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.

Spain’s win was had by a single goal in the 63^rd minute by Golden Boot contender, David Villa. The forward took a shot, which rebounded to a teammate who then slipped it back to Villa with a quick dig of the heel. Villa chipped it in to the goal before Portugal’s valiant goalkeeper could recover from the prior launch.

So graceful, and yet so happenstance, the perfect sequence of actions and reactions which lead to success.

From the viewer’s perspective, it seemed like a complete accident, a pretty high stake for such an important match.

And it got me wondering about probability and success and our lives beyond sports.

For example, the relevance of a soccer game pales in comparison to the significance of our health. How good we feel is the crux around which our entire lives pivot.

Think about it, when you’re exhausted or in pain, getting through the day is a chore, and there’s little energy left big projects or inspired thinking. Yet when your body’s dialed in and your mind is clear, you can enjoy life much more sweetly.

Professionals practice over and over until mistakes are minimized, and the ability to spontaneously adapt to the circumstances at hand results in a favorable outcome.

Likewise if you consistently effort to listen to your body and act accordingly, heeding its warnings and taking good care of it, you can reduce costly slip-ups and avoid a lot of suffering.

And beyond that, a secondary benefit emerges, a magic that happens only through that constant “training”—your body begins to deal with unexpected circumstances in much more skillful ways.

When the ball gets blocked, you can immediately fire in for another shot. If you happen to get sick, your body can rebound quickly and efficiently.

In the U.S. the health trend is reaching obsessive levels as a counteraction to a culture with minimal body awareness.

But by consistently working towards the end in mind, good results become effortless, and health becomes an accident.

The perfect goal is opportunistic, unplanned, but perfectly responsive in the moment. We can train our bodies to be like that, resilient yet adaptive to their environment.

Our bodies and every thought, mood and emotion we experience are made up of what we consume – what we eat, what we drink, what we breathe — and it’s our gut which takes that information from the outside world and conveys it into something the inside can use. So what we can get from the GI tract literally makes up every cell of our body. 

In episode “G” of the ABC’s of Gluten Free podcast series, we cover gut health from a holistic perspective so you can learn to improve your digestion from the core.

In this episode we take you beyond just the food you ingest, and discuss how to enhance absorption of important vitamins and minerals, how to reduce uncomfortable symptoms of gas and bloating, and natural therapies which repair the digestive system, even if you have food sensitivities.

Want to know more?

Check out the podcast series with Tiffany Pollard, founder of Eating for Evolution, and we’ll help you out with every aspect of  living a healthy and exciting gluten free life. Here’s the link: http://community.eatingforevolution.com/articles/?ac=dg4h6rib

Oh, and if you haven’t already, sign up for my free report on the Top 10 Digestive Health Tips in the upper right hand corner of this page!

It’s about having a lifestyle that generally promotes wellness

and skillfully addressing sickness when it arises.

Health is more than merely absense of sickness.

It’s a sense of strength, clarity, energy and engagement with oneself and the surrounding world.

It’s understanding the small daily choices that contribute to a sense of wellbeing

(true prevantative medicine!)

and having the self-regard to seek resources needed to help recover from illness.