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

You already have everything you need to be content. Your real work is to do whatever it takes to realize that.

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.

There's a basic feeling of lack that we want to distract ourselves from. We want to fix it by looking outside ourselves, as if it is going to fill us up.

You don't need a scale to tell you whether you're allowed to like yourself today. You are. You belong here. No matter what you weigh, you deserve joy and happiness.

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way - and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.

We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don’t feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not when we don’t do what they want us to do.