between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you’d rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a sky-scraper on sand: without a foundation, the new structure collapses.

It’s about your desire to flatten your life. It’s about the fact that you’ve given up without saying so.

Compulsive eating is an attempt to avoid the absence (of love, comfort, knowing what to do) when we find ourselves in the desert of a particular moment, feeling, situation. In the process of resisting the emptiness, in the act of turning away from our feelings, of trying and trying again to lose the same twenty, fifty, eighty pounds, we ignore what

Staying requires awareness of the desire to bolt. Of the stories you are telling yourself about the need to bolt. Staying means recognizing that when you want to bolt you are living in the past. You are taking yourself to be someone who no longer exists. Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don’t take yourself to be a

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

(beginning with allowing themselves to use food as a way of supporting rather than punishing themselves)

You can ask yourself if the feeling has a shape, a temperature, a color.

As long as you are striving and pushing and trying hard to do something that can never be done, you know who you are: someone with a weight problem who is working hard to be thin. You don’t have to feel lost or helpless because you always have a goal and that goal can never be reached.