How to Lose Weight Without Dieting

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Heal Overeating: Untangled, a series of audio sessions and more (tools, visualizations, exercises) to help you create the relationship that you want with food and your body.

I talk a lot about how diets don’t work – and here’s why.

You must love yourself unconditionally in order to heal – and this includes loving yourself when you are fat, out of control, overeating – anything that makes you feel unlovable or that you want to fix.

Most women hate this idea. They don’t want to love and accept themselves as they are because they think I’m saying, “You can’t change.” Far from it.

Accepting yourself and being gentle with yourself isn’t about remaining stuck, living in denial, or indulging in your painful patterns like bingeing or overeating. No. That is suffering. It’s what we’re trying to shift.

Compassion is the leavening that creates change. It’s how you shift habitual patterns.

Compassion creates the space to break out of the trance of food suffering – your normal habit of indulging (overeating), denial/ignorance (I’ll get serious about my weight next week/Monday/after the holidays), and judgment (I’m such a fat cow! I’m such a mess; I’ll never change.)

Compassion is changing in a different manner – one that keeps your self esteem and love intact. Compassion is unconditional love. It’s saying, “There is nothing I can do to make me more lovable. I’m okay just I am.” Which you are.

Boundaries, direction, discipline are their complement – your inner masculine to your inner feminine (unconditional love.) You use your inner masculine when you set a goal or have a desire and organize your life in such a way that you can achieve it.

Structure and compassion work together. Compassion is the how of change. Structure is the what of change.

It’s not an either/or. It’s not about saying, “I’m going to love myself unconditionally and not change a single thing in my life and just sit here on my duff.” You don’t have to choose between gentleness/compassion and boundaries/discipline. You integrate both. And that is how you lose weight in a kind, loving, fruitful manner.

So as you think about food, your weight, and how you want to eat, think of it this way:

1. You need to love yourself unconditionally. You need to trust yourself to honor the ebb and flow of your needs.

You need to separate from the voices in your head that say, “You’re a fat piece of crap who can never change and has no control over food.” As long as you are telling yourself or believing that message, you will find it impossible to change in a joyful manner. You will be anxiety ridden and fearful and always waiting for the other shoe to drop – EVEN if you are able to change your behavior. Even if you have rules that seem to be “working” you will be anxious about following them or breaking them or wondering, “How long will this “good” period last?” This feels no freer than being fat and stuck in overeating.

I want you to have complete freedom from food suffering.

2. You balance compassion and unconditional love with structure. Figure out what you desire for your weight and food. Then create the daily structure to support that desire.

You must choose. You have to decide – how do I want to live in my body? What do I want to look like? How do I want to eat? How do I want to feel physically? (Most of us don’t choose but ping pong back and forth between “I want to eat whatever I want when I want it” and “I want to be fit and trim-” and often in the same day!)

There are no right or wrong answers. Really. I could care less what you eat, how much you weigh, what you look like. I love you unconditionally. Your worth is not dependent on those things. What I want for you is to be happy. To be free from food and weight suffering. And to be free you have to love yourself unconditionally and choose what you want for your body, and then be willing to do the work necessary to honor those choices. And you have to be willing to accept the consequences of those choices.

When you choose, for example, “I want to be able to eat a wide variety of foods, including lots of junk whenever I want it” you have to accept – okay – that creates a certain outcome. That may mean being 5, 10 or 30 pounds heavier than you would be if you ate less junk.

Likewise, if you choose, “I want to be at a healthy weight for my body” that will create certain consequences – like having limits on the amounts and foods that you eat, setting aside time for exercise, etc.

Either outcome is okay – it’s your life. Your body. But what do YOU want? And are you willing to accept the natural consequences of your choices?

You will drive yourself insane if you choose something and yet aren’t willing to accept the natural outcome. If you want to eat lots of junk, and you know it causes your body to gain weight, and yet you aren’t willing to accept the accompanying weight gain, that is crazy thinking. It is wishful thinking. It is fighting with reality – and “reality always wins” as Byron Katie said.

It will make you nuts and keep you angry and feeling like, “It’s not fair.” It will keep you in a battle with yourself where you are at war between what you want – a healthy fit body – and the fact that you don’t want to do the work to get that healthy fit body – eating whole foods or exercising.

If you want to have a healthy, fit body, and your body has 30 extra pounds on it, you won’t feel good in it. You’ll hate it. You’ll resent it – when what you’re really resenting is that you’re not giving yourself permission to go after what you really want – a healthy fit body – or you’re not willing to do the necessary work to obtain that body – like eating differently.

It would be like saying, “I want to drive over the speed limit” and then getting angry when you get a speeding ticket. Or like saying, “I want to be a mom” and then get mad that you have to take care of your children.

So with food, for example, if you say, “I want to be at a healthy weight,” then it’s a matter of saying, what do I need to do every day to produce that outcome? How do my daily choices create that?

That’s how you use your masculine. You decide. You create the structure and the framework. And you act. And that action feels good because it has integrity in it – it’s what you are choosing to do (not what someone else tells you to do) – and then your behavior is matching it. You are following through on your decision – actually putting it into behavior instead of just thinking about it, dreaming about it, or wishing for it.

Your feminine comes in with how you go about doing that. It’s examining the methods and motivation to go after your choices. Are you doing it because you love yourself and you want to honor your beauty, your needs, your health, or are you doing it with a whip in hand, whipping yourself into change? Are you thinking that weighing less or eating healthier makes you somehow more lovable, a better person, more spiritual, more evolved?

No. It can’t give you that. Nothing can. It is an exercise in futility. Unconditional love and acceptance has to come inside, independent of what you do or how you behave. You can be the most spiritual person and be fat. They are two totally separate things.

So create whatever you want to create in your life with food and your body. Then create the necessary structures to do so – create your container. Let your decision of “this is how I want to live in my body” drive your daily decisions. And do those decisions with love – knowing that you can’t do anything to increase your inherent worth or loveableness.

This, in a nutshell, is the key to food and body freedom. It’s what worked for me. It’s what finally helped me get off sugar, stop craving junk, and enjoy eating whole foods. It’s what helped me stop sabotaging myself. It’s what helped me stop criticizing and being jealous of other women who were taking good care of their bodies and looking fabulous (because I wouldn’t give myself permission to go after that myself.)

It’s also what helped me be okay with my commitment of looking and feeling my best. I love to have a fit body – I like wearing pretty clothes instead of hiding my body in my fat pants. So my choices reflect that. And I love and accept my choices instead of fighting against them because they are my choices and tied to my deepest desires.

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from Heal Overeating: Untangled, a series of audio sessions and more (tools, visualizations, exercises) to help you create the relationship that you want with food and your body.

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