When we honor and nurture our bodies we keep the possibility of a purposeful, healthy present and future alive within us. When we enrich our bodies with rest, create movement that challenges us while inviting gentleness and provide our bodies natural, quality foods the possibility for living meaningful, vision-filled lives opens before us.

When we abuse our bodies with substances, judgment, criticism or cruelty we darken the places where light is required to move us toward our vision of a purposeful, fulfilling life.

Consider, what would it mean to be your body's best friend? If you were your body's best friend what would you say to it? What would it say to you? What does it need to hear? How would you reassure it? Support it? It is not an accident that our bodies are ALWAYS present and ALWAYS available for connection with our spirits and our minds. You can be your body's best friend. You are THE ONE it has been waiting for!

When I consider what I would say to my body it goes something like this: "You are not what your parents and friends said you were...ugly, lazy, slobbish, in need of a tent-maker for clothing, undisciplined. You are a precious being who, in total innocence in a traumatic, unsafe environment turned on yourself when you turned to food in an attempt to find some comfort, calmness, and affection. You are the very opposite of lazy and undisciplined. You have searched for decades without resting for comfort, affection, tenderness and love. You never gave up searching! You kept searching. But while you were searching with food I have been here all along and I have now learned how to give you what you crave and I have the support to continue to give you what you crave...a love and comfort that "comfort" food can never deliver. "

When I consider what my body would say to me it goes something like this: "Don't leave me! Don't turn your back on me and trash me the way all the others have and the way you used to! The means don't trash me (disparage me) and don't treat me like a trash can to fill with unhealthy food in unhealthy quantities. Post-surgery, don't deny me the nutrition I need for health and don't continue to use food primarily as a source of comfort. If you can't see me and treat me well and love me then who will? I need you! Now that you can see me please do not turn your back on me again."

With an open-hearted, internal dialog such as this food can take its rightful place as a source of fuel rather than as a fleeting, unsustainable source of pseudo-love.

How are you moving beyond food addiction, beyond the nuts and bolts of surgery and becoming available for the purposeful, vision-filled living of the rest of your life?

Great article. Words are power and what we say to ourselves and how we treat ourselves is key to our success or failure.

I know I too often hear those biting words in my head from my past that make me feel vulnerable and just not good enough. When I get in that mind space I can spiral quickly downward and be a total self saboteur.

Lisa, What can you do/say to yourself in the early moments of the downward spiral to end the free-fall into self-sabotage? If you had to create a manual for you to use at those moments what would it say? Really sit with that question. You might benefit from writing that manual and keeping it handy. We all have such moments. No one is more qualified than you to write that manual for you to end the free-fall and return to the light of your potential!