Hello there! I just got my esteem account activated and I really can't wait to get in the thick of things which is why I'm sharing this piece.
Back then when I was in high school, I always dreamt about having Esther's legs, Tony's eyes and Anne's hair. But I liked my skin, my hair, and my eyeballs, but everything else had to go. Then in my 20s, I dreamt about slicing off pieces of my thighs and arms the way you carve a turkey, certain that if I could cut away what was wrong, only thr good parts-the pretty parts, the thin parts would be left. I believed there was an end goal, a place at which I would arrive and forevermore be at peace. And since I also belived that the way to gey there was by judging and shaming and hating myself, I also believed in diets.
Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a food terrorist, a lunatic. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful relaxed human being.
Although the very notion that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to relaxation is absolutely insane, we hynotize ourselves into believing that the end justifies the means. We treat ourselves and the rest of the world as if deprivation, punishment, and shame lead to change. We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation. Our deeply ingrained belief is that hatred and torture work. And although I've never met anyone-not one person-for whom warring with their bodies led to long-lasting change, we continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we will prevail.
But the truth is that kindness, not hatred is the answer. The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value, and possibility. To change your body, you must first understand that which is shaping it. Not fight it. Not force it. Not deprive it. Not shame it. Not do anything but accept and-yes-, Virginia-understand it. Because if you force and deprive and shame yourself into being thin, you end up a deprived, shamed, fearful person who will also be thin for ten minutes. When you abuse yourself (by taunting or threatening yourself), you become a bruised human being no matter how much you weigh. When you demonize yourself, when you pit one part of you against another-your iron-clad will against your bottomless hunger-you end up feeling spilt and and crazed and afraid that the part you locked away will, when you are least prepared, take over and ruin your life. Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand. Without a foundation, the new structure collapses.
Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first. With understanding, inquiry, openess. With the realization that you eat the way you do for lifesaving reasons. I tell my people that there are always exquisitely good reasons why they turn to food.
