If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.

If you treat your feelings with as much love as you treat your dog or your cat or your child you'll feel as if you were living in heaven.

No matter where you go, no matter how many gifts you give and receive this holiday season, unless you are actually present, it all flies by as if in a dream. Satisfaction in anything--a meal, an interaction, a gift, a sunset--depends on your willingness to take it in. Breathe. Feel your arms and your legs. You are allowed to love every little thing about yourself and your life. You are allowed to take up space and be all that you are. Really you are.

The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning and transformation.

We are using the food as a doorway to understanding the rest of our lives.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it.

When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn't go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.