CHAPTER 1
Find Your Enough, Face Your Feelings, Feel the Love
"What happens in your mind determines your experience of life."
—Marianne Williamson
Let me take you back to how my days began. Upon awakening, I would immediately run my hands over my stomach to feel how concave or round it was. I needed to feel my hipbones. Getting out of bed and making my way to the scale was exhilarating. I liked playing a game with myself where I would guess my weight before stepping on. A good number invigorated me and actually made me feel high. Insanely, a number that was more than my desired weight served its purpose as well. It meant I would have to restrict, and there was great comfort and safety in that as well. It had become routine for me to step on and off three times, checking the accuracy of the scale, questioning its position on the tile floor. I had given up my power to the scale, defining myself by what I imagined others saw about me from the outside. I lived according to thoughts created by the inner voice that told me I needed to "be" thinner, smarter, or more of something.
For a long time, I believed I was broken. It didn't matter that I was in a loving marriage, had raised two daughters who were kind, generous of spirit, and highly successful in their respective lives. I couldn't shake the negative self-talk that came from believing I wasn't enough or that there were circumstances in my life that I judged to be unfair.
Not until I accepted recovery in the sense of regaining what was lost or taken, was I even aware of how much of a choice I have regarding how I react to what life hands me. I've come to view life as a poker game—I can pick up the cards dealt me, hold them in hopes of a winning hand, or I can fold, confident in the knowledge that this round has reached its rightful end and there will be other chances to play.
Focusing on what I am grateful for required a shift in my mindset and a new way of being. I started with simple gratitude for my realization that I needed to be grateful. Next came gratitude for the journey itself and my commitment to it, even though the journey was difficult at times.
What followed were monumental shifts in my thinking as I opened up to the possibility of being enveloped by the love in my life. I developed a willingness to ask for the peace and serenity I longed for. I started to notice the beauty of the world around me—for example, cloud formations and the colors of the sky at sunset. My mind got quiet, and I could relax into the paradox that even with all the uncertainty, life was as it was supposed to be. Soon, the things I was grateful for were around me in abundance as I released the negativity that held me back.
When we disengage from the inner voice of negativity and realize it is not telling the truth, we are no longer boxed into our thoughts and we can fully inhabit our bodies. This experience can be spiritual in nature as a kind of magic occurs when we tap into the wonder and natural beauty of the body we possess.
When we do this, we change in that we operate from a place of love rather than fear—the fear of not being "enough." Love allows us to be forgiving and compassionate. When we are present like this, love starts with ourselves. We can live in gratitude, focusing on what we have rather than what we think is missing, opening us up to the possibilities that we can handle whatever comes our way.
While this first step is the foundation for your journey to food freedom, it is also the ultimate goal. I am not asking you to render yourself powerless; rather, I am guiding you to empower yourself as you disengage from fear and limiting beliefs that keep you repeating compulsive and unhealthy behaviors.
Willpower doesn't work, as it implies an all-or-nothing control exerted to restrain us from self-indulgence. Willingness is a kinder state of being that prepares us to accept change from a loving place, a more feminine approach that is more aligned with the journey. When the journey includes self-kindness and connecting to the truth buried in our souls, we reclaim what we've forgotten as we lost ourselves in food and negative thoughts about our bodies.
As I hope you discover in this chapter and in the following pages, your relationship with food is a reflection of your relationship to yourself and your story. Our stories differ from one another but nonetheless they got us to the same place of fear and uncertainty.
Maybe you feel you need to handle everything by yourself; maybe you have larger-than-life issues that create the sense of you having to be bigger to carry all those issues; maybe when things start to go well you don't think you deserve it; maybe you are afraid of losing a loved one if you look or act a certain way. The reason doesn't matter. What matters is that your desire to change your relationship with food is not about becoming more or less of yourself, but becoming more authentic to yourself.
When you lovingly transform your relationship to yourself, you transform your relationship to everything else.
It starts with gratitude. Gratitude awakens us to being open and connected to our selves and others like nothing else. It allows us to stay in the present moment and even accept our flaws and imperfections, enabling us to feel at ease, a lightness of being that will bring us home to ourselves.
Practicing gratitude negates the two root causes of the disease of not enough. The first is a sense of dissatisfaction, which opens the door to the second: being consumed with and compulsive about trying to get more, be more, and be better in order to be happy and content. We think, "If only I could lose this weight; "If only I could get to the gym every day"; If only I can get my partner to communicate better"; "If only I had more money, a better job ..."
The gift of gratitude is that it reverses the pattern of looking outside ourselves and immediately puts us in touch with the many gifts and blessings already present in our lives. Gratitude allows us to be connected to the positive life force of now. Instead of waiting to lose the ten, fifteen, or thirty pounds in order to be happy, gratitude for the journey will bring happiness where you are so you can wear the great clothes today or have the talk now with your boss about the raise you deserve.
Gratitude helps to eradicate fear, unveiling the loving-kindness we need to live the fully nourished life we deserve and desire. Gratitude is a profoundly transformative practice and a big part of many cultures. In the Jewish spiritual tradition, for example, the very first words of prayer spoken upon wakening express gratitude for the gift of another day of life: "I am grateful. Thank you for returning my soul to me with great compassion." The Buddhist practice, too, is to begin each day with appreciation for the rare gift of a precious human birth and to contemplate its changing nature. One reflects: "How then shall I live this precious day?" and "What is important for me to recognize, remember, and pay attention to today?"
Even science has its theories about being grateful. Scientists have conducted research on gratitude and determined it to be an attitude, a mood, and an emotion.
Numerous studies support the profound effects of gratitude on the people who feel it. In one, subjects asked to complete weekly gratitude journals reported increased overall well-being as they exercised more, slept less fitfully, enjoyed better health, and had a more optimistic view of life.
Even a one-time show of thoughtful gratitude will produce an immediate increase in happiness and decrease in depressive symptoms. Participants who kept up with their gratitude practice experienced long-lasting and positive results.
Finding Your Enough
A heart filled with gratitude generates actions that complete the circle between the gifts offered, our willingness to receive, and the universal source of the gift.
Stepping into the sacred space of gratitude allows us to find our way back to the time we were comfortable—before our limiting beliefs took over and our story became one of needing to rely on compulsive behaviors in order to find that place again. The freshly baked brownie, the bag of chips, the glass of wine, or new pair of shoes will never satisfy if we aren't coming from a place of compassion and consciousness for the abundance we are surrounded with already.
Gratitude will bring you back to yourself, home to yourself, not to the image of who you think you should be. It allows you to move from "I am not" to "I am." Having said this, there is nothing wrong with wanting to be stronger, leaner, healthier, except when the quest becomes the bane of our existence, causing us to miss out on believing we are enough as we are. If you shame and deprive yourself into reaching a goal, any goal, you will reach it as a shamed and deprived person. When the journey is guided by positive energy, you arrive at the destination with vibrancy.
For many of us, believing in and finding our "enough" is challenging. We have forgotten our true nature—the essence of our authentic selves; the person we were before we let compulsive behaviors protect us from feelings we feared would derail us. We lost track of who we are because we came to believe that we are our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and stories. We became separate from our bodies, rendering us homeless.
Gratitude focuses on what we already are and what we already have. Feeling gratitude turns our attention to the deeper sense of ourselves where we can believe we are enough and feel fulfillment. People who live grateful lives understand that pouring our best into the life we have now is the best reward, giving us the self-assurance and confidence to take us through the inevitable hard times.
When we connect with the part of ourselves that accepts who we are now, we begin to feel whole. We can add the joy, sorrow, success, and disappointment to the circle that completes us.
Face Your Feelings
Becoming aware and curious will allow you to question those deeply held beliefs and your reactions to scenarios that trigger you and question if these reactions are how you have to respond. Without awareness, we flounder and drift through life. With curiosity, we gain clarity and direction. Questioning our thoughts and beliefs opens us up to noticing them and finding out where they came from. The beautiful gift from this is the opportunity to be with ourselves.
When we face our feelings, we step into a place we never knew existed. We brilliantly turned to compulsive behaviors in an effort to numb us to those feelings we chose to avoid, even feared. Discovering that we can examine and question them, we learn they are not rooted in truth and that they need not be feared.
Question where the stories began. Were they the response to someone else's wounding? Can you find compassion for the origin of the story? Many of my generation were often told to "Stop crying or I'll give you a reason to cry." Maybe you heard, "Do as I say, not as I do." These messages told us we shouldn't feel, that we had to toughen up and stand strong. Chances are, the person who gave you that message was handed the same one. Once we become aware of the meaning behind the message, and follow through with questioning, we start to see that perhaps the story we are attached to is no longer working for us.
Accepting what we can't change and facing what we can makes room for forgiveness and huge personal growth. In that growth we begin to experience loving-kindness and compassion. Compassion leads to forgiveness and an end to struggling with what was. Forgiveness helps us to let go of judgment, anger, and ultimately fear. When we are forgiving and compassionate, we can find nourishment from within.
Best-selling author Melody Beattie teaches that if we identify the problem and feel the feelings, we can redirect the course of our lives. Be grateful for all of it—the blessing comes in being able to develop the awareness, feel the feelings, be humbled by this newfound gift, and then let it go if they no longer serves us.
Emotions become feelings, which become thoughts, which morph into beliefs. We lose ourselves to those beliefs in the sense that they take on a power of their own as they dictate who we think we are supposed to be. When we realize that feelings are only feelings and thoughts are only thoughts, not who we are, we can meet them and engage them.
Not feeling our feelings causes us to check out, making us numb and cut off from not only our feelings but from what is actually good and blessed in our lives. Once we face the feeling, meet it, and embrace it, we can gain confidence that our feeling no longer has that power over us.
Most of our beliefs are rooted in fear. The word afraid comes from the root word frai, which means "beloved, precious, at peace." When we add the prefix A, which means "away from," the word afraid means "being away from the state of feeling beloved, precious, and at peace." Fear wreaks havoc. It puts us into stress physiology and disconnects us from interacting with the wisdom of our bodies. When fear causes us to rely on strategies for survival, on a natural level it is a good thing as it is intended to protect us. Often, however, what we fear is not actually a threat and our fear is nothing more than an emotion we've invented.
All the promises to self and loved ones will continue to meet resistance until we can let go of our attachment to false and limiting beliefs about ourselves and the food we eat, or don't. The burden created in our minds shows up as excess baggage that eventually wears us down.
Letting go allows us to feel lighter. When we feel lighter, we become lighter. When you are free, you are able to make changes from the inside out, making it possible to change the outside as well.
Too much or too little food, too much or too little exercise is not the cause of our weight issues. Fear is often the cause, and that fear blocks our minds and hearts from love. Fear translates to confusion, and it can ebb and flow within us like the tide. It resides all around us, and if you are reading this book, then chances are it lives in your kitchen.
Let it know it is no longer welcome. Exorcise the demon of fear by finding the room within your self that you can return to safely. Create the space within you to welcome love so fully that there is no room for the fear. From that love we can access the inner wisdom we need to find compassion for ourselves.
Feel the Love
We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from the offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.
—Brenee Brown
Love is an incredibly powerful force. We are all ultimately seeking it, in one form or another. If we are to be successful in finding that love, we must give it to ourselves first. Many of us have difficulty with this concept as we may not feel worthy or we may be harboring long-held beliefs from our pasts that insist we are not. To add love to the mix of feelings is to give our selves the experience of freeing our selves from the fear, to experience peace and all that is precious.
Falling in love with ourselves asks us to stop beating ourselves up and become willing to accept that we are human. In that humanness, we have had many different relationships with ourselves. We have had times when we liked ourselves more and times we've been disappointed in ourselves. It doesn't matter what our past story is; adopting loving acceptance means we learn to accept ourselves for who we are, as well as who we are not.
As we envision a more loving relationship with ourselves, it is important that we look to parts of our story that we express compassion for. Feel love for the awkward and confused teen. Appreciate the scared you who perhaps alienated a loved one. Loving acceptance is also about learning to love and accept others as they are, as well as who they aren't and always do our best to respond with love and compassion. Compassion allows us to see with the eyes of wholeness.
Even when we experience a dark night of the soul, being aware of and able to tap in to loving-kindness means we possess the power to choose love over fear. Life then takes on a new dimension.
I am not referring to love in the romantic sense, rather a love that fills us with simple joy and serenity. The kind of love that once experienced, connects us to the part of ourselves that needs no distraction. We can stop thinking about how thin we want to be and discover a basic sense of being, without judgment. We can finally come home to ourselves with a full heart.
Nine years into my journey home to myself, I can feel the welcome mat beneath my feet, as I am finally grounded.
