The Days Between: Making Peace with Food This Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur
Every year, the same ten days arrive, and every year they ask something difficult of the people I work with. Rosh Hashana opens with a table full of round challah, apples dipped in honey, brisket, kugel — a holiday built, quite literally, around abundance and sweetness. Then, ten days later, everything reverses. Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, asks for a twenty-five-hour fast — no food, no water, just prayer and reflection. For most people, this rhythm is simply tradition. For many of the people who sit across from me in my office, it is one of the hardest stretches of the entire year.
I notice it every September. My phone starts ringing more. Old patterns that had gone quiet for months resurface at the holiday table, in front of family, under the particular kind of scrutiny that comes with a community that cares — sometimes too much — about how bodies look. I want to talk honestly here about what I see this time of year, because I think it helps to know you are not the only one carrying it.
I want to speak directly to the men reading this, because so much of what gets written about eating and body image assumes it’s a women’s issue. It isn’t. A great many of the men I work with have spent years quietly overeating — at holiday tables and everywhere else — using food to manage stress, exhaustion, or pressure they never felt they had permission to talk about out loud. And increasingly, they’re arriving in my office already taking a GLP-1 medication — Ozempic, Wegovy, and others like them. I want to be clear: these medications can be a genuinely useful medical tool, and I am not in the business of second-guessing a prescription written by someone’s doctor. But a medication can quiet an appetite. It cannot teach a person how to sit with a hard feeling without reaching for food to make it more bearable, or how to trust their own body again. That work still has to happen — and it’s work I do with people every single day, medication or not.
The women I work with often carry a related but different struggle: binge eating, bulimia, a private cycle of overeating followed by an attempt to compensate for it. This pattern can intensify sharply around a fast day like Yom Kippur. Some people find themselves overeating in the days leading up to the fast, almost bracing for it. Others struggle with how to break the fast at the end of the day without the meal spiraling into something that feels completely out of their control. I want to say plainly: neither of these is a character flaw, and neither means something is permanently wrong with you. They are patterns. Patterns can be unlearned.
This time of year, I also see a surge in exercise — people trying to “earn back” a holiday meal, or manage their anxiety about a changing body by pushing harder and harder at the gym. There is a real and important difference between healthy movement and exercise addiction, and the line isn’t drawn by how many minutes you spend working out. It’s drawn by why you’re there. Are you moving because it feels good, or because you’re afraid of what happens if you miss a day? Have you kept training through pain your orthopedist told you to rest? Have you skipped a holiday meal with your family because a workout had to come first? I have sat with people managing very real orthopedic injuries — stress fractures, joint damage, cartilage worn down well before its time — that trace directly back to a relationship with exercise that stopped being about health a long time ago. An orthopedist can treat the injury. My work is helping someone understand what that injury was protecting them from having to feel.
Here is what I want every person reading this to know, whether you see yourself somewhere in these paragraphs or you’re worried about someone you love: recovery from emotional eating is not a life sentence of white-knuckling your way through every holiday table. It is not something you manage forever, quietly, from the sidelines. Over the years, I have helped many, many people make real, lasting peace with food — to the point where a holiday meal becomes just a meal again, where a scale or a mirror no longer gets to decide the shape of someone’s day, and where they are genuinely living, comfortably, in the body they want to be in. That peace is attainable. And it is permanent — not because the old patterns can never show up again, but because once this work is done, you have what you need to meet them, sit with them, and let them pass.
Yom Kippur, at its heart, is a day about teshuva — about return. Recovery asks for the same thing. It is a return to trusting your own hunger and fullness, to trusting your body, to trusting yourself. If this High Holiday season feels heavier than it should, I would be glad to talk with you. I work with individuals, couples, and families, and I run support groups as well, with offices in Midtown Manhattan and Highland Park, New Jersey, and teletherapy available for those who prefer it.
Wishing you and your family a healthy, peaceful New Year.
If you or someone you love is struggling with food, eating, or body image, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders Helpline is free and confidential: (866) 662-1235.