if compulsive eating is anything, it’s a way we leave ourselves when life gets hard.

unlike Restrictors, who try to manage the chaos, Permitters merge with it. They see no point in trying to control the uncontrollable and have decided that it’s best to be blurry and numb and join the party. Have a good time.

“When you stop and let yourself feel what is being offered to you, it is never, ever what you thought it would be.

Failing is built into the weight game. There is no way to play it and win.

The glitch here is that it’s not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse.

Since Restrictors are constantly trying to contain the wild energy stomping to be released—the full moon, after all, is always only days way—they can never truly relax. Since they are trying to stave off the inevitable, they have to work very hard, and since they have to work so hard, they have convinced themselves that suffering is noble. And if

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself—but never quite believing it because you don’t sense yourself

If I fix myself so that I am no longer myself, then everything will be fine. My feelings will be manageable.

But right here, right now, in the center of this wound—I’ve been abandoned and betrayed by who and what really matters and what I’ve got left is food—is where the link between food and God exists.