Food, Sex, and Shame, Part 1
Both food and sex are vital for sustaining life yet are often fraught with complex emotions and struggles.
In the first of a two-part conversation, Dan and Rachael invite you to explore these deeply personal topics with curiosity and compassion. While we’ve previously discussed shame, food, and sex as separate issues, today we’re diving into their powerful connection—and why it matters.
Both food and sex are not just about survival; they can also offer comfort, pleasure, and a sense of belonging. From our earliest moments in the womb, these embodied experiences shape our understanding of safety, love, and connection. Yet, many of us know all too well the tension that surrounds them. Cultural messages, systemic oppression, and personal trauma can leave us feeling overwhelmed or disconnected from these vital parts of our humanity.
Our hope is that this conversation reminds you: your relationship with food and sexuality is part of your broader story—a journey toward healing and wholeness. As you listen, we invite you to reflect on your own experiences with tenderness and grace, knowing that you are not alone in these struggles.
Please note that this episode contains discussions of sexual development, sex, body image, and disordered eating, and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Related Resources:
- Listen to our past 4-part series, “Food and the Body.”
- Check out the “Compared to Who” podcast episode with Dr. Dan Allender, hosted by Heather Creekmore: Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Episode Transcript:
Dan: Rachael, I had a sweet conversation doing a podcast on the new book and this lovely woman, I had listened to her podcast before, Heather Creekmore, who has a podcast called Compared to Who, and she does a lot of work on eating, body image. And she asked me a question at pretty much the end of our interview about how much shame there seems to be with regard to sex and food, and asked me to spend a few minutes talking about that. And I don’t know why, at least in my mind, we’ve not done a conversation. We thought, we’ve talked about shame, we’ve talked about sex, we’ve talked about food, but not the three together. So let’s just say, is this a sort of trigger warning I’m offering? I doubt it, but at least for our audience to know, it’s really a very important topic because when I think about the reality of my life, let alone the clients I work with, there often is an intersection of shame with regard to those two realities of our way of being in the world. So as we launch, I’m so curious what your thoughts are as we begin this discussion.
Rachael: Well, yeah, I mean, ultimately when you sent me the email… Hey, what do you think about having a more comprehensive conversation on shame and sex and food? I thought, absolutely not. I don’t want to have that conversation. And I had to kind of pause, go, yeah, I felt the like, oh, that’s like wading through a swamp with the amount of shame, the amount of assault, the amount of systemic evil realities, and then wildly the ways that intersect with our bodies and stories in really particular ways. So yeah, there was something in me that was like, oh yeah, this feels like an important conversation. I don’t want to do it. Let someone else do it.
Dan: Why don’t you just do it by yourself, Dan?
Rachael: Yeah, you can just go solo on that. You just have that one with yourself. But I’m here. I’m here.
Dan: I think as we at least orient our listeners to our own ambivalence, therefore connecting that there may be some degree of ambivalence on your part to hear two podcasts actually, because the way we’ve framed it is it’s important to know what the war is without any, shall we say, effort to create a kind of, it doesn’t have to be this way, but that’s how we enter into this. It’s huge, it’s important, but there’s such potential hope involved, but it also requires, can we talk about why there is such a war in this intersection of our sexuality and the issue of food? And I know from one standpoint, obviously sex and food is our primary means of how we sustain and perpetuate our beings. It’s kind of like already having to name that it’s where life begins and virtually every day when we break our fast, breakfast, and we start a day in one sense with the necessity for nourishment to sustain life. Now whether you’re doing intermittent eating or not, you’re still going to eat at some point, even if there is a regularity of fasting, it is not turning away from food, but beginning to engage a deeper desire that indeed food wakens. And again, we do not live on bread alone, as we know, bread becomes such an important category for life sustaining, but also as a metaphor for so much more. And so when we say it sustains and perpetuates our very life, it’s both the fact of it, but also what it represents in a larger sense.
Rachael: Absolutely. It’s also like sex and food, apart from just being necessary for both birth and sustenance are also ways in which we get to receive comfort and soothing of our bodies. And I see even in your language, I think about the ways you’ve taught me from the womb, not just someday down the road, but in the very womb.
Dan: I remember having a conversation with a woman who was a physician, OBGYN, and again, the context is less important than the conversation itself. And she was talking about how many people don’t fathom that their in utero child is actually largely through the process of gestation, taking their fingers to what brings a degree of comfort. And I’m like, what are you talking about? And she said, well, aren’t you aware that all children either have their fingers in their mouth because there are more nerve endings in your mouth than any other part of your body except, and I had that sense of what, no, no, no, no. Don’t tell me that my child was masturbating in the womb in preparation for the discomfort and exit and then entry into a fallen world. And I’m like, well, it makes sense. We have more nerve endings in our penis or clitoris and in our mouth, in our taste buds than any other part of our body. Nothing awakens the intersection of dopamine and pleasure, but also a sense of, again, the bonding biochemical oxytocin, but as well the intersection was serotonin, and that is our mood biochemical. So our body not only needs the sustenance to be able to move into being and life, but we needed comfort and we needed soothing. Frankly, we needed pleasure even in the womb. So when we begin to actually go, yeah, no, there already is a whole lot of life intersecting our primary sexual body parts and our mouth in terms of food. That became something clearer. But I think it also opened up that it becomes a window into eternity, meaning today, but also for the forever. How does that land for you?
Rachael: Yeah, I mean, honestly in a very nerdy way, where it takes me is the research we did on Sabbath, but for specifically Heschel and his work on Sabbath, talking about a practice for eternity and with Sabbath primarily being around feasting and food, but also sensuality and pleasure and this sense of rest and play and co-creation. We know, I mean, it’s what we’re created for. If we go back to our origin story, as James was talking about in our conversation last week, it’s part of how God created us and intended this kind of union and this feasting and this way of being together that is incredibly embodied and bodily.
Dan: So deep at that interplay of to become one flesh is a reality of the movement of leaving your father and mother, of uniting in a way that bears the intersection of words, how we speak, how we engage, but also becoming one flesh is a not only procreation and pleasure, but it is a symbol in some ways. It’s a sensual engagement with the Trinity’s love for one another, union, what it means to have Christ within you, the hope of glory. So when we begin to have a category that evil’s not fond, not fond of union, if its name is Diabolos, that is the one who scatters, who divides, if its name is Satan, that is the accuser, then we can presume that union, that pleasure of connection where we do not lose our identity, our sense of individuality, our difference. Yet there is something that in the movement of sexuality becomes a new creation, a new creature. And in that new creation itself, it may be a poor parallel, but all parallels are, shall we say, in some sense impoverished as we talk about the trinity. But there is that union difference. There are three in one, and yet there is a one. So we’re really meant to indeed see the pleasure of our sexual play as not just an enjoyment, though it is, but also a entry into what we cannot in our own left hemisphere comprehend, but we can perhaps sensually experience in some way. And I think the same with regard to the banquet, food being, I think whenever I think of the banquet, my first thought is Psalm 23. When you think about food, I’m curious, when you think about scripture, when you think about the warp of Hebrew Bible to New Testament what images come for you.
Rachael: Well, two, certainly. He’ll prepare a feast for me in the presence of my enemies. And again, we have such an individualistic mind frame. We often picture ourselves at a table alone in the presence of our enemies, but a feast involves community and connection and togetherness. But I also think about the Eucharist and I think about the body and blood of Christ and this feast that the followers of Jesus are invited to, which is quite absurd to feast on God’s body, to take in God’s body as a way of sustenance and having empowerment to follow Jesus. So certainly that’s what, and then I think if I’m thinking outside of the text, I think about my Italian family and how central the table is to family life and to rituals of connection and celebration, holidays. And I think that’s true for most cultures of people. Even if the nature of the table or the food, the types of food or the rituals of gathering, even if they are different, there is this centrality of feasting on the table as a core part of being human.
Dan: Well, there is in one sense, in naming those two, and that would be my two as well, the Psalm 23, but also the Eucharist and the fact that when Jesus suggests that you will need to eat my body and drink my blood in John 6, many disciples at that point departed. It was too, shall we say egregious, too incomprehensible to think about the implication of what he’s inviting us to. But it’s one of the reasons I will love the Luke 22 passage with regard to Jesus saying that it’s both remembrance but also anticipation. In other words, he’s saying, I want you to eat this meal so that you’ll remember, but also so that you will have a category for anticipating what’s ahead. I think the primary beginning point to all this is no wonder this is a war zone.
Rachael: That’s right.
Dan: And if sex isn’t a war zone for you, well welcome. You actually probably never had to exit Eden. And if food is not an issue, remarkable. But I think there is for many, many people a sense of which there’s a war with food and a war with sexuality. And I love the fact that you have that image of the sweetness, the wildness, the glory of what you’ve described, at least of the intensity of taste and conversation, at times, even conflict amongst your Italian family. I think of it unfortunately within the narrowness of an only child with deeply troubled mother and a very passive father. And so the image of food, it’s interesting that in the context, friends are now reading The Deep-Rooted Marriage and now talking with me about what they knew of me but also now know more as a result of reading the book. And I had dear dear friends say to me, we did not realize the war you’ve had with food, but we’ve always known you’ve had a war with your body with regard to food. And we’ve just never made, in one sense, the linkage between, gosh, like Becky would say, how many different, not just diet, but how many different ways of trying to approach food have you had over a lifetime? And it’s like madness, just looking at the debris of body image, the debris of eating has this long, long history with food. How would you say that for yourself?
Rachael: Yeah, it’s a great question. In many ways, my war with food is more trauma related. I mean, it’s all trauma related, but more the sense that my body does not digest food well, and it hasn’t since childhood because of what we’ve learned about the ways in which the body is why our gut and our nervous system, how connected they are. So I feel like certainly I’m much more of an emotional eater than I ever thought in the sense that I really look to certain foods to give me dopamine, and when they’re not available, I can feel my mood shifting. But where I also go is, so I have chronic heartburn, and for a long season of life, I had chronic constipation. So just like a disordered way of my body receiving food. But you have to keep eating anyway. And so that feeling of a breakdown, and I think where I also go is it can be so easy for us to come to this thinking about our bodies as the starting place of this war. I think it’s the battlefield. But when we’re talking about evil, we’re talking about very, I think so many people because of what we’re going to get to with shame, they hear this conversation and they immediately go to all the places where we struggle, where some might even see us, where we sin when we’re talking about sex and food, where we are failures, where yeah, we’re just bad people or we just have addictions and all those things. They are a part of the story. But when we look at the structure of our world, whether it’s food scarcity, food hoarding, food toxicity, living in a food desert where you only have access to junk food that’s affordable because you don’t have a vehicle, and it’s like there’s so much injustice. There is a systemic reality of evil that is oppressive when it comes to food. So that’s in the atmosphere, but how is it colliding with our stories and our family of our developmental trauma as we grow and develop how our bodies are metabolizing? So I don’t say that to make it too overwhelming, that can feel overwhelming. But I do say that for those of you that are listening and automatically going to a place of shame and contempt, I just want to invite a pushing back a little bit of that judgment, like a loosening of the shame to be like if we’re talking about something that evil hates, and in some ways parts of ways in which our body are familiar with the war are the site of the battleground and how that impacts our relationships, we’re not just talking about our personal failures or our personal shortcomings.
Dan: So important to hear that there are systems set up perhaps not in the sense of, ‘they’re evil,’ but systems set up to create a structure of repetition of return in a kind of addictive cycle. I mean, we know this, it’s been well documented that, for example, our cell phones create a kind of dopamine arousal just at the thought of opening, let alone opening them. We know that game creators and others know there are addictive processes, and they’re using that as a means of having you return, therefore bring the advantage financially to the creators. It’s one of the, shall we say, brilliant structures of capitalism that you have to return and use obsolescence is built into almost everything because we have to sell more, not critiquing, I’m just saying the phenomena is very much a part. So we know as well.
Rachael: I also think it’s okay to critique
Dan: Totally
Rachael: Exploitative systems.
Dan: Oh, absolutely. I’m not wanting quite to say…
Rachael: Not to say they’re all that.
Dan: Well or that the makers originally in a kind of satanic, I want to rule the world through getting you to buy another bag of Fritos. Yet the other hand is that with regard to sexuality, and certainly with regard to food, we certainly know it arouses senses, it creates desire. And in that, the easiest and most intense forms of arousal come through this interplay of in one sense of the word destructive food and pornography and certainly arousal structures that create a fantasy that for at least some alleviate hunger while also increasing desire, therefore a greater sense of starvation. So all we’re saying at the beginning is, dammit, this is a war zone, and it has to be heard that it isn’t just those who struggle with eating disorders, or again, I want to say, I dunno, anybody who has what I would call just a holy body image, but all that to say food and how our bodies experience food and the aftermath, let alone sexuality. When we start talking about the obvious statement of sex sells, I mean, it’s just been a line presumed as the basis of drawing people into the metabolization of desire. So this ground of sex and food, I think we’ve established well enough is a freaking war zone. What’s your sense of as we move to the topic of shame in this realm?
Rachael: Well, I think you’re the person who said this in my notes. It’s just in many ways, shame is the currency. Shame and contempt are the currency of evil. Certainly other degradation. There’s tools, but this is what the return on investment is. And I just think about how shame ultimately invites us to turn our face away from God, from each other, and even from ourselves, just this deep sense of my experiences of where I have experienced the most profound shame. It’s literally the visceral feeling is if I could find a way to disappear, to evaporate, to cut a hole in the ground and fall through it, to not be seen, but to not exist, right? There’s such a death dealing power to shame. And again, we’re talking about the shame that comes through violence and abuse and oppression and harm and really ultimately sin. And yeah, so I think about the body that these food and sex, again, are so central to our bodies. And yeah, I mean everything we put words to. So I feel like actually a lot of grief as we step into talking about shame and I feel the rattling of my own places, which is probably why I had a lot of ambivalence about not wanting to have this conversation.
Dan: And again, we’ll step into it with the reality that if you’ve escaped shame with regard to your body and food or your body and sexuality, it is more than likely that what you have done is become, to a degree shameless, that you haven’t so much healed or recovered because the grief you just put words to, I think is indicative that we still struggle. But there has been enough movement that you are not stultified, not shut down, but you’re actually able to feel that sense of loss for what it has brought. I know as Becky and I talked about sexuality in this particular podcast, and she was saying just the simple sentence when she said, are you going to talk about how sex has changed as we rise into the realm of being truly senior citizens? And I’m like, no. Why? Such a strong response? Well, I’m grateful for our play, but our play doesn’t hold the same capacity, same level of pleasure, same level of meaning. It’s like getting up in the morning. I don’t bound down the stairs in the way that I might have in my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, maybe even sixties. And in that same sense, there isn’t the same freedom. There is a greater sense of joy because it’s a greater struggle than it was ever before. But having to enter into change regarding sexuality, and that sexuality changes when you obviously move from the beginnings of a marriage into your first children, then the changes that come as you move into perimenopause, and then as you move into all sex changes and every season of life. And yet, how often do we, for example, how often have we addressed this in our podcast…
Rachael: Or even in our trainings?
Dan: So when we begin to allowing ourselves to enter into, oh my gosh, with shame and that sense of exposure of something raw, naked and bad/wrong. So you can’t even find language to tap into what’s experienced in the body when shame is there. When I overeat or when I mishandle food or drink, there is a sense of which there is an effort to fill, but in the effort itself, it exposes the emptiness. So when any food or sex becomes a means that I would use the word idolatrous when it becomes a means by which I really am trying to replace the first commandment, trying to replace the fundamental stance of existence of I have a hunger that will never be met fully until I’m with him. Yet that hunger is really met even now to be a bonding, a connecting with others, being able to eat in the case of my marriage, a intersection of our bodies, that even with their frailty is meant to bring a sense again, of not just pleasure but anticipation. So all that to say, it’s so much easier to just give into judgment and to contempt…. Well, isn’t that pause interesting? Isn’t that pause interesting? What was happening for you in that quiet few seconds?
Rachael: Well, I actually think because of what you were sharing about aging and sex, it was actually opening up new, and you mentioned perimenopause. Nobody talks about perimenopause or menopause. That’s not something we get to talk about as women from public platforms unless you’re a doctor or, so I think it was more new categories of places where I actually am wrestling with shame and heartache that I haven’t had the time and space to put language to. So I think I wasn’t traumatized, I just was more, yeah, new realities were opening up of places to be curious about, or places where maybe I’m under judgment and have contempt that I haven’t been as aware of or where I’m wrestling with shame that are new. They’re new territories. I mean, you’ve listed a whole bunch of things and I’m like, yeah, I have a two and a half year old and I’m likely entering perimenopause. So there’s a collision of things that are also like, okay, yeah, that’s a lot. That’s a lot. So yeah, I mean it’s back to so much of what I think we long for is, is there one thing we will we ever be free? And your sense of there will be a hunger in us for wholeness until we are with God that is unmet and there is more freedom for us. There is more healing for us. There is more, as you said, joy and anticipation. So I wasn’t feeling like, oh no, I feel despair now. I just was thinking, oh, I’m never really going to arrive at a place where whatever hard won freedom I’ve tasted is like enough for tomorrow.
Dan: Well, one of the benefits, and we know this of just having the privilege of having a conversation like this, is that Becky asked prior to our doing this, whatcha going to talk about, oh, sex and food? And because it’s been for us particularly food such a war, she’s like, are you going to talk about the baked potato? And I’m like, I’ve talked about the baked potato before. And I’m like, but are you serious? We’ve got to have a conflict over whether a baked potato is actually done or not. And to know that even moments where after 48 years of marriage, our sexual desire is hardly ever equal at the same time. And just the disparity of when she is more amorous and I’m like, I’m tired, or vice versa. And you just go, why couldn’t there be a baked potato that’s fully done on both sides in the way we wish? Or there’s just an absolute equal desire for sexual congress and, given the disparity of desire, I don’t think evil is unaware of that, and particularly knowing that these have been so, and I use the word symbolic, but even that feels too theoretical, but they hold for us the banquet our bodies were meant for. They hold the union that we’re meant for in that sense of when you see him, then you’ll be as he is. But holding that and being able to go, well, this has been a war zone in my twenties and thirties and then beyond. I won’t go through each decade. Why would I be surprised? It’s in the seventies that it continues to be a realm in which we struggle. But the bigger struggle, and I hope this is what people are hearing, isn’t the fact that we struggle, but the power of shame to actually bring you to a kind of invisibility or you shield yourself with the power of contempt against yourself or the other. And in that, we’ve got to disrupt the power of shame and contempt in these specific areas and that’s what we want to launch into next week.
Rachael: Stay tuned.