yourself eat anything you want and food becomes a commodity. It’s less interesting to stand before the glittering, freshly stocked All You Can Eat buffet when you have been standing there every night for the past six months, eating all you want, which is less and less each time. When no food is off-limits, all food becomes equal and calories evaporate, even if they pile on. But these calories, no matter how actually fattening, contain no meaning. Your war with your weight must end because wars require more than one active party.
You could end up actually losing the weight you could never lose back when you were trying like hell to lose it.
Maybe it will take months or even years for this weight to come off. If it happens, it happens as a result of allowing yourself something, not denying. The weight is lost naturally, from a positive mind-set, not manically banished and forbidden to return.
You might not lose any weight at all and this needs to be fine with you.
Unless you have a medical condition or you engage in zero physical activity, your body will try and be the weight it wants to be. It’s quite possible your arms and legs and butt will be larger than you have told yourself they ought to be.
The only real authority in the matter is your body. And some bodies are designed to be larger than others. Some peoplecan be quite large and live healthy, very long lives. We’re a fat-paranoid nation, but in the data I looked at from the CDC, people who were a little bit larger lived longer and were insulated against certain diseases.
Plus, of all the things you could do with your life, spending so much mental and physical energy on your gastrointestinal tract is somehow too wasteful.
Knowing that you’ll feel great about yourself, look amazing, and have so much more fun as a thin person is exactly like believing that being rich would end your financial worries and free you to do things like shop for seven-hundred-dollar vintage T-shirts and finally learn glassblowing. So that you could enjoy life instead of struggling constantly.
No doubt, some things would be better as a skinnier person, just as some things would improve with wealth. But happiness or satisfaction or contentment are not among these things.
Like so much in life, happiness is sold separately.
A more disappointment-resistant plan would be to get “thin happy” now at whatever weight you are. So that thin doesn’t equal happy to you anymore. It’s less compelling to obsess over getting more of something you already have.
Losing weight is something you absolutely can do and you don’t need a book or a scale to do it.
All you need is need.
You must want to lose the weight and become that skinny person more than you want to eat, more than you want the comfort that food provides you. You must want to lose weight to such an extent that the want is transformed under the pressure of your focused and powerful desire into a diamond of pure need.
When want is aimed in a very specific direction, when the want you feel is so strong it’s a need, achieving your goal is simple. Not necessarily easy. But simple. And fast, even if it takes a long time. Because when you are focused on a goal, the little steps involved in reaching that goal—such as time—just don’t make it onto your radar; they don’t matter.
If willpower is required to achieve this goal, that’s how you know you don’t want it enough on a deep, organic level.
Mechanical failure will eventually occur.
Willpower is like holding your breath: you can only do it for so long.
Which is exactly why will-powering your way through to thin won’t work. Can you name a single example in your life of when you ever needed willpower to get something you really, really wanted, needed ?
If you are trapped in a car underwater, you will not need willpower to roll down the window. You will feel only one thing: the need for air. You will start trying to roll down that window and either you will roll it