Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.

Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run-if it's only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a portal to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter, then there is no end to what you can learn, be, understand, become.

Your relationship to food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom.

If you want to eat when you're not hungry, you're hungry for something else.

Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

Awareness is a way you keep yourself company. When you are aware you are being compulsive, you are no longer locked in the behavior. You have a choice to stop. That choice--and therefore awareness itself--is freedom.

And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.