

# Skinny Thinking

# Workbook

# Skinny Thinking

# Workbook

### Five-Minutes-A-Day

### to Permanently Heal Your Relationship with Food, Weight & Your Body

### Laura Katleman-Prue

### Cave of the Heart Publishing

### Cave of the Heart Publishing

ISBN: 1449991548

### Copyright © 2009 by Laura Katleman-Prue

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author and publisher.

### CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1: FREEDOM IS POSSIBLE 1

A Word of Caution 4

My Story 5

The Ego and Essence in the Battle of the Bulge 14

Bringing Awareness to Eating 19

2: THE FIRST STEP: WISE FOOD CHOICES 23

The High Price of Using 36

Healing Food Addictions 40

The Secret! We've Got It Backwards! 50

The Weight Loss Starts! 60

Negative Beliefs About Eating Nutritious Foods 64

Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Food Choices 68

Chapter Summary 71

To Do List 73

3: THE SECOND STEP: WISE EATING 75

Breaking the Trance 76

Pretending Not to Eat 77

Eat When You're Eating 78

Losing Weight with Reasonable Portion Sizes 80

Another Secret: Making Friends with Hunger 82

More Wise Eating Habits 89

Losing Weight Using the Second Step 96

Inquiry to Dissolve Resistance to Wise Eating 98

Chapter Summary 100

To Do List 100

4: THE THIRD STEP: WISE THINKING 103

Seeing the Whole Picture 105

Eating When You're Not Hungry 112

Kung Fu for Cravings: Powerful Weight Loss Tools

Kung Fu for Emotional Eating: Busting the Diet Buster!

The Thought Diet 128

How Conditioning About Food Is Created 131

Relationship with Food 134

Pleasure 139

Letting Go of Romanticizing Food 141

Dieting from the Ego vs. Essence 143

Chapter Summary 149

Eating Guidelines and To Do List 151

Questions and Answers 154

5: THE FOURTH STEP: WISE EXPRESSING 157

Swallowing Your Feelings 158

It's Just Conditioning 164

Addictions: The Ego's Way of Avoiding Feelings 165

Speaking Your Truth Instead of Stuffing It 170

Wise Self-Expression: Healing Low Self-Esteem 177

Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means...(Negative) 180

Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means...(Positive) 185

Wise Responding 189

Wise Expressing 197

Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Responding,

Wise Expressing, and Emotional Eating 199

Chapter Summary 202

To Do List 204

6: THE FIFTH STEP: WISE RELATIONSHIP WITH

THE BODY 207

The Birth of a Core Belief About the Body 210

More Weight Means... (Negative) 216

Less Weight Means... (Negative) 219

Inquiry for Negative Beliefs About the Body 224

A Writ of Body Attachment 227

A New Relationship with the Image in the Mirror 237

The Miracle of Acceptance 243

Honoring Yourself 249

Chapter Summary 253

To Do List 255

APPENDIX A: Support 257

APPENDIX B: Meditation 258

##

# ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

Any wisdom in these pages, comes from the "deep wells" I call my teachers, specifically Gina Lake, Theo, Stuart Schwartz, Pamela Wilson, Mooji, Michael Regan, Neelam, Adyashanti, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Nirmala, Dorothy Hunt, Ramana Maharshi, Robert Adams, Krishnamurti, Yogananda, and Nisargadatta. Last but not least, I would like to thank those I have not called teacher but, nevertheless, have had a profound impact on loosening the ties of identification with the ego: my husband, my ex-husband, my daughter, our dog, my parents and sisters, my friends, and the greatest teacher of all— life. I bow to all of you in deep reverence and gratitude. I hope that in some small measure this book will serve the freedom of those who read it and put it into practice.

# INTRODUCTION

Straining to read the barely legible scrawls from my own recovery journey with food one day, I decided to create a workbook, to spare readers a similar struggle. View this workbook as a roadmap, a way to document your healing journey. Sometimes it's hard to see progress, challenging world of food addiction.

Your workbook is healing support, a way for you to remind yourself to bring new awareness to the experience of eating and life in general.

If you haven't read _Skinny Thinking_ (for women) or _Lean Thinking for Men_ , pick one of them up, read it and reread it until The Five Steps become second nature. The workbook isn't a substitute.

For the quickest and easiest recovery, fill out the Workbook as you're reading. Skinny Thinking and Lean Thinking for Men are the bible and the workbook is an adjunct, a personal food journey diary to support you as you learn about the Five Steps.

### How to Use this Workbook

Please go through the book sequentially at first and begin to put The Five Steps into practice and make them your own in a way that fits for you. You may decide that you would rather implement The Third Step first and end with The Second Step. Or you may find that you want do them all at the same time! The best guide for how to proceed is your own inner knowing. Although, for me, a few of the steps took root simultaneously and overlapped, the steps are presented here in the order that I used to become free from my eating obsession.

Because everyone is different, we all operate on different timetables. You may be able to master The First Step right away, while your friend takes three months to complete it. And she may master The Third Step right away, while you take longer. The important thing is that you learn about the steps in order because the understanding that goes with this new relationship with food is cumulative and sequential.

At the end of each chapter, you'll find a "Chapter Summary" and a "To Do List" to help support your new relationship with food and your body. Use the "Chapter Summary" as a quick reference guide to solidify and reinforce your new understandings and perspective. Use the "To Do List" to help jumpstart your healing by putting these action steps into practice right away.

Support is key in this journey. Get hooked up with a buddy through the Facebook Fan Group: SKINNY THINKING! By Laura Katleman-Prue. Then, log onto the Skinny Thinking website: www.SkinnyThinking.com to sign up for the e-newsletter and the free weekly conference calls to help support you as you heal. Check out the website calendar for Laura's Skinny Thinking Workshop schedule.

# CHAPTER 1

# Freedom Is Possible

###

Yes, it is possible to be free from obsession with food and bodyweight! It is possible to live without worrying about what you will eat next, whether it will make you fat, or whether you'll have the willpower to eat in a way that keeps you from busting out of your jeans. It is possible to free yourself from the food addiction that causes a myriad of health problems, including weight gain. It is possible to live without measuring your self-worth by the vicissitudes of the bathroom scale. It is possible to leave this seemingly insurmountable source of suffering behind.

The subject of this book is seeing the whole truth about food and what's been going on in your relationship with it. No matter how long you've been struggling with food, you don't have to take this issue to your grave. You can free yourself of it for good. All you have to do is follow The Five Steps.

In the upcoming pages, you'll see how your thinking has led to an overblown relationship with food and this relationship is the root of your weight issues. You will discover that romanticizing food leads to overweight, and looking in the mirror from your ego's perspective reinforces body-identification and causes suffering.

Thankfully, there is another way: moving out of ego-based thinking and into the Wise Witness. This way of being sets you free and leaves worries about weight in the distant past.

###

## The Ego and Essence in the Battle of the Bulge

The epic battle enacted under the guise of the battle of the bulge is the struggle between the ego, that negative chatterbox in our heads, and Essence, the spark of divinity within each of us. It's the suffering caused by this battle that moves us to break free from our unconscious patterns and conditioning and instead live in our natural state of Essence. In this state, we experience the peace and joy available in each moment and that can never be taken from us. This is the battle: resistance versus acceptance; the ego versus Essence; self-delusion versus the evolutionary impulse for Truth; the ego's small sliver of truth about food and the body rather than the whole picture.

### The Villain

In our struggles with overweight, the ego in the form of the Relentless Critic is the judgmental voice inside our head, berating the way our body looks, telling us: "Your gut is too fat." "Your legs are too skinny." "You're out of shape." "You need to look like the images you see in the media—young, handsome, and cut." "You'll never attract the kind of relationship you want unless you get into better shape."

When it comes to food, the ego, in the form of the Pleasure-Seeking Child, causes us to gain weight by telling us things like: "You've been working so hard and deserve a slice or two or three of cheesecake." "You should live a little and give yourself a treat." "Eating a bit more won't hurt even though you're already full." "You've had a lousy day, so why not make yourself feel better with a little Pleasure Food?" "Indulge now and worry about tomorrow, tomorrow."

The ego is a lot of things, but it's no fool. To stay employed, it invented the never-ending "build-a-better me" project. Here's how it works: the ego creates your eating problem by tempting you to use Pleasure Food to as a treat, cajoling you to eat a few more bites, even when your stomach is bursting. Then, it has the unmitigated gall to shame and castigate you over the weight gain it caused! The coup de gras comes as you're berating yourself for overeating, looking to escape the misery of a belly that overflow your jeans, the ego rides in on a white stead, offering salvation—a new diet to rid you of your excess weight and become the sexy hunk you've always known you could be. It declares that you still have a chance to win the love and attention of the perfect partner and live a happy life. Just when your storybook ending is within reach, it rears its ugly head again, enticing you with momentary pleasure from high-taste food.

When eating your fill of Pleasure Food results in unwanted weight gain, the ego derides you for letting yourself go, having no willpower, and getting fat! What nerve! Finally, after beating you to a pulp and causing your self-esteem to plummet, the ego comes to the rescue by offering you a surefire plan to get thin again: the latest and greatest diet and fitness regimen to get your body into great shape. When you predictably fall off the wagon due to its incessant luring, "you know who" will be there to chastise you and then offer salvation—and you're off and running again.

As you can see, the ego really knows how to keep us busy and distracted. We can become so caught up in trying to hurdle its eating and weight-loss obstacles that we don't realize that it's causing our suffering. Once we stop listening to the ego and doing its bidding, we immediately experience the pure joy of just being. This pure joy of being is exactly what the ego wants to keep from us because once we discover we don't need it to be happy, it's out of a job. We take our power back and choose, instead, to rest in the peace and contentment that's available in every moment in the natural state of Essence. The more we do this, the easier it is to heal our eating issues and lose weight.

### Our Hero

Now that we've seen the villain in our story, it's time to meet our hero. Essence is our true self, what we were before we started listening to and believing in the ego. It's that internal place of calm and serenity that we've all visited in moments when the mind is quiet. Think back to a time when you've felt completely at peace. That delicious feeling is Essence. Even though we may not be aware of this consciously, each of us touches into it every day!

We can see Essence clearly in the innocence and openness in babies and animals. I'm not suggesting returning to the pre-egoic state but, rather, that if we want to experience life from a delightful place of openness, wonder, and curiosity, we have to relearn how to connect with Essence, shedding what no longer serves us so that our natural state of radiant happiness shines through.

Connecting with Essence means entering the thought-free state. Although meditation is the most common way to move out of the mind, it can happen anywhere, anytime, as long as we're not caught up in thoughts or feelings. We can be noticing the clock on the wall, the leaf floating in the breeze, or our hand as we turn the page.

Any information that comes to us from the senses, unfiltered by thoughts, takes us to Essence. If we are to break the habit of listening to the negative mind, the habit that's responsible for our food issues, we have to cultivate a new habit of moving into the thought-free state, ideally for at least 10-15 minutes every day. For more tips on meditation and connecting with Essence, see Appendix B.

## Day 1 – Five Minute Freedom Exercise

The following exercise helps you get in touch with the emotional, physical, and spiritual cost of your eating and weight issues and the freedom you will feel once you you're your back your power over food:

Freedom Exercise

_Close your eyes and get in touch with the impact of food and weight issues in your life. What have they cost you mentally, emotionally, and spiritually? How have they impacted your relationship with yourself and others? Have they kept you from following your heart and going after what you've wanted?_ _Write down any insights below._

_Now imagine how your life would be if you felt free and relaxed around food. Imagine that it no longer absorbed your mental energy. You no longer feel powerless or afraid, but aligned, balanced, centered, and confident. How would you live? How would you treat yourself and others? Imagine all of the energy that you used to devote to worrying and thinking about food flowing into creative and fulfilling endeavors in your life. How does your body feel? Notice any emotions or sensations that arise. Use this exercise as often as you can, even once a day, to support the permanent change you're making in your relationship to food._ _Record any insights below:_

This exercise demonstrates the benefits of living free of a food issues and helps you see the cost of keeping addictive foods in your life. This seeing will enable you to make more conscious eating choices rather than listening to the mind's lies, which tempt you to act out cravings. Ask yourself, "What is my freedom really worth?"

Emotional, physical, or spiritual costs _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________The benefits of freedom _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________-

# CHAPTER 2

# The First Step: Wise Food Choices

###

"Wise Food Choices," The First Step, means getting most of your calories from healthy, nutritious, whole foods like fruit, vegetables, seeds, nuts, grains, and meats or vegetable protein— _eventually_. What do I mean by "eventually"? This is your life and your process. Because everyone is different, you'll be making those changes on _your_ timetable, going at the pace that feels right for _you_. For some people, that will mean cutting out most junk food cold turkey right now! And for others, it will mean giving up or limiting Twinkies six months from now. But if you're asking for my advice: the sooner you start implementing the First Step, the easier and happier your life will be.

Making wise food choices means eating with health in mind—eating foods that make sense for the optimal functioning of your body. It's common sense, really. Every day, you'll want to make sure you get protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats from whole, unprocessed food like vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and lean meats or vegetable protein. Ideally, each meal should be balanced in this way, too. Any easy rule of thumb is: food is grown, junk is made.

You don't need to be rigid about this, though, so please don't turn this habit into another stick to beat yourself up with. The body is adaptable, and it's okay to eat for pleasure sometimes as long as _eventually_ most of your calories are nutritious calories. (If you're not sure how to eat healthily, read a good book on nutrition or visit a nutritionist. I recommend Eating Well for Optimum Health by Andrew Weil.)

## The High Price of Using

When we're about to indulge a craving, we only see one side of the coin. All we can think about is pleasure, and we deliberately overlook the other ramifications—the pain, sluggishness, and weight gain. The price we pay for seeking pleasure through unhealthy, entertaining foods is not only in compromising our physical health, but also in the emotional and mental energy we put into our relationship with these foods.

When we crave and overeat Pleasure Foods, we don't see the whole story. We focus on the momentary pleasure we get, without recognizing the unwanted impact this behavior is having in our life. _It's a short-term pleasure, a fleeting experience that carries a very high price._ We don't consider the negative consequences of our choice to eat Pleasure Foods _because a pleasure-seeking principle takes over and overrides the rational process and doesn't allow us to see the whole picture—the whole truth about empty foods._

##

## Why Listening to the Body Doesn't Work

Listening to our body to decide how to eat doesn't work these days because we're eating the wrong foods. The messages from a body that's addicted to junk are simply not a reliable guide to healthy eating. The stuff we're eating was created to entice us to eat, it throw off our taste buds and our body's signals for hunger and satiation.

Look at the foods that are available now compared to what pioneers had—chicken, sweet potatoes, and corn. They were satisfied by those whole foods. But this is not the same world, and the foods we eat these days are addictive and not satisfying.

The truth is: as nice as the idea sounds, we really can't talk to our bodies. Although our bodies have some unconscious input into our eating—like when my girlfriend was anemic during her pregnancy and dreamt of liver sausage, but as far as picking up the phone and dialing into our bodies and asking for guidance about what to eat—we can't do it. We can't communicate with the body directly on a conscious level. If you want to know what to eat, the best strategy is to learn which foods are healthy, educate yourself about portion size, then go into the rational mind and use it to create a balanced meal.

To begin to get your power back and establish a healthy, rational relationship with food:

  1. Stop listening to your body and,

  2. Heal your food addictions.

Here is a food matrix listing many of the Pleasure Foods that can keep you struggling with your health and weight:

Food Matrix of Pleasure/Comfort Foods

Physically & Emotionally Addictive | Emotionally Addictive

---|---

 |

Food made with sugar and/or chocolate such as: | Salty fried foods:

Bakery goods | Potato chips

Ice cream | French fries

Candy | Fried chicken

Chocolates | Salty foods:

Soft drinks | Pretzels

Milk shakes | Popcorn

 | Starchy foods:

 | Bread

 | Pancakes

 | Waffles

 | Grits

 | Salty fatty foods:

 | Butter

 | Cheese

 | Nuts and nut butters

 | Hamburgers

 | Hot dogs

 | Fatty starchy foods:

 | Pizza

 | Quesadillas

Although you probably already have a good idea what foods are emotionally or physically tied in, it's helpful to clearly identify them for yourself. Begin by asking yourself the following questions, filling in the blanks with "celery":

  1. Does the prospect of eating ______ make you giddy and excited?

  2. Do you have a hard time limiting how much you eat of _____? Can you easily eat just one bite and stop?

  3. Does eating ______ or having it around make you feel powerless and out of control?

Did you answer "yes" to any of the questions? That's hard to imagine because people generally don't get addicted to celery, carrots, Brussels sprouts, or spinach; they get addicted to junk. Although everyone has particular food fetishes, most tend to fall into the "junk" category, rather than the "food" category.

When a food is emotionally or physically tied in, you crave it and feel giddy and excited around it. Sometimes you experience powerful urges, a frenzied compulsion to find and eat it, not five minutes from now but right now! Your addictive foods are the ones that you look forward to eating and often eat past satiety because you enjoy the taste. They're also the foods you turn to when you're looking for comfort, a treat, or an escape from uncomfortable feelings.

Rarely able to eat just one bite, you feel impotent and weak willed around them. Stressful thoughts about your relationship to addictive foods undermine your self-esteem and cause even more destruction by triggering your conditioned pattern of eating them when you're upset.

## Day 2 – List your comfort foods(Five Minutes)

  1. Using the Food Matrix of Pleasure/Comfort Foods above, identify your pleasure or comfort foods.

  2. Ask yourself the three questions about them.

  3. List your comfort foods in the space below:

  4. Appreciate yourself for completing this exercise.

**_** _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## A Mature Relationship With Food

Our conditioning creates an overblown relationship with food causing us to see it as our lover, our friend, and our fulfillment. As a result, we think we need it to be happy. It's important to understand that we've been relating to food in a conditioned way, because in seeing that, we can begin to develop a more rational relationship to eating. When our conditioning comes up, we can see it, and say to ourselves, "Oh that's just my conditioning—believing that food is treating me and giving me something special. But the truth is: it isn't."

Just because you're grown-up and there isn't an adult telling you when to stop doesn't mean you can eat whatever you want and not pay a price. If you want to permanently solve your weight and food issues, you need to develop the adult inside of you, or that Child's going to just keep going after the treats.

Most of us experience having a more mature relationship with food when we're on a diet. In this case, the diet book becomes the parent. But until you integrate that parent, you'll go back to your old ways as soon as the diet's over. You have to build a relationship with your own inner Parent, which is your own inner wisdom, or the Wise Witness. The Wise Witness is an aspect of Essence that has always been there, but you may not have noticed it because you were so busy listening to the Child—your conditioning. The Wise Witness is that objective place within you that is able to choose to follow your conditioning or not. The more often you align with the Wise Witness, the easier it becomes to make the wise choice. The spiritual aspect of your healing around food is developing the sense of yourself as this Wise Witness, the objective, true self that sees the whole picture and isn't buffeted by conditioning but can choose whether to indulge or not.

### Treating vs. Eating

The two reasons we might overeat even a healthy food are:

  1. To nurture ourselves or

  2. To stuff our feelings so that we become numb to them.

In both cases, our conditioning has been triggered either by an external event or by our own negative thinking, and with this triggering comes a great opportunity to become free from this conditioning once and for all. Our most limiting conditioning is made up of painful beliefs we formed in childhood to protect ourselves. Not only do these beliefs no longer serve us, they keep our natural happiness from us. If you have a habit of using food to sooth yourself when you're anxious, upset, or uncomfortable, you can interrupt that pattern and allow yourself to feel the feelings you've been avoiding. In the upcoming chapters, we'll explore a number of ways to release conditioning and help you redefine your relationship to food.

There are two ways to approach eating: 1) from the Pleasure-Seeing Child (our conditioning), which is part of the ego, or 2) from Essence, our true Self. Whenever we're eating to fill a psychological need rather than a physical need, we're identified with the ego, or the Child. Essence on the other hand, encourages actions that support the optimal functioning of the body, so it probably wouldn't move us to overeat when we've had enough.

Here are some examples of how the Child tries to get us to eat when the body isn't hungry:

  * I love this taste. I want more of it.

  * I'll be hungry later if I stop now.

  * That tastes really good. Just a bite or two more won't hurt.

  * This is healthy, so I can eat more of it. So what if I'm not really hungry anymore.

  * I've been good; I deserve that second dessert.

  * I'm bored. What can I eat now?

  * I should be hungry now. It's dinnertime, so I might as well eat something.

Or if we have overindulged, the Critic berates us with harsh judgments such as:

  * You know you shouldn't have eaten that; now you'll gain weight.

  * You are such a glutton.

  * It wasn't enough to eat some of that; you had to go and eat the whole thing!

  * You're insatiable.

  * Eating like that is a sin. Repent or God will send you to hell.

  * You'll never get the body you want this way, and then you'll die fat, unhappy, and alone.

The secret to being able to stop eating entertaining food is to _stop wanting it_. Well, duh! Forgive me for stating the obvious. It's reasonable to posit that if you didn't _want_ to eat entertaining food, you couldn't overeat, and you couldn't get fat. The tricky piece is: how do you stop wanting these Pleasure Foods, particularly when you are in the habit of eating them? In fact, _the more you eat them, the more you want them_ , and the more you want them, the more you eat them. It's a vicious circle.

How do you escape? Pay close attention: _you can only stop wanting entertaining foods by not eating them._ This is completely counter-intuitive. We're used to thinking, "Gosh if I stop eating this food that I love, I'll feel deprived, and want it all the more." This is true if you cut out entertaining foods temporarily, but—and this is a big "but"— _if you decide that those foods are no longer in your life, you stop thinking about them._ And if you stop thinking about them, you stop craving them, and if you stop craving them, you stop eating them, and—wonder of wonders—you lose weight!

The take home message is: _thinking is everything_! It's the key to our cravings and the key to our entire experience of life. _Without thoughts about food, we have no food issues, and without food issues, we have no weight problem._

### Taking Our Power Back Over Food

Why would we do something as irrational as eating food that has no nutritional value? The answer, of course, is: it tastes good. We crave the taste, so how do you stop wanting what you want? The simple answer is that you can't. You can't push against desire because you're always too late. The desire happens, and then you wish it hadn't. Wishing always comes after the fact.

The only way to stop wanting a food is to decide that it's no longer in your life because then you stop thinking about it and, if you're not thinking about it, you can't desire it. Here's how that would look: You're walking by a bakery with a friend. She wants a cookie and asks if you want one too. You respond, "You go ahead. I don't eat cookies anymore."

### The Upside: You're Not Really Giving Up Anything!

Once you give up the Pleasure Foods that throw off your taste buds, healthy foods taste so delicious! You get at least as much pleasure from eating them (if not more) than you ever got from eating the Pleasure Foods, but without the addictive relationship!

The reason abstaining from Pleasure Food works is because you haven't eliminated the pleasure of eating; you simply _eliminated eating food solely for pleasure._ That's a big difference! Even if you eliminate all of your favorite foods (and I'm by no means suggesting that you do that), you will still get pleasure from eating because food tastes good, and even healthy food is pleasurable to eat.

### But I Will Feel So Deprived!

Ask yourself, "What is it that will feel deprived if I give up an addictive food—my body or me?" Is it true that my body will feel deprived? Or is it more true that I'm fantasizing about having a certain taste experience? The truth is that bodies don't feel deprived, egos do—the Child does. Deprivation is a conditioned idea that the Pleasure-Seeking Child has talked us into time after time—so many times, in fact, that we've actually come to believe it. The Child tells us that we're feeling deprived and that we deserve two slices of chocolate mousse cake and a hot fudge sundae. It uses the idea of deprivation as an excuse for overeating, and we comply. The body, on the other hand, could care less. It eats whatever is in front of it. It's the Child that says, "Hey, you're depriving me."

Deprivation is a conditioned idea that tells us we should be able to expect certain taste experiences because we've had them in the past and we're accustomed to them. Because we're used to having dessert, we come to expect it, and when we don't have it, we tell ourselves the story of "being deprived" and get in a tizzy about it.

Is the body really deprived without dessert? The body needs a certain number of calories, vitamins, minerals, and a healthy balance of protein, carbohydrates, and fat. If we're giving it these things, it's not deprived. Deprivation is a lie that comes from the Child. It's how we characterize the Child's tantrum when it's not getting its desire for Pleasure Food met. Once you see this, you're onto the ego's game, and you can't be tricked into believing in or following the lie. You're no longer attached to getting pleasure from Pleasure Food. When you're free from the attachment to this desire, you still enjoy food, probably as much, if not more than before, but the difference is that _you don't need to get pleasure from a particular food at a particular time_.

### You Can Still Have Treats

In transitioning to healthier foods, it's helpful to identify a few foods that you don't have an addictive relationship with that you consider treats. Find foods that you don't want to keep eating. But if you find that you can't stop eating them, eliminate them—that is if you want to be free of the addictive relationship.

When I want something a bit more interesting than protein, grains, and fruits and vegetables I eat: low fat baked blue corn chips, small amounts of cheese, whole-grain bagels (although I don't keep them in the house), ice-cream (that I make using carob and bananas instead of chocolate and sugar), brownies (that I make using bananas and carob instead of chocolate and sugar), popcorn, toasted whole wheat pita pockets, organic peanut butter, raw almonds, frozen fruit (grapes, dark sweet cherries, oranges, bananas), dried unsweetened apples or pears, and muesli (that I make myself). The key is: I can eat them in moderation because they don't make me feel out of control.

## The Weight Loss Starts!

Weight loss is a "tortoise and the hare" race. There are no brownie points for being quick off the starting mark; it's about going the distance and getting a body that you'll like for life, not just a few weeks. You probably already know how the hare does things because you've been a hare and done that.

Cementing in The First Step—Wise Food Choices—avoids this pitfall. Let's get started so that you can begin experiencing better health and the other benefits of weight loss. Everyone is different, so start to make changes in your diet in a way that feels right for you. Remember, you're creating a lifestyle change, one that you'll keep for the rest of your days.

The end goal is to be eating mostly nutritious, healthy, whole foods that are grown not made. When you make eating this way a habit, you'll be amazed at how easy and satisfying it is. Your reward for making this change is twofold: 1) a healthy body that stays at a natural weight without struggle and 2) freedom—you don't have to struggle and suffer over feeling out of control around food.

This book is not about imposing rules. It's about developing the ability to see the whole truth of what's going on when you're eating something so that you can determine for yourself which foods you're okay with and which ones you aren't.

Once you cut one thing out, you'll see that it's not difficult to do. When you eliminate something, you stop thinking about it, which means you stop desiring it, and you don't suffer. Desire equals suffering. The very definition of desire is: wanting something you don't have. When you don't completely eliminate a food from your diet, you don't banish it from your thinking. And thinking about food is where all the trouble starts.

  1. If you're a big junk food eater, _start by eliminating_ _one junky item_. For example, if you like having a Coke, fries, and a cheeseburger for lunch, start by cutting out the fries. (In the beginning, don't sit near someone who's eating them if you can help it!) See how this feels. You might miss fries for the first few days, but then notice how easy it is _not_ to eat them. If a thought about fries arises, ignore it. Don't pay attention. Think about or do something else. Pretty soon you'll notice that you don't even think about them anymore, do you?

Once you discover how easy it this is, try eliminating the next item. When you feel ready, move on to the Coke. And after that, try eliminating the whole category of fried foods.

You don't have to make these changes overnight. There's no hurry because we're talking about a new way of eating for the rest of your life, a new relationship with food, not just a diet.

Or

  2. Cut out most of the junk, if not all of it. This strategy makes most sense if you are not a big junk food eater. I was able to take this step because, at the time, the only real junk I was eating was sugar and chocolate.

If you're beginning to heal your food addictions, it's very possible that you're already starting to lose weight. In the first year after I gave up sugar and chocolate, I lost ten pounds without even trying! One reason this can happen is that you may find that the foods you have left, after giving up your addictive foods, are a little less sexy and harder to overeat.

Don't worry if you haven't started to lose weight yet. Everyone is different. The next chapter, which introduces The Second Step, Wise Eating, will help you see lower numbers on the scale.

Let's move on to your beliefs. Here's your chance to uncover any negative beliefs you may have about eating mostly healthy, nutritious foods.

## Day 3 – Moderate or Eliminate

## (Five Minutes)

  1. Decide which foods to moderate (make a rule about that you can stick to)

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  2. Eliminate foods you haven't been able to moderate.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  3. Create a rule for a food that you want to moderate

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

  4. Actually eliminate a food. (or two or three) Trust me. You can do this and you'll be amazed how easy it is and feel compelled to thank me and send me expensive gifts afterwards!

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

## DAY 4 – Uncovering Negative Beliefs About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods

###

You may be surprised to discover the negative beliefs you have about making wise food choices. As you read, circle any that ring true for you.

What It Means About My Character

  * I don't know how to enjoy food or other pleasures.

  * I'm a "cold fish."

  * I'm no fun.

  * I'm "holier than thou."

What It Means to Others (Friends, Family, Colleagues)

  * Others will judge me as:

  * Controlling

  * Arrogant

  * Cold and clinical

  * A party pooper—no fun to be around

  * Someone to envy

  * Someone who is trying to show them up and make them feel less than

  * Someone they love to hate and gossip about

  * Pretentious

  * An example of how not to live

  * Too perfect

  * I'll lose all my friends, and my family won't want to be around me either.

  * I'll be able to maintain a normal weight, and I'll appear different to others because of it. They'll feel distant from me, as if they don't know me anymore.

What It Means About How I Live My Life

I eat to nourish my body, and that means:

  * I'll be miserable living without the pleasure I get from my favorite foods.

  * I won't have any pleasure in my life.

  * I'll stop socializing because people will be uncomfortable that I'm no longer using eating as entertainment.

  * I'll be lonely.

### Negative Beliefs About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods

What It Means About My Character

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About How this Body Processes Food

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to Others (family, friends, colleagues). How Do I Think They're Judging Me?

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About How I Live My Life

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Career

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## DAYS 5-7 Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Food Choices (Five Minutes/Day)

This section is pivotal to healing. It's your chance to take the beliefs you've uncovered to inquiry, a powerful tool I discovered by studying The Work by Byron Katie. Inquiry helps you see that what you've been believing is the root of your food and body-image suffering.

Are the painful beliefs you circled reliable? After all, whether you admit it or not, you've been living life as though they are. I've come to see that no thought is big enough to hold the whole truth. At best, a thought is a partial truth, a perspective, or point of view. If we have enough presence of mind and detachment from our thinking to question whether a negative thought is true, we can diffuse its power.

The power a thought has over us is only the power we give it. Chances are that if you're suffering, you're believing a thought that's not true.

Go back to the food beliefs you just circled along with any additional beliefs you found, and take as many of them to inquiry as feels right. Then, see what happens to your assumptions about your life and your relationship to food. Let's get started. Ask yourself these two questions about your negative beliefs:

  1. Is it true?

  2. Is the opposite as or more true? Find examples to support the new positive belief.

Here are some examples:

**Disturbing Belief:** **Eating mostly healthy food means that I won't enjoy eating anymore. I'll be miserable.**

Inquiry:

  1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** Eating healthy foods means that I _will_ enjoy eating, and I will still experience happiness and pleasure in life. **Could this be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence for this?** I can't know how healthy foods will taste to me after my taste buds readjust. It's very possible that I will enjoy eating as much, or even more than before. The bottom line is that I can't know the future. There are plenty of times when I'm engaged in what I'm doing and really enjoying myself without food—like when I go for a walk on a nice day or listen to great music. I know that my life can still be pleasurable without the experience of eating certain foods.

**Disturbing Belief:** **Junk food is my only source of pleasure.**

Inquiry:

  1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** Junk food is not my only source of pleasure. **Could this be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence for this?** Just feeling alive is pleasurable! I get pleasure from seeing the sunset, seeing a baby, seeing a cute dog, taking a hot shower, reading a good book, sleeping soundly, listening to music I like, or doing things that are aligned with my life purpose. There are so many other ways I get pleasure that I didn't even realize!

Also, if junk food were my only source of pleasure, I would be happy to sit down alone and just eat. But I don't do that. I eat while I'm watching TV or reading. In fact, I never just eat! If junk food were so special to me, I wouldn't need to entertain myself in other ways while I was eating.

Finally, I can't know how healthy foods will taste after my taste buds adjust. I might find that I enjoy them just as much as I ever enjoyed the junk.

## Day 5 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  1. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  2. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  1. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  2. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  3. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 6 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  1. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  2. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  1. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  2. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  3. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 7 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  1. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  2. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  1. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  2. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  3. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Wise Food Choices Check-in

Phew! You made it. You got through The First Step. Now, be honest, was it really that bad? Piece of carrot! Right? What I mean by "you got through it" is that you read about and are considering making some of the changes I suggested. Perhaps you are beginning to introduce more whole, healthy foods (that are grown) into your diet and eliminate some junk food.

Don't be discouraged if your diet isn't healthy yet. You have a history with junk food that probably spans many years, and some of those foods are emotionally tied in. Don't get discouraged if The First Step takes months or even years for you to fully complete! Take whatever time you need to create this new lifestyle. It's not a race. It's a new way of eating and living that brings you freedom and peace of mind, not to mention a worry-free, slimmer body.

## Chapter Summary

  * Food is grown, not made.

  * Most people are hooked on Pleasure Foods.

  * Food delights four of our five senses.

  * We're programmed to love food.

  * Eating a lot of Pleasure Foods has trained our taste buds to desire them.

  * Eating mostly fast or processed food has meant that we've been choosing taste over health.

  * When we're about to indulge a craving, we're focused only on the pleasure and blind to the other ramifications of this choice—the discomfort, sluggishness, weight gain, and the psychological suffering, such as shame, self-castigation, and low self-esteem.

  * We put a tremendous amount of emotional and mental energy into our relationship with Pleasure Foods.

  * The double whammy is eating junk and not having the room or the desire to eat healthy, nutritious foods. The cost of the double whammy is that the body misses out on the healthy calories, and it has to expend energy to get rid of the junk.

  * Listening to the body doesn't work if you're eating the wrong foods because they throw off your taste buds and your body's signals for hunger and satiation.

  * When you give up all junk food, there are still plenty of healthy foods that you can use as treat foods.

  * When you stop eating junk food, your taste buds change, and the healthy food tastes better than the junk ever did, but without all of the negative side effects.

  * The best way to stop wanting junk food is to stop eating it.

  * It's much harder to keep eating addictive food than to stop eating it.

  * If you're addicted to a food and can make a rule about it and stick to it, you can keep eating that food.

  * You can never be free of an addictive food by eliminating it temporarily.

  * If you hope to eat an addictive food again someday, you'll continue to fantasize about it.

  * If you decide to abstain from a certain food, you can't be wishy-washy about it. You have to be resolute that this food is not in your life anymore.

## To Do List

Check off the tasks you've completed:

  * I created a list of Pleasure Foods.

  * I asked myself the following questions about each one:

    * Does the prospect of eating this food make me feel giddy?

    * Does it have little or no nutritional value?

    * Can I stop eating this? Am I satisfied with eating one bite or does this food always leave me wanting more?

    * Do I feel out of control around it?

  * If I answered "yes" to any of those questions, I limited or eliminated the food.

  * I handled food addictions by either:

    * Finding a strategy I could stick to or,

    * Eliminating the food for good.

  * I limited or eliminated a junk food.

  * I limited or eliminated most junk food.

  * I made a list of foods that are no longer in my life.

  * Most of my calories now come from healthy, nutritious, whole foods that are grown.

# CHAPTER 3

# The Second Step: Wise Eating

###

. Eating is a skill you already have in spades. Understood.

The intent of this chapter is to teach you to eat _wisely_ , from a place of balance and calm rather than in a frenzied, out of control, mechanical, or can't-get-enough-of-this-heavenly-substance-called-food way. If you put The Second Step into practice, it will teach you new ways of eating that will guide the course of your weight loss and serve you well for the rest of your life. It will teach you how to first recognize and then neutralize the Pleasure-Seeking Child's weight loss sabotaging tricks, while deftly dodging the Relentless Critic's whip as she tries to flog you into shape.

If you've read many books on the subject of weight and diet, some of these steps may not be new to you, but please keep reading anyway. I'm talking about a new approach and even exposing some problems with some of the current diet prescriptions, which keep people floundering and stuck. Although I'd read most of the books about weight and diet and thought I knew everything, there were gaping holes in my understanding, which was why I was still struggling with my weight and heavier than I wanted to be. So please don't skip over any of this chapter because you think you already know what's in it.

If stressful thoughts come up about wise eating, be sure to jot them down and question them in the inquiry section so they don't take you off course. Also, tick off the checklist at the end of this chapter to make sure you're following the wise eating tips. If you do this, you'll be well on your way to making The Second Step your own. Good luck and have fun!

## Breaking the Trance By Taking a Break and Slowing Down

Many of us go "zombie" when we're eating and become completely unaware of how much we're actually consuming. Without knowing it, we can end up shoveling in food like an energizer bunny in a carrot patch. Anything we can do to interrupt and bring awareness to this pattern is helpful.

Personally, I like to stand up and walk around a bit. If I'm at a restaurant, sometimes I go the ladies room, even if I don't need to, just to break the trance.

Another helpful strategy is to put your fork down between bites. When I go unconscious, I can get into a pattern of loading up my fork for my next bite while I'm still chewing the previous one. In other words, I'm on automatic, chain eating without pausing. To counteract this, I literally stop, put my fork down, and take a few breaths before continuing with my meal.

Many of us have a habit of racing through meals. When you do this, it's easy to lose track of how much you've consumed and to overeat. Make a conscious effort to eat in slow motion and take time to chew your food. When you're very hungry it's especially important to eat slowly to avoid buying into the story that you're hungry, so it's okay to eat a lot of food and eat it fast. It's amazing how many calories can go in when you're eating fast! And don't forget, you don't enjoy your food as much when you're eating fast.

## DAY 8 – Slowing Down (Five Minutes)

Today, particularly if you're a speed eater, slow your eating way down. Put down your fork in between bites, or get up and walk around during the meal. One way to do this is drink your food and eat your drink. What I mean by this is chew your food so completely that is liquefies and spend so much time drinking that each sit is like taking a bite of food. You spend so much time drinking that it's as if you're actually chewing each sip.

As you go through your day, try to do at least one of the following during each meal or snack. Going forward, continue this practice each day:

#### Checklist

  * I put my fork down in between bites.

  * I put my fork down for at least a minute at least twice during the meal. Instead I focused on the conversation at the table. I listened to someone else without taking up the slack by eating.

  * I got up and walked around to create a break in my eating action.

  * I chewed my drink.

  * I drank my food.

  * Congratulate yourself for making a change in your routine.

## Nibbling Pretending Not to Eat

There's an unspoken rule that "nibbling calories" don't count. You can eat a lot of food when you're not paying attention.

One of the tricks of the Pleasure-Seeking Child is the belief that if you're not paying attention, it doesn't count. It's denial. But to the body, it counts. The body notices, and to it, nibbling calories count like any others.

I got into the habit of eating and talking on the phone or cooking. I spend a lot of time on the phone for work, and since I work from home and do most of the cooking in our family, I'm constantly in the kitchen, I'm always on the phone, and I'm always cooking.

The other thing about nibbling was that it robbed me of eating pleasure! Because my attention was elsewhere, I couldn't completely enjoy the food or focus on my phone conversation or cooking because my attention was divided, and that was unsatisfying. To overcome this habit, I had to make a rule: nibbling and cooking, and nibbling and the phone don't go together.

I also decided to eat _only when I was sitting down and put my food on a plate._ At first, being used to nibbling, I would constantly catch myself reaching for a bite. Sometimes I would catch myself before the nibble crossed my lips and sometimes not. Slowly but surely, the old habit gave way to the new one.

## DAY 9 – A Non-Nibbling Day (Five Minutes) (Skip this if you're not a nibbler )

Today, make a pact with yourself not to nibble. Any time you want to eat something, park your rear end in a chair and put the food on a plate. Continue you this non-nibbling practice for life.

#### Checklist

  * I didn't nibble today.

  * I put all my food on a plate and ate sitting down.

  * I wasn't able to avoid nibbling so I tried again the next day and the next day after that until I was able to go an entire day without nibbling.

## Bringing Awareness to Eating

To align with Essence, we need to continually bring our attention back to _awareness_ by asking ourselves, "What is aware of what's happening in this moment?" It should come as no surprise, that _awareness_ is key when it comes to healing our crazy relationship with food. When we're aware, rather than listening and paying attention to our thinking, we're aligned with Essence, and the ego has no power over us.

For years you may have been overeating because it's how you learned to comfort and take care of yourself when you were feeling tired, stressed, bored, lonely, or angry. Even as a child, overeating to get happy and stuff uncomfortable feelings may have been your way of loving yourself. Now you see that this way of caring for yourself doesn't serve you and creates suffering rather than happiness and comfort.

An important part of this process of freeing yourself is discovering what food means to you. What is the emotional connection you've created with food?

If you overeat for emotional reasons and want to heal this pattern, it's paramount to notice whether you're actually present when you're eating. It's easy to become hypnotized by the rhythmic motion of your fork or get lost in thoughts or emotions with little or no attention on how much you're putting in your tank. No wonder it's easy to gain weight! Eating without being present is like pumping gas blindfolded from a tank with no automatic shut-off. Neither has a good outcome. One brings a messy gas spillover, the other, a belly spillover.

###

### Asking for Help

How can you become more present, particularly if you've had a lifelong habit of going unconscious around food? Set an intention and ask for help.

Ironically, those of us who love food, give it a lot of our attention, and see it as central to our happiness are not very aware when we're eating. We find ourselves eating quickly or while doing something else, such as driving, talking on the phone, watching television, or reading, so the experience of eating isn't as satisfying as it could be.

Begin by bringing awareness to the whole process of eating by getting curious about it: When and why do you decide to eat something? What are your eating triggers? How are you feeling while you're eating? Are you engaged in the sensual experience of eating, or is your mind somewhere else, engaged in problem-solving or ruminating over a frustrating experience?

## Day 10 – Five Minute Awareness Tips

  1. **Ask for help.** Set the intention and ask for help in bringing awareness to your eating. Be prepared for insights to arise. When they do **write them down in the space below.**

  2. **As you go through your day, notice your eating triggers and record them in the space below.** How does eating happen for you? How do you decide when and what to eat? Start to notice your eating triggers. What are the emotions and thoughts that send you racing toward the fridge? When you're bored, is your first impulse to get some food? **Your thoughts.** What are you thinking about? Are you anxious about paying your bills? Are you replaying an uncomfortable conversation from earlier in the day? **Your feelings.** What are you feeling? Are you stressed, anxious, angry, or fearful? Does the life you're living suit you? Are you doing what you love to do? If your overall choices aren't right for you, you're going to feel depressed, and that depression will fuel your food issues.

  3. Appreciate yourself for completing this exercise.

**_** _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Losing Weight Using Reasonable Portion Sizes Rather Than Listening to Your Stomach

To reach a healthy bodyweight, we need to re-educate ourselves about portion size. One of the main reasons people are overweight is that they have a skewed idea about how much they can eat and stay at their desired weight. _The portions we imagine we can eat are much larger than what we can actually eat_ without gaining weight. How did this happen? Restaurants. Because of humungous restaurant portions, we've been conditioned to expect and only be satisfied by large portions. It comes as no surprise that _eating large portions means weight gain._

If you're overweight, chances are you have an issue with portion size. To overcome this, find out what an appropriate portion size is for you rather than accepting the heaping platefuls doled out in restaurants. Find out the number of calories you can eat to maintain a healthy weight and translate that into food choices and portions sizes. (If you don't know about calories, pick up a pocket calorie counter at your local bookstore or supermarket.)

For example, find out what the portions look like in a 400-500 calorie meal and use that as a guide to help you eat more reasonable amounts. If you go out to a restaurant, look at the portion your server gives you. Is it reasonable? If not, don't eat it all. Only eat the amount of food that you decide is appropriate for the body size you want.

If I know a restaurant serves large portions, I either ask to split the entrée with someone or ask the server if I can get a smaller portion. When I receive a larger portion than I need, I either move the food I don't plan to eat to the other side of my plate or transfer it to another plate during the meal and then take it home in a doggie bag.

Listening to the body's satiety signals and using them as guides for knowing when to stop eating doesn't work well. Waiting to stop until your stomach registers as full isn't a good idea. Many diet books suggest listening to the body to get a handle on weight issues, but this strategy has never worked for me.

The body isn't very good at knowing when to stop. If it were, there wouldn't be so many obese people. Although the sensations in your stomach might be a gross measure of whether you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they don't tell you when to stop. Decide how much you're going to eat ahead of time, and _let portion size rather than whatever your body is telling you determine how much you eat_.

If you're tummy rumbling hungry, that's a trustworthy sign and you can know that it's time to eat a meal. But when you've already eaten, using _the feeling in your stomach is an unreliable gauge_ for knowing how much to continue to eat or when to stop. Sometimes the more we eat the hungrier we feel!

Assuming you can rely on your stomach to tell you how much food to eat is one of the main misconceptions people have about food. Judging from the feeling in their stomach, people often think they're still hungry, so they eat more. Yet the feeling of satiation doesn't register right away, and for some of us, it never registers. Some people feel a bit hungry most of the time.

## DAY 11 – Paying Attention to Portion Size (Five Minutes)

  1. **Portion size.** Become aware of how much food you're putting on your plate. Is it a reasonable amount? Many of us are used to eating portions that are much larger than we need. Here are some rules of thumb:

  * A normal portion of protein is the size of your closed fist.

  * Fill your plate this way:

  * One quarter of your plate for protein,

  * One quarter of your plate for grains, and

  * Half of your plate for vegetables.

For Breakfast:

  * Did you eat reasonable portion size of protein?_______

  * Did you eat a reasonable size of fruits or vegetables?_________

  * Did you eat a reasonable portion of grains?__________

For Lunch:

  * Did you eat reasonable portion size of protein?_______

  * Did you eat a reasonable size of vegetables?_________

  * Did you eat a reasonable portion of grains?__________

For Dinner:

  * Did you eat reasonable portion size of protein?_______

  * Did you eat a reasonable size of vegetables?_________

  * Did you eat a reasonable portion of grains?__________

For Snacks:

  * Did you eat reasonable portion size?_______

  * Did you eat reasonable portion size?_______

  * Did you eat reasonable portion size?_______

## Eat When You're Eating

If food has been your drug of choice, you've used to it to numb out. That's been your habit. To get free, you need to create a new habit of being present to the experience of eating—to "eat when you're eating." It's rare for people in our culture to just eat—we're either driving, watching television, talking on the phone, having a conversation, or reading. But sitting down and experiencing each mouthful of food as it leaves our fork—now that's radical!

See if you can stay awake while you eat. It's not that I'm expecting you to nod off and swan dive into your soup! Just see if you can stay in the present moment, experiencing the sensations of eating rather than escaping into thought. In other words, "eat when you're eating."

Whenever I _just eat_ without doing anything else, I notice that the ego calls this "boring." It wants to rush the experience and actually looks at more food as a burden!

The story: eating is "boring," is opposite to the story the Pleasure-Seeking Child tells when it wants us to overeat. At those times, it tells us how wonderful the food will taste and distracts us from what is happening in the moment so that we will imagine the sensory pleasure of eating something delicious. But when it comes right down to it, the ego isn't interested in the sensory experience of food. It only wants to eat if it can do something else at the same time and distract us from the present moment.

## DAYS 12-15 - Eating When You're Eating (0 Minutes)

You've made it to day twelve! Congratulations! You deserve a freebie. So here you go:

Take stock of whatever else you're doing when you're eating. You're eating anyway, right? So in fairness, this exercise shouldn't count in your daily minute total. Are you driving, surfing the internet, watching television, or having a heated discussion? For five minutes each day, during a meal or a snack, just eat—without any other distractions. Continue this practice going forward. It really doesn't take any more time, just a commitment to becoming more aware. Record your experience below.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## DAY 16 - Are you Hungry? (Five Minutes)

At the onset of an uncomfortable sensation, many of us look to food to feel better. Rather than asking ourselves what we're feeling and needing in the moment, we make a beeline for the fridge. But unless we ask ourselves the question, we'll never know what's really going on with us physically, emotionally, or spiritually. We insert the food and then wonder why we don't feel better. Innocently, we thought we'd addressed the body's need or the uncomfortable emotion only to find that we're right back where we started from.

After a Skinny Thinking Workshop, many participants emailed me that they were about to reach for food and instead stopped the action and asked themselves if what they were feeling was truly hunger. Discovering that they weren't actually hungry, but thirsty instead, was a watershed realization. Afterwards, they wondered how many times they'd mistaken thirst for hunger.

Just for the heck of it try this experiment: the next time you think you're hungry ask yourself if it's really true.

  1. Ask, "Am I hungry right now? Or is it possible that I'm thirsty, tired, upset or excited instead?"

  2. When you're about to reach for food and it's not time to eat ask yourself, "What am I really hungry for right now?" "Will food fill the emptiness or discomfort I'm feeling in this moment?" You'll be amazed at how many times food isn't what you want after all!

## Making Friends with Hunger

Okay. I can see you bristling. Relax. I'm not asking you to subsist on a celery stalk and a lemon wedge and be ravenous and miserable all the time. And, you need to know that to maintain a natural, healthy weight, most people need to learn to tolerate some hunger before eating a meal.

Hunger's a good friend that's been given a bad wrap. If you let it, it can help you lick your weight battle for good. Now let's explore whether it's possible to welcome some hunger. Can you allow it to be there for a short time, rather than immediately sprinting to the fridge the minute you notice you're no longer full?

In fact, many of us have forgotten what hunger feels like, equating it with not being full anymore. This isn't hunger. Hunger is the tummy rumbling, the slightly uncomfortable sensation that goes with having an empty stomach. If we allowed ourselves to get genuinely tummy-rumbling hungry a few times a day, our weight problems would disappear.

Any negative feelings and beliefs you may have about hunger are an opportunity to become free from them through inquiry. Somewhere along the way, you may have concluded that hunger should be avoided, and now go to great lengths to prevent it, including packing in food ahead of time just in case you might be hungry later!

Begin by abandoning the notion that _you know_ about hunger because thinking we know about something closes off new possibilities. Then, get curious about the experience of hunger. Compare your beliefs about it with the actual experience. Like everything else, hunger comes to leave, not to stay. Welcome it and see what it _actually_ is, as opposed to what you think it is.

## DAY 17 – Listing Your Fears and Beliefs About Hunger (Five Minutes)

The consequence of not being willing to embrace hunger is living with a heavier body. Maintaining a normal, healthy body size means learning to live with some hunger. If you're not comfortable with this idea, you can look at your beliefs about it. Perhaps you're giving it more meaning than it deserves. Does it stir up fears that you're not going to survive? Ask yourself to allow any unconscious ideas about hunger to rise to the surface

To help these ideas surface, ask yourself why hunger is so frightening or uncomfortable. What are your beliefs about it? What will happen if you let yourself get hungry? List your fears and beliefs about hunger:

  1. What's the worst that will happen if you let yourself get hungry? _(I'll feel faint and light-headed and be short tempered with everyone. I feel out of control when I get hungry.)______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  2. What will happen to your body if you let it get hungry? ( _If I wait till I get hungry, I'll lose all self-control and binge like a crazed savage. It's not healthy to let myself get too hungry.)_ ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Comfort and the Ego

Comfort is one of the ego's main requirements. In our society, we think we're always supposed to be comfortable and as a result, when we encounter the slightest discomfort, our immediate response is to try to change it.

Yet, like it or not, learning to tolerate some hunger is part of maintaining a healthy weight. Some of us can't remember what it feels like to be hungry. Consciously or unconsciously, many of us have created a strategy to pre-empt tummy growling by eating all day long. This may be part of an overall life strategy of pleasure-seeking and pain avoidance. Playing with hunger is a great opportunity to become your own science project. Get curious and see what happens when you interrupt your conditioned feeding response and actually allow the presence of some hunger into your life.

The Exceptions

Although a general rule of thumb is to eat only when you're hungry, there are a few exceptions:

  1. Eat when you're hungry only _if it's also when you've decided to eat_. If you've been overeating on a regular basis, it's important initially _not to follow the dictates of your stomach_ because overeating has thrown off your appetite, and you need to readjust it to what is more normal before you can trust your hunger. Your stomach sensations are unbalanced in proportion to how unbalanced your relationship is to food. You may think, "But I'm so hungry," but you've trained your body to be hungry frequently by feeding it often. In this case, it's helpful to come up with an eating plan that provides a reasonable number of calories for you to either maintain your size or lose weight.

  2. Many of us also confuse hunger and thirst and think we're hungry when we're actually thirsty, and as a result, are chronically dehydrated. When you think you're hungry take a moment and ask yourself if this is really the case. Ask if you could be thirsty instead.

  3. Finally, many of us confuse being ill, tired, or bored with being hungry. In other words, we interpret any experience of discomfort as hunger. Ask yourself if you could be coming down with a cold, fatigued, or bored instead.

## Day 18 – Experimenting With Hunger (Five Minutes)

When we're identified with the ego and seeking pleasure or avoiding pain or any uncomfortable sensation, one way to overcome our fear of hunger and regain our power over food is to play with hunger. Devote a day to experimenting with it by allowing yourself to get hungry before each meal or snack. Once you notice you're hungry, wait 30 minutes or an hour before eating. When you do this, you may notice that the hunger comes and goes, and the most uncomfortable feelings don't last. If you ignore them and don't fulfill them right away, they turn into other sensations that are easier to live with. At some point, hunger sensations level off, rather than getting worse and worse.

It's helpful to see that it's not a problem _not to eat_ even when you're very hungry. Unconsciously, there can be a sense that we have to eat right now because we're hungry. But hunger doesn't make food imperative at that moment because the body is adaptable. You can choose what and when to eat rather than following the dictates of your stomach.

Another benefit is that hunger resets your taste buds to appreciate healthier food, and this helps The First Step to take root: switching from eating junk to healthy food.

Hunger, like everything else, passes if you don't get involved with thoughts about it that create stress and negative emotions. If you just allow hunger to be present and even welcome it, it loses its power over you.
Record you experience of hunger. Compare the actual experience of hunger to your beliefs about it. Were your beliefs accurate? Was being hungry horribly uncomfortable?

Beliefs:____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Actual Experience: ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 19 - Replacing Negative Thoughts About Hunger with Positive Ones (Five Minutes)

While you're experimenting and beginning to experience some hunger, notice the thoughts that arise. Are they positive or negative? Do they tempt you to go to the refrigerator or pull into a fast food restaurant? It's natural to want to alleviate hunger because our conditioning around it has been so overwhelmingly negative.

One of the fastest, easiest ways to release negative ideas is to replace them with positive ones, like we did in the section on self-esteem. Here are some positive thoughts to help you counter the ego's negative commentary:

  * Hunger is good.

  * Hunger is normal.

  * Hunger is helping me reset my taste buds and metabolism.

  * Hunger is easy to tolerate.

  * Hunger is healthy.

  * Hunger is welcome here.

  * Hunger is freeing me.

  * Hunger is helping me to see the truth.

  * Hunger is helping me to reach a healthy bodyweight.

  * Wow! I experienced hunger and I lived!

  * The body is designed to get hungry before it eats.

Negative Thought

___________________________________________________

Positive Replacement Thought

___________________________________________________

Negative Thought

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Positive Replacement Thought

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Negative Thought

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Positive Replacement Thought

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Negative Thought

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Positive Replacement Thought

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Negative Thought

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Positive Replacement Thought

___________________________________________________

Negative Thought

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Positive Replacement Thought

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## More Wise Eating Habits

### The Scale: A Great Weight Loss and Maintenance Tool!

Contrary to the advice of many books on eating and weight issues, it's more than okay to take your bathroom scale out of storage. It's a must. I used to be afraid to weigh myself because I didn't want to know the truth. If I suspected that I'd gained weight, stepping on the scale, would confirm my suspicion and wreck my day. If I weighed less than I expected, I was afraid that I would break my diet and overeat to compensate for the unexpected boon of being lighter, and then I'd suffer over that! There was no way to win! For me, the scale was always the harbinger of bad news.

The ego doesn't want us to weigh ourselves because it doesn't want to know the truth. Incidentally, this is not only how it deals with food and weight—but with all of life! It wants to pretend it can do whatever it wants without accountability. And the scale is accountability.

Weighing in once a week is one thing, but don't take weighing to the other extreme either. You'll make yourself crazy if you try to weigh yourself constantly. Weighing after haircuts and nail clippings is definitely over the top!

Everyone is different. So, for example, if you are cutting your calories by 100-200 per day and losing one pound a month, it's probably best not to weigh yourself more than once a month. But for most of us, weighing every week is fine. It's really the best way to tell if your diet is working.

"What about the jeans test?" you query anxiously. The problem with using the fit of your jeans to monitor your weight is that jeans tighten up after washing and stretch after wearing, so the results vary. The jeans test leaves room for doubt and, goodness, how the ego loves wiggle room! It revels in it. "Maybe I gained weight and maybe I didn't. Who knows? My jeans are still loose after all!" After you've lost all the weight you want, continue to weigh yourself so that you know, rather than speculate, about how much you weigh. That way the pounds can't creep back surreptitiously.

The scale can be a great friend, helping you to monitor your weight so that you don't gain more than a few pounds before you're alerted to it and can limit your calories to return to your desired weight. If you don't let yourself gain more than a couple of pounds over your ideal weight before you do something about it, you can maintain your weight easily, without any stress or worry. You'll avoid going very far overboard with food again because won't want to experience the consequences when you step on the scale.

## Day 20 Weighing Yourself (One Minute)

Weigh yourself at whatever interval seems right. In general, I recommend once a week.

### Weight Log

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### The Beauty of a Plan

Committing to a plan is a great way to implement the Second Step: Wise Eating. The ego resists making a commitment with all its might, choosing instead to be wishy-washy. "Maybe I'll do this or I'll try to do that" is a great example of "ego-think." The problem with this approach is: it leaves the door wide open for a backslide because you didn't _really_ commit. Whenever you notice you're unwilling to commit to a plan you've created, that's the ego trying to sabotage your intentions to eat well.

You know that you can commit, plan, and strategize because you've done it so many times when you've dieted. You simply use the functional mind to help you and shut out the pleasure-seeking mind that wants to thwart your plans.

When most of us go off our diet, we return to letting the Child aspect of the ego guide our eating. This is why we regain our lost weight. The Child hates eating pragmatically, always preferring to be free to do what it wants, when it wants. If you look into the beliefs that prevent you from committing to a particular food plan, they might go something like this: "What if I commit to eating X and then I find that I don't want to eat X? What if something else looks better? What if food is available on the plane and I'd rather eat that? What if I'm still hungry after I eat what I've allowed myself? I don't want to limit myself."

In this situation, simply know that this is the voice of the Child. Notice it and ask yourself if that's what you want to follow this time. What has following it gotten you in the past? See the truth about not committing to a plan. Recall situations when you didn't plan or commit. What have you done? Have you been able to eat healthy food in reasonable amounts or have you overeaten? What's your track record? How often have you overeaten?

Here's a food log to help you see if you were able to stick to your plan. It also lets you record how you were feeling and whether you were present while you were eating. Remember. Be gentle with yourself. Don't use this tool as an opportunity to beat yourself off if you slip up. Slipping up is part of the healing process. If it happens, see it as an opportunity to be kind to yourself and forgive yourself for being human.

## Meal Plan Day 1

TOTAL CALORIES ~1200

## Breakfast

1 Cup Fresh Fruit

1/2 Cup Oatmeal

1 Cup Low-Fat Yogurt

## Snack

Smoothie

(1 Cup Berries blended with 1 Cup Skim Milk and Ice Cubes).

## Lunch

2 Slices Whole Wheat Bread

1/2 Cup Tuna (in water only) or veggie burger

Salad (Tomato, Cucumber, Lettuce) with 1 teaspoon tamari + 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar + 1/2 tbsp olive oil.

## Snack

One medium apple

## Dinner

3.5 oz (~100g) chicken breast (grilled skinless boneless) or 3.5oz of grilled low fat organic tofu.

1 Cup Broccoli

1/2 Cup Brown Rice

## Meal Plan Day 2

TOTAL CALORIES ~1200

## Breakfast

1 Slice of Whole Wheat Toast

1 veggie egg white omelette

## Snack

1 Medium-Sized Banana

## Lunch

1 Slice of Whole Wheat Toast with Low-Fat Cottage Cheese.

Handful Mixed Nuts (Almonds, Walnuts, Brazil nuts)

1 Medium Fruit (Apple, Peach, Plum, Pear, etc)

## Snack

One medium apple

## Dinner

Medium Baked Potato

3 oz (~85g) Sirloin Steak or 5 slices of tofu bacon

1/2 Cup Mushrooms

1/4 Cup Onions

1 Teaspoon olive or canola oil (cooking)

1 Cup Mixed Vegetables

Ensure you drink plenty of water - aim for 8-10 glasses per day.

## Meal Plan Day 3

TOTAL CALORIES ~1200

## Breakfast

3/4 cup oatmeal  
1/2 Medium banana sliced  
2 tsp. chunky peanut butter

##

## Snack

1 oz. Hazelnuts

## Lunch

Turkey burger or Salmon Patty  
2 slices whole grain bread  
2 tsp. prepared mustard  
2 slices fresh tomato  
2 leaves butterhead lettuce

## Snack

One medium apple

## Dinner

3 oz. Grilled Haddock  
1/2 cup brown rice  
1/2 cup beets  
1/2 cup zucchini  
1 cup tossed green salad  
2 tsp. olive oil  
2 tbsp. cider vinegar

### Food Log

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### Reprogramming the Taste Buds

When you start eating more nutritious food, you discover that the _healthy food starts tasting so much better!_ Eating a lot of sugar, salt, and fat distorts our taste buds. When you stop eating them, your taste buds get reprogrammed, and healthy food starts to taste wonderful—as good, or better, than the non-food. And you don't experience the negative consequences of the non-food, such as ill health, sluggishness, bloating, and weight gain.

The other reason healthy food starts to taste delicious is that when you're eating less and allowing yourself to get hungry, even healthy food tastes great. This is very different than eating for pleasure, which tastes good momentarily but causes suffering when you overeat. When you eat moderately and eat healthy, nutritious food, you don't feel out of control like you do with foods that are physically or psychologically addictive. In other words, there is freedom in this way of eating!

## Losing Weight Using the Second Step

Contrary to popular wisdom, there's no problem with dieting—as long as it's not crash dieting. Most of us who have eating issues have read truckloads of books on dieting and have been on gajillions of different diets, hoping to figure out the best way to lose weight and keep it off. After all of that, who would have guessed that losing weight isn't a mystery after all?

Current research shows that losing weight the old fashioned way, by counting calories, works. It's a simple concept based on calories in and calories out. You decrease the food calories you take in until they are less than the calories you expend during the day. Remember, if you don't know about calories, pick up a pocket guide at the supermarket or simply search the internet for the calories of the food you want.

Not only that, any diet will work, including the "all Twinkie diet," as long as you reduce your calorie intake below your daily maintenance requirement. Many website calculators will help you figure that out. I used: <http://www.freedieting.com/tools/calorie_calculator.htm>. Just punch in your weight and daily activity level and voila! Out comes your daily maintenance calorie.

After you have your calorie maintenance number, simply decide how many calories you want to cut out per day. If you only have a few pounds to lose, you may want to reduce your intake by only a few hundred calories per day. If, on the other hand, you have twenty or more pounds to lose, you may want to reduce your intake by at least 400 calories. Ask your doctor how many calories per day is safe for you.

I don't recommend crash diets because they encourage the body to go into fasting mode and slow down its metabolism. If you eat healthfully, the way you plan to eat for the rest of your life, and just cut back a few hundred calories per day, you will lose weight slowly and change your eating habits over a long period of time. This increases your chances of making these changes permanent rather than temporary. What's the hurry? You have the rest of your life to shed your excess weight. It's our impatience—the desire for a large, rapid weight loss—that's kicked us under the bus in the past. Don't go there this time!

## Inquiry to Dissolve Resistance to Wise Eating

Take a moment to notice any resistance to Wise Eating. What stressful beliefs have the new habits regarding food, portion control, writing down what you plan to eat, and weighing yourself unearthed? Write them down, and take them to inquiry. Here are two sample inquiries, using some of the most common resistance points. If you are having either of these two resistant thoughts, perform your own inquiry on them. More inquiry practice never hurts!

Disturbing Belief: I'll never lose weight this way! It's going to take forever!

Inquiry:

  1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** I will lose weight this way and it won't take forever. **Could this new belief be as true or truer? What is your evidence for this?** I can't know the future. Hence it's true that I can't really know if I will lose weight this way or how long it will take. However, if I'm doing the math right, if I reduce my calories, I will inevitably lose weight. Scientific studies have shown that counting calories to lose weight works. In addition, if I'm weighing myself regularly and I find that I am not losing weight as fast I as I would like to, I can reduce my calories even more.

Disturbing Belief: I'm a failure because I can't control my eating

Inquiry:

  1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** I'm a success because I can't control my eating. **Could this new belief be as true or truer? What is your evidence for this?** I can't always control my eating, and the fact that I can acknowledge this means that I'm ready to be healed. This issue is fueling my evolution, and I have the courage to look at it and tell myself the truth about it. How could I be anything but a success? I am putting in the time and effort to become free from the conditioning that has imprisoned me, and the fact that I can't always control my eating has led me to this golden opportunity.

### Wise Eating Check-in

Phew and double phew! You made it through The Second Step. How does it feel? Are you still breathing? Is your heart still pumping blood? You've made it through the most challenging information in the book. Congratulations! How are you doing with The First Step?

## Chapter Summary

  * Many of us go "zombie" when we're eating.

  * Nibbling calories count.

  * Nibbling while doing other things is not very satisfying because you can't fully experience eating or whatever else you're doing because your attention is divided.

  * Most people have a skewed idea about the size of the portion they can eat and still remain at their desired weight.

  * The "jeans test" is unreliable.

  * The bathroom scale is your friend again.

  * Hunger is your friend.

  * If people let themselves get hunger a few times every day, it would end the obesity problem in this country.

  * Hunger is not a reliable gauge for when to stop eating.

  * Any diet will work as long as you are consuming fewer calories than you're using.

## To Do List

Check off any tasks you've been able to complete. Remember, you don't have to be perfect at these tasks before checking the boxes. Tick them off the list if you've made some strides or attempts. Even if you've only practiced something once, tick it. Remember, these behaviors are new and may take quite a long time to take hold. You've reinforced your old habits for years, so be gentle and patient with yourself as you establish new behaviors.

  * I was able to _just eat_ rather than doing other things at the same time.

  * I sat down to eat.

  * I avoided nibbling.

  * I put my fork down in between bites or walked around during a meal to interrupt my automatic food shoveling.

  * I used the Food Log to plan. I wrote down my food for the next day.

  * Using the Food Log, I checked the foods that I actually ate and added any additional foods that I hadn't planned on eating (including nibbles).

  * If I deviated from the plan, I didn't beat myself up.

  * I controlled my portion sizes.

  * I've been weighing myself regularly to help me manage my weight.

  * I wrote down my fears about hunger and took them to inquiry.

  * I've been waiting until my tummy is talking to me before eating.

(Optional)

  * I would like to lose weight, and I have been cutting out _____ calories per day.

# CHAPTER 4

# The Third Step: Wise Thinking

###

You made it through the first two steps! Congratulations! I can't wait to introduce you to The Third Step, my all time favorite. It's the missing piece of the weight loss puzzle. If you don't address it, you'll keep riding the weight loss/weight gain roller coaster and never heal permanently. I'm especially excited to share this step—Wise Thinking—because it was the last nail in my food and weight issues coffin.

Before we get started, let's check in. How are you doing? Have you started putting the first and second steps into practice? Remember, you don't need to do everything all at once. This is your process, and you decide when to implement the changes. This isn't a two-month diet with a four-month maintenance plan. Rather, you're embarking on a new way of living, creating habits that will serve you for the rest of your life. That being said, it's perfectly okay to take it slow.

Some components of the steps will be easier for you than others, and there may be some aspects you don't need to implement at all to feel healed and relegate weight problems to a distant memory. For example, my relationship with food is very pragmatic and healed, and yet, sometimes I still nibble while I'm cooking. And that's okay because I don't suffer over it, and my weight and health aren't impacted. For other people, this may not be the case, and they may need to fully commit to a "non-nibbling" stance and make it an ironclad habit.

In my case, I had to be steadfast about The First Step. I couldn't have taken a wishy-washy stance about sugar and chocolate and healed my compulsion around those foods. If you're not addicted to any food, this _may not_ be true for you. You may be able to keep more junk food in your life because you're able to limit your consumption and keep it under control.

I can see the roadmap forming on your forehead now. "How am I supposed to know which steps to be strict about?" Of course, you know what the Pleasure-Seeking Child would answer. She's happy to be wishy-washy about all of it. After all, she's been running the show for years, and likes it that way. Although you may be able to treat some aspects of The First and Second Steps as an a la carte menu (e.g., you may not need to write down what you plan to eat), you'll have to discover for yourself what is critical for your own healing.

This is not another diet created by an external authority with rules you have to follow to get the results you want. This is the book that tells you the truth about food and your thinking, but how you use it, is up to you. This is where you have to become a grownup and level with yourself about what you can and can't handle in regard to food and eating. But remember, The Five Steps are about freedom, not about becoming perfect, so be gentle with yourself.

That being said, let's move on to The Third Step. This is where the rubber hits the road in your freedom around food. If you truly want to be done with this issue for good, it's the opportunity you've been waiting for: unfastening the lynchpin that's held your eating issues together. Because that's the case, The Third Step is a fixed price menu, with no substitutions. But—take heart—solve this, and you'll solve your weight problems for good!

In this chapter you'll learn how to think _differently_ about food and, hopefully, think very little about it, if at all, when it's not time to eat. You'll do this by seeing the whole picture about food rather than believing it to be the be all and end all of life.

Once you see the truth, there's no going back; your feet will be squarely planted on Recovery Road. You'll learn helpful strategies to stop wearing a path to the fridge, such as connecting with a life purpose that feels engaging and fulfilling, and implementing kung fu for cravings and emotional eating. Without further ado, let's begin!

## Seeing the Whole Picture

When we give into a food craving, overeat junk food, or eat when we're not hungry, we are focusing on one thing and one thing only: immediate pleasure. Seduced by the promise of pleasure, short-lived though it may be, we are blinded to the complete picture, the full spectrum of consequences of this choice. We are caught in magical thinking, pretending that eating Pleasure Food will give us what we want—relief and happiness.

We didn't create this habitual pattern of following food cravings on our own. Advertising hype about food that stresses taste over health is aimed at the pleasure-seeking part of us, and encourages the Child's way of thinking about food. It is a myopic perspective that narrows our focus down to a small sliver of truth about food—taste. Bombarded hundreds or even thousands of times each day directly and subliminally by messages about the taste of Pleasure Food, it's no wonder that our first impulse is to reach for it when we don't like whatever we're experiencing!

As we've seen, our romantic thinking about food is centered around certain types of foods—entertaining foods that are ultimately not fulfilling. It's fine to eat them in small amounts, but when they're the cornerstone of our diet, it's costly to our health. In the same way, following the egoic mind and getting caught up in its stories and desires can be fun sometimes, but as a general practice, it's neither nourishing nor fulfilling.

## Day Seeing The Whole Picture of Following a Food Craving (Five Minutes)

Complete the chart below. When you're finished, look at the chart on the next page and fill in anything you missed.

Consequences of Overeating and Following a Food Craving

Positive Consequences | Negative Consequences

---|---

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 |

 |

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Consequences of Overeating and Following a Food Craving

Positive Consequences | Negative Consequences

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We taste something that we like. | The taste only lasts for a short time.

We avoid feeling an uncomfortable feeling for the moment. | The taste leads to wanting to taste more and eat more.

 | We feel guilty for eating a food that is high in calories and not nutritious.

 | We feel guilty for overeating.

 | We berate ourselves for not having enough willpower.

 | We gain weight.

 | We undercut our growth by missing out on discovering the beliefs that are generating our uncomfortable emotions.

 | We hide because we feel too fat.

 | We lose confidence professionally and socially.

 | We feel physically uncomfortable: bloated, nauseated, or listless.

## Day Seeing The Whole Picture of Eating Nutritious Food (Five Minutes)

Complete the chart below. When you're finished, look at the chart on the next page and fill in anything you missed.

Consequences of Eating Nutritious Food

Positive Consequences | Negative Consequences

---|---

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Consequences of Eating Nutritious Food

Positive Consequences | Negative Consequences

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Our taste buds readjust. | We occasionally miss the taste of junk.

We come to like the taste of nutritious food.

|

We feel proud of ourselves for eating healthfully.

|

We gain confidence because we're treating ourselves better.

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We lose the urge to binge and regain our power over food.

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We become healthier and more energetic.

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We set a good example for others.

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We stop eating emotionally as a result of using inquiry to examine our beliefs.

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Our body reaches and stabilizes at a healthy weight.

|

### 

### What Story Are you in?

If you notice an urge to eat something when you're not hungry, you're probably involved in a "story"—something negative that the mind is telling you about yourself, life, others, or something you're doing. Some examples of typical stories that may be running prior to an urge to reach into the cookie jar are:

  * I'm bored.

  * I just want to have that taste in my mouth.

  * I really don't want to do this project.

  * The last thing I feel like doing is gathering the trash.

  * I really don't want to make this phone call that I'm supposed to make.

  * I hate filing.

  * I can't face the piles of work on my desk.

  * Time to balance my checkbook again.

Sometimes, when we're resisting the task in front of us, the idea of distracting ourselves with an exciting taste experience is tempting. A vision of hot fudge cascading down slopes of pure white vanilla ice cream can transport us from the deadly humdrum of daily life. Who couldn't use a respite from changing the sheets or tax preparation or whatever task we love to avoid?

Sometimes we eat Pleasure Food to change our experience of life in the moment—we eat to escape and entertain ourselves rather than for nourishment. There's nothing wrong or bad about this; it's a totally natural and innocent way of trying to love and sooth ourselves when we're bored or under stress.

However, overfilling our tank has consequences that don't feel loving to ourselves: we can get indigestion or feel bloated, nauseated, headachy, low on energy, or sleepy. We may feel guilty, regretful, angry, and judge ourselves for lacking will power when we weight gain and our clothes feel tight.

So what can you do? First, if you notice your hand reaching toward the cookie jar or the ice cream drawer in the freezer when you're full, you can ask, "What story am I in?" or "What am I believing that's not true?" or "What do I really need right now?" Get quiet and take a few minutes with these questions. Almost always, you will find a painful emotion or some unease. Lurking underneath this feeling is an uninvestigated stressful thought.

One of the costs of overindulging in Pleasure Food is that you don't get a chance to experience or inquire about what you're feeling or believing. The ego's Pleasure Seeking Child goes after pleasure as a way of coping with what it doesn't like about life. When we automatically indulge and fulfill a desire, we miss out on its real message: there's something that's off here that I need to address, either inside myself, in my life, or with another person. Keep this in mind and notice when the Child kicks in. Ask yourself, "Is there something that I'm resisting about life, something that I'm trying to cope with by seeking pleasure?" or "Why do I need pleasure now?" and "What do I really need?"

### Just This Once...

Rather than treading the well-worn path of self-soothing through food, try something different, just this once. Don't give in to the usual urge—for now. You can always do that later if that's what you want, but for now move out of the kitchen, sit quietly, and inquire. Ask for help and insights into whatever is going on, whatever is creating that empty feeling that is calling out to be filled. Is there something else you're needing or wanting? How else can you take care of yourself that feels kind and loving? Is there a truth you need to speak or an action you're suppressing?

Overeating when the stomach registers full requires a degree of self-delusion. In these moments, the Pleasure-Seeking Child is in charge because we're only considering taste, not health. We're thinking, "This tastes really nice. I want more of it, even though I'm full." To do this, we have to put on blinders and be willing to see only part of the truth, "Right now, I'm more interested in immediate gratification than any negative consequences."

In Economics, the Law of Diminishing Returns states that at a certain point, the value of having more of a particular good or service levels off and then decreases. To relate this truth to eating, we have to slow down and notice what happens to our experience throughout a meal. When we first sit down, assuming we're hungry, the first few bites taste delicious. But, as we move toward satiation, the experience changes, and each successive bite becomes less pleasurable. Once we're satiated, the pleasure drops off even faster, until each additional bite becomes downright unpleasant!

###

## Eating When You're Not Hungry

### Anatomy of a Craving

A craving is an overwhelming desire for a particular food that screams for immediate fulfillment. A memory of eating a Pleasure Food causes us to imagine tasting this food again, and a craving is born. When a craving strikes, the sensation takes over, and it becomes all we can think about. Not fulfilling the craving isn't even an option. The issue is not _whether_ we can have the object of our desire, but _when._

When a craving is on the scene, it can feel like _it's_ driving and we're just along for the ride. We're the slaves, and the craving is the master. When we finally fulfill our desire, when we finally bite into that donut or piece of chocolate cake, _we credit the food_ for the momentary bliss we feel.

But we have it backwards: _the craving caused the suffering_ , not the deprivation of the object of our desire, as our mind would have us believe; and _the elimination of the craving, not the food, caused the bliss._ We feel great because we're no longer burdened by the craving, and yet we give the credit to the chocolate cake.

If we overeat chocolate cake, the suffering isn't really gone but transformed into the guilt and self-loathing we feel after indulging. The ego keeps our thinking compartmentalized so that, in the throes of a craving, we only think about the object of our desire rather than the complete experience. We become the "Scarlet O'Haras of eating," opining, "I'll think about that tomorrow." This is how we dupe ourselves into indulging and suffering again and again. We only think about the fleeting pleasure we get from fulfilling the craving and ignore the negative repercussions. Here's a diagram of the ego's version of following a craving versus the complete experience:

**The Ego's Version:** _Craving_  _Obtaining the Object of Desire_  _Fulfillment_

**The Complete Experience:** _Craving_  _Indulgence_  _Momentary Pleasure Due to Elimination of the Desire_  _Guilt, Self-Loathing, and Weight Gain_

The other way we pull the wool over our eyes when a craving hits is to tell ourselves we can just have a little of what we desire and then stop. But if we are addicted to a food, it's very difficult to stick to that plan. Most of us end up overeating because we don't find the satisfaction we expect, and there's no clear signal to stop, other than the pain of an overstuffed belly.

If we could eat just a little of something we crave, we wouldn't suffer the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences that often go hand in hand with addictive pleasures. If we were able to actually carry this out, we would break the cycle and take our power back. Unfortunately, most people with food issues can't do this. If freedom is what you want in your heart of hearts, you have to either weaken the emotional ties with Pleasure Foods, limit your consumption of them, or eliminate them.

### The Pleasure-Seeking Child

When you hear that familiar voice inside your head demanding, "I want to eat this now," you can be sure the Pleasure-Seeking Child is on the scene. It acts nothing like the wise adult part of us that wants to eat a particular food because it's part of our nutritional agenda for the day. The Child gets us into trouble, and the more we can recognize it, the less power it has over us. Every time we decide not to respond to it, we reduce its power.

The Pleasure-Seeking Child is an egoic habit we created. The "I want" that it expresses is a habitual "I want," and we can reduce its power and control over us by not succumbing to its demand. However, if you're very identified with that part of yourself, you don't feel like you have a choice. Its demands feel like a life or death imperative: "I have to eat this now, not two minutes from now." That's a sign you're identified with the Child. It says: "I want it now. Let me have it. I'll hate you if you don't give it to me."

The Child rationalizes, plays games, and hooks us with partial truths about food that have nothing to do with its nutrition (the real reason we eat it). The Child's focus is pleasure-seeking not what the body actually needs. It could care less about what's good or bad for it. It just wants what it wants and doesn't see the whole picture, like a parent would.

The more you can recognize this Child aspect of yourself, the easier it will be to align with the Wise Witness and take your power back. The Wise Witness knows there's a price to pay for following this pleasure-seeking principle, and _if you strengthen your Wise Witness by listening to it_ more, then you will feel less need to follow the dictates of the Child.

There's no need to be rigid about this. When the desire to eat comfort food arises, just recognize it: "Oh, that's my Pleasure-Seeking Child." Doing this lessens the Child's power because, all of a sudden, you realize that what you thought you wanted is really just what the Child wants. In seeing this, you've dis-identified with the Child. When you see the truth, "Oh that's just my conditioning. That's just my Pleasure-Seeking Child," it interrupts the pattern. It cuts through it.

There are two benefits of dis-identifying with the Child:

  1. The Child (i.e., ego) is weakened and

  2. You have time to make a more rational choice.

Instead of indulging, you may say, "I'm not going to indulge the Child right now." Or, like a wise parent, you may just say no to it: "No, you can't have another cookie." Or from that place of choice and detachment you might decide, "Okay, let's have some pleasure." Then, you're choosing rather than reacting based on compulsion, based on your identification with the Child.

When you react out of habit and your conditioning, it feels like you have no choice. That's a huge difference! When you're in your power choosing, you're free, and when you're listening to and obeying the Child, you're bound. The goal is to recognize that you're not the Child and develop enough distance from him so that you're free from unconsciously and automatically acquiescing to him and indulging his demands.

When you see that the "I" that craves is the conditioned self and not you, then it is much easier to ignore the craving. You are _that which is noticing the Child craving food_. If you're what is noticing the desire to eat something, it stands to reason that you can't be what is desiring it. From that place of dis-identification you can turn your attention elsewhere.

Saying yes to the Child is a personal choice that depends on how much comfort food you're allowing yourself and how it's affecting your weight and health. If you're gaining weight on it, it's too much. Once your overall relationship with food is rebalanced and you're eating solely for pleasure much less, there is some room for a food party if it doesn't get out of hand.

### Boredom and the Pleasure-Seeking Child

Keith: I eat as a distraction from routine, boring tasks. It engages the senses in a way that is more exciting than the feeling of being bored. Being bored is just something that the mind constructs. There's no real truth to it. It's just a mental construction believing that the mind's opinion that this task is boring.

Many of us eat too much or eat when we're not hungry because we're bored. We tell ourselves the unhappy story that whatever is happening is uninteresting and not what we were hoping for from life. Judging life for not providing the very intense kind of happiness that we would like, the ego tries to get it back. But when we tell ourselves a story that results in boredom, we end up feeling stuck, and we move into default mode—reaching for something good to eat. We allow the Pleasure-Seeking Child to take over, and we see food solely as a source of pleasure.

When we're bored, we're restless and dissatisfied. The ego doesn't like what's showing up, yet it has no clarity about how to remedy it. Boredom is a muddled, stuck state that the ego creates, agonizes over, and turns into a problem. Because the ego wants a certain feeling of happiness each day, when it doesn't get it, it causes more suffering by suggesting Pleasure Food as the solution.

When we're bored and the Pleasure-Seeking Child is tempting us to eat the food we love, we can say, "Not now—maybe later," just as we might respond to a persistent four year-old who wants something that doesn't make sense at the time.

The Wise Witness remembers the whole truth about Pleasure Food: even though it may taste nice for a few fleeting seconds, it can't alleviate boredom. If we eat it and we're not hungry, it may not taste as good as we had imagined or we may overeat it and end up feeling worse because we gave into our craving. Seeing the whole picture, the truth about food from the perspective of the Wise Witness, interrupts the automatic tendency to reach for food when we're bored.

The other truth is that when we eat to numb out, we miss the opportunity to heal whatever conditioning is arising. The next time you're bored you can ask, "What is Essence's experience of boredom?" You know the ego's experience, but what is Essence's experience of boredom? Essence just notices it. It isn't the generator of the feeling (the ego is), and it isn't affected by it either. It just notices boredom arising and doesn't evaluate it as something to like or not like. It isn't trying to get life to conform to a certain feeling. It's just humming along, okay with everything as it is.

When boredom arises, we can become aware of it and realize that it's not who we really are. In other words, we can dis-identify with it. Because we're able to notice this aspect of the self that is bored (the ego), that can't be who we really are, and we don't have to own it or identify with it. Who we really are is what is able to notice the ego being bored. We simply allow the feeling of boredom to be present and re-engage in what we are doing. When we allow a negative feeling to be present without having any agenda for it to go away or when we're engaged in what we're doing, we're not thinking. And if we're not thinking, we automatically align with Essence and we can't be bored. What a blessing! Thank goodness aligning with Essence heals any negative feeling—including boredom.

## Kung Fu for Cravings: Powerful Weight Loss Tools

A craving comes from the thought "I want." Though desire may seem like it has a physical component (and in the case of a physically addictive food, it does), a desire is just an idea that's been reinforced by eating a particular pleasure-food. Believe it or not, it's actually possible to notice your thoughts about food and just ignore them. If there is an emotion behind the craving, ignoring those thoughts is much more difficult. But, have no fear. You'll learn what to do in the section on emotional eating.

Here is some powerful kung fu for those times when you get an attack of the craving crazies:

### Powerful Craving Kung Fu #1: Put Your Attention on Something Else

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Do something else or think about something else. Read something. Talk to someone. Take a walk. Do a crossword puzzle. Finish the laundry. Drive somewhere. Turn on the television. Listen to music. Meditate. Focus on your senses. What are you feeling, seeing, smelling, or hearing? Almost any distraction will do. Make a list of non-eating activities you find engaging and nurturing so that when a craving strikes, you're ready for it.

  3. Don't give your attention to ego-based thoughts (especially negative ones), thoughts that are about "me" and "my story" or start with "I": "I like, I want, I don't want, I hope, I don't like, I feel, I think, I believe, I can't, I won't, I'm not, I did..." This involvement with the "me" is what landed you in the "craving crazies" to start with.

### Powerful Craving Kung Fu #2: Seeing the Whole Picture

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Remember the whole picture of food—how short-lived the pleasure of eating a particular food is, how bad you will feel physically and emotionally if you overeat, etc.

## Kung Fu for Emotional Eating: Busting the Diet Buster!

Have you ever had a feeling of gnawing insatiable emptiness that just won't let go of you? This is what I feel when I'm on the verge of an emotional eating attack. Something or someone is bugging me, and all I want to do is stuff myself with the best tasting food I can find. I'm not picky at this point, I just neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed to eat something, pronto! This feeling of urgency is so strong because I've followed it and reinforced it over and over for years.

Eating was how I coped with life. If life didn't feeling good, I indulged in negative thoughts that made me feel even worse. To feel better, I ate too much. If stress or an uncomfortable emotion came on the scene, my hand automatically reached for food, and I turned into an eating machine. Happiness was the issue and food a mere symptom.

Emotional eating is eating without being aware that you're eating. Instead, you're thinking and feeling, and feeding your feelings with more stressful thoughts, while unconsciously shoveling down copious quantities of food, perhaps, without even tasting it.

_Bob:_ Any emotion causes me to eat. If I feel sad I'll go get an ice cream cone thinking it will perk me up. I think sugar made me happy but it actually ends up making me feel worse. I eat tons of extra calories and this makes me even more depressed.

If this has been your habit, the compulsion to eat feels so strong that it seems physical. If you're still eating food that you're physically addicted to, it is. But the strength of the compulsion is actually due to the countless times you've reinforced it by reaching for food to soothe uncomfortable emotions. But fear not! It's possible to interrupt this pattern.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #1: Dis-identifying with the Feeling (More on this Topic in The Fourth Step)

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Ask yourself, "What am I feeling right now?" Wait for the answer.

  3. When the answer comes, ask yourself, "What's noticing _________ (the particular feeling you are feeling)?" and fill in the blank with whatever feeling is present. Let's say agitation is present. Ask yourself, "What's noticing agitation?" This is a powerful question because it helps you dis-identify with the feeling.

  4. Say to yourself, "Oh, thank goodness, it's just agitation—it's not me." It couldn't be me because I'm over here, noticing it. It's such a huge relief to realize that the feeling's not you! Normally we merge with negative feelings and assume they're our feelings, but they belong to the false self, the ego, not to us—not to who we really are, which is the Wise Witness, or Essence. From a place of identifying with the feeling, we have little power or objectivity. But if we're noticing a feeling, we're outside of it, aligned with the Wise Witness. In my experience, this kung fu cuts the power of the feeling in half immediately.

  5. From here, letting the feeling dissolve is easy. All you have to do is allow the feeling to be there without having any agenda for it to leave. Stay present with the sensation and—this is key—don't continue to feed it with negative thoughts. Otherwise, you will be there for a looooonnnnnggggg, long time! Simply ask yourself, "Is it okay for _________ (the particular feeling) to be here right now?" Just let it be there, welcome it, and stay with it with patience and acceptance.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #2: Dis-identifying with Thoughts About Food

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Ask yourself, "Am I hungry right now?"

  3. If the answer is no, inquire, "What is it that is aware of the thought "I want food right now"?

  4. Next ask, "Is that thought or impulse to eat, me?" "If I am aware of it, how can it be me?" Once you realize that this thought is not you, you automatically dis-identify with it, and it loses its power.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #3: Identifying the Need

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Ask yourself, "What am I needing right now that is causing me to want some pleasure?"

  3. If the answer is appreciation or comfort or understanding, in your mind, give yourself what you need, in the form of an imaginary hug or words of consolation or praise.

  4. Alternatively, ask yourself, "Is there something else here that's whole and complete and doesn't need anything?" This will help you see that the real you, or Essence, doesn't actually need what you may think you need.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #4: Inquiry

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Notice that you're upset and address the upset directly using inquiry. You do this by asking yourself, "What story am I telling myself that's causing me to feel this way right now?" "What am I believing?"

  3. When you discover the belief, take it to inquiry, by asking the following questions:

  * **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this belief is true?** Even if you belief that it's true, go on to the next question.

  * **What is the opposite of this belief? Could this be as true or truer?** Come up with evidence to support the opposite belief. If the opposite of the belief is also true, perhaps the original negative belief is not as true as you may have thought!

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #5: Seeing the Whole Picture

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Remember the whole picture—the pleasure of eating a particular food is so short-lived! Imagine how bad you will feel physically and emotionally if you overeat.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #6: Put Your Attention on Something Else

###

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Put your attention on something else:

  * Focus on information from your senses. What are you seeing, hearing, smelling in the moment? What else is happening other than the feeling and thoughts that had been feeding it?

  * Do something else. Turn on the radio or television. Open a favorite book. Make a phone call. Anything that you do to distract yourself from the feeling allows you to stop feeding it with more thoughts. You put out its fire by cutting off its only fuel source: thought.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #7: I Do that Too

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. If you're angry at someone else or feel hurt because he or she did something you didn't like, remember a time that you did or said the same sort of thing and forgive that person. We can only feel upset at someone else if we can find the same failing in ourselves. To keep yourself from stuffing the feeling with food and heal:

  * See your own failing and

  * Forgive yourself and the other person.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #8: Think Something Positive Instead

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Replace the negative thought that's generating the feeling with a positive one. For example replace the thought, "Nothing's going right today" with "Everything is going right today." Then come up with evidence to support the positive thought. This Kung Fu can be a bit of a slippery slope because it does keep you in the realm of thought. When you're in thought it's easy to go back to spinning a negative story and feeding the feeling again.

### Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #9: Allow the Feeling to Be There

  1. Notice that a craving is on the scene, and get yourself the heck out of the kitchen!

  2. Drop your story about the feeling and simply allow it to be there. Notice the sensation. What does it feel like in your body? What color is it? What shape and texture does it have? Allow the feeling to be there without any agenda for it to dissipate.

### My Process

Breaking the habit of emotional eating can be a VERY gradual process depending on how much you've reinforced it. Eating was my automatic response to any kind of emotion that showed up, even extreme happiness! If I had a tough problem I was trying to work out, my hand would reach for some chips to help turn the cogs in my head. Here's the skinny on my healing process:

  1. **Phase One: Noticing After the Fact.** At first it seemed impossible to interrupt my automatic eating response beforehand. Instead, my noticing tended to come in after my emotional eating, not before. After some initial feelings of disappointment that I hadn't been able to catch it sooner, I would do a post mortem and use one of the Emotional Eating kung fus. My work in Phase One was learning to be gentle with myself and forgive myself for not being able to break this habit perfectly.

  2. **Phase Two: Noticing During an Emotional Eating Attack.** Next, I noticed that I was eating emotionally while I was doing it and chose to stop, sooner and sooner. At first, choice came in after I'd been at it for five minutes, then three minutes, then two, and so on. As before, I would do a post mortem and use one of the Emotional Eating kung fus.

  3. **Phase Three: Noticing Before an Emotional Eating Attack is About to Erupt.** Phase Three happens when you're able to notice the impulse to eat emotionally and catch it _before_ you act on it. You use your kung fu before the fact. You notice the feeling, thought, or need and deal with it directly rather than stuffing it with food. Understand that Phase Three can be a long time in coming—perhaps years, and even after it shows up, you can still move back to Phase Two or even Phase One intermittently.

### Feeding Our Souls Instead of Our Stomachs

Just because feelings and thoughts enter our awareness, doesn't mean we have to act on them—we can just notice them. This is freedom. Being aware of thoughts and feelings rather than identifying with and acting on them is a huge leap forward in making peace with eating, weight, and our bodies. Yet, if we're giving up our current egoic relationship with food, going to food for comfort to avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings, we need a new relationship with something else to replace it. Where will we find comfort, pleasure, and relief? How do we do this? It's simple. We begin to feed our souls more by forming a relationship with something that's always available to us and infinitely more satisfying—Essence.

We're always being fed from our deepest self. Recognizing and acknowledging this helps us to heal and grow. When an unpleasant emotion arises, notice it, allow it to be, and then ask to receive insights and healing. Ultimately, freedom from any issues we have around food is about becoming more established in Essence. To do that, we need to be quiet, listen, and not be in a lifestyle that's so busy and stressful that we're constantly getting lost in thoughts, emotions, and doing.

If you're not physically hungry, but you feel the urge to experience some pleasure from food, and you don't want to follow that urge, you can move into the heart. Try the following exercise to move from your head to your heart:

**Exercise:** _Imagine yourself moving from your head (the ego's world of thoughts, emotions, and cravings) into the space of the heart (the world of Essence). You are floating downward into a delicious, peaceful, joyous space of freedom: the velvety black cave of the heart. It is a restful place of ease, where nothing is required of you, a place free from the stresses and problems of daily life. Simply rest there for 5-10 minutes and recharge your batteries. Pick a certain time each day to devote to this practice._

As you practice moving from your head and into your heart, you will weaken your cravings by strengthening your connection to Essence. The more you practice this, the more it will become second nature to rest in the cave of the heart, no matter what else you might be doing.

##

## The Thought Diet

### How Weight Issues Are Created

Can you restrict your thoughts about food the same way you restrict calories on a diet? To stop thinking may seem about as possible as refraining from eating altogether! When food has been your primary source of pleasure and nurturance, to stop thinking about it, may seem inconceivable. Therein lies the rub. We _assume_ that it's not possible, so we don't even try. We don't try to change the channel on mind TV because we assume that once a thought about food crosses the screen, it's all over. There's no chance of getting interested in anything else. Not so!

Luckily, a thought about food is just a thought, like any other thought. All thoughts are equal in their weightlessness. The ego wants you to believe that not only can't you ignore a food thought, you have to follow it. You have to find and consume Pleasure Food right away, if not sooner! But guess what, once again, it's just the Pleasure-Seeking Child lying to you.

Have you ever noticed that you don't tend to get hungry when you're busy, and then, when you start thinking about food, suddenly you want it? There's a fundamental relationship between thinking about food and eating. When we're craving food even when we aren't hungry, it's likely that we're bored or trying to avoid something we don't want to do. We're probably looking for a way to distract ourselves from the resistance we're feeling and the negative, or stressful, thoughts that go along with that. These thoughts create uncomfortable feelings, and rather than sit with the feelings until they dissipate, we might make a bee-line to the refrigerator to try change our experience. Yet, when something happens that needs our immediate attention, food is the farthest thing from our mind. If you're thinking about food when you aren't hungry, try asking yourself: What experience am I trying to avoid right now?

The problem with thinking about food is that it leads to eating. Of course this isn't a problem if you're actually hungry. And yet, if you are in the habit of thinking about food often, it's likely that you're eating more food, and more Pleasure Food in particular, than you need. Thoughts about food can become our mind's default position, coming in whenever we are stressed, excited, overwhelmed, upset, elated, or bored—any excuse to think about food will do.

### Get Engaged in What You're Doing

One way to stop thinking so much about food is to become engaged in whatever you're doing. When you're focused on and present to what's happening now, whether it's work, running an errand, vacuuming, finishing a good book, or making a call, you're less likely to think about food—unless, of course, your stomach starts talking to you. When you're really absorbed in something, you can go for hours without a single thought about food or even noticing that your stomach is empty.

### Remember Where Impractical Thoughts About Food Come From

Another way to stop thinking about food when you're not hungry is to remember where impractical thoughts about food come from. If you're thinking about food when you're not hungry, that's the Pleasure-Seeking Child looking to have some fun. Just noticing this and not following these fantasies about food will eventually break this habit, and those thoughts will arise less and less. But don't be discouraged if, in the beginning, your noticing is still followed by eating. The pattern of following your thoughts into the kitchen may be very entrenched. Fortunately, if you're patient and vigilant, eventually noticing your fantasies about food will lead to ignoring them.

### Eliminating Romantic Thinking

Finally, if you put The Second Step to work and write down the food you plan to eat for the day and resolve to stick to that, the ego sees the futility of trying to tempt you. When it realizes that you're not open to fantasies about food, it eventually gives up. Instead, when the time comes to eat, you'll use the functional aspect of the mind to decide if you're going to have oatmeal or yogurt and an apple. When you're on a set diet for the day, you don't give the Pleasure-Seeking Child a say in the matter.

Relating to food by romanticizing it is one of the reasons we have issues with our weight. We can change this dysfunctional relationship with food by learning to think about it in a different way, and that is to _not think_ about it or think about it pragmatically. Being pragmatic about food means using the mind to decide what to have for lunch based on what and how much the body needs nutritionally. That's how Essence uses the mind to think about food.

This is radically different from how the egoic mind (the mind that's run by conditioning and the Pleasure-Seeking Child) thinks about it. The ego's thoughts are imbued with romance, fantasies, dreams, imaginings, and feelings about food.

Thinking about food in a romantic way may have become so ingrained that we aren't even aware of it. This is a big part of the problem. Once we see this, we can take the next step: not imagining what a food would taste like and not thinking about food romantically anymore. If we stop thinking about food romantically, our relationship with food will change and so will our weight.

## How Conditioning About Food Is Created

In this section, you'll travel back to when your beliefs about food were first formed and then explore how they've been impacting your life. Next, you'll use inquiry to see whether they're true, and if you find that they're not true, you'll set the intention to allow them to dissolve.

## Relationship with Food

Food tantalizes our senses, beckoning us with mouthwatering aromas and titillating tastes and textures. Compounding these qualities with the fact that as human beings we're programmed to love food, we have a perfect storm for an overeating and weight control disaster. Eating is pleasurable, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying food. Yet, when food becomes the object of our desires, our secret passion, entertainment, a naughty indulgence, we've turned it into something it's not—a lover.

We don't always see both sides of the food coin. Instead, we fantasize about the taste of our favorite foods, overlooking the consequences of over-indulgence: the uncomfortable bursting at the seams feeling, the weight gain, and the sluggish feeling of eating past the point of satiety. We ignore the unpleasant side of overeating and only imagine enjoying huge quantities of the foods we love. In this limited view, we forget that we live in a world of inexorably linked pairs of opposites—wherever there is pleasure, there is pain. Hence, when we overdo it, food can be a source of pain as well as pleasure. Here are some common ways to view food. Circle the roles that food plays in your life:

I see food as...

  * Reward

  * Entertainment

  * Fulfillment

  * Excitement

  * Enemy

  * Temptation

  * Lover

  * Companion

  * Loyal best friend

Food has come to mean so much more than fuel that keeps the body running. Unconsciously, we imbue food with the power to fill many physical and emotional needs. It becomes our savior, nurturer, friend, and lover, who is always available, never lets us down, never puts us down, and never says no. Epitomizing fidelity, no matter what is happening in our lives, whether we feel on top of the world or down in the dumps, food is there to keep us company. For the fleeting moment it spends in our mouth, our favorite food always delivers.

To understand our mysterious relationship with food, in the next section, we'll examine the stressful things we're telling ourselves when we eat to satisfy emotional needs. For example, we might be telling ourselves, "When I eat because I'm feeling down it means:

  * That I'm weak.

  * I'll never get the body I want. My body is defective. It doesn't process food the right way.

  * I can't get on the right track in my life, and I won't attract the kind of partner I have always dreamed of.

To help you uncover your beliefs, ask yourself what you are telling yourself that's causing you to feel bad and reach for food. Keep a running list. In the next chapter, in the section called "Wise Self-Expression: Healing Low Self-Esteem," I created a worksheet to help you explore any negative self-beliefs you've formed because of your emotional eating. If you feel moved to, you can skip ahead now and circle the beliefs that feel true. Then, take these beliefs to inquiry asking yourself:

  1. Is this belief is true?

  2. What is the opposite of this belief? Could that be as true or truer? Then come up with evidence to support the opposite of your stressful belief.

For example the belief is: I'm weak. Can you really know that's true? The opposite is: I'm strong. This belief is at least as true or truer. I'm strong because, I had the will power to go on diets and lost weight. I'm strong because I'm reading this book. I have the courage to look at my relationship with food so that I can heal. I'm strong because I've been able to incorporate some of the suggestions in this book. Change is not easy. I'm strong because I've been able to reverse longstanding habits in order to prioritize my health.

Set a goal of taking at least one negative belief to inquiry every day. As you question these beliefs, they will naturally let go of you. The more you question stressful thoughts, the less power they have over you, and the sooner they'll stop creating the negative emotions that moved you to want to eat emotionally in the first place!

###

### Dieting While on the Thought Diet

If you're dieting and you find yourself thinking about food, other than what's on your plan, you're off your diet. If you have a set menu for the day, there's no room for food fantasies or a romantic relationship with food. Only functional thoughts about food like: "Okay these are the two options right now, this or this" make sense. This way of thinking about food cuts the ego (the Pleasure-Seeking Child) out of the equation and frees up your mind for other pursuits. Other than that, there's no reason to think about food at all throughout the day.

If the Child's saying, "What about this? Or maybe I could have that," you're already off the diet. That's the slippery slope. It's easier to not give the Child a toe in than to allow yourself to consider its suggestions. Don't let him participate in your food choices.

This is a truly transformational diet— _a thought diet_. It means giving up certain kinds of thoughts about food—the fantasies and ruminations: "HHHHHHHmmm, what would _taste_ yummy right now?" The moment we start projecting into the future and imagining how a food would _look, smell, or taste_ , the Pleasure-Seeking Child is off and running, and he becomes very difficult to ignore. These fantasies create desires and desires demand fulfillment and usually lead to action.

This pattern of indulging our fantasies is the well-trodden path that we've followed so many times before that it has become our default position. Once this fantasizing gains momentum, turning it off is like trying to stop an oncoming freight train. It's better to stop it before it leaves the station. In the same way, it's much easier to use the Wise Witness to say no or "not now" to the Child before the imagining begins.

Once you stop entertaining in food fantasies, the Pleasure-Seeking Child will stop creating them. Ever since I resolved not to travel down that slippery slope, the Child rarely tries to create food fantasies anymore. I've seen through the ego's lies about food and know clearly what it can and can't offer me, so I'm no longer an easy mark.

### Changing Our Relationship to Food

We can change our relationship to food by seeing the difference between how the ego (the Child) relates to food mentally and how Essence relates to it. Essence sees the whole picture, whereas the egoic mind presents only a small sliver of truth, gets lost in a hypnotic trance about Pleasure Food, imbues it with romantic feelings, and weaves enticing fantasies and dreams about it.

For those of us who have food issues, the Child is automatically activated around food, and we don't see or consider another way of being in relationship to food. We may experience how the Wise Witness relates to food for short periods of time when we're dieting, but we don't see it as the way to be with food. We have to be willing to give up our dream of food, our fantasies, our overlays, our feelings, and see the whole picture—the whole truth about food.

The result of holding on to our fantasies and following them are ill health and overweight, while the result of following the truth is the opposite. As you can see, there are many good reasons to go on a thought diet.

Up until now, you may not have seen thinking about food romantically as a problem, yet this _is the crux of the problem._ There's another way of thinking about food that is not only not a problem, but results in energy, good health, and a natural bodyweight. But to get there, we have to be willing to give up the ego's relationship to food by seeing through it, by seeing that it's not the whole truth and that it doesn't give us what we think it does. It only gives us so much pleasure, and after a certain point, it gives us pain.

The good news is that you don't suffer in this new relationship with food. When people are on a diet, they discover how much more they appreciate all food, and when your relationship with food becomes healthier, you will experience this as well. Not only will you become healthier but you'll actually enjoy food more.

When you give up your dream of food, you don't really give up anything, and you can still have fun with food sometimes. The difference is that when you have a dysfunctional relationship with food, you're constantly relating to it as if it's entertainment, and that's when it becomes a problem.

## Pleasure

If you eat for pleasure chances are you equate food with comfort, nurturing, and fun. You see food as your friend, a treat, or a reward rather than just nourishment. It's a very deeply imbedded view in which food becomes larger than life, taking on a glorified and revered position in your life. You blow its importance way out of proportion relative to what it can actually offer you. Because you see your relationship with comfort food as being more important to your happiness than it actually is, if you allow yourself to have comfort food after abstaining from it on a diet, you can easily go hog wild.

It's important to see that the pleasure from eating is so fleeting! Soon after you put something in your mouth, the experience of eating is over. That's part of the whole truth that the Child doesn't want you to see. But seeing it is liberating because you realize that if you don't have two minutes with that particular food, it really won't impact your life.

How we think about food makes it seem so wonderful, desirable, meaningful, and important. Once we see how untrue and overblown our thinking is about it, we're well on our way to thinking about it differently.

We can become so completely absorbed in romanticizing food that we're unable to see the whole truth. When we habitually think about food in a way that creates excitement and pleasurable sensations, it makes food seem wonderfully fun and special, and this can result in an emotionally charged, hypnotic state. Without realizing it, we slip into another state of consciousness, an altered state of sorts, where seeing the whole truth about food is impossible.

Glorifying food is a habit of believing that we need it to be happy and to feel good, and we don't. As we examine our beliefs about food and discover the truth, we realize that we never needed to get pleasure from food because life itself is pleasurable. Even without pursuing pleasure, the experience of being alive is innately fulfilling.

For example, I gave up sugar and chocolate years ago, and I don't miss them a bit. Once I decided that they weren't in my life anymore, I stopped thinking about them; and because I don't think about them, I don't miss them. Thinking about a food creates a desire and a craving for it, which leads to a perceived need for immediate fulfillment.

There are a lot of things that are not in your life right now that you don't miss a bit and you don't desire. What you desire depends on what you think about. Even if you never ate for pleasure again, life would still be pleasurable.

###

## Letting Go of Romanticizing Food

Part of our healing is to stop glamorizing food by withdrawing some of the false projections and meanings we've given to it. Food seems so desirable because we trump it up in our minds, thinking about it the way we think about an encounter with a lover or a long lost friend. Rather than thinking, "Gee, I'm hungry and need to fill up with some healthy food," we lust after it, longingly proclaiming, "Oh darling, chocolate chunk brownie, I love you so and can't wait to get you into my mouth." We make food more special and important than it is by thinking about it in these ways, and this is completely out of line with what it can actually offer us. We relate to food by romanticizing it.

A balanced relationship with food would be more like your relationship with toilet paper. Okay, I admit this is a crude analogy. But with both food and toilet paper, quality is important, they provide a needed service (when you need it, you need it!), the experience of using them is quick, and most importantly, there's no need to think about them when you're not using them. It's not like you're going to create an overblown fantasy anticipating the velvety softness of 2-ply Cottonelle!

It's useful to notice _how_ you think about food and _how much_ you think about it. An important step in healing is to notice any romantic thoughts about food and ask if these romantic projections are really true. Can food fulfill you and give you lasting pleasure? When you go without food and don't think about it, you see the truth: you really don't need food as a source of pleasure. Of course, you need it to survive, but you don't need to have a certain food at a particular time. When you don't think about food, you're free of it, and you see that you don't need to have a romance with it. Then your relationship can become very practical and healthy.

Instead of dreaming about food, like we might fantasize about sex, part of my healing has been noticing the pleasure in being alive, in performing simple everyday tasks, and thinking about food in a practical way. The romantic relationship, the tendency to dream and fantasize about it, disappears as we see the complete truth about what food can and can't offer us.

The way we think about food is the crux of our problems with food. If our romanticism and longing for food goes away then our problem with food goes away.

## Dieting from the Ego vs. Essence

When we are identified with the ego, the hope of being admired motivates us to diet. The ego keeps us on our diet plan by spinning fantasies about the kind of life we'll lead, the clothes we'll wear, and the partner we'll attract in our new svelte body. If we fall off the wagon, look out! The Relentless Critic aspect of the ego is merciless, calling us every name in the book for going off our diet. The Critic uses moral judgments about food and brow beating to keep us on our diet, while the Dreamer aspect of the ego motivates us with the lure of having our desires fulfilled.

Essence, on the other hand, encourages us to bring our body back into balance by prioritizing health, freedom, and happiness. Essence moves us to feed our bodies in a way that corresponds to staying at a healthy, natural size. If we're aligned with Essence when we're dieting, we see the whole picture about what food can and cannot offer us, and what a thinner body can and cannot offer us, rather than deluding ourselves about how great life will be after we lose weight. We live in the present moment and remember that our ultimate goal is freedom from the conditioning that's bound us and kept us suffering.

When we're aligned with Essence, dieting opens our eyes to the truth about eating, health, compulsions, life, and ourselves. We remain open and curious about experience, willing to inquire into and see the truth about even our most cherished beliefs.

Dieting from Essence is an entirely new relationship with food, our bodies, and thoughts. Anything new takes time and patience to assimilate, yet the rewards are great because the habits we cultivate when we diet from Essence permanently transform our thinking and don't end when we stop dieting. They become a new way of life.

Because dieting from Essence reverses longstanding, deeply entrenched habits, it's natural to have missteps along the way. If we backslide, Essence is compassionate and has no judgment about it. It sees a backslide as an opportunity to remember to be kind and gentle to ourselves, rather than chastising ourselves the way we used to when the ego was in charge.

### Exercising from the Ego vs. Essence

To the ego, exercise, like dieting, is a means to an end, the way to get a sexy, lean body that will attract admiration, relationship, security, and success. Other than that, the ego has no use for it. Just as it's perfectly happy to go on unhealthy crash diets, which starve the body of the nutrients it needs, in order to get a sleek body, the ego has no compunction about jumping into a punishing exercise regime rather than building up to it slowly with health in mind.

Essence, on the other hand, is primarily focused on nourishment, self-care, and simply delighting in the feeling of being alive in the body. Noticing that your body's energy is waning, it sends an intuitive message urging you to rest or sleep. Or seeing that your body would benefit from movement, it plants the idea of going for a walk. Essence enjoys the feeling of exertion and wellbeing that come from moderate exercise, while the ego exercises to create a sexy body or to compete with other bodies.

### After the Diet

Many of us are great at losing weight. We go on a diet, lose the weight we want, and think we no longer have issues with food and weight. Then, slowly but surely we return to eating the way we're used to eating, which caused the weight gain in the first place. And guess what—all the weight comes right back. So losing the weight isn't the problem.

The million-dollar question is, "What do you do after the diet, when you're back to allowing yourself a broader range of food?" The answer is—just notice when the Child comes in and ignore him. Dieting helps us establish a different relationship to food by relating to it as the Wise Witness rather than the Child, and this new habit can be carried into our relationship with food permanently—and it needs to in order to keep the weight off.

### Yo-Yoing in Smaller Swings

Many of us who've used food for comfort and entertainment have spent our adulthoods on one diet after the next, each time hoping to tackle our weight problem for good. Our closets have become mini-boutiques to accommodate our skinny, medium, and heavy bodies—depending on where we are in our yo-yo arcs.

Healing is a process rather than an instantaneous fix. If yo-yoing has been your pattern, as your thinking comes into balance and your eating naturally follows, the swings might remain for a while, but over time, they will gradually get smaller and smaller. For example, if your weight used to swing thirty pounds, you may swing twenty, then ten, then five, then one or two pounds. Most people can't go from swinging twenty or thirty pounds to one or two.

If you're still yo-yoing some, you may feel like you're not progressing, not healing. But this issue wasn't created overnight, and it may not be healed overnight. The key is patience. Don't torment yourself if you find that your weight continues to go up and down for a while. That's natural.

There is a habitual way of eating that corresponds with a certain body type. Overeating corresponds with a heavier body. Because many people don't want a heavier body, they force themselves to diet, but if they haven't changed their relationship to food, they will regain the weight. You can force weight off, but if you don't change your relationship to food, then the body is going to go back to matching the way you're habitually eating.

If on the other hand, you decide that you don't want to have a heavier body, you have to also decide that you can't ever go back to eating the way you used to eat. If you do that, don't expect to look the way you look at the end of a diet. It's just a fact of life that has to be faced if you want to maintain a healthy, natural body size.

### Backsliding

The process of changing your eating habits can be very slow. Please try to be patient! A lot goes into changing the way you eat. You have to change not only your relationship with food, but your grocery shopping habits and how you respond to influences in the environment that keep the old habits going, like the people you spend time with. So it's important not to beat yourself up if you backslide.

One of my many backslides:

  * I learned firsthand that physical discomfort can lead to overeating.

  * For now, I can see that it's helpful to stick to an eating plan, particularly when I anticipate that I may be facing a physical or emotional challenge.

  * It was opportunity to see and learn how to keep the rational part of myself in charge.

  * It gave me a chance to practice inquiry and be tender with myself. By seeing the painful belief for what it is—a lie—I can become free of that line of conditioning for good.

####

### Evolution: There Is Another Way of Being with Food

If you're willing to see the truth—that an irrational part of yourself has been running the show—then you're no longer identified with it and you can begin to take a more rational approach.

Not everyone is ready to dis-identify from the Pleasure-Seeking Child. Many people see that their relationship to food is making them unhappy and are still afraid to give it up because they don't know what will be left. Just as we can't see what's possible in terms of our spiritual evolution when we're ego-identified, we can't see that there's another way to be with food and still be happy when we're identified with the Child and it's driving our relationship with food.

But many people don't have the will to move out of the Child and instead, continue to indulge it because they don't believe they can be happy if they stop. They don't really want to change because they don't believe they can be happy without their current relationship with food. When people are identified with the ego—they don't believe there's another way of being.

Fortunately, because you're reading this book, there's a good chance you're ready to see that there's another possibility other than being the Child in relationship to food. You're willing to consider the possibility that you can be happy if you let go of your unbalanced relationship with food.

## Chapter Summary

  * Remember to see the whole truth about food rather than the Pleasure-Seeking Child's truth about it.

  * Eating Pleasure Food leads to wanting to eat more of it.

  * Remember all of the unpleasant consequences of overeating a Pleasure Food:

  * The guilt about eating unhealthily and not being strong enough to stop

  * Not fitting into clothes

  * Wanting to hide because you feel too fat

  * Weight gain

  * Low self-esteem

  * Losing confidence professionally and socially

  * Feeling bloated, nauseated, or listless

  * Connect with a life purpose that is engaging and feels fulfilling.

  * The Pleasure–Seeking Child is the part of us that gets activated when we experience a craving. It says, "I have to have this right now!"

  * When we're identified with the Pleasure-Seeking Child and we get a craving, it feels like a life or death imperative.

  * You sap the power of the Pleasure-Seeking Child when you decide not to respond to it every time it shows up.

  * The ego motivates you to diet with the promise of being admired.

  * Essence moves you to feed your bodies to stay healthy.

  * If you're willing to see that an irrational part of yourself has been running the show, then, you can begin to develop a more rational approach to food.

  * Eating is so quick—so fleeting.

  * Seeing that the pleasure you get from eating is fleeting is liberating because it helps you realize that not having two minutes with a particular food won't impact your life.

  * How you think about food is what makes it seem so wonderful, desirable, meaningful, and important.

  * When you see how untrue and overblown your thinking is about food, you're on our way to thinking differently and healing your relationship with food.

### Eating Guidelines and To Do List

When we're listening to Essence, or the Wise Witness, we naturally adhere to the eating guidelines below. The objectivity and rationality of Essence counteracts the ego's emotional or childish side.

How are you doing with incorporating the first three steps? Remember, you've been letting the Child call the shots for years, so be patient with yourself. As you check the To Do List below, be gentle. Let it be okay for you to have missed, forgotten, or been unable to put some aspects of the first three steps into practice. If, in your heart of hearts, you really want to be free of your eating and weight issues, you will be, on your own time schedule.

The First Step

  * I've been eating mostly unprocessed foods.

  * Most of my calories now come from food (that's grown) rather than non-food (that's made).

  * If a food makes me feel out of control or if I'm addicted to it, I either created a strategy to limit it that I could stick to or I cut that food out of my life.

The Second Step

  * I've been more aware while I've been eating.

  * I either wrote down my food or decided what I was going to eat and stuck to it.

  * I waited to eat until I was hungry.

  * I checked in with my body to see whether I was truly hungry, to avoid mistaking thirst for hunger.

  * I chose how much to eat based on portion size rather than satiety.

  * I ate more slowly.

  * I put down my fork in between bites or got up and walked around.

  * I ate when I was eating. I ate by myself, concentrating on the sensual experience of eating.

The Third Step

  * I've been paying attention to my thinking.

  * I've been thinking pragmatically rather than romantically about food. This means that when I catch myself imagining how a certain food will taste, I stop it.

  * I set the intention to have a practical, wise, and healthy relationship with food.

  * I've been noticing when my Pleasure-Seeking Child comes on the scene.

  * I've been deciding whether or not to give in to my Pleasure-Seeking Child rather than merging with it and doing whatever it wants.

  * When the desire to overeat comfort food arises, I've been seeing it as my conditioning, as the Pleasure-Seeking Child.

  * I've been using inquiry to help me see the whole truth about food—what it can offer me, and what it can't.

  * When I want food and my body's not hungry, I've asked myself any or all of the following questions: What is it that's aware of the thought, 'I want food right now?' Is that thought or craving, me? If I am aware of it, how can it be me?

  * I used any or all of the following Powerful Craving Kung Fus:

  * Powerful Craving Kung Fu #1: Put Your Attention on Something Else

  * Powerful Craving Kung Fu #2: Seeing the Whole Picture About Food

  * I used any or all of the following Powerful Kung Fus for Emotional Eating:

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #1: Dis-identifying with the Feeling

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #2: Dis-identifying with the Thought

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #3: Identifying the Need

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #4: Inquiry

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #5: Seeing the Whole Picture About Food

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #6: Put Your Attention on Something Else

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #7: I Do that Too

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #8: Think Something Positive Instead

  * Powerful Emotional Eating Kung Fu #9: Allow the Feeling to Be There

  * I've been devoting 5-10 minutes per day to recharging my batteries.

  * To counteract romanticizing food, I've asked myself if my romantic projection is really true.

  * I backslid and didn't beat myself up about it.

## Questions and Answers

Q. In relationship to hunger, is it better to wait to eat until I'm just a little hungry or until I'm really hungry?

One of the problems with waiting until you're really hungry before you eat is that you can lose your will to stop eating once you finally have a chance to eat. If you're really hungry, you're more likely to feel that you really deserve to eat a lot or that being so hungry must mean you need more food. So, generally speaking, it's best to not let yourself get really hungry.

Getting a handle on compulsive eating and eating issues means doing whatever it takes to keep the rational part of you, rather than the emotional part of you (the Child), in control. Letting yourself get too hungry can knock out the rational part and cause the Child in us to say, "What the heck, I'm hungry, so I'm going eat whatever I want."

Q. Who can benefit from this book?

This book can help anyone who has a romantic relationship with food and is open to seeing the whole truth about it. If your eating has a strong emotional component, then both psychotherapy and a non-dual or transpersonal approach are important for healing.

Q. What about balancing different tastes? What about feeling satisfied after eating?

It's important to distinguish between satisfaction that's conditioned and satisfaction that comes from a nutritionally balanced diet. Satisfaction is really just an idea. After you've eaten something, what is it that decides it's satisfied or not satisfied? It's the ego—the conditioned self—based on what it's used to. For instance, many decide they're satisfied after dessert because that's what they're used to. If you're used to having bread with a meal, then to not have bread with a meal makes you feel unsatisfied. It's not an objective feeling; it's a conditioned experience.

Q Why would some people be unwilling to change their relationship to food?

If they've devised a life that's unsuited to them, they may need to restructure it and make different choices to be happy. Their eating compulsion may be covering up a much deeper misalignment of their life choices, which has moved them away from what they need to be happy.

_Eating for pleasure is one way to cope within a very unhappy situation. If people are stuck in a life that doesn't fit for them, they might not be willing to change their relationship to food. If they gave that up, then they may believe that they wouldn't find anything good_ _about their life, and they might not be willing to make a change that would make them happier._

Yet, there are always ways to find fulfillment in any situation. For example, if a person is unhappy being a mother or stuck in a career she doesn't like but needs to pay the bills, perhaps she could do or study something else she loves while still fulfilling her responsibilities. There are always ways to bring in activities or hobbies that help people to be happier and more fulfilled within their not-so-fulfilling life structure.

# CHAPTER 5

# The Fourth Step: Wise Expressing

Congratulations on getting the first three steps under your belt. Let's take a minute to recap. How are you doing with incorporating some or all aspects of the steps into your life?

**The First Step:** Is your diet getting healthier? Have you found a strategy that allows you to continue to eat your addictive food? If not, have you been able to abstain from your addictive foods? If you decided to abstain, have you been surprised by how easy it's been?

**The Second Step:** Are you waiting until your tummy rumbles before you eat? Are you becoming more aware of your eating triggers, the situations that lead you to eat? Have you been able to bring more awareness to your eating? Have you been weighing yourself regularly?

**The Third Step:** How about your thinking? Are you beginning to see the whole picture about food and let go of your romantic fantasies and misconceptions about it? How are your Kung Fu for Cravings and Kung Fu for Emotional Eating skills coming along? Don't get discouraged if you're finding it difficult to put these new habits into practice. Looking for fulfillment and relief by way of Pleasure Food has been the pattern, the well-worn path you've traversed for years. Repeating that pattern has strengthened and reinforced it, so it's not surprising that it takes time and practice to rustle up enough awareness to be able to make a new choice. But have no fear. You'll be vying for your kung fu black belt in no time!

What about backsliding? Have you experienced some of that? If so, it's to be expected and a natural part of the process. It's perfectly normal and certainly _doesn't_ mean that you've fallen off the wagon and won't heal. If you've made it this far and you're still game to read on, there's no turning back. You're solidly on the road to recovery, although it may not happen on the ego's timetable. Again, remember to be gentle with yourself and let it be okay to make mistakes.

Let's move on to The Fourth Step: Wise Expressing. This step will pay dividends in all areas of your life.

## Swallowing Your Feelings

From an early age, many of us created emotional connections with sweet, salty, or fatty foods. When we were afraid, angry, or sad, we medicated ourselves with Pleasure Foods. Now, as adults, rather than uncovering the painful beliefs that generated the emotions and using inquiry to dissolve them or expressing what is appropriate to others in the moment, we stuff down our feelings with food.

For most of my life, my fear of incurring the wrath of others was so strong that I would do almost anything to avoid it. Terrified of upsetting others because I unconsciously equated their anger with annihilation, I would do whatever it took to stay safe. For me this meant distracting myself with food to keep my own reactions in check and avoid provoking someone else.

As a child, I wasn't in mortal danger from any of the adults I knew, but they certainly had power over me. As I got older, my fear of avoiding the wrath of others was way out of proportion. No one was really going to kill me, but the terror I felt in the moment was tantamount to being chased by a grisly bear!

The first step in freeing myself from this pattern was seeing that people's anger couldn't physically hurt me. I was safe. Next, I realized that even though eating could delay and blunt my reaction, it didn't serve me. I would overeat, stuff my feelings with food, and then, because I was upset with myself, turn the anger inward, beat myself up, and take my upset out on my family.

Avoiding the risks inherent in speaking my truth had other negative, self-destructive repercussions: I repressed my feelings and created a compulsive eating habit. In the next section, we'll explore how we create the feelings that we try desperately to avoid.

### Where Feelings Come From

Feelings come from thoughts. It seems like this should be common knowledge—found in a standard issue, operating manual on how to be human. Just think—if we'd known that feelings come from thoughts when we were children, we could have learned to manage our stressful thoughts by either ignoring or questioning them. We would have avoided creating negative feelings in the first place!

Maintaining our emotional hygiene by seeing the negative thoughts we were buying into would have become second nature—the only sane way to live. An unpleasant emotion would have been rare because we would have stopped creating them by ignoring the mind's lies. If we noticed a negative feeling, an alarm bell would go off inside us and we'd immediately ask, "What am I believing right now that's causing me to feel this way?" This question would yank us out of the ego and transport us back to the rational, pleasant world of Essence. However, without this essential life knowledge, we've become accustomed to listening to and believing stressful thoughts that create anger, sadness, and fear.

Emotions manifest as sensations in the body, making them seem much more real than thoughts. If we feel a certain way, that feeling must be true? If this weren't enough, inflated by self-righteousness, the ego comes up with all the reasons why _we're right_ , feeding the emotion with more thoughts, pumping it up until it achieves its desired objective—action. The ego is always looking for a fight, and the worse we feel, the better it likes it.

Thank goodness we have a choice. We don't have to travel the well-trodden path of generating negative feelings. Instead, we can form a new habit of ignoring the egoic mind and seeing thoughts arising as simply conditioning. With practice, we can learn to do this even before feelings have a chance to form!

## "Shoulds" and Other Arguments with Reality

Whenever we're upset about what's happening, we're arguing with reality. Life in the form of a particular situation has already happened. It's a fact, and there's nothing we can do about it. Byron Katie says, "When we fight with life we lose, but only 100% of the time!" Our resistance to life is created by the thought, "This shouldn't be happening." This is the most common way that we cause our own suffering.

Whenever we're irritated by a situation—we're waiting in a traffic jam or someone breaks a promise—the mind tends to jump in and proclaim that this or that _should_ be different: "There _should_ be more staff on the cash registers so that people don't have to wait for such a long time." "They _shouldn't_ make a promise they can't keep." "They _should_ have known better." "This slow car in front of me _should_ go faster."

Notice what happens when you use the word "should." There's an immediate contraction in your body because you're resisting life, and that doesn't feel good. Your perspective narrows down to one aspect of life, the tiny sliver of the truth about a situation that's right in front of you, and you miss the whole picture, the whole truth. Seeing only the reasons why things _should_ be different, you don't consider the possible benefits of the situation.

When we're standing in a long checkout line at the supermarket, we don't consider the possibility that the time spent waiting gives us an opportunity for quiet contemplation. The broken promise gives us a chance to learn discernment: seeing whom we can depend on. By remembering how it felt when we made a promise that we didn't keep, we're able to sidestep judgment and learn compassion and forgiveness instead. Here are some other ways to respond to an unexpected or unwelcome situation:

  1. _You can look at the potential benefit that comes with this new development._ You don't have to jump right into the downside or what you think _should_ be happening instead, as you might have done in the past. Considering the benefit eliminates the reaction altogether. It may take a lot of practice to get to this point. After all, you've had many years of arguing with reality.

  2. _You can recognize that your conditioning is coming up_ _and say, "Oh that's just my conditioning coming up."_ This noticing helps you dis-identify with your negative story and let it go. If you're quick enough, you'll notice and dis-identify with it before any reaction is felt in your body!

  3. _If you miss your chance in #2, notice and acknowledge that you've been triggered._ You can say something like, "Wow, I've really been triggered" or "I'm really in reaction." Noticing and telling yourself the truth brings you back to the present moment and takes you out of the story your mind is telling you about the situation. It extracts you from the argument you are having with life and enables you to bring your attention to the sensations in your body.

  4. Be gentle with yourself and let it be okay that you're in reaction. Ironically, this will move you into acceptance! Once you're in acceptance, no matter where you find it, even if you find it in accepting your own resistance, this will take you back to Essence!

## Day 5 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  3. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  4. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  4. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  5. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  6. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 6 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  3. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  4. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  4. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  5. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  6. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 7 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  3. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  4. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  4. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  5. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  6. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Other People's Criticism and Aggression

Eating was my answer to everything, especially when people were critical of me or when I was belligerent with them. Thinking I needed comfort food to get me through those situations, I'd be reaching for the pint of Ben & Jerry's so fast that heads would spin. Negativity (which is from the ego) in others created more negativity in me and vice versa.

There is no such thing as a nice ego. Whether it's ours or someone else's, egos are mean and ruthless. Some egos can put on a nice face to get what they want, but they're never purely altruistic. When the ego acts or speaks, it is always about "me," "my life," and "what you can do for me."

When a nasty ego is acting out, it's so natural to move into the same negative state. We're conditioned to take negative behavior on the part of others personally and react by either: attacking, defending ourselves, or stuffing our feelings down (with food of course). All of these responses keep us aligned with the ego.

The other possibility is not reacting at all and staying aligned with Essence. To do this, we only have to realize that the other person is in the ego and that egos egg other egos on. Once we understand this, we can choose to step back, take a breath, notice what's happening, stay in Essence, and _not take the bait!_

Moving away from an ego that wants to fight with us is far from easy. Our own ego is likely to be breathing down our neck, saying things like, "Are you just going to stand there and take that from him? You wimp! Where's your backbone?" The other guy's ego is egging us on and in cahoots with ours. Both are trying to push, dare, and shame us into the fray. If we have the strength and presence not to fight, that is all the better because this is a battle we can never win. Situations like this are a great opportunity—a chance to practice detachment from the ego and align with Essence.

If we can manage to _not_ take the bait, this is a huge step toward our own freedom. As a sage once said, "It is easy to be enlightened in heaven," but can we be enlightened in the hell created by a bully or someone who's taking his or her foul mood out on us?

## Day 5 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  5. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  6. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  7. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  8. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  9. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 6 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  5. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  6. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  7. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  8. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  9. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 7 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  5. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  6. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  7. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  8. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  9. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## It's Just Conditioning

If we're able to notice when conditioning has been triggered, either ours or someone else's, we can learn to sidestep our emotional eating response. Miracle of miracles, we can even catch an emotion before it's been created!

When people are criticizing us, it's just their ego, their conditioning talking—not who they are. Although there may be a sliver of truth in what they're saying (this is what hooks us), because they're speaking from conditioning, we know that their words can't contain the whole truth. When people criticize, judge, attack, or blame, in that moment, they believe their conditioning and they're suffering. The best relationship we can have to them is one of compassion for their suffering.

Being able to respond with compassion when people are attacking us only requires being able to see the truth—that their behavior doesn't reflect who they really are, which is pure love, or Essence. It's just their conditioning talking. If we can be present enough to automatically recognize conditioning when anger is coming at us, we won't have time to take it personally.

In other words, if our first reaction is to recognize the conditioning, instead of taking it personally, then there will be no upset. But, if we take it personally and feel upset, then it can be hard to regroup and get back to the truth. If we can train ourselves to see conditioning, to instantly notice when negativity is present and label it, "That's conditioning showing up," then our noticing will pre-empt our automatic response of taking it personally. Our first reaction will be to see the truth before any negative belief has a chance to arise and precipitate messy negative emotions.

Whether conditioning is coming at us from the inside or the outside, we can approach it the same way. If we notice it right away, label it as conditioning and don't buy into it, we can sidestep both the emotion and our emotional eating response altogether.

## Addictions: The Ego's Way of Avoiding Feelings

When we were young many of us who now suffer from addictions were terrified of anger. Because grownups looked enormous, we were afraid that if they got angry enough, they would hurt or even kill us. We may have associated anger with death, and since then we've tried to avoid these emotions at all costs. Unconsciously we may have come to believe that if we allow ourselves, or provoke others, to feel intense anger, we'll either be killed or our rage will be so out of control that we'll kill others. So for safety's sake, we've formed the habit of numbing ourselves out with food.

Ron: There was this angst that I felt all the time and I used food to medicate myself. I also used cocaine this way and cigarettes. I quit everything but I couldn't quit food.

I'd eat all the time when I was eating emotionally. And I was never satisfied.

Because food was my drug of choice, at the first sign of an unwanted emotion, I would stuff the sensation down with sweet, starchy or salty food, swallowing it so quickly that I barely was able to chew it, much less taste it. Distracted by the angry, fearful, or worrisome thoughts that precipitated my frenzied eating, it was easy to completely miss the sensation of eating. A robotic pattern took over, and negative thoughts wove an increasingly compelling and upsetting story, which only intensified the feelings and led to more frantic, compulsive eating. Caught in the grips of stressful thoughts, eating was the only way I knew to take care of myself. The thoughts seemed so logical and true that it didn't occur to me that I could challenge or ignore them. Instead, I would anesthetize the pain by stuffing myself with more food.

I began this book with a description of a binge that was born out of perceived humiliation at my college dance recital. Dating back to my teenage years, I've often eaten to distract myself from emotional distress. The compulsive eating response to disappointment was so engrained in me that it became automatic. It's taken tremendous focus and attention to begin to act differently, to stop the action, and ask myself, "Is food really what I want, or is there a feeling I'm trying to avoid right now?"

One important step in dealing with conditioning is to _slow down the action_ as much as possible. This can be challenging because addictive patterns makes us go into zombie mode, distracting us and keeping us from being present.

Knowing this, I recommend asking for help ahead of time. We can ask to be more present when an eating compulsion strikes. By setting this intention, we commit to our own healing and growth and plant our feet squarely on the path of recovery. It's as if we're saying, "I'm ready to move on and transform my dysfunctional relationship with food."

After we've set the intention, even if we continue to go unconscious for the next twenty, fifty, or five hundred times, when an impulse to eat comes up, something in us will remember that intention, and eventually we will be able to interrupt the emotional food stuffing response. The more often we can interrupt our usual pattern, the easier it will become. Just as we created the old habit of addiction in response to our frightening emotions, we can create a new habit of awareness by slowing down the action and removing ourselves from the danger zone—wherever the food is.

### Emotional Eating Mini-Review

Part of what follows is a review of the Emotional Eating Kung Fu from the previous chapter, The Third Step: Wise Thinking. Because emotional eating is perhaps the biggest hurdle we face in healing our food issues, a mini review can't hurt. Here goes:

  1. When you notice that impulse to stuff yourself with food, you can simply acknowledge it and take yourself away from the trough.

  2. When you are able to notice the impulse, you are no longer identified with it. You've weakened it and become more conscious. At that point, you can ask yourself, "What story was I telling myself? Why do I need comfort right now?"

  3. Next, you can use inquiry to debunk the story. This helps you see that your thinking is false. Once you do that, its hold over you weakens, and you are less likely to seek solace in comfort food.

Once you notice that gnawing, empty feeling that's about to lead you away from yourself and into acting out your addiction, ask yourself any one of the following questions:

  * Am I physically hungry right now? Or am I looking for comfort?

  * In this moment, what stressful thought am I believing?

  * What am I believing that's not true?

  * Is there something that I'm trying to avoid with food?

  * Would food satisfy me completely right now? Would it satisfy me forever?

Another helpful approach is telling the Child, "Not now, maybe later." If you can put off the indulgence, you're more likely to be able to find something more satisfying to do. Instead, take care of yourself in a way that supports and nourishes your soul rather than doing something you're likely to regret later.

Feeling the impulse to eat when you're not hungry is a failsafe sign of being in reaction and a great opportunity to ask yourself the previous questions. It doesn't really matter which questions or techniques you use. Whatever you can do before or in the midst of emotional eating to slow down the action and interrupt the pattern is the "right" thing.

### Allowing the Feeling to Be There

After taking yourself away from food and identifying the belief that's causing the feeling, you can use inquiry to further weaken the negative belief and unwind the conditioning that's causing you to suffer. If the feeling is still there, allow it to be present. Accepting it and allowing it to be present will enable it to eventually dissolve back into Essence.

Emotions don't come to stay; they come to leave. If you can learn to stop feeding them with more negative thoughts, they dissolve more quickly. The best internal posture is simply to be present and _allow_ whatever is happening in the moment, without adding more negative thoughts to it.

Many of us habitually suppress our unpleasant feelings, but doing this is like trying to keep a beach ball submerged under water. We might be able to manage it for a little while, but sooner or later, it will pop back up. Similarly, our anger, fear, or resentment will pop back up, and we will have to face it one day.

One way to heal this conditioning is to ask yourself, "What am I suppressing?" Ask for help to be able to make your unconscious feelings conscious. As they begin to surface, inquire into any beliefs that present themselves. When you're experiencing a feeling, you can ask yourself:

" **Can I just allow __________(the particular feeling) to be here?"**

Or say inwardly:

" **It's just (the particular feeling) _________. What a relief—it's not me. I can see it, so it can't be me.**

In this way, you dis-identify with the feeling rather than merge with it. If you can see it, how can it be you? A thunderstorm covers the whole sky, but the sky is not affected. In the same way, when emotional weather happens, who we really are isn't affected. We're the sky, not the thunderstorm. Once you know the feeling is not you, it instantly loses most of its power.

If you can allow it, without resisting it or wanting it to be different or having any agenda for it, it will eventually dissolve. However, if dissolving the feeling pronto is your goal, you're imposing your agenda on it and, therefore, resisting it rather than allowing it to be there, and as a result, chances are, it will hang around for quite awhile!

One reason our emotions feel so overwhelming is that we identify or merge with them. We become the anger or sadness or fear. We think that it's _our_ anger and feel self-righteous about it. "It's mine, and I have a right to express it, and you'd better respect it!"

But who says that emotions belong to us anymore than thoughts belong to us? Both arise and subside unbidden. If we feel ownership of our emotions and believe they're meaningful, it will be harder to let them arise and subside naturally. We'll want to hold onto them, feel their power, and feed them with more thoughts and beliefs that justify their presence. Then, we'll want others to validate our position and our right to feel what we feel.

Instead, if we can remember that we are that which is _aware_ of emotion, rather than the emotion itself, it will have far less power over us. From this vantage point, we can watch the action without getting involved in it. Anger happens. It arises, it's felt, it does its dance, it subsides; and we remain unchanged. We are the space in which anger arises, and we're completely unsullied by it.

##

## Speaking Your Truth Instead of Stuffing It

It may seem odd to have a section on communication skills in a book about our relationship with food and the body; and yet, if we're fighting with people, castigating ourselves, or afraid to ask for what we want or to say no, the ego has us locked up, and we'll be racing to the fridge faster than a roadrunner on steroids. Fighting, internally or with others, strengthens the ego; conversely, peace aligns us with Essence. If you want to stop eating your feelings, reducing your reactivity to others is helpful. Communication skills can help you accomplish this while creating adaptive, positive relationships. In the upcoming pages you'll learn ways to express your feelings, help you discover what you're repressing, and help you reduce or even eliminate confrontations.

### My Difficulties

With a history of feeling bad about myself, speaking my truth has been difficult, and I've often said yes when I meant no. My fear of disappointing people and desire to please were so great that they kept me from expressing the authentic "no" ringing inside me. My fear turned me into a liar and manipulator to get the approval of others.

For most of my life, I've been afraid to express what I was feeling or what was true for me. I assumed that if I told people that I didn't like what they were doing or saying, they would reject, ridicule, or humiliate me. This fear was so strong that I would repress my feelings, while rationalizing this behavior as conflict avoidance, or blaming it on the fact that I wasn't good at thinking on my feet.

On top of it all, I judged myself for being spineless. To avoid feeling angry or afraid, I would numb out by stuffing my face with the chocolatiest confection I could find. In those moments, I didn't know whom I was angrier at: other people or myself. In my head, I would rail at them for doing what they did, and then I would blast myself for being unable to respond or protest in the moment.

### Speaking Essence's Truth

In the movie, "You've Got Mail," I identified with the Meg Ryan character when she dreamt of coming up with the perfect put down. Finally, when she came face to face with her antagonist, she delivered a great biting quip. To her amazement, the experience was nothing like what she'd thought. She felt awful because it hurt to hurt someone else, even someone she disliked intensely. This is the difference between speaking the ego's truth and speaking Essence's truth. Speaking the ego's truth creates separation and makes everyone feel bad, and speaking Essence's truth brings people together and connects them to their hearts.

Expressing negative emotions and reacting negatively to others is hurtful, but sharing truthfully what we're feeling, experiencing, or thinking, from a place of balance and calm can gives others helpful information and aligns everyone with Essence. In this way, it can be positive and useful. Here's an example from my life:

A friend and I had plans to meet. I arrived at the prearranged time and place, but my friend was nowhere to be seen. I waited for ten minutes, and still no friend. When I called to ask her what happened, she responded that she'd had a change of plans. This response upset me because:

  1. She changed our plans without letting me know ahead of time.

  2. Ten minutes after our meeting time she still hadn't called, and I had to call her to find out what was going on.

  3. If I had known that she wasn't planning to come, I could have called someone else.

Here are two possible responses, one that could lead to compulsive eating, and one that represents a more balanced response:

Stuffing my feelings and pretending there is no problem:

I can pretend that it's not a problem and stuff my feelings. After all, I don't want to make her mad or make her think that I disapprove of her. If I tell her the truth, she may not want to be my friend anymore.

"No problem. These things happen. It's fine. Don't worry about it."

Expressing myself in a balanced way (after any anger has subsided):

  1. I can factually express the truth: "Sarah we had plans, remember?"

  2. I can express my feelings and how her behavior impacted me: "I feel disappointed that you didn't tell me sooner because I could have invited someone else."

  3. I can tell her what I want. I can let her know what I'd like her to do in the future:

"Next time, please let me know ahead of time if you need to make a change."

  4. I can let her know how her behavior has affected my feelings about the relationship: "Sarah, when you do things like this, it makes it hard for me to stay open to you, and I want to let you know that I will be doing my own work on this as well." Including this depends on the nature of the relationship. For instance, this might not be appropriate to say to someone in a work situation.

Speaking Essence's truth is cathartic and healing, diffuses conflict, and actually brings us closer to others, while speaking the ego's truth separates, inflames, and escalates conflict. We know we are speaking the ego's truth when we find ourselves blaming, name-calling, making generalizations, and judging. In speaking the ego's truth, we act out and defend our conditioning; in speaking Essence's truth, we take responsibility for it.

To be clear, by expressing how we feel, we're not asking the other person to change. Sometimes, to be able to be with and our anger or some other emotion rather than repress it, we need to express ourselves from Essence. This could take the form of asking for what we want in the future (e.g., "I'd appreciate it if...."). This isn't the same thing as telling someone he or she has to change, which can sound judgmental and angry. How we say things and where the words are coming from make all the difference.

When we acknowledge our weaknesses or admit we're having trouble releasing something, this is coming from Essence, since the ego doesn't admit to its failings. You might say, "This is going on for me, and it's interfering with my ability to feel close to you, and I'm working on it."

When we're stuck in an unresolved feeling and having difficulty moving on, asking the other person for an apology can help. You can simply say, "It would really make a difference to me to have an apology. If that's something you feel you could do, I think that would help me feel better." Apologies move both parties into Essence, whether we're on the giving or receiving end.

### Human Doings

Because our culture tells us that happiness is something to be attained rather than something to be noticed, we've become a society of doers. We _do_ rather than _be_ because we've been taught that doing will get us what we need to have a meaningful and happy life. Once we've gathered the external trappings of a successful life, we think we'll be happy. Yet, when we're too focused on doing, we miss out on our natural happiness. In addition, because we do too much and don't value feeding our souls enough—going within, resting, being quiet, listening, and meditating—many of us are perpetually stressed out. As a result, we find ourselves trying to get pleasure and satisfaction from tasting something good.

Our relationship with food is a spiritual issue. Ask yourself, "Is there a part of me that feels happy and at peace in this moment?" How connected do you feel with that part of you? This is your own Essence. The more we are connected with our own Essence, the part of us which is always happy and content, the less we are connected with the ego and its drives and the less we will look to things outside ourselves for happiness.

If we aren't happy, it's because we are telling ourselves something negative or because we've made choices that are not aligned with what we love to do or with our life purpose. Our mind can cause us to be unhappy because minds are, by their very nature, negative. For example, the mind could be telling you that what you're doing isn't meaningful or that you're not doing it well enough. So, it's possible to be living a life that supports your life purpose but not be happy because your negative mind saps the joy out of it. The mind declares: "This is how things should be and how you should be," and it quickly follows that with, "and you're not." "You're not the way you should be; you're not doing it right."

In our culture we associate eating with celebration and parties and so when we think our lives lack enjoyment, we try to create fun through food. Yet, life often lacks fun because we've made it that way, either by creating lives that don't suit us, doing too many things, or engaging in negative thinking.

The happier we are, the less likely we are to create a painful, out-of-line party with food, like the one I had after my dance recital. If we let ourselves rest more, if we ease up on ourselves, if we allow ourselves time to just be, then our whole life will feel more like a party, and we won't need to create a party with food.

### Anger and Repressed Emotions

Eating compulsively and bingeing both come from repressed emotions, particularly repressed anger, and may require therapy to heal. Everyone has repressed emotions and it's usually not a problem. It only becomes a problem when the anger causes us to hurt others or become self-destructive by eating to medicate ourselves.

We often repress the anger that we feel when we don't go after what we want, when we aren't true to ourselves, or when we don't express or stand up for ourselves. We let our negative thinking stop us. When this happens, not only aren't we following our hearts, we're not following the dictates of the ego either. Because we haven't learned to be assertive, we're not taking action in our lives, and we're stuck and depressed about it.

Many of us aren't following our passions because we let our conditioning stop us. For instance, if you want to be an artist, you may not pursue that for fear (conditioning) of not being able to make a living at it. If you aren't cut out for parenthood, you may end up having children because of conditioning that says you should.

If you follow your conditioning instead of your heart, you may be unhappy, living a life that doesn't fit for you. And if you don't do something to change that, you'll continue to feel unhappy and depressed.

To do some work on this on your own, ask yourself these questions: Is there anything I'm keeping myself from doing? Is there anything I'm keeping myself from saying? How do I avoid asserting myself? Even if you discover an ego-based desire that you're not following, it's not healthy to repress it. Instead, let it see the light of day, acknowledge it, and then follow it or not. But don't delude yourself into thinking it's not there, because if you do that, you'll soon find yourself in roadrunner mode again. If you choose to go after this desire, don't fret because even going after egoic desires brings growth and evolution.

### Becoming More Assertive and Following Your Heart

One way to change this pattern is to become more assertive. If we feel that we're not entitled to get angry or say "no," instead of standing up for ourselves, we get angry in our minds and either repress or feed our feelings. When this happens, we're likely to be eating at the same time that we're having an angry conversation in our head that we could have dealt with another way. If you're doing this, you need to attend to the emotional issue that's come up rather than feeding it with food and more thoughts. You can learn to heal it rather than feed it.

Begin by discovering what created the emotion in the first place. Start by examining the structures in your life. For example, if you're angry or resentful about the way your life is set up, you may need to make some changes. It's best to stop doing things that you don't want to do, within reason, or at least take steps in that direction. Even though you may feel locked into your life, you don't have to spend most of your time doing things you don't want to do. To become empowered and stop repressing or eating your feelings, you have to begin to listen to your heart and redirect your life so that you're doing what you want to do.

Unless you realize that you are _choosing_ how you spend your time, you will feel victimized, angry, and resentful and find yourself eating emotionally. There are always tasks that people would rather not do, but no one has to work at a job that just doesn't fit. Eliminate as many unpleasant tasks and activities as possible so that you can be happy. You're not meant to live a life that you don't want to live.

Often we get going in the wrong direction because our mind or other people's minds tell us we have to do this, that, or the other thing to survive or to attain a certain standard of living. If you're doing what you want to do, you won't need to get happiness from things. If you're happy and fulfilled doing what you're doing, life will feel good and you won't feel the need to eat emotionally.

There's the ego's version of happiness, and then there's real happiness. These two versions of happiness look very different. If living your heart's truth or following your passions doesn't include the money, success, or admiration the ego desires, then it can take courage to see that you can be happy living simply and doing what you love instead of having all the niceties that other people think you need.

In exchange for doing the things you hate, the ego offers you a nice car or nice house as a reward so that you can feel good about yourself. That's the trade-off. But you don't have to get happiness from feeling good about yourself on an egoic level. When you're being true to yourself, you feel good about yourself because you genuinely like what you're doing. Then feeling good isn't conditional. You won't need to be famous, sexy, or rich to feel good about yourself.

## Wise Self-Expression: Healing Low Self-Esteem

An important part of expressing ourselves wisely rather than using food for comfort is learning wise self-talk. Years of negative self-talk and believing those negative thoughts creates low self-esteem. Despite everything we've achieved, thoughts like "I'm no good," may still plague us and will continue to do so until we begin to question, see through, and detach from them.

Those of us with eating and body issues, base our self-esteem on how we look and how we've been eating lately. If our weight's in line, the ego showers us with praise; if not, it kicks us into the gutter, saying things like, "Eating is so basic, if you can't get a handle on that, how do you expect to ever do anything else?" Take heart, no one should be ashamed of having food and body issues—they're rampant. The reason they're so hard to overcome is because food, unlike alcohol or drugs, is the only addictive substance that _we need_ for our very survival.

To create a new habit of wise self-expression, it's important to become aware of what you're saying to yourself. Set the intention to _notice_ the way you habitually talk to yourself. If you say negative things, either replace those thoughts with positive thoughts or question the negative thoughts using self- inquiry.

If you're feeling bad about yourself, it can drive you to comfort yourself by eating. However, if you can set the intention to notice when you're feeling bad about yourself and ask, "What am I telling myself that is making me feel this way?" you interrupt the pattern. Then, you can replace your negative self-talk with positive self-talk. But if you eat to feel better, it adds to the problem, causing you to feel less attractive and bad about yourself. It's a vicious circle.

If you can see the whole picture, that ultimately overeating tastes good for a few seconds and then you feel worse for hours or days afterwards, this seeing can help to break the pattern of emotional eating. Eating the cookies brings a fleeting, nice taste in your mouth and momentary relief from a negative feeling. Not eating the cookie gives you a chance see:

  1. What you're saying to yourself that caused you to feel bad,

  2. Perform self-inquiry, and

  3. Become free of the negative belief that caused the negative feeling.

Can you choose to go against the usual pattern—just for today—and see what happens? It's your choice—cookies or freedom?

Remember: changing this pattern can take time. After all, how many years have you been engaging in negative self-talk? My guess is that you've been doing this most of your adult life. Please be patient and tolerant with yourself as you chip away at this pattern.

In the next section, we'll examine the stressful things we may be telling ourselves when we eat to satisfy emotional needs. For example, you might be telling yourself the following when you eat because you're feeling down:

  * I'm weak.

  * I'll never get the body I want.

  * I can't get on the right track in my life, and I won't attract the kind of partner I have always dreamed of.

To help you uncover your beliefs, read the lists in the next section and circle the ones that apply to you. Hold onto them because a few pages from now you'll have a chance to question them in the section called "Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Responding, Expressing, and Emotional Eating."

The more you question stressful beliefs, the less power they have over you, because you get to see that they don't tell the whole story, the whole truth. When you see this, you can't believe in them in the same way, and if and when they arise again, you won't give them a second thought!

### What Your Beliefs About Food and Eating Mean About You

We all have so many beliefs about food and eating that it might be hard to know where to start. In addition, these beliefs affect how we feel about ourselves. For example, you might think any or all of the following at different times in your life or even at different times during the day. Food...

  * Is my Achilles heal

  * Is heavenly

  * Is my only source of pleasure

  * Has to be governed with an iron fist

  * Makes me fat

  * Is not safe because I have to control myself when I'm around it

  * Is my curse

Ultimately, no matter how much you dress it up, food is fuel. It's the stuff we stick in our tanks to keep the body moving, thinking, working, playing, and breathing. However, as we've seen, this basic truth about food has done little to prevent us from forming wildly romantic beliefs, and creating an overblown relationship with it. In this section, circle all of the beliefs about what it means to eat emotionally that cause you stress so that you can question them later.

### Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means... (Negative)

What It Means About My Character

  * I'm weak.

  * I have no willpower.

  * I'm a hopeless failure.

  * I'm unlovable.

What It Means to Others (friends, family, colleagues)

Others will judge me as:

  * A loser because I can't get my eating under control

  * An emotional wreck

  * Not living up to my potential

  * Someone to look down upon

  * Gluttonous

  * Disgusting

  * An example of how not to live

  * Others think my eating is:

  * Immoral

  * Repulsive

  * A turn off

  * Pathetic

What It Means About How I Live My Life

I eat emotionally and that means:

  * I'll never stay in a stable weight range and that means:

  * I'll stop socializing.

  * I'll stop trying to find a partner.

  * I'll feel like a failure.

  * I'll always be on a diet, trying to get a handle on my weight, and that means:

  * I'll always be unhappy.

  * I'll always struggle.

  * My weight will always yo-yo, so I'll never be able to maintain a normal weight.

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

My emotional eating means that:

  * I'll always be fat, and that means:

  * I won't be loved.

  * I'll end up alone.

  * No one will want me.

  * I won't be able to attract the kind of partner I want because I'll be judged for not being more together and in control of myself.

  * No one will want to be in relationship with me because I'm always in a bad mood when I eat emotionally.

  * I'll never be able to reveal this shameful practice to my partner, so I'll always have to hide my munching.

What It Means About My Career

My emotional eating means that:

  * I won't have the respect of my subordinates, peers, or superiors.

  * People at work will think I'm weak-willed and lacking in self-esteem.

  * I'll lose out on promotions.

  * I'll talk out my bad moods on my co-workers

  * I'll never live up to my potential.

  * If I can't do a simple thing like manage my weight, I'll never amount to much.

If you have other stressful beliefs that weren't listed, take a moment to fill out the following form:

### Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means... (Negative)

What It Means About My Character

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to Others (family, friends, colleagues). How Do I Think They're Judging Me?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About How I Live My Life

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Career

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

###

### Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means... (Positive)

In this section, we'll investigate positive beliefs about eating emotionally. Believe it or not, positive beliefs can also get in the way of creating healthier habits. For that reason, it's important to identify any beliefs you have about the payoffs you're getting from emotional eating and make them conscious so that you can decide whether you want to keep them. Circle each belief that resonates for you so that you can inquire about them later.

What It Means About My Character

  * I'm strong because I don't conform by controlling my eating.

  * I'm easy to be with, not fussy.

  * I have tremendous willpower because I'm thumbing my nose at social norms of eating.

  * I know how to take care of myself.

  * I love myself.

  * I can shield myself from painful feelings.

What It Means to Others (friends, family, colleagues

Others will see me as:

  * Agreeable because I'll be stuffing and repressing my anger. My relationships are all about pleasing the other person.

  * Great to have a relationship with because I never need anything. I never ask anyone for anything. If they do something I don't like, they will never hear about it from me.

  * Someone who doesn't sell out. I'm my own person because they see me eating what I want and as much as I want.

  * Someone they feel comfortable with because I pose no threat.

  * They can always feel that they're stronger and have more willpower than me.

  * Fun to be around because I can always find a reason to eat and celebrate.

  * Others think my eating is:

  * Healthy

  * A way to celebrate life

  * A turn on

  * Cool

What It Means About How I Live My Life

I eat emotionally, and that means:

  * I'll have lots of eating buddy friends who can count on me for a good binge.

  * I'll never maintain my natural weight, and that means I will stop trying to find a partner. I will avoid the emotional rollercoaster of romantic relationships.

  * I'll always be on a diet, trying to get a handle on my weight, and that means:

  * I'll never be bored because I'll always have a project.

  * My life will be predictable.

  * I won't have to take risks and possibly get disappointed.

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

My emotional eating means that:

  * Food will be my primary relationship, and it'll never let me down.

  * I won't look for relationships and consequently, I'll never be dumped.

What It Means About My Career

My emotional eating means that:

  * I won't be yelling at my co-workers, taking my bad moods out on them.

  * People will see me as happy and charming and want to work with me.

  * I'll get promotions and live up to my potential.

If you have other positive beliefs that weren't listed, take a moment, and fill out the following form:

### Eating to Satisfy Emotional Needs Means... (Positive)

What It Means About My Character

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to Others (Family, Friends, Colleagues). How Do I Think They're Judging Me?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About How I Live My Life

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Career

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 5 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  7. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  8. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  10. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  11. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  12. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 6 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  7. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  8. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  10. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  11. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  12. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 7 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  7. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  8. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  10. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  11. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  12. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Wise Responding

Wise expressing also means learning to respond to others while remaining aligned with Essence. When you're aligned with Essence, you don't need to turn to food for comfort. It can be really challenging to stay balanced when another person is angry and confronting us. Again, tread lightly with yourself here and don't expect to instantly be able to put this habit into practice. Just remember, when someone is angry, they're coming from the ego and try not to get hooked or escalate the situation.

My husband and I have learned to use four words that immediately diffuse a charged situation and keep me from reaching for food. If one of us is upset and hurling blame and accusations, the other tries to respond with, "I can see that." These words alone can be enough to create a reprieve so that we can catch our breath and relate to each other from Essence. By saying, "I can see that," we acknowledge other people's perspective, they feel heard, and it's easier for them to move back into Essence.

When you speak to other people, try to see where they're coming from, to imagine how you would feel if you were in their shoes. Ultimately all acts of hostility and abuse arise from a hurt place in the perpetrator. Though it may be difficult to see at the time, these aggressive acts are actually cries for love.

When people are acting out of the ego, acknowledge that and know that it's not who they really are. Remember how awful it feels to be so contracted and have compassion for their suffering.

Here are six ways to listen and respond empathetically to someone who's acting out of the ego that can help break the pattern of turning to food for comfort. As you read them pay attention to any resistance you may be feeling to wise responding. Where is the resistance coming from? Jot down any stressful beliefs that come to mind so you can take them to inquiry a few pages from now in the section called "Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Responding, Expressing, and Emotional Eating."

  1. Giving the Other Person the Benefit of the Doubt

Although we can never really know what's going on inside someone else, we do know that life isn't always easy. We can all identify with feeling stressed or going through a difficult time. If the other person isn't treating us respectfully, it's possible that they're having a tough time. Even though we don't know their circumstances, we can choose to give them the benefit of the doubt.

  2. Imagining What It Would Feel Like to Be in The Other Person's Shoes in a Tense Situation

Escalating Example: Getting Defensive (What Not to Do)

**Other Person:** I can't believe you. You're so rude! How can you put me down like that?

**You:** _What do you mean? What are you talking about? I wasn't rude at all—and I most certainly did not put you down. How dare you accuse me of doing that! I'm not that kind of person._

Escalating Example: Attacking Back (What Not to Do)

**Other Person:** I can't believe you. You're so rude! How can you put me down like that?

**You:** _What are you talking about? Are you nuts? I can't believe your nerve. You're totally blind to your own faults. You know you're the rude one, and if anyone puts people down, it's you._

Diffusing Example: Putting Yourself in the Other Person's Shoes (What to Do)

**Other Person:** I can't believe you. You're so rude! How can you put me down like that?

**You:** _(We imagine what it feels like to have someone treat us rudely and put us down.) Wow, I know what it feels like to have someone be rude to me and put me down. It doesn't feel good at all. I'm sorry if that's how things came across to you. It was not my intention to be rude to you or put you down._

  3. Using the Four Magic Words: "I Can See That"

Escalating Example: Getting Defensive (What Not to Do)

**Other Person:** It really burns me when I'm talking to you and you're paying absolutely no attention to me.

**You:** _What the heck are you talking about now? I always pay attention when you're talking to me. I can tell you everything you just said to me._

Escalating Example: Attacking Back (What Not to do)

**Other Person:** It really burns me when I'm talking to you and you're paying absolutely no attention to me.

**You:** _You're one to talk! You never pay attention to me when I'm trying to talk to you. What a hypocrite!_

Diffusing Example: Using the Four Magic Words (What to Do)

**Other Person:** It really burns me when I'm talking to you and you're paying absolutely no attention to me.

**You:** _I can see that. It can be really frustrating when you're trying to talk to someone and they aren't paying attention to you. Please, tell me again. I promise to pay better attention._

Another Diffusing Example: Using the Four Magic Words (What to Do)

**Other Person:** How could you do that? How could you make that decision without even consulting me? What were you thinking? Or were you even thinking at all? It really frustrates me when you leave me out of a decision that involves both of us.

**You:** _I can see that. I'm sorry. Next time I'll try to remember to involve you in decisions rather than making them on my own._

  4. Mirroring

Sometimes when we're in an emotionally charged interaction, it's hard to hear what others are _really_ saying. We hear what we _think_ they're saying rather than what they're _actually_ saying. They might be in reaction and not able to clearly express what they mean or they may be speaking out of their conditioning, which in turn, triggers our conditioning.

Mirroring, by reflecting back what other people are saying, can keep us from simply reacting from our conditioning and escalating a disagreement into an argument. The point of mirroring is to validate the other peoples' feelings and truly understand what has upset them so much. However, you have to be careful not to be formulaic about it so that the other person doesn't feel like you're acting "above it all" by using therapeutic techniques. Here's an example:

**Sally:** (raging) I really hate it when you talk to me in that tone of voice. It makes me furious. You're really talking down to me. Who do you think you are talking to? And who do you think you are—all high and mighty?

**John:** I can see that I really upset you. Could you please help me understand why?...Okay, you really don't like it when I talk to you in the tone of voice I just used. Is that right? (The second part of mirroring is checking back in for accuracy. This is what Sally is doing when she asks, "Is that right?")

**Sally:** Yeah, that's right. (Emphatically)

**John:** And when I use that tone of voice, it makes you feel like I am talking down to you?

**Sally:** Yeah, like you're better than me.

**John:** And that tone of voice makes it seem like I am better than you, high and mighty. And this makes you furious.

**John:** Yeah

At this point, Sally may still be angry, but at the very least she feels heard. She knows that John has really paid attention and listened to and acknowledged her feelings.

  5. What Am I Feeling and Needing in the Moment?

When someone verbally attacks you, go inside and see what you are feeling and needing in the moment. If your partner has criticized you, you may be feeling hurt and need to feel safe and loved. Here's an example:

**Sally** : You didn't call the electric company like you said you would! You never remember to do the things I ask you to do. Do I have to remember everything?

John goes inside and realizes that he's feeling hurt because he believes that Sally is attacking and blaming him. He asks himself what he needs right now. He discovers that he needs to feel acknowledged for all of the things he _does_ remember to do. So he does this for himself, instead. He makes a mental note of and acknowledges himself for everything he remembers to do and forgives himself for forgetting this one thing. This begins to diffuse his hurt feelings. Next, he responds by acknowledging his partner's feelings and point of view.

**John:** I see that I forgot to phone the electric company. I can understand that you would be upset about that. I'll call them just as soon as I finish this project.

  6. Expressing Impact and Asking For What You Want (Using the Example from #5)

John continues to do his own work on this by making a plan to continue to acknowledge and appreciate himself for all the things he remembers to do and for all the contributions he makes to the household and partnership. In addition, if Sally continues a pattern of blaming and criticizing him, John can express the impact of that on him and ask for what he wants her to do differently. This is different than blaming and judging Sally. Here's what he might say:

**John:** When you talk to me that way, it's hard for me to feel close to you. I really care about our relationship and want to feel connected to you. Next time, maybe you could say something like: "John, I see that you forgot to phone the electric company. Could you please phone them the next chance you get?" Then, maybe you could ask, "How can we work together to help you remember things like this?"

## Day 5 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  9. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  10. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  13. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  14. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  15. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 6 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  9. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  10. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  13. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  14. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  15. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 7 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  9. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  10. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  13. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  14. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  15. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Wise Expressing

When we get upset, it's natural to want to lash out at whomever we think is responsible for our pain and, of course, reach for something tasty to eat. Either that or we stuff our feelings down with food. These conditioned impulses come from the ego and have been reinforced over many years. For this reason, it takes a lot of practice and self-restraint _not_ to attack and not to go for the comfort food. If you tend to react immediately, it may take a while to change these patterns, so be patient and gentle with yourself, just like you would if you were teaching something new to a young child.

You might be thinking that people won't like you or your spouse will leave you if you start speaking your truth, saying "no" when you mean "no," or asking for what you want. Whatever fearful beliefs comes up, test them by taking them to inquiry and see whether they hold up.

When powerful negative emotions erupt, it can be challenging, particularly if we feel that we've been wronged in some way. It's natural for our ego to want to settle the score by making accusations. Instead, try to find a place to be alone or at least away from this other person.

First, notice that you're aware of the emotion, so it can't be you. You're not the anger or the hurt feeling. Dis-identifying with it in this way greatly diffuses it. Next, drop your story about the situation and focus on the body sensation associated with the emotion. Witness it but don't feed it with more thoughts or a story about how bad or wrong the other person is. Just watch and feel the sensation.

After some time, you may notice the sensation beginning to shift or dissipate. Don't impose any timetable on it. Just give the sensation the time and space it needs. Once the feeling has dissipated, you have a choice: either to let the other person know what's come up for you or deal with the upset within yourself using inquiry. If you choose to speak to the other person, do your best to do it in a neutral, non-judgmental way. Express impact without blaming. Here is an example:

Escalating Example: Blaming and Judging (What Not to Do)

**John:** I can't believe you left that back door open again. Don't you know how that makes me feel? You're so inconsiderate! If you cared about me, you would remember.

Diffusing Example: "Just the Facts, Ma'am" (What to Do)

In this example, John waits until he feels balanced and calm before approaching Sally. He begins by expressing the facts of the situation without judging or blaming Sally. Then, he asks for what he wants, the action he wants Sally to take to address his need to feel safe. Finally, he acknowledges the effort that Sally is already making and goes one step further by expressing his willingness to help Sally address this need. He is willing to work with Sally to come up with ways to help her remember to keep the door locked.

**John:** Sally, I noticed that you left the back door unlocked last night. It's the third time this week. I feel really unsafe in the house when the back door is unlocked. In the future, could you please try to remember to lock it? What do you think would help you remember?

**Sally:** I'm not sure. Believe it or not, I do try to remember.

**John:** I do appreciate that you try. Thank you. Would it be helpful to have a note on the door?

**Sally:** Yeah. I think that would help me.

**John:** That's great. Thank you for helping me with this. I feel much safer knowing that I can count on you to keep that back door locked.

## Inquiry for Resistance to Wise Responding, Wise Expressing, and Emotional Eating

Please don't skip this section! It's pivotal to your healing. It's your chance to take the emotional eating beliefs you circled a few sections back, and any resistance you might be feeling to wise responding and wise expressing, to inquiry.

These beliefs are important! They lie the root of your food and body image related suffering and now's your chance to deflate them. So go for it!

Now that you've explored a wide range of ideas about expressing yourself, responding to others, and food and emotional eating, you're ready to take them to inquiry. Find out if these painful beliefs are reliable. After all, you've been living life as though they are. Now is their time of reckoning!

Go back to your emotional eating beliefs and any stressful beliefs that arose when you were reading the Wise Responding and Wise Expressing sections and take as many of them to inquiry as feels right. Then, see what happens to your relationships with yourself, other people, and with food! You think your beliefs are powerful? Questioning whether a negative thought is true—now that's powerful! Let's get started. Ask yourself two questions about your negative beliefs:

  1. Is it true?

  2. Is the opposite as or more true? If so, find examples to support the new positive belief.

Here is an example to help you get the hang of it:

**Disturbing Belief:** **I'm hopeless, a failure as a person if I can't control my eating.**

Inquiry:

  1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** I'm a success if I can't control my eating. **What is your evidence for this?** I'm a success because I'm telling myself the truth about my eating. Only when I tell myself the truth about something can I learn and grow from the experience. If I'm able to control my eating and I've formed a romantic relationship with food, perhaps I will never get to really understand what food means to me or investigate and remedy what's really bothering me. I will miss the opportunity to tell myself the truth about what's going on and heal conditioning that's robbing me of aliveness and happiness.

Here's an example to help you release any resistance to wise expressing:

**Disturbing Belief:** **Speaking my truth means that my relationship with my partner will fall apart. Because I won't be repressing my anger, I won't be keeping the peace anymore, so we'll split up.**

Inquiry:

  1. Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** Speaking my truth means that my relationship with my partner will _not_ fall apart. In fact, it will get even stronger and more peaceful and we'll end up staying together. **What is your evidence for this?** I can't know the future, so it seems just as likely that speaking my truth will make the relationship stronger rather than tearing it apart. The very fact that I am speaking my truth, rather than stuffing it with food, will mean that I am likely to be happier and have higher self-esteem, and that alone will make me a better partner.

## Day 5 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  11. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  12. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  16. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  17. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  18. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 6 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  11. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  12. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  16. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  17. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  18. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Day 7 Inquiry

**List a** **Disturbing Belief About Eating Mostly Nutritious Foods (from the list you compiled on Day 4):** **______________________________________________________________________________________________________**

Inquiry:

  11. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _____________________

  12. What is the opposite of this belief?

**______________________________________________________________________________________________________Could this new belief be as true or truer than your original belief?** **What is your evidence? List three reasons or pieces of evidence for this:**

  16. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  17. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

  18. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

# Chapter Summary

  * From an early age, many of us created an emotional relationship with sweet, salty, or fatty foods.

  * Rather than stuffing our feelings with food we can either:

  * Use inquiry to debunk our stressful thoughts,

  * Stay present with our feelings, or

  * Express what is appropriate to others in the moment.

  * Feelings are created by thoughts.

  * We don't have to create negative feelings. We have a choice.

  * We can ignore the mind and notice that the thoughts arising are simply conditioning.

  * With practice, we can learn to do this even before feelings have a chance to form.

  * Once we recognize that another person is in reaction or acting out of the ego, how we respond is up to us.

  * When someone attacks us verbally, we're conditioned to take the behavior personally and react by either attacking back or defending ourselves. Both of these responses strengthen the ego in us. Instead, we can choose to step back, take a breath, shift into Essence, and not take the bait!

  * One important step in dealing with conditioning that has been triggered is to _slow down the action_ as much as possible.

  * We're the sky not the thunderstorm.

  * Sometimes we need to speak our truth to be able to be with our anger rather than repress it.

  * Speaking our truth could mean asking for what we want in the future (e.g., "I'd appreciate it if....").

  * Telling someone to change, which can sound judgmental and angry, is different from speaking our truth.

  * How we say things and where the words are coming from—the ego or Essence—makes all the difference.

  * Eating compulsively and bingeing both come from repressed emotions (particularly repressed anger) and may require therapy to heal.

  * Repressed anger comes from not going after what we want, not being who we are, not expressing ourselves in the world, or not standing up or doing what we're moved to do.

  * Low self-esteem comes from believing negative thoughts about ourselves.

  * When we have low self-esteem or feel bad about ourselves, we may try to feel better by eating. If we eat to get happy, it adds to the problem, causing us to feel worse about ourselves. It's a vicious cycle.

## To Do List

Use this To Do List to jog your memory as you put this new step of Wise Expressing into practice. Reading it over frequently, will help you remember to begin to express yourself in a healthy way, one that supports your growth and happiness, rather than reinforcing the pattern of emotional eating. Check off these items when you have been able to put them into practice:

  * Here are some new ways that I've used to respond to an unexpected or unwelcome situation:

  * I looked at the potential benefit that comes with this new development.

  * I didn't jump right into focusing on the potential downside of a situation, as I might have done in the past.

  * I recognized that my conditioning was coming up and said any of the following to myself:

  * "Oh that's just my conditioning coming up."

  * "Wow, I've really been triggered."

  * "I'm really in reaction."

  * I was gentle with myself and let it be okay that I was in reaction.

  * I noticed that a craving was on the scene and asked myself one of the following questions:

  * "Am I physically hungry right now? Or am I looking for comfort?"

  * "What stressful thought am I believing?"

  * "What am I believing that's not true?"

  * "Is there something that I am trying to avoid through food?"

  * "Would food really satisfy me completely right now? Would it satisfy me forever?"

  * I noticed that a craving was on the scene and told myself, "Not now, may be later."

  * In the midst of an intense feeling, I asked myself:

" **Can I just allow __________(the particular feeling) to be here?"**

  * In the midst of an intense feeling, I said inwardly:

" **Oh it's just (the particular feeling) _________. What a relief—it's not me. I can see it, so it can't be me.**

# 

# CHAPTER 6

# The Fifth Step: Wise Relationship with the Body

Congratulations! You've made it through all of the steps related to eating and expressing yourself, and now you're ready heal your relationship with your body. This relationship is the mental image of the "meat suit" you're wearing.

Before we move on, let's do a quick check in. How are you doing with The First Step? If you have been eating a healthier diet, your taste buds should be adjusting to it nicely. What I mean by that is: wholesome fruits, vegetables, grains, and protein might be tasting pretty darn spectacular by now. And don't forget to let yourself have some treat foods (that hopefully have some nutritional value) to make things a little more interesting. If you're still eating some junk, that's okay too. It's okay to have a little party with food every once in awhile, just not every day. As the grownup in your new relationship with food, you'll need to gauge your own junk quotient.

This work is about you deciding how to feed your body for the rest of your life. It's not another diet that you're adding to your resume. Consequently, it may take some time to find out what you're comfortable with, what works for you.

Onto The Second Step. If you're trying to lose weight, have you dropped some pounds by making a food plan and sticking to it? Are you 1) bringing more awareness to your eating? 2) weighing yourself regularly to track your progress? 3) eating smaller portions? 4) making friends with hunger?

What about The Third Step? How are you coming with busting your food romanticism? Are you starting to see what food can give you, and what it can't? Has this realization helped you to "kung fu" your cravings and emotional eating?

Finally, what about The Fourth Step? Have you been able to 1) be with your feelings and inquire into the stressful thoughts that generated them? 2) speak your truth to yourself and to others from the place of the Wise Witness? and 3) be kind and gentle with yourself when you've slipped up and spoken the ego's truth instead?

Hopefully, you're well on your way to taking your life back from nagging thoughts about food and weight, and are ready to move on and tackle the seemingly insurmountable issue of accepting your body, just as it is. It may seem like a contradiction to accept your body and, at the same time, decide to lose weight to improve your health. Yet, to reject the reality of your current body size is to suffer, and it doesn't even help you lose weight! Both accepting your current size and dieting to achieve a healthier body can be expressions of honoring and loving yourself.

Creating a wise relationship with your body is about allowing change to happen from a place of tenderness, rather than from the Relentless Critic's self-loathing or the Dreamer's overblown fantasies. This is where the Skinny Thinking approach differs from other diets that actually reinforce the voice of the Dreamer and the Critic. The key is noticing where the impulse comes from. If it's a loving impulse, it's coming from Essence and supports a new, wiser relationship with the body.

Can you even imagine what it would feel like to accept your body right now? It's a radical idea that doesn't even occur to most women. But I'm here to tell you that not only is it possible, but it's the likely outcome of creating this new habit. So why not start, right now, clearing the way for realizing this possibility? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, set the intention, and ask for help to be able to accept your body exactly as it's appearing now, in this moment.

Now that you know where you're headed—complete freedom from body-identified suffering, here's a quick preview of this chapter. First, you'll travel back to when your body beliefs were created. As you read about my beliefs, you'll begin to remember when and how your own beliefs began. Where were you? What were you doing?

For many men, having a body that turns heads means you have life by the tail. If your body is overweight, it doesn't measure up, and you're a failure. Not just in this one area, but in every area! No wonder we're so crazy over this issue!

Let's say this is your belief system, your key to understanding how to make life work for you. All you have to do is maintain a perfect body, and you've got it made; you're safe, right? What could be easier? However, if you've been letting this belief run your life, "easy" is the last descriptor I'd use! Thank goodness, it's far easier to unravel this painful belief than to try to live your life by it.

Wacky as it may sound, the upcoming sections will teach you how to look in the mirror. From a young age, we learned to look at our reflection from the damaging perspective of the Relentless Critic. Now it's time to make peace with the body. Thank goodness! To do this, we need to learn to look from Essence, from the Wise Witness.

## The Birth of a Core Belief About the Body

### Fear and Desire

The root of desire, which comes from the ego, is fear. If we inquire into the beliefs beneath our stress, agitation, anger, and sadness, we discover the fear of loss. If like Darren, you decide that you're fat and that means that you won't be able to be in a relationship or live a happy life because of your weight, you live in fear. You're afraid that if you can't take off the weight, you lose your dream of one day having a happy life. To distract yourself from your fear, you may desire pleasure, overeat, and gain weight. For me, the fear of loss, which translated into a fear of the negative consequences that I attributed to being overweight—humiliation, loneliness, and low self-esteem—created the desire to get thin.

After reaching my weight goal through dieting, I couldn't rest because I was afraid of gaining weight again, and this fear created a desire for pleasure. I was back on the feast/fast merry-go-round again. This was the perfect set-up for yo-yo dieting and endless weight loss and gain. The only way to put an end to this cycle once and for all was to stop romanticizing food and create a more rational relationship with it. This ended my addiction for good. And if I can do it, you can do it too!

### Investigating Beliefs About the Body

Now that some of the men I interviewed let you in on some of the toxic beliefs about their bodies, it's your turn. Fair is fair, after all! In the next two sections, you'll get some prompters to help you examine the stressful beliefs you have about your body, and you may even uncover some you didn't know you had.

Here we go. On the first line, check out the beliefs Bob had about how men's bodies should look. Then, on the line below it, fill in yours for the same body part. If perchance you have a body part with no corresponding judgment, lucky you! Just skip that line. (As you can see, not having a judgment for each body part was not Bob's problem!)

Legs should be well defined and strong, not skinny.

Legs should_______________________________________

Arms should be muscular not fat.

Arms should_______________________________________

Bellies should be flat and roll free.

Bellies should_______________________________________

Hips should be narrow, not round and feminine.

Hips should_________________________________________

Chests should be well defined and muscular. No male breasts please!

Chests should_____________________________________

### Beliefs About Bodyweight

Now that you're on a roll, sharpen your pencils, roll up your sleeves, and let's get down to it. I promise that these exercises will be worth the effort. In the following lists, notice which beliefs feel true for you so that you can question them later. Bringing stressful, unconscious beliefs about the body into the light of day and seeing that they never tell the whole truth is the first step in their dissolution. Once they dissolve, there's nothing left to trigger painful emotions like anger, shame, fear, and sadness. Living unburdened by these beliefs is like having the weight of the world lifted from your shoulders.

Negative emotions sap our energy and are the biggest triggers for eating for comfort and pleasure. The more you can allow your negative beliefs about food, your body, life, others, or yourself to dissolve, the fewer negative emotions you'll create, and the less you'll be moved to eat emotionally.

Circle any beliefs that ring true for you. My body:

  * Is out of control

  * Is insatiable

  * Has to be governed with an iron fist

  * Is programmed to make me fat

  * Is fat and ugly

Next, look at the meaning you've given to any negative beliefs about being heavier than you'd like to be, in all areas of your life. Circle each one that is true for you.

### More Weight Means... (Negative)

About My Character

When I'm heavy, it means:

  * I'm weak and have no willpower.

  * I'm a hopeless failure.

  * I'm not lovable.

What It Means to Others; How They're Judging Me

Others will think that I'm:

  * Sloppy

  * Lazy

  * Not living up to my potential

  * Someone to look down upon, not in their "league"

  * Gluttonous

  * A loser

  * An example of how not to live

What I Imagine Others Think About My Body

Others think my body is:

  * Dumpy

  * Asexual

  * Disgusting

  * A turn-off

What It Means About How I Live My Life

I will:

  * Avoid mirrors

  * Stop socializing

  * Stop trying to find a partner

  * Avoid thinner friends and family because I don't want to be compared to them. I'll feel bad about myself in their company. Everyone will see me as a loser.

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

  * I won't be able to attract the kind of partner I want.

  * My partner will always be on the lookout for someone thinner.

What It Means About My Career

  * I won't have the respect of my subordinates, peers, or superiors.

  * People at work will assume I lack self-esteem and willpower.

  * I'll lose out on promotions.

  * I'll never live up to my potential.

What It Means to My Parents

  * They will be ashamed of me.

  * They will wonder where they went wrong with me.

  * They will feel like failures.

If you have other stressful beliefs that weren't listed, take a moment and fill out the following form:

### More Weight Means... (Negative)

What It Means About My Character

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to Others (family, friends, colleagues). How Do I Think They're Judging Me?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What I Imagine Others Think About My Body

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About How I Live My Life

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Career

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to My Parents

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

In this section we'll investigate negative beliefs about being thin. If you were planning to skip this section because you don't have any negative beliefs about being thin, think again! This section can be quite the eye-opener.

Ron: I grew up in an Italian family and everyone was heavy. I never went on a diet and no one ever suggested that I go on a diet because no one saw being overweight as a problem. We were all big and that was our normal.

When I finally lost weight as an adult and my mom saw me for the first time, she said, "Oh my God what happened to you? You're way too thin. It's not healthy." I said, "Mom I want you to imagine that you don't know me, you've never met me, and you're seeing me for the first time. Would you think I was too thin? Would you say the same thing?" She had to admit that she wouldn't say that. For the first time, I had a normal sized body and she'd never seen me that way.

We assume that being thinner is a panacea, but a lot of us have hidden fears about it, which sabotage our pound shedding. What does your extra weight mean to you and your family and friends? Does it represent safety, protecting you from the risks of intimacy or following your true passions? Circle each belief that rings true for you:

### Less Weight Means... (Negative)

What It Means About My Character

  * I'm weak and have no willpower to ignore societal pressures about weight.

  * I'm not lovable.

What It Means to Others (family, friends, colleagues). How Do I Think They're Judging Me?

  * They'll envy and admire me and hate me for it.

  * They'll want to have sex with me, and I don't want that.

  * They'll think I'm vain and self-involved.

  * Others will think my body is:

  * Wiry

  * Scrawny

  * Unappealing

  * A turn-off

  * My parents will:

  * Be worried about me

  * Wonder where they went wrong with me that I am so consumed with being thin

What It Means About How I Live My Life

  * I won't be able to hide anymore.

  * I won't have any more excuses about not getting on with my life.

  * I won't be able to live in the future and will have to face the reality that this is my life now.

  * I'll have to take risks, and I might fail.

  * I'll have to give up food as my primary source of emotional nourishment.

  * I'll have to starve myself and give up the foods I like.

  * I won't be able to enjoy food.

  * Staying at my natural weight will be a constant struggle, so I'll always be stressed out, hungry, and unhappy.

  * Being at my natural weight equals deprivation.

  * I'll love looking at myself in the mirror and become totally superficial and self absorbed.

  * I'll be unhappy because I'll live in fear of gaining the weight back.

  * The people I love won't love me anymore.

  * I'll feel like a failure.

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

  * I'll be totally exposed and vulnerable without my fat armor to protect me.

  * Potential partners will be turned off because they will assume that I must be narcissistic to look this good.

  * I won't be able to attract the kind of partner I want.

  * I'll get too much sexual attention and won't know how to fend it off.

  * I won't be loved.

  * I'll end up alone.

  * I'll stop trying to find a partner.

  * I'll avoid heavier friends and family members because I won't want to be compared to them. I'll be afraid that they'll feel jealous and uncomfortable being around me.

What It Means About My Career

  * I won't have the respect of my subordinates, peers, or superiors.

  * People at work will view me as lacking in self-esteem and willpower.

  * I'll never live up to my potential.

  * No one will respect me in my career.

If you have other beliefs that weren't listed, list them on the following form:

### Less Weight Means... (Negative)

What It Means About My Character

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to Others (family, friends, colleagues). How Do I Think They're Judging Me?

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What I Imagine Others Think About My Body

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About How I Live My Life

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Ability to Be in Relationships

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means About My Career

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

What It Means to My Parents

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

## Inquiry for Negative Beliefs About the Body

Like a record stuck in a groove, we repeatedly use stressful beliefs about our body to torture ourselves. Once we decide they're true, we swallow them whole. Yet, if we inquire and realize that these beliefs don't tell the whole truth, we undermine them. This is the beginning of freedom. If we stop believing something, it no longer has power over us.

Unknowingly, we've been our own jailers. Challenging the beliefs and the fears that keep them in place through inquiry is the key to our jail cell. We can escape anytime we want—all we have to do is remember to take out our key: questioning stressful beliefs.

Now that you've identified many of your body related judgments and seen how they've affected your life, here's your chance to loosen their grip on you. As you take them to inquiry, magically, they will let go of you, either immediately or over time.

The more you question your stressful thoughts, the less power they have over you, and soon they will cease to affect you at all. Like someone speaking in a language you don't understand, other people's words, media images, and your own stressful thoughts will find no place to land. This can be the end of your internal war, the end of your suffering over beliefs about your body.

The more painful the belief, the less truth it contains. If thinking a thought makes you feel bad, right off the bat, you know that it's not true. The first step in examining a stressful belief is to ask if you can know with absolute certainty whether that belief is true. Is there any evidence to the contrary?

The second step in undermining a pesky negative belief that keeps dogging you is to look at its opposite. Could the opposite of the negative belief be as true or truer? If so, what evidence can you find to support the new positive belief. Make a list. Doing this, helps you replace the painful negative belief with a positive one. This is how you trade stress for ease!

Many people mistakenly think that after they've performed self-inquiry on a belief _once_ , they've eradicated the conditioning. If only this were true! _Repeated_ inquiries dissolve conditioning for good. After all, it's taken years to create and reinforce these belief constellations, so it's not surprising that it takes repeated inquiries to unravel them.

Let's look at some examples of negative body-related beliefs to see how inquiry can weaken them:

Belief: I can only be happy if I'm lean and in shape.

Inquiry:

  1. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _(Close your eyes. Let the question sink in so that the answer can arise from within you, rather than rushing to come up with the answer. The ego tends to jump in with what it_ _think_ _s is true.) If your answer is yes, you can absolutely know that you'd be happy if your body were lean and in shape, ask yourself if you can predict the future. Can you really know how you would feel? Even if the answer is, "Yes, I know I will be happy if I'm lean and in shape. I got that way before, and I was happy, and my love life was great!" move on to the next phase of inquiry._

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** _I wouldn't be happy if my body were lean and in shape. This is at least as true._ **What is your evidence for this?** _I was lean and in shape a few years ago, and I liked how my body looked, but I was obsessed with food and making sure that I wouldn't gain weight again. I couldn't enjoy myself because I was always worried and stressed out._

Belief: I hate my body.

Inquiry:

  1. **Can I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is true?** _Yes, absolutely._

  2. **What is the opposite of this belief?** _The opposite would be: I love my body. I'm having a hard time believing that this thought is true. Well, I suppose there are things that I love about my body:_

  * It keeps me alive and breathing in the material world.

  * It's generally healthy.

  * It allows me to move from place to place.

  * Having skin lets me experience a cool breeze on a hot day.

  * It doesn't have a serious illness.

  * It doesn't have any chronic conditions.

  * It has good vision.

  * Its teeth are strong and healthy.

If, like me, you've believe that you hate your body, then take that belief to inquiry, as I did in the example above, and come up with evidence to support the opposite belief: I love my body. If you're able to come up with concrete examples of how you _actually_ do appreciate your body, notice what happens. What is the impact of this inquiry? Are you aware of any softening of this belief: I hate my body, or does it have the same grip on you as before? Did the inquiry create a crack of doubt in this belief boulder? If so, you have placed your feet squarely on the path to freedom. Like flipping over the first domino, it's not long before the whole lineup of negative body beliefs tips over!

Remember the negative beliefs you circled in the last two sections? Go back, at your own pace, and take as many beliefs to inquiry as feels right. Perhaps, depending on your lifestyle and schedule, set a goal of questioning one belief each day, and see what happens to your relationship to food and your body.

## A Writ of Body Attachment

In the criminal justice system, a warrant for someone's arrest is called a "writ of body attachment." In spiritual parlance, "body attachment" is the belief that you are the body. As in the criminal justice system, this belief also robs us of our freedom, the freedom to experience our true nature—unbounded joy. According to Hindu philosophy, the notion "I am the body" lies at the root of all human suffering.

Through the simple misunderstanding that we are our body, we think that when it gets old, we get old, when it's fat and out of shape, we're fat and out of shape. No one around us questions this hypothesis, and neither do we. It's so easy to get caught up in the ubiquitous messages of the culture and forget the simple truth: we are spiritual beings having a human experience rather than human beings having a spiritual experience.

Here is how you became identified with your body: Starting with the name you got from your parents, you were taught to think of yourself as a separate person. Personhood meant that you had a unique body that allowed you to feel pain and pleasure, and hunger and thirst.

Soon, you learned that you were a boy person. As you got older, you noticed that when your particular body fell down and skinned its knee, you felt the pain, but your sister didn't.

Over time, you moved from not being identified with the body, as a baby, to complete body identification. This change was twofold:

  * First, you linked the notion of self with the body. You looked in the mirror and acknowledged, "This reflected image is me." This frail, skin-covered, eating, pooping, sleeping machine is me—not my brother, my mother, or my dog, but me.

  * Second, you innocently attributed the body, its gender, appearance, size, shape, and function with _certain meanings_ —some positive and some negative. For example, your body is male, _and that means_ the world will take you more seriously than if your body were female. Your body has long fingers, _and that means_ you might be well suited to playing the piano. Your body has large, square chin, _and that means_ have a strong character. You have a small chin, _and that means_ you're weak. You're overweight, _and that means_ no one will ever love you, and you will always be alone and unhappy.

In addition, we learned from the other people in our lives and the media that bodies of our gender are supposed to look a certain way, and ours either did or didn't. Eventually, there was a moment of reckoning when we stood before the mirror and took a good hard look and decided how we measured up. We asked ourselves, "Do I make the cut, or do I fall short?" And if you didn't measure up, what action did you take? Did you accept your body as it was, or did you try to conform by altering it through diet or exercise or even surgery? If you decided you didn't measure up, in that moment, you created a negative body image.

As you got older, this culturally reinforced gender-based standard broadened, commanded more of your psychic energy, and penetrated your self-worth. You believed that people would either think well or ill of us, judge or envy us, or desire or reject us based on how our body looked. In this ego-based construct, your body's appearance determined whether you would be a success or failure in life. That's how important this body stuff is—or at least to those of us on the weight and dieting treadmill of misery!

Many men put tremendous pressure on themselves to be the best we can be, and this desire extends to the size and shape of our bodies. From the time you were very young, you were taught to believe you had to be handsome to attract your perfect partner and live happily ever after. To reinforce this belief, we are subjected to a daily barrage of media images of young, lean, handsome men who seem to be leading happy, glamorous lives. The implicit message is that to be successful, you have to look like them.

This pressure to conform to cultural standards of masculinity, not only doesn't feel good, it causes great stress. When you have negative beliefs about your body, you make the following mental leap: because your body isn't up to par, neither are you—and you suffer. Your suffering is the thick smokescreen of stressful thoughts and feelings that obscures your natural state of peace and joy. It's always caused by the same thing—believing something that's not true. Ironically, even though we've come to believe that thinness is our ticket to happiness, when we feel stressed, we use eating to feel better.

But hold on, you may say, "I don't really believe those things about my body." And you may be right, however, there are many beliefs we aren't consciously aware of that are running us. If your goal is to create a healthy relationship with your body, then making those unconscious beliefs conscious is important. To do this ask that your unconscious beliefs about your body be brought into your conscious awareness and then be on the look out for insights that arise throughout your day. Once you learn what they are, you can take them to inquiry and weaken their negative influence.

Your body may be heavier than other bodies, but fat can never be who you are. Thinking that you are your body is like looking at a couch, thinking you're it, and suffering because your "couch body" has short legs and some other couch has longer ones and is, therefore, better.

To begin to detach from the idea that you are your body, think of it as a car ferrying you from point A to point B. It's at your service helping you get around and experience life in the material world through your senses. Your job is to keep it clean and fueled, maintain it through exercise, and do whatever you can to keep it running well. When you use a car to get from one place to another, you don't confuse it with yourself. You don't think you _are_ the car, right? So what makes you think you are this body?

We get tricked into thinking that our particular body _is us_ because we experience its sensations. That's how we get hooked. To challenge this idea, ask the question, "Who is seeing this body?" The answer of course, is, "I am." If you're the one seeing this body, how could it be you? Whenever you realize that you're caught in the belief that you're the body and identified with its characteristics, you can remember the truth and snap out of it.

### Pursuing the Perfect Body: The Road to Hell

I used to believe I couldn't be happy unless I was at my ideal weight. Caught up in the imaginings of the Dreamer, the aspect of the ego that fantasizes about the future, I believed that if I were thin, all my problems would melt away. Dreaming about the future can be fun, but the flip side of the Dreamer's dream is not much fun at all: If your body doesn't look the way you think it should, even if you have all the trappings of a successful life: wealth, a fulfilling career, and a happy relationship, you'll still suffer.

What I didn't realize was: it was _the thought_ that my body didn't look right _,_ rather than my body's actual appearance, that was causing my pain. Without the thought, the body was just doing what it did—breathing, walking, sleeping, and there was no suffering. What was having a problem with my body's so-called imperfect size? None other than the villain in the eating/body-image saga—the ego of course!

At the time, I wasn't able to see that I had the perfect body all along! I have always had the perfect body for me—to learn and experience through. None of us has to wait to be happy until we have that so-called perfect body. We can be happy right now, rather than postponing our lives because the image in the mirror doesn't conform to what the ego wants or likes. We know this is true because we all experience moments of happiness, regardless of our body size. _We're happy when we experience life_ _directly, without analyzing or judging it;_ and we suffer when we believe thoughts that say we look bad or we've failed. The truth is: other people don't really care how we look; they're too busy worrying about how _they_ look. The only one keeping score is our pesky ego.

Over the last thirty-five years, my body has been 10-20 pounds heavier than my ego preferred, so I suffered. I struggled, strived, lost weight, and was happy for brief intervals. Of course, the ego attributed this happiness to my new, thinner body. But the real reason I was happy was I got a break from continually striving to be thinner. My attachment to having a thinner body caused me to suffer, and when I reached my goal weight, the striving ceased and consequently, so did my suffering.

Having a "perfect" body doesn't lead to true happiness. Those of us who have achieved the perfect body at some point in our lives know this is true because other undesirable consequences may come with it: obsessive focus and identification with the body and worry about future weight gain.

If you have attained your ideal body weight at some point in your life, did it make you happy? Are you seeing the whole picture? It may be true that you attracted more attention and admiration, but did that translate into happiness? Did you worry about maintaining your weight? Were the partners you attracted the kind of people you wanted to be with?

The idea that a perfect body will make you happy is just a belief. The key to becoming free from this belief is just to see it for what it is—a lie, or a partial truth. You do this by remembering the times you've been happy at a heavier weight and unhappy at a lighter weight. From there, you can begin to dis-identify with the body altogether, whatever its weight. That's true freedom.

### Stressed and Obsessed

The premise of the myth of thinness is: if we achieve the body of our dreams, we'll live happily ever after. After all, thin models and movie stars give the impression of leading charmed lives. So it's natural to assume that if we had bodies like theirs, our lives would be great too.

The rub is that the media-fabricated images of ripped, lean bodies set up an impossible standard for most men to attain. For diet magazines, books, and programs, gyms, and spas, this myth means money in the bank. It keeps you striving, and if you're striving, you're also buying, and probably losing some weight.

But look out! After the diet ends, the Pleasure-Seeking Child resurfaces tempting you with all the taste pleasure you've been missing, and you guessed it—we regain the weight. After the pounds climb back on, because you don't look like the hunks in the magazines, you open the door for the troublemaking twosome: the Critic (telling you how bad you look and warning you that we're ruining your life) and the Dreamer (planting the seed of hope that all of your wildest dreams can come true if we just get back into shape). Once again you're a sitting duck for the next miracle diet. Under the influence of the troublemaking twosome, following the new miracle diet isn't a problem because, after all, what's a little sacrifice and deprivation when our whole future hangs in the balance?

Let's face it, as a society, we're body obsessed. Oprah Winfrey, one of the truly iconic figures of our time, admitted once that no matter how much success, fame, or money she had, none of it mattered—none of it—if she couldn't fit into her clothes, if she couldn't control her eating. This is the ego's voice, telling us that if we can't manage our weight, we're a failure. Of course, this troublemaking ego has a vested interest in keeping us feeling bad because if we're suffering, we're more likely to follow its plans—plans that always involve striving. This is the ego's cycle—striving followed by success, followed by failure, followed by more striving, and on and on ad nauseum until we die.

### Is It Worth the Suffering?

###

If you're able to accept being overweight right now, what does this mean? Does it mean you'll slide into being fatter and fatter and never be lean again? All it means is: this is what your body weighs right now. It doesn't mean you won't ever weigh less. It doesn't mean you'll weigh this much for the rest of your life!

If you're suffering over not having the perfect body, over not achieving the Dreamer's dream, ask yourself, "Is it worth the suffering? Does it really matter?" What would happen if you just let yourself be the way you are right now—just for now?

What does this excess weight mean to you? Is it really that bad? It's important to look at what the extra weight means because _the meaning you're giving it is what is causing your suffering._ Who cares that you might not look as attractive carrying the extra weight, the ego or Essence? The answer is: the ego cares because everything matters so much to the ego.

Can you accept the ego's preference? Can you accept not liking your excess weight? Is it worth the suffering that resisting the way your body looks right now causes you?

Really look at this because the suffering doesn't change anything. Not liking your weight doesn't change anything. It only causes you pain. For this reason, resistance is an irrational stance. If your body is this way, you might as well like it. Why spend time evaluating it? Why spend one second evaluating it? It doesn't serve you.

Trying to lose weight for health reasons and to look and feel better is one thing, but trying to create a perfect body is quite another. If you want a perfect body, it's important to ask yourself, "Is that where I want to put my energy? Is that what I want to focus on?"

Striving for the perfect body takes a tremendous amount of attention, time, energy, and money. Just look at what celebrities go through to look the way they do. If that's what's important to you, go for it, but realize that there's a cost.

The cost is all the attention you end up giving to your looks. Your life becomes all about appearances. You only have so much time and energy, so what's important to you? Where will you put your attention, your time, and your energy? That's why it's important to ask yourself, "Does not looking perfect matter?" "How much does it matter?"

It matters so much to the ego, but it's not the route to happiness. "Looking perfect" matters to the ego because it wants to be admired for being lean, muscular, handsome, disciplined, and special. "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?" No one wins in that game. There's no happiness in it because admiration for being attractive comes paired with the suffering of trying to hold onto it. Aging robs even the best-looking men.

Think of all the men you know who are not thin or in shape and yet they're totally lovable. Isn't it true that you love them all the more for their imperfections? It can be hard to love people who look so perfect. In fact, they often lack an inner attractiveness because they've focused so much on their outer appearance. _Being at peace with how you look rather than obsessing over it_ is actually much more attractive.

It's one thing to care about the health of your body, but there's no fulfillment or happiness in caring so much about your appearance. Put your attention and energy into serving others and paying attention to them. Put your attention into loving and accepting others and seeing their beauty. Once you do this, you'll forget about striving to have the perfect body. You have only so much energy and so much time. What will you put your attention on—the inner or the outer? The outer is just a dead end.

### Mirror, Mirror on the Wall...

Mirrors reinforce body identification. When you look in the mirror, you think, "That's me." When the ego looks in the mirror, it imagines how others will see you and whether how you look will help it get what it wants. It also fantasizes about being admired and the wonderful life you could have, if only you looked the way it tells you, you should.

On the other hand, when Essence looks in the mirror, it's for pragmatic reasons. It makes sure that you buttoned your shirt right or that you don't have any spinach in your teeth. It knows that this two-dimensional representation of the body isn't you. Only when you look deeply into the eyes of the reflection do you get a taste of what you really are—radiant spaciousness, eternal, beyond name and form.

When you look in the mirror, do you look to find what's right about your appearance or what's wrong with it? Most of us look in the mirror to nitpick and zero in on our problem areas. The ego sees flaws, and all bodies have them, so mirrors are the ego's perfect tools.

If you spend much time looking in the mirror, you can easily get caught up in the Relentless Critic's superficial world of appearances. The Critic aspect of the ego urges us to look at our body with a magnifying glass and causes us to lament over the tiniest flaws. Then, it either comes up with a solution or leaves us to suffer. Either way, it weaves a negative story that creates negative feelings.

When we're away from mirrors, it is easier to become more aligned with what is _looking out from our eyes_ (Essence) rather than what our _eyes see_ in the mirror. When we align with the Wise Witness, we experience ourselves _looking_ rather than as an object of perception. When we believe we're objects, that belief opens the floodgates for the Critic to come in and judge and evaluate. If you want to stop suffering over how your body looks, avoiding long looks in the mirror is a good place to start.

## A New Relationship with the Image in the Mirror

When we look at ourselves in the mirror through the eyes of the Relentless Critic, we do it with an investigative eye, querying, "Am I getting old?" "How do I look?" "Where are the wrinkles?" "Is my jawline sagging?" This is radically different than looking in the mirror more pragmatically in order to comb our hair or brush our teeth.

The mirror brings out the ego, or false self, not who we are. If we're suffering over what we see in the mirror, then in that moment, we're ego-identified. Once we become aware of the negative relationship we have to the image in the mirror and the suffering we create by the harsh, rejecting, even violent way we scrutinize it, we can choose to disengage from negative self-talk and develop a kinder relationship with that image. Negative thoughts, such as "I don't like it," "I want to change it," "That's awful," _aren't us_ , they're our conditioning. The more we realize that the mirror brings out the Relentless Critic, the more we can work to develop a different relationship with the image by being very gentle toward it.

From the Wise Witness, we can forge a new relationship with the mirror that's not problematic by not looking too closely. We do what we need to do (brush our teeth or hair), and move on. Relating to the body from this place means: looking in the mirror and not scrutinizing, evaluating, judging, or imagining what other people are seeing. If you can step back and bring awareness to that which is looking, you align with the Wise Witness and connect with its compassion for the contracted part of us that's unhappy with what it's seeing.

This body and its image in the mirror are no more who we are than a tree. The truth is that it doesn't matter what we look like. We only think it matters. The lesson you can learn from bodyweight issues and aging is that your inner, rather than your outer, attractiveness is what makes you handsome—your authenticity and comfort in your own skin. Some of the most handsome men are less so because they lack the poise, calm, and lovability that others who are less handsome possess, and this inner poise and alignment with Essence is very attractive to others.

Mirror Exercise

Look into your eyes in the mirror for 15-20 minutes. (Don't be surprised if you see images of many different faces.)

During this exercise, it is possible to experience the truth of what you are because your actual visage gets lost in your looking. You may see your face morph into many other faces. The truth is that you're all of those faces and possibilities—the beautiful and not so beautiful—and none of them. You can come to see that you aren't just one image because even that image hasn't stayed the same throughout your life. It's just an image, a vehicle. And that's what becomes apparent when you stare into your eyes for a long time.

What you're looking at just comes and goes—the beautiful and the ugly all appear. What's _looking_ is what's true and real, and the image, the appearance, isn't real and doesn't matter. It's transitory, and when we're at peace with that, other people relax and become so comfortable with us. We transmit ease and contentment when we're at peace with ourselves and how we look, that allows others to be at peace too.

### Aligning with the Wise Witness Instead of the Ego

When we're identified with the ego, our relationship to our body is guided either by the Critic or the Dreamer. It's easy to get sucked into the Dreamer's fantasies of the perfect life we'll live when we're thin or fall prey to the Critic's judgment, fear, anxiety, and self-deprecation. Together they spin the story that if we get the right body, we can create a storybook life, and without it, we're doomed to failure.

Thankfully, we can step out of the Critic and the Dreamer and relate to our body from Essence's Wise Witness. When we do this, it's easy to follow intuitions that move us toward health, moderation, and balance. The Wise Witness accepts being overweight and, at the same time, intends that the body be brought back to a healthy weight, unlike the ego whose goal is to create a body that will attract attention and admiration.

To stop suffering over how your body looks, I recommend the Goldilocks approach: "This body is not too thin or too fat but juusssstt right for this moment." The perfect body is the one that's appearing in this moment, the one that's reflected back in the mirror. Can you just let your body be the way that it is right now?

The truth is that your body is the way it is in this moment. You can't change that fact. It's too late; the moment is already over. To reject this reality is to suffer. Your choice is: either be at this weight and accept it or be at this weight and suffer. Which will you choose: freedom and happiness, or suffering? It's up to you. If you can accept this body for now, not forever, it leaves you free to move forward from a rational place of health and balance. If you resist this body, if you hate it, you'll stay stuck. The old adage, "What you resist persists," is true.

"But wait," you may say, "How can I accept what I don't like? If I don't like this body, is it still possible to accept it?" Yes. You simply accept that your body is how it is right now. It may not be your preference, but if you can just allow it to be, you will move out of resistance. If you can let it be okay that the ego doesn't like how your body looks right now, from that perspective, as the one who is noticing the resistance and accepting it, you're outside of it. It may seem subtle, but there's a Gulf of Mexico between thinking _you are_ the flawed body and noticing that the ego doesn't like the look of the body. From that place you accept your resistance to it, and let that resistance be okay.

Always nudging us in the direction of wellbeing, Essence's intuitions direct us to rest when we're tired, eat when we're hungry, drink when we're thirsty, and exercise to keep the body healthy. Essence is like the honest mechanic, tuning up our car for optimal performance, while the ego is like the confidence man, always ready with a story that moves us toward immediate gratification or romantic fantasies of a future that takes a punishing routine to achieve.

Whenever we find ourselves invested in the body's appearance or worried or excited about how other people may view it, we know that we're aligned with the ego. Whenever we're content with what is at peace within ourselves already, we know we're aligned with our true nature or Essence.

### Replacing Negative Thoughts with Positive Ones

One easy way to break the habit of negative body self-talk is to replace negative thoughts with their opposites. For example, if you think, "I hate my stomach," replace that thought with, "I love my stomach." If you think, "My skin is too wrinkled," replace it with a positive thought such as, "My skin is perfect just as it is" or "I love the lines on this face." Even if you don't believe these positive thoughts at first, just keep repeating them and finding supporting examples. For example, the thought, "I love these arms. Their strength allows me to lift and carry things and function in my life" gives you a compelling reason for loving your arms and creates a positive new story that replaces your negative thoughts about your arms. Set an intention that, from now on, you'll automatically replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts. Pretty soon, negative thoughts won't be able to enter your airspace undetected!

The more you replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, the less you'll be able to be sucked in by them. Instead, you'll remember that the ego doesn't tell the whole story about your body—or anything else, for that matter! At first it may be tough to let go of those old negative thought patterns, but like tugging a poorly planed door over a thick carpet, as you pull the door across the carpet time after time, it eventually becomes easier, until there's no more resistance at all. It's the same way when it comes to replacing your negative thoughts. Eventually, it becomes automatic. Knowing that they're false, you don't allow them to derail you into a negative story.

Your weight is just a number on the scale, nothing more. As your sense of self becomes separated from your image of the body, you're more able to view the body as your earth-exploring vehicle rather than a statement about your value or who you are. You don't have to take the body's weight personally. If you were shopping for vases you might remark, "This vase is round and that one is tall." In the same way, you can dispassionately remark, "This body has more weight and that body has less."

As you begin to dis-identify with your body, the body that appears in the mirror will seem to be no more yours than the mail carriers'. You call it yours, but perhaps it's only out on loan—so why not care for it as you would a faithful servant and stop identifying with it?

Our ability to see the body as a servant rather than our personal identity helps us become more practical in how we relate to it and less caught up in it emotionally. But, you may ask, "What if I do start seeing my body this way rather than who I am, then what? Who will I be then?" Great question! Are you willing to take the risk and find out? What do you have to lose other than bondage? You may discover that the only thing you ever had to lose was your suffering! "What profiteth a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36) In the same way, how does it serve us to strive for and get the perfect body for a relatively short while and miss out on the peace and joy that can never be taken from us?

I should mention that although I experienced a sudden dis-identification with the body, this is unusual. For most people, it's a gradual process of lesser and lesser identification.

Exercise: Seeing the Body in this Moment

Find a quiet place to be alone, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and relax. Feel the flesh of this body and sense its shape. Ask yourself the following: Is it possible for this body to be any different than it is right now—in this moment? Really let the question sink in. Simply be present with it. Feel the absurdity of wishing or expecting this body to be different. Close your eyes and ask yourself, "Is it okay for this body to be the way it is right now?"

Puzzled after my experience of dis-identifying with my body, I queried a teacher of mine about how this miracle could have happened. He reminded me that I'd been praying to be free of the suffering of identification with the body for a long time. For years, I'd been attending body-image workshops, performing self-inquiry, and just plain praying and asking for help with this issue.

Becoming free from conditioning around body-image is like chopping down a tree: We swing the axe over and over again, slowly chipping away at the seemingly impenetrable trunk. From all outer appearances our efforts have little impact on the tree. Undeterred, we keep swinging, hoping that our toil will eventually bear fruit. Then, lifting the axe over our shoulder for the thousandth time, without warning, our unremarkable blow fells the mighty tree. In the same way, this apparently intractable issue can vaporize like the morning mist.

After I returned home, still dis-identified with my body, I hoped, once and for all, to stop suffering over how my body looked. Although my relationship with my body had changed, my relationship with food hadn't. As a result, I gained weight, and my ego had a lot of unpleasant things to say about that. As I paid attention to the Critic's derisive thoughts, I believed them instead of questioning them, and lo and behold, I started to suffer again, and my body identification returned. Thankfully, two years and many body-image related inquiry sessions later, identification with my body has gradually diminished again. Though it has not completely vanished, I rarely suffer over my body's appearance these days.

##

### Looking at the Body Objectively

Your body simply is the way it is in this moment. That's reality. Wishing and hoping for it to be different is a losing battle and a painful proposition. It might lose a limb in the next thirty seconds or it could go on a diet tomorrow and become smaller, but why suffer by denying and resisting the truth of this moment?

Look at your body objectively. Pretend that it belongs to someone else and evaluate it factually, using neutral descriptors. Here is an example of a neutral body description:

This body is five foot eight inches tall.

The hair is cropped, and thinning.

The skin is pale.

The legs are muscular.

The shoulders are broad.

The fingers are long.

The cheekbones are high.

This face has dimples.

This face has a roman nose.

The lips are full.

There is a lot of light in the eyes.

See if you can come up with a similar description for your body. Fill in the following sheet factually, as if a scientist were viewing your body and describing it in a professional report.

The skin on the face___________________________

The eyes_____________________________________

The nose_____________________________________

The chin_____________________________________

The mouth____________________________________

The hair______________________________________

The arms_____________________________________

The shoulders_________________________________

The hands and nails_____________________________

The torso_____________________________________

The chest_____________________________________

The waist_____________________________________

The stomach__________________________________

The genitals___________________________________

The buttocks__________________________________

The thighs____________________________________

The calves____________________________________

The feet______________________________________

This exercise can help you see what's possible, to feel what it would be like to view your body without judgment or identification. As you begin this journey of accepting how your body looks, imagining where you're going will help you start moving in the right direction. In the same way, as you set the intention to heal your relationship with food and your body, knowing what's possible, paves the way for a radical shift in perspective.

### Honoring Yourself

Close your eyes and find the part of you that's struggled with these issues for so long. See the pain and suffering you've endured. See the times you've experienced self-loathing, castigation, and shame for being caught in the crossfire between the Pleasure-Seeking Child and the Critic's mutually exclusive desires: the desire for pleasure and the desire to be thin. Feel compassion for your suffering and honor your willingness to look for a way out. Honor the humility that has allowed you to open to a new perspective, one that runs counter to conventional wisdom. See how you've tried to create moderation and balance in your life, struggled to overcome weight and body-image issues, worked on yourself, tried different diets, read self-help books, gone to therapy, and endured the negative comments of others and your own Relentless Critic. Finally, through grace, you're ready to embrace fundamental and permanent transformation.

Take a moment to honor yourself and feel gratitude for your fortitude and perseverance while grappling with one of life's most difficult issues. Congratulate yourself for having the courage to move beyond your old patterns and being willing to try something new.

_Skinny Thinking_ is not a magic pill. Appreciate yourself for having the patience to endure a process that has its own timing and _is not instantaneous_. In our culture, we've come to expect immediate results, and yet, compulsive patterns established and reinforced over many years aren't likely to vanish overnight. So please continue to be patient and tolerant with yourself! It takes time to incorporate these new perspectives and habits.

Now that you've come this far, you're at the point of no return, even if you aren't ready to put any of the steps into practice. Just reading about this perspective has irrevocably altered your thinking. You've seen that there's no Santa Claus and you can never go back to believing in him.

If, on the other hand, you've been putting these new concepts and practices to work, you're probably beginning to taste the freedom awaiting you. If not, take heart. Don't give up or beat yourself up. By learning this new perspective and practicing The Five Steps using the inquiries and exercises, you're moving toward a healthy, balanced relationship with food.

Use this book as your manual and read it over and over again so that the ideas presented become second nature. Let them become your new understanding, your new way of thinking about eating, weight, and yourself. The key to healing your eating issue is changing the way you think about food. If you can do that, your eating habits and weight have to change.

The same holds true for your body-image. If you can change the way you think about your body, what it represents to you, and how you relate to the image in the mirror, the torment around it will end.

Once you've seen the truth, you can never go back to believing the lie. You can never go back to seeing food, your body, and your relationship with them in the same romanticized way. Congratulations! It's only a matter of time before your food, weight, and body-image issues are distant memories.

### Surrender

This book began with the question: Is it possible to live without measuring your self-worth by the vicissitudes of the bathroom scale? It is possible to leave body and food-related suffering behind for good? My own answer, based on my healing my deeply entrenched, dysfunctional relationship with eating and my body, is a resounding, "yes!"

Surrender is an alien concept in western culture. If we want something—anything—we're taught to go out and get it because that's what winners do. Our dreams are limited only by our imagination. Once we settle on a goal, we follow it unwaveringly to completion. Heroes in the movies never give up and neither do we.

Growing up, we cut our teeth on expressions like, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going" or "If it were easy, everyone would do it." Giving up or surrendering is something only losers do. Winners never wave the white flag, they tough it out until their last breath.

Surrender, on the other hand, is more of an acknowledgment than an action. It happens when we stop our habitual behavior, take stock of things, and realize that forcing, pushing, and controlling our way through life has never brought happiness and satisfaction. It's stepping back and looking at ourselves with tenderness and compassion, the way we would look at a young child who accidentally broke a dish. Surrender is a gentle seeing of how we innocently caused our own misery, and in that seeing, it ends forever.

Contrary to the predominant cultural messages, surrender is an act of maturity, courage, compassion, self-love, and acceptance that says, "I accept this moment exactly as it is." When we see the truth of our relationship to food and the body and earnestly ask for help in healing it, that is surrender. Surrender is an acknowledgement that how we've been seeing things and behaving hasn't been working and has been causing us to suffer instead.

This acknowledgement is a major rite of passage and wakes us up out of our Pleasure-Seeking Child and the Relentless Critic and aligns us with our own inner wisdom. In this moment of clarity and recognition, miracles happen, freedom happens.

One day, without ceremony or fanfare, you will realize that you can't remember the last time you had a worry about eating or your weight. You can't remember the last time you paid attention to or suffered over a critical thought about your body. These issues you thought you would take to your grave are finally healed. That is my prayer for you.

### Wise Relationship with the Body Check-in

Congratulations! You made it! You've gotten through all of the steps. Congratulate yourself for your commitment to your own growth and healing. It takes tremendous courage to even think about changing your relationship to food, particularly if it's been your main source of comfort and pleasure. If you are putting some or all of the steps into practice, that's terrific! However, please don't be discouraged if you're not ready to start. An important part of this new relationship is learning to be gentle and kind to yourself and this is the only message you take to heart and put into practice, it's a wonderful achievement.

Don't worry or chastise yourself if your diet isn't healthy yet or if you haven't been able to control your nibbling or ignore the voices of the Child, Dreamer, or Critic. You've created an emotional connection with food and those troublesome egoic characters that can take time to reverse.

Don't get discouraged if these steps take months or even years to complete. Take whatever time you need, and remember: you don't need to be perfect. The rewards will more than compensate you for your efforts, creating a new way of eating and living that brings you freedom, peace of mind, and a healthier, slimmer body.

## Chapter Summary

  * The root of desire, which comes from the ego, is fear.

  * When we inquire into the beliefs underneath stress, agitation, anger, sadness, we discover a fear of loss.

  * When we discover that the beliefs we've been using to torture ourselves don't tell the whole truth, we undermine them. This is the beginning of freedom.

  * If we stop believing something, it has no power over us.

  * The more painful the belief, the less truth it contains.

  * If thinking a thought makes you feel bad, then it's not true.

  * You've always had the perfect body for you—to learn and experience through.

  * You don't have to wait to be happy until you have that so-called perfect body.

  * With the "perfect body," may come other undesirable consequences, such as unwanted sexual attention, objectification, and worry about gaining weight again.

  * Attaining the "perfect," culturally sanctioned body doesn't lead to true happiness.

  * Essence accepts being overweight and, at the same time, intends that the body be brought back to a healthy weight.

  * The ego pushes us to create a body that will attract attention and admiration.

  * Disliking the way your body looks doesn't change anything. It's an irrational stance.

  * To not like something is to suffer.

  * There is no fulfillment or happiness in caring so much about how you look.

  * Being at peace with how you look rather than obsessing over it is much more attractive to others.

  * Mirrors reinforce identification with the body.

  * The Dreamer looks in the mirror to see how others see you.

  * Essence uses the mirror pragmatically. Looking from Essence means doing what you need to do and then moving on.

  * Essence knows that the image isn't who you are.

  * When you're away from mirrors, you become more aligned with what's looking _out_ from your eyes.

  * Thoughts about the image in the mirror like, "I don't like it" or "I want to change it" _aren't us_ ; they're our conditioning.

  * When you bring awareness to your looking, you align with Essence and its compassion for the contracted part of you that's unhappy with what you're seeing.

  * This body and the image of it in the mirror are no more who you are than a tree.

  * The truth is that it doesn't matter what you look like.

  * Inner beauty makes you beautiful.

  * We experience the Relentless Critic as judgment, fear, anxiety, and self-deprecation.

  * Essence, in the form of the Wise Witness, generates intuitions that move us toward optimal physical health, moderation, and balance.

  * Changing negative patterns can take a long time because they originated in childhood and have been operating and reinforced over your entire life!

## To Do List

Check off any task that you have fully or partially completed:

  * I've made a point of not looking too closely in the mirror.

  * When I have looked in the mirror, I've avoided scrutinizing, evaluating, judging, or imagining what other people are seeing.

  * I've been working on breaking the habit of negative body self-talk by replacing negative thoughts with positive thoughts.

  * I asked for help to accept this body as it is, in this moment.

  * I've been gentle and patient with myself.

# APPENDIX A

### Support

Support is key in this journey. So take advantage of what's available in the Skinny Thinking universe:

  * Get hooked up with a buddy through the Facebook Fan Group: SKINNY THINKING! by Laura Katleman-Prue: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=101147094020&ref=ts.

  * Then, log onto the Skinny Thinking website: www.SkinnyThinking.com to sign up for the e-newsletter and the free weekly conference calls to help support you as you heal. Also, check out the website calendar for Laura's Skinny Thinking Workshop schedule.

# APPENDIX B

###

### Meditation

Meditation is so important because it moves us into Essence and gives us the direct experience of the peace and love that shines through everything. In meditation, there is no sense of "me," just Oneness. That's the good news.

The challenging bit is: _the last thing the ego wants us to do_ _is meditate._ Meditation is the fast track to enlightenment, or ego annihilation, and like everything else, the ego wants to survive. To do this it has to keep us feeling separate by identifying with and paying attention to our thinking. But when we meditate, we move into the thought-free state, instead and experience ourselves as Essence. In this state, there is no ego and lord knows it doesn't like that!

Luckily, meditation doesn't have to mean sitting for hours in the lotus position. (I have a restless leg for goodness sakes!) You don't have to go live in a cave and retreat from the world. Right now, in your current lifestyle and with all your so-called flaws and insecurities, you can realize the truth of your being.

The ego doesn't take this idea of meditation lying down. Here are some of the compelling reasons it gives you not to meditate: "It's boring, nothing happens." "You have too many things to do as it is, and now you want to add meditation." "It's a waste of time."

This is how the ego tries to manipulate you and keep you from your freedom. Don't let yourself be bamboozled by any of these arguments before you've given meditation a chance because your priceless freedom is at stake, and nothing is more important than that.

The ego doesn't want to meditate. It keeps you from your goal of aligning with Essence and being present by saying, "I don't want to meditate." Of course it doesn't want to meditate. Of course _you_ don't want to meditate. But the real question is: how much do you want to be free? Do you want to be free enough to meditate 10-15 minutes every day on a regular basis and possibly more over time?

Meditation is important because it teaches you how to move out of the egoic mind and into a place of peace. The egoic mind keeps us from our natural state of peace and contentment, so detaching from it is key.

If you are having trouble getting yourself to meditate, take a moment and ask yourself how you keep yourself from meditating. What do you say to yourself? The mind is very skillful at saying things to prevent you from meditating because it wants you to follow conditioning, instead—the thoughts, and feelings that involve you in your identities and behaviors. This is how it keeps its job, which is making you feel unhappy and separate.

In our normal egoic state of consciousness, most of us follow our thoughts and feelings and do what they suggest. However, meditation allows us to detach from the mind and the feelings. From a more meditative place, it's possible to observe the thoughts and feelings because you're doing it from the place that is aware of them. But this idea of detachment and observation is a bit academic without a direct experience of meditation.

Awareness is not just an idea; it's an experience, and when you're experiencing awareness, you're in a meditative state. The whole point of meditation is moving into a place of awareness: awareness of experience as it is arising in the body-mind and awareness of thoughts and feelings, without getting involved in them. In meditation, you just watching everything come and go—sensations, sights, sounds, and whatever else is being experienced in the moment, in the now. You just observe and experience without thinking about what you are experiencing.

Get to know the sensations that may come with this state of consciousness: the shimmering radiance in the visual field; the faint buzzing sound of the stillness; and the feeling of spaciousness, ease, and contentment. It is good to know these sensations because they are like touchstones that deepen the experience of peace. The more you pay attention to them, the more your meditation deepens. Asking yourself, "Where's the peace?" can also help you shift into Essence.

Don't be put off by the word "meditation." It's nothing more than Awareness—being aware of what's happening in this moment. For example, right now, I'm aware of the feeling of my fingers on the keyboard as I type. This is meditation. The key (pardon the pun) is: _this moment_. Whenever you're aware of what's in the present moment, you've left the realm of the mind.

Believe it or not, the mind has never set foot in the moment; it can only think about it but never go there. Check this out for yourself. Your thoughts are either about the past or the future, and the closest they ever get to the present is evaluating it, judging it, analyzing it, or categorizing it.

### Preparing to Meditate

Whether you meditate regularly or are a complete novice, preparation helps. Here are some ways to quiet the mind, to make it easier to drink in the peace that meditation brings. Although I call them preparations, they're meditations in their own right.

Meditation Preparation Exercise: Slow Deep Breathing

  * Sit in a comfortable position in a quiet place where you're unlikely to be disturbed. Begin with slow, deep breaths: inhale to the count of four and then exhale to the count of eight. This exercise will prepare your body and mind for meditation. Allow yourself to relax back into the stillness that you have created through deep breathing. If your mind wanders, gently bring your attention back to your breathing.

Meditation Preparation Exercise: Focusing on Your Hands and Feet

  * Direct your attention to your hands. Notice any sensations present there. You may feel tingling, vibration, and/or spaciousness. Your hands could feel less solid than they were just a moment ago, as if there are extra molecules of space in between each cell. Some of the sensations associated with Essence are spaciousness, vibration, and tingling. So if you're feeling any of these things, you're there!

  * Next, focus on your feet in the same way. See if you can feel any tingling or vibration there. Does the feeling of spaciousness grow as you keep your attention there? See if you can focus on the energy in both your hands and feet at the same time. If thoughts come, gently bring your attention back to the energy in your hands and feet.

Meditation Preparation Exercise: Alternate Nostril Breathing

Alternate nostril breathing is a form of breathing exercise called _pranayama_ that has been practiced for centuries by ardent yogis in remote ashrams for the purpose of quieting their minds. You inhale, hold, and then release the breath to a 1-3-2 count or any multiple of this, such as 2-6-4 or 4-12-8.

  * Place your right thumb on your right nostril and your ring and pinky finger over your left nostril.

  * _Holding your left nostril closed, inhale for a_ _count of four_ _through your right nostril._

  * _Next, keeping both nostrils closed, hold your breath for a_ _count of twelve_ _._

  * _Finally, let go of your left nostril with your pinky and ring finger and exhale for a_ _count of eight_ _._

Repeat this alternate nostril breathing until your mind is quiet _._

Meditation Preparation Exercise: Sequential Relaxation of the Body

Lying on the floor or on a bed, focus your attention:

  * Contract all the muscles in your feet as tightly as you can and then release them.

  * Next tighten all of the muscles in your calves as much as you can, then release them.

  * _Continue this process, tightening and releasing the muscles in your thighs, buttocks, stomach, chest, hands, arms, neck, and face_ _._

Continue relaxing as many parts of the body as you wish until your mind is quiet.

Other Meditation Preparation Exercises are:

  * Chanting or Singing Devotional Songs

  * Listening to Chanting or Devotional Songs

  * Yoga Postures

### Traditional Meditation

Commit to spending 10-15 minutes meditating each day and gradually increase this over time. You can choose from any number of guided meditation tapes, or meditate to soothing music. Simply set the intention to rest, to be still.

It's easiest for most people to meditate at the same time each day. Find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed. Sit crossed legged on a cushion with your back upright or in a comfortable chair.

Sometimes when we sit down to meditate, the mind bombards us with thoughts. Don't be concerned. Just let the mind spin and unwind itself, and gently turn your attention away from it and back to the quiet.

There's no way to stop thoughts. It's their nature to float in and out of our awareness. As you give your thoughts less attention and stop following them, your mind will quiet down, and your thoughts will have less power over you.

There are countless methods for closed eye sitting meditation. Here are a few of the most common:

Witnessing

One of the most basic approaches to meditation is to relax, let go, and do nothing. Surrender to the moment and become a silent witness. If thoughts and sensations arise, simply observe them, without adding to them or following them. Be a detached and passive observer and simply feel your fundamental being.

Mantra Repetition

Many different traditions use silent mantra repetition to focus the mind during meditation. Some popular mantras are:

  * Soham (Repeat So on the in-breath and Ham on the out-breath.)

  * Om Namah Sivaya (Repeat the entire phrase on the in-breath and the entire phrase on the out-breath)

  * Om Mani Padme Om (Repeat the entire phrase on the in-breath and the entire phrase on the out-breath)

Entering the Silence

Soften your awareness and make the intention to enter the space between your thoughts. Ask the mind if it would allow you to go without thinking for a few moments.

### Meditation is Being in Essence

If a sitting meditation practice isn't possible or desirable, you can turn everything you do into a meditation. A doorway to the timeless exists in each moment, regardless of what else the moment might contain. You can walk through it and perform your daily activities immersed in Essence. In fact, you never have to leave Essence at all. It's who we are at our core, so why would we need to leave it to engage in activities? Whenever we are doing anything other than thinking or feeling, we're in Essence. Here are some everyday opportunities to shift into in Essence:

When You First Wake Up

Notice how you feel when you first wake up. When you're in that fuzzy in between state, no longer asleep but not quite awake yet, is there a delicious feeling of spaciousness? Does everything feel soft and still? Do you notice tingling in your hands or feet? Is the space in the room shimmering? Do you notice a slight buzzing or ringing sound? These are all subtle manifestations of Essence. These sensations, images, and sounds are how our senses tell us we've shifted from the ego to Essence.

Essence is where we reside before our mind "clicks in." Here, we feel open, expansive, and joyous, without a care or worry. We rest in this state only as long as we stay merged with and identified as Essence. Then, in less time than it takes to blink, and usually before we are conscious of it, we're catapulted out of this Eden, through the presence of thought. All at once, we remember that we're a person with a life and problems and a "to do" list.

If you make a point of resting in this in-between state when you first wake up, you will remain in it longer and longer each day, and the egoic mind will stay at bay. If it tries to carry you off into thoughts about the future and what you have to do, simply go back to the sensations of Essence. When it's time to get up, carry these sensations with you and set the intention to stay in Essence. If you get caught up in thought, simply shift back by asking yourself, "Where's the quiet?"

Once you notice how good it feels to be in Essence, you're drawn to it and want to go there more and more. The more you're in Essence the worse it feels to be in the ego. Once you register this difference, you make the choice to return to Essence again and again.

The Ego doesn't like this, of course, because it sees the writing on the wall: its days are numbered. It's only a matter of time before Essence takes its rightful place at the helm, guiding your life.

Looking Up at the Sky

Looking at the sky can create a luscious experience of spaciousness. The key is not to think about it. Just notice the vastness without labeling it. (The ego loves to label everything—this is the way it pulls us out of Essence and back into thought. It's very tricky; it may even disguise itself as a positive thought, hoping we won't notice that we have lost our peace, our connection with the changeless reality!)

Finding Your Own Special Times, Places, and Activities

As you move through your day, certain times, places, and activities immediately transport you into Essence or the natural state. Make a point of noticing when this happens. As strange as this sounds, I love sitting in my car in the garage just after I've shut the engine off. The stillness is so powerful! Another odd place is my closet. Whenever I walk inside, I try to remember to reconnect myself to my true nature.

Even though Essence is always available to us, some places make it more accessible. Places where people have performed spiritual practices carry the vibrations of Essence. When cultivating your connection with Essence, find those places and spend time in them.

An alternative is to meditate in the same place each day. If you're able to do this, notice how this spot becomes quite still and aids you in finding the space between your thoughts.

Spending Time in Nature

Being in nature naturally pulls you into Essence. It's great to spend as much time walking or sitting by yourself in nature as you can. Silence is so palpable and available there. It's not that it's unavailable in other places and other situations, but for some reason, resting in Essence seems to be easier in nature.

Noticing What's in Your Field of Awareness

Focusing on anything in your field of awareness shifts you into the thought-free state. Looking at a leaf on the sidewalk, a crack in a wall, or the food as you're cooking dinner will take you into the present moment—which is Essence. However, the minute you start describing it or cataloguing it mentally, you're right back in the ego.

Noticing What You're Sensing

Noticing—without comparison, analysis, or labels—whatever you're hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, seeing, or sensing in your body can be a great meditation that you can use wherever you are, whatever you're doing. The ticking sound of a clock, the feeling of a gentle breeze on your skin, the smell of fresh air, or the taste of food can all transport you into Essence if you focus your complete attention there.

"I AM" Breathing

When the mind has a persistent theme or beef that it keeps bringing you back to and it's difficult to find a break in those thoughts, "I AM" breathing can be very helpful. Here's how it works:

On the in-breath, silently repeat "I."

On the out-breath, silently repeat "AM."

Again, on the in-breath, silently repeat "I."

And on the out-breath, silently repeat "AM."

Continue to repeat "I AM" with your breath for as long as you wish.

To help this practice take root, you may want to devote a day to "I AM" breathing. Let it be your companion as you move through the day.

If you're in a stressful situation or you feel a confrontation coming on, "I AM" breathing can bring fast relief. It can take the anxiety level down and give you a moment of respite to pull yourself together and exercise self-restraint.

Focusing on Your Breath

Take a deep slow breath in, and feel it move all the way into your belly. Hold it for a moment, and then gradually release it. Repeat this deep breathing a few more times.

### Nontraditional Meditation

Our daily routines provide ample opportunity for sliding back into Essence. In this section, I have listed some other ways to meditate. Add to it—or better still, create your own list.

While you're doing these things, have the intention of dropping into Essence. That's enough. As thoughts flow in, just notice them and bring your awareness back to Essence.

Activities that Lend Themselves to the Experience of Essence:

  * Walking

  * Exercising

  * Stretching

  * Practicing yoga

  * Dancing

  * Listening to music

  * Relaxing in bed before sleep

  * Lingering in bed in the morning when you first wake up

  * Repetitive tasks like folding laundry or washing dishes

  * Sewing, knitting, crocheting

  * Gardening

  * Cooking

  * Doing the dishes

  * Cleaning

  * Making art

  * Filing

  * Waiting in line

  * Driving

  * Sitting in a traffic jam

  * Eating

  * Brushing your teeth

  * Going to the bathroom

  * Taking a shower or bath

### Summary

  * Find the type of meditation that works best for you.

  * There is no way to stop thoughts, but you can ignore them.

  * Preparing to enter the thought-free state can be helpful, regardless of whether you meditate regularly or you're a novice.

  * Meditation preparation exercises:

  * Slow deep breathing

  * Focusing on our hands

  * Alternate nostril breathing to a 1-3-2 count

  * Sequential relaxation of the body

  * Other meditation preparation exercises:

  * Chanting or singing devotional songs

  * Listening to chanting or devotional songs

  * Yoga postures

  * Meditation _is_ being in Essence.

  * When you first wake up _,_ notice how you feel. Essence is there before your mind clicks in.

  * Look up at the sky for an experience of spaciousness.

  * Nature will pull you into Essence.

  * Taking deep breaths and focusing on your breath moves you into Essence.

  * It is enough to simply have the intention of dropping into Essence.

  * "I AM" breathing is a powerful meditation that can be practiced anytime.

  * Your daily life routines provide ample opportunity for meditating or sliding back into Essence **.**

  * Activities that lend themselves to experiencing Essence are: walking, exercising, stretching, yoga, dancing, listening to music, relaxing in bed before sleep, lingering in bed first thing in the morning, repetitive tasks like folding laundry or washing dishes, sewing, knitting, crocheting, gardening, cooking, cleaning, filing, waiting in line, driving, sitting in a traffic jam, eating, brushing your teeth, going to the bathroom, and taking a shower or bath.

  * Certain times of day, activities, and places that make it easy to access Essence:

  * Noticing the sensations that are present when you first wake up

  * Looking up at the sky

  * Spending time in nature

  * Focusing on anything that is in your field of awareness

  * Noticing what you are sensing

  * Practicing "I AM" breathing

  * Focusing on your breath

### Connecting with a Fulfilling Life Purpose

Another way to stop wearing a path to the fridge is to connect with a life purpose that actually engages you and feels fulfilling. When you're so excited about what you're doing that you can't wait to get started, food becomes less interesting and sexy. You're in the flow, and no sensual pleasure can compete with that high. From that place, food is simply fuel. It tastes good and you enjoy it, but you're so engaged in what you're doing that you can forget to eat, and only a gnawing stomach reminds you to stop and take a food break.

You know when you're aligned with your life purpose because you feel happy and excited about what you're doing. Look at how you're living. Are you doing things you enjoy and are good at? Are you giving yourself time to rest and just be? Sometimes we feel depressed because we're out of the flow of life and not listening to our intuition. Our intuition guides us in the direction of fulfilling our life purpose, but if we're frantically _doing_ all the time and not giving ourselves enough down time, we won't be able to catch its insights.

