This Is How Read Online Free PDF Page B

down or you will die trying.
    Where there is willpower there is a Band-Aid that’s eventually going to fall off.
    You only need willpower to get what you don’t want or you only want to want. By want to want, I mean, something you wish you wanted. But don’t really.
    If you find that you require willpower to lose weight, you aren’t ready to lose weight. There you have the truth, as much as you may despise hearing it.
    You don’t want it deeply and completely enough.
    Something within you is reserved in the matter.
    This is what you need to solve. You need to know where that voice of dissent is coming from.
    For example, maybe you know for a fact losing weight will improve your health and how you feel every day and maybe you have several other really smart, reasonable reasons why you want to get thinner. You know you aren’t fooling yourself into thinking your life will be perfect or you will suddenly reverse-age or become beautiful in a way you never were before; you aren’t expecting profound changes to your self or your life, except the ones you know you can expect.
    But perhaps despite knowing yourself and your motivations as well as you do, you actually find more emotional comfort in food than you are either aware of or willing to admit.
    In other words, some other aspect of your emotional or psychological structure is dependent on your continued ingesting of too many calories.
    This would be enough to derail your best efforts every time.
    When I say that your want must be transformed into a need, I don’t mean you can sit with almost constipated focus and effort and try to want it more than you already do.
    What you can do is level with yourself. Allow the voice of dissent you have stifled to speak.
    When you really want something to the point of need, you don’t care or even notice the “temptations” that could lead you off course. You don’t struggle with cravings, for example. Sure, maybe you have them, but you don’t pay any attention to them, so they go away.
    Wanting something with every cell in your body makes the effort required to achieve what you want incidental, entirely beside the point. Because your focus never wavers from the goal. You aren’t bothered by any distractions because you aren’t looking at them—you are seeing past them to what you want in your future.
    Unless some part of you is not fully onboard.
    Unless some part of you wants things to stay exactly as they are. And no amount of mental sledgehammering is going to change this. What will change it is exploration.
    Maybe there is a very good, smart reason why some part of you wants to remain the weight you’re at. It could be you haven’t been thin since you were sixteen. It could also be that when you think back to being sixteen and thin and happy because you were thin, there was a time when you weren’t so happy. A friend of your brother’s hit on you in a totally invasive, offensive way. Or a family member commented on your breasts and though it was innocent enough, it freaked you out.
    This unexamined part of your mental scaffolding is resisting your weight loss efforts out of self-protection. Sometimes, this concern belongs to a much younger version of yourself. Simply recognizing where this fear comes from, combined with your adult experience, is enough for you to realize fully, “Oh. No, that’s not going to be an issue now.”
    It really can be something that small and old and childlike that’s holding you back.
    It might also be something else. Only you can discover where this holdout is within you.
    And it will be something so close to you, you can’t even see it. By close, I mean so intrinsic, so ancient, so much a part of you.
    “But I can’t be thinner than my sister. She’ll hate me.”
    “But if I do become thin, I might want a different husband, because I settled.”
    “If I’m thin, I won’t have my weight issue as company anymore. I’ll be entirely alone. I’ll be entirely exposed.”
    If you