You will stop turning to food when you start understanding in your body, not just your mind, that there is something better...Truth, not force, does the work of ending compulsive eating.

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.

How you eat is how you live.

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.

Come back to yourself. Return to the voice of your body. Trust that much.

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.

To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act -- and to what you do when things don't go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat.