What are you hungry for? Hint: It’s not food. In fact, it’s everything but food. This provocative new book reveals the self-defeating truth about dieting, while lighting the path to a full and healthy life. Says Oprah, “This book is an opportunity to finally end the war with weight and unlock the door to freedom.” Below, O‘s exclusive excerpt.

When I was in high school, I used to dream about having Melissa Morris’s legs, Toni Oliver’s eyes, and Amy Breyer’s hair. I liked my skin, my breasts, and my lips, but everything else had to go. Then, in my 20s, I dreamed about slicing off pieces of my thighs and arms the way you carve a turkey, certain that if I could cut away what was wrong, only the good parts—the pretty parts, the thin parts—would be left. I believed there was an end goal, a place at which I would arrive and forevermore be at peace. And since I also believed that the way to get there was by judging and shaming and hating myself, I also believed in diets.

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic. The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

Although the very notion that hatred leads to love and that torture leads to relaxation is absolutely insane, we hypnotize ourselves into believing that the end justifies the means. We treat ourselves and the rest of the world as if deprivation, punishment, and shame lead to change. We treat our bodies as if they are the enemy and the only acceptable outcome is annihilation. Our deeply ingrained belief is that hatred and torture work. And although I’ve never met anyone—not one person—for whom warring with their bodies led to long-lasting change, we continue to believe that with a little more self-disgust, we’ll prevail.

But the truth is that kindness, not hatred, is the answer. The shape of your body obeys the shape of your beliefs about love, value, and possibility. To change your body, you must first understand that which is shaping it. Not fight it. Not force it. Not deprive it. Not shame it. Not do anything but accept and—yes, Virginia—understand it. Because if you force and deprive and shame yourself into being thin, you end up a deprived, shamed, fearful person who will also be thin for ten minutes. When you abuse yourself (by taunting or threatening yourself), you become a bruised human being no matter how much you weigh. When you demonize yourself, when you pit one part of you against another—your ironclad will against your bottomless hunger—you end up feeling split and crazed and afraid that the part you locked away will, when you are least prepared, take over and ruin your life. Losing weight on any program in which you tell yourself that left to your real impulses you would devour the universe is like building a skyscraper on sand: Without a foundation, the new structure collapses.

Change, if it is to be long-lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first. With understanding, inquiry, openness. With the realization that you eat the way you do for lifesaving reasons. I tell my retreat students that there are always exquisitely good reasons why they turn to food.

Can you imagine how your life would have been different if each time you were feeling sad or angry as a kid, an adult said to you, “Come here, sweetheart, tell me all about it”? If when you were overcome with grief at your best friend’s rejection, someone said to you, “Oh, darling, tell me more. Tell me where you feel those feelings. Tell me how your belly feels, your chest. I want to know every little thing. I’m here to listen to you, hold you, be with you.”

All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

The path from obsession to feelings to presence is not about healing our “wounded children” or feeling every bit of rage or grief we never felt so that we can be successful, thin, and happy. We are not trying to put ourselves together. We are taking who we think we are apart. We feel the feelings not so that we can blame our parents for not saying, “Oh, darling,” not so that we can express our anger to everyone we’ve never confronted, but because unmet feelings obscure our ability to know ourselves. As long as we take ourselves to be the child who was hurt by an unconscious parent, we will never grow up. We will never know who we actually are. We will keep looking for the parent who never showed up and forget to see that the one who is looking is no longer a child.

I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they’re hungry and to feel what they feel when they’re not. Inquiry—the feel-what-you-feel part—allows you to relate to your feelings instead of retreat from them. “Notice what arises, even it surprises you.”

Read the full excerpt.

Years ago I went vegan for ethical reasons, and cut out all animal products from my diet. This was excruciatingly difficult, but I could have made it much easier on myself. I slipped in blocks of tofu where a slab of meat would have been, sautéed tempeh with my rice and vegetables, whipped up tofu-merengue pies, and put several packages of processed, fake-meat material between two slices of bread each week.

I was bored with the food I prepared myself, but panicked when I tried to eat meals in restaurants, feeling there was nothing I could have.

So what was the problem? I never sought out new foods in the place of animal-based proteins. Why I didn’t master split pea soup and cornbread or add toasted almonds and sunflower seeds to salads, I can only attribute to lack of imagination and culinary know-how. Reducing my palate by cutting out foods and not expanding it with new options left my belly full but my body void of satisfaction. Not to mention most meat substitutes are wheat derivatives, so before I discovered Celiac, I was harming my health further without realizing.

So I can stock you up with recipes for wheatless crepes and cornmeal pie crusts, but until you consider quinoa on its own or dare to try foods that don’t remind you of how you regularly ate in your gluten days, you might feel you’re seriously missing out!

Thankfully, an abundant variety of fresh foods is available and building in alternatives to the diet can be easy when you take the risk to experiment. So cook up some vegetables and quinoa or discover the art of tomato-basil polenta, and see if your pining for wheat doesn’t lose some of its fervor!

Empty your house of them. Give away your leftover Halloween candy. Hide the Christmas chocolates. Keep the cookies in a shoebox on the top shelf of the closet, and place the stepstool in the opposite side of the room.

For some, this may be successful.

Frankly I always found these tactics fanned the flames of desire.

What you can’t have you want more of, right? Just think of dating psychology for a moment and my point is proven.

Anyhow, I worked through many of my food addictions in the past, but I was still hooked on something very very powerful. Dark. Chocolate.

Here’s how I overcame my daily obsession.  

But first a back story: I was always the kind of kid who, after being told not to open the door, headed straight for the handle the moment the adults left.

So naturally when I tried to wean myself off chocolate by hiding it, I’d go through the effort to unbury and devour it before my rival rationale could enter. Not to mention I always remembered exactly where I hid it! We really can’t fool ourselves for long.

So that’s when it occurred to me: rather than caving into temptation of the forbidden fruit, I should let it not be forbidden.

I began leaving squares of dark chocolate with cacao nibs and minty chocolate bunny heads and organic Mayan spice bars on the counter, in the fridge, next to the tea in the cupboard, even next to my work computer. It was all I saw. In the morning when I got of bed, I spotted chocolate before I could even make it to the bathroom to brush my teeth.  

Did I eat dark chocolate first thing in the morning? Yes.

Did I snack on it mindlessly while at my desk? Of course I did.

But I wasn’t breaking my will.

Eventually two really powerful things emerged:

1) Chocolate became mundane.

My craving for it was no longer a yearning for novelty.

2) It began to teach me true discipline.

At some point when we can see our temptation in plain light, it ceases to become so dazzling. At some point eating so damn much dark chocolate was, well, sickening.

True discipline wasn’t about saying no, it was about understanding consequences.

When I work with my clients, there are plenty of ways to use the right food and diet to permanently and effectively eliminate sweets cravings. But on top of those methods, uncovering some of the driving forces and increasing awareness is just as powerful a tactic.

And both these roads lead to long term success, rather than sneaky antics or sheer force, and the sweet tooth is healthily repaired.