If you decided to reteach yourself your own loveliness today, what would you do? How would you speak to yourself? Can you allow yourself that much?

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.

I feel like it's been important for me to use my own personal experiences with food and money to help people to not feel ashamed. I felt so much shame about my own experiences.

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic…The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not.

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.

I live between fearing doom and wishing for it.