so you (presently) forget how bad you feel about yourself (although the negativity resurfaces later, compounded and even more toxic than if you'd just dealt with it before turning to your outlet/addiction).

Notes:
(1) This is through the perspective of women, for the reasons that men tend to be less outwardly sensitive to food issues (although they are there too, sometimes). Mothers are nurturers who cook for their families and feed their kids, traditionally. There may be differences in different families, but for this writing, family females are used to represent everyone in a generation who may have contributed.
(2) This is an exaggeration, used as a basic and condensed template. Events might not be so direct or powerful in real life. It's more of an exploration on how negativity and addiction can be inherited through genetics and family culture.

Generation 1: Your Grandmother
So you've learned to turn to food when you feel unhappy about yourself or your life. We have a lot of food in this country. If your mother (your chief nurturer) was fat, or eating disordered (to whatever degree, "diagnosed" or not),  and/or from a food-oriented culture (Italian, say), you learned to feel a little uncomfortable around food. You can't necessarily track it back to all of that consciously when you're growing up, but you know that you feel odd pressure around food. Your mother and aunts are pushing things at you constantly. You can never not eat or pass something up. It's a big issue, usually. You have always been so strongly encouraged to eat, and meanwhile your mother is trying to lose weight constantly, and she seems unhappy. Your aunts tell you how thin you look, but you definitely know you've actually, clearly, gained weight since she saw you last.

Generation 2: You
So now, you've inherited this familial food-obsession. The children of overweight, underweight, or eating-disordered parents usually are also overweight, underweight, or have severely distorted relationships with food, respectively.

And say now years pass, you try to push aside your food issues, try not to fall into the same traps as your mother and family for the rest of your life. You walk an edge. But you enter your adult years, and responsibilities add up, husband, house, car, school, choices, add heavy pressure to your life. So, as your mom did, despite you saying you would never be like that, you deal with all that stress by eating when you're upset, or overwhlemed. You are conscious that you're turning to it a lot of the time (where maybe your mother hadn't been so aware), but you can't seem to stop it. An inherited fatal attraction. You understand more fully how your mother must have also felt better when eating comfort foods--cookies, homemade classics, ice cream, breads--because you certainly do. But soon you are obsese, say, and you give in, and now you just accept that this is how you were raised, this is how you are.

Generation 3: Your kids (From your perspective)
Now you've proceeded ahead with things despite your growing negative emotions and instability. You have kids, thinking that will actually take your mind outside of yourself. But it happens that they add enormous additional stress to your life because you want to love them fully but you can't seem to be well enough inside yourself to treat them as they should be treated. You are supposed to give them attention, but you still need to attend to yourself.

When your kids are acting up, you feed them, and they calm down for a minute. You love them and want them to have all that they need to eat. You don't really know how much someone needs to eat, though, because you don't really eat when you're hungry or stop when you're full. You don't eat for physiological reasons; it's really only emotional. You're eating all the time, therefore, because you've snowballed into an emotional trainwreck. Your body physically, now, is overdosed on sugars and fats, which adds that negative physical element to the emotional stress as an unfortunate consequence that keeps you rutted even more firmly.

You find that you and the kids may eat together in stressful states, because you've fed them to quiet them, you've fed them to make yourself feel better, you've fed them to truly nurture their bodies, you've fed them for having fun, because food has become a mystery to you, and you apply it to many things. The vibes are subtle, but they're there. They eat often as you do, and they assume they can eat whenever they want. Sometimes they've tried to eat something, but you've realized a bit of what things they're learning. So you snap at them and tell them they can't have that cookie right now. You go into the other room out of their sight afterwards, and eat a cookie yourself later on, because you feel guilt for having done that.

And then, say you're feeling good one day. Out of your genuine love for your kids, you think "what will make them happy? I want to treat them to something special today!"  The first thing that comes to mind, however, is easy and immediate, and it's food, because you're so fixated on it, it's constantly in your brain. You think, I'll take them on a drive, we'll get Happy Meals from McDonald's, they'll get a toy, they'll get fries, I can get them a little ice cream cone too. The kids are young and they smile delightedly at the prospect when you suggest it. They are happy at the time, but then if this happens many times, they soon become unhappy. Because ironically, Happy Meals are made from toxic, unhappy ingredients that make kids fat and sad as the toxins get stuck in their tissues and brains. Addictions are forming.

Generation 3: Your kids (Their perspective): Your parent looks at you at your young age of 10 becoming just like her, fat, sad, and tormented by food, and she becomes then fatter and sadder with that realization, as she turns again to the only thing she knows to make things better, worse, different, numb. You start looking at yourself in the mirror, and vow never to eat again. You begin to hate yourself.

THE GREAT HOPE:

You can actually break this trip cycle. You can step outside of it. You're aware of it now, you've just been on a bad trip for years. Don't worry, you'll come out of it with just a little effort. You practice spirituality, you sit and meditate, you break the cycle of unhappiness, feeling compelled, reaching for cookie, putting into body, feeling shitty, being compelled, reaching for cookie, putting into body, feeling shitty, feeling compelled to eat... You can break the cycle, sit in meditation, and look at yourself. You can realize that there's really no reason to hate yourself so much. It won't be this easy thing, necessarily, but if you are persistent and gentle with yourself, consistent, you will come out of it in no time. It's very easy to meditate and sit with yourself. All you have to do is breathe, don't do or try to do anything. You calm down enough to see through the negative waves of thought that charge through you. You see it's all old and past, from when you couldn't reason well beyond your coarse, immediate emotions as an unthinking little kid. You're older now.

You're beautiful and perfect just as you are. You've always been that way. You're coming to your senses, out of the negative emotion trip. Hello, it's wonderful to meet you again.

It will be okay. We are all already okay.