What if the magicial Merlin appeared to you and said, “I have a gift here for you.  It’s a thin body and piece of mind.  If you take it, you’ll never have to agonize about your weight again.”  Would you take it?

That’s not just a fantasy.  That same experience is available to you, except that you have to play the part of Merlin.  You have to be just as generous with yourself as he would be, just as willing to give it to yourself, and just as sure of your power to make it happen.

You don’t think twice about giving presents to other people.  But when was the last time you gave yourself a gift just because you were you?  There doesn’t have to be a reason, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.  It can be a walk in the middle of the afternoon, a bubble bath, notepaper, a single flower.  It doesn’t matter what the gift is.  What matters is the thought behind it, the fact that you cared enought to do something nice for yourself.

That may not sound like much, but giving yourself little presents and little doses of positive attention is like training for the big gift — a thin body.  You’re giving yourself the gift of you.

Kenny Rogers has a line in one of his songs that goes,”If you’re going to play the game, you’ve got to learn to play it right.”

Learning the rules of weight loss, or of life for that matter, will help you keep your sense of humor.  And the first rule is: Life and everything in it is a game.  Of course, it upsets most people to hear that losing weight is a game.  It didn’t seem like a game when they got up this morning and tried to squeeze into their clothes.  But the fact is, this is a game we’re playing. Continue Reading

Anything you do passionately becomes fun.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s exercising, doing needlepoint, making love, or advancing in your career.  If you’re passionate about it, it’s exciting and you’re having a good time.

Some people think that passion is a random thing that goes with some things and not with others.  That’s just not true.  You can be passionate about anything, even doing the dishes.  All you have  to remember is that you’re the one  in charge of whether you’re passionate or not, and that whatever you do is going to be a lot more fun if you do it with passion. Continue Reading

You don’t have to eat just because it’s a certain time of the day. Meal times are set up arbitrarily. People in different parts of the world eat at different times of the day, and there’s nothing sacred or particularly natural about breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

It might be interesting if just for a week you ate only when you were hungry, as if breakfast, lunch, and dinner didn’t exist. When do you suppose you would be hungry? It would probably be different for you than it would be for another person. People get hungry at different times and in different ways. There’s such a thing as the cocktail hour, but you already know that you don’t have to have a drink every evening at 6:00.

Eating by the clock is a good way to fall back into unconscious eating. The clock says noon, so you start putting food into your mouth just because the hands on the clock are pointing up. You don’t think about whether you’re hungry, or even about what you want to eat. You just move automatically toward food.
Eating because it’s time to eat doesn’t even have to center around breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You may have a friend with whom you always take your morning coffee break. Each day the two of you go down to the cafeteria or the deli and grab a bite to eat. You do it as a ritual, more out of a habit and companionship than out of hunger. Ask yourself whether you want to continue doing that. You can still take breaks with your friend, but you can change the ritual. You might want to take a walk together than eat. The important thing is that you don’t have to continue doing something just because at one point it became a habit.

Another way you can use time to fool yourself into eating more than you want is by saying, “If I don’t eat now, I’ll be starving by the time dinner comes.” Maybe you will and maybe you won’t. Eat what you want now, and let later take care of itself. Your eating habits and patterns will be changing. You might not get hungry at the same times. Let your body develop its own patterns. Avoid preventive eating. Carry an apple around with you if it makes you feel more secure.

And who said you have to wait till dinner to eat, anyway? You can eat anytime you’re hungry, even in the middle of the afternoon. You and your body are in charge not the clock.

DONOTCHANGE

Fat and Happy? You must think I’m kidding. Who could be fat and happy? The two don’t go together. Let’s take a look.

Given everything that you’ve done so far to lose weight and everything you’re willing to do (or not willing to do) from now on, the truth may actually be that you are never going to get thin. If that’s the case, then wouldn’t the most practical thing be to accept yourself the way you are and get on with your life? If deep in your heart you know you really aren’t willing to do what’s necessary to be thin, then the most sensible, practical , and loving thing you can do for yourself is to accept yourself the way you are. Quit all this beating yourself up about your weight, and use that energy to start living the way you want to.

Think of all the things you could do if you just gave up and enjoyed being the way you are. You’d never again have to worry about dieting. You could buy clothes that were comfortable, rather than buying them one size too small to try to look smaller than you are. You could eat whatever you wanted and enjoy it. You could lean back and laugh when people bought diet books. You could stop putting your life on hold until after you were thin and start living it fully right now.

The very act of getting off your own back about losing weight will actually allow you to lose weight. When you accept yourself exactly the way you are, things will naturally start to turn around. Part of it is that if you start caring enough about yourself to get off your own back, you eliminate many of your reasons for overeating. Since there was no more battle on dieting, eating will become rather dull.

It will take a lot of courage in choosing to be fat and happy. It goes against everything written or spoken in our culture on the subject of weight. But you can end weight as a problem in your life forever in one instant by choosing to be fat and happy.

DONOTCHANGE