It is now four days since Easter. Have you yet had the courage to look in the mirror at your face, your belly when you step out of the shower? Did you finally get up the courage only to become totally distraught at the image before you?

Two articles on today’s oprah.com caught my eye. The first one said, “Go Ahead and Eat That Easter Candy,” relating that chocolate can be good for us. On the opposite side of the page appeared the title  “Weight Loss Roller Coaster,” the story of Kathrine Lee who in 2002 showed off her 175-pound weight loss on Oprah’s stage. She kept the weight off for seven years, but slowly the weight crept back on.

Four days after Easter I felt more inspired to read the latter article. “Finally, at 300 pounds, Kathrine had an aha! moment. After reading Geneen Roth’s book Women, Food and God, Kathrine learned losing weight is not about punishing or depriving yourself—it’s about embracing yourself. ‘Kindness is actually what heals,’ she says.”

If you keep clicking through the article, you come to an excerpt from the book, which includes the following:

“We think we’re miserable because of what we weigh. And to the extent that our joints hurt and our knees ache and we can’t walk three blocks without losing our breath, we probably are physically miserable because of extra weight. But if we’ve spent the last five, 20, 50 years obsessing about the same ten or 20 pounds, something else is going on. Something that has nothing to do with weight.”

“The bottom line, whether you weigh 340 pounds or 150 pounds, is that when you eat when you are not hungry, you are using food as a drug, grappling with boredom or illness or loss or grief or emptiness or loneliness or rejection. Food is only the middleman, the means to the end. Of altering your emotions. Of making yourself numb. Of creating a secondary problem when the original problem becomes too uncomfortable. Of dying slowly rather than coming to terms with your messy, magnificent, and very, very short—even at a hundred years—life. The means to these ends happens to be food, but it could be alcohol, it could be work, it could be sex, it could be cocaine. Surfing the Internet. Talking on the phone.”

“The Sufi poet Rumi, writing about birds learning to fly, wrote: ‘How do they learn it? They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.’”

“If you wait until you have Toni Oliver’s eyes and Amy Breyer’s hair, if you wait to respect yourself until you are at the weight you imagine you need to be to respect yourself, you will never respect yourself. To be given wings, you’ve got to be willing to believe that you were put on this Earth for more than your endless attempts to lose the same 30 pounds 300 times for 80 years. And that goodness and loveliness are possible, even in something as mundane as what you put in your mouth for breakfast.

Beginning now.”

OK, I now make a note in my planner, “Get Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth.”

Beginning now…quit beating yourself up for what you did in the past. Just last night a friend reminded me that the past and future are all about the ego.

Just stay put in this present moment. Now is the new beginning.

An excerpt from today’s message from Neale Donald Walsch gives further emphasis on the now…

“Is it love, or is it fear?

Everything you express emerges from one of these two

starting points. Yet you can return to love, as Marianne

Williamson famously wrote, at any time you wish. For

each day, each moment, offers a new beginning.”

Maria Robinson said, “Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.”

Here’s the challenge for today: Go back to that mirror. Stand up straight, proudly square your shoulders. Look yourself in the eye and return yourself to love, self love.

Just think, a new beginning…beginning now. How exciting.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 9:34 am and is filed under Weight Loss. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.