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.

While my clients have experienced tremendous digestive and reproductive successes, my goal is to help as many people in this lifetime as possible to live healthier happier lives, and I’ve realized that for now that means using a different model.

I’m in grad school right now going for my MBA to keep up-leveling what I can offer you. Please keep connected and stay tuned for great new blog posts, podcasts, and e-books as I release them!

Love,
Megan

P.S. If you’re looking for abdominal massage in your area, check out the Mayan Abdominal Massage or Chi Nei Tsang pages to locate practitioners.

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.

If you look at influential public figures or successful business owners or accomplished artists, you’ll notice their backbone is their community. They’re well connected with a network, a mastermind or accountability group, or maybe they maintain involvement in online forums to help them refine their craft.

Switching to a gluten-free diet and maintaining an interesting, health-promoting way of eating is also a skill set that needs to be cultivated over time, so what better way to do that then with resources designed with these interests in mind?

As the world becomes more Celiac savvy (and more diagnosed with gluten intolerance), the easier it is to find people to connect with around gluten intolerance. And those connections might very well be the support net that holds you up at the beginning.

Even people just a step or two ahead in their process have already established a network of healthcare providers, safe restaurants, and supportive friends, so leaning on the amateur experts around you can be a help.

When I’m traveling to a new area, I like to check out meet-up groups (www.meetup.com), postings on bulletin boards of health food stores, gluten-free bakeries and restaurants, community centers, and even yoga studios and other places where the health-conscious congregate. There is no doubt they can point me in the direction of anything I’m looking for, and it’s always great to meet people who orient themselves in similar ways.

There are also loads of more formalized support groups and organizations for sufferers of Celiac Disease and other forms of gluten intolerance. Here are a few of my favorites in the United States:

The Celiac Sprue Association

www.csaceliacs.org

The National Foundation for Celiac Awareness

www.celiaccentral.org

The Gluten Intolerance Group

www.gluten.net

Celiac Disease & Gluten-Free Diet Support Center

www.celiac.com

Celiac Disease Foundation

www.celiac.org

Some of these groups also have local chapters and events, so consult their websites to see what might be offered in your area. Remember, it’s a lifelong road, but you don’t have to journey it alone.

Also check out the Blogroll for other helpful groups and businesses!

2 bunches curly green kale

1 large carrots

1 small red beet

¾ c. cashews

½ c. raisins

2-3 T. olive oil

1 T. apple cider vinegar

Sea salt

Fresh ground pepper

Rinse and destem the kale. Chop it into smaller, bite-sized leaves, place it in a bowl, and thoroughly knead with fine sea salt. Using a vegetable peel, create shavings from the carrots and beets and throw into the bowl. Chop cashews and add them in with the raisins. Toss altogether with oil and vinegar, and top with fresh ground pepper. For best results, chill in fridge for a couple hours before serving. For more protein, you can roll up this salad in some slices of organic turkey.

Details: Thursday 4/15 from 7-8pm PDT
(That’s tomorrow, so hurry!)
Register Here.

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!

Hosted by the Endometriosis Research Center of Greater Seattle

at the Mercer Island Public Library

Thursday April 16, 6:30pm

Come learn how daily decisions about food and exercise impact endometriosis, and how to use your diet therapeutically.

This free event is open to the public—contact me to register.

Please help the women in your life who struggle with endometriosis by inviting them to this talk.

Explore how daily decisions about food and lifestyle impact endometriosis, and how to manage your symptoms through the tiny decisions that make a huge difference.

In this intriguing and important class, we will uncover:

• a holistic perspective of endometriosis
• the link between diet and nutrition
• foundations of a health-promoting anti-endo diet

Space is limited–contact me for more information and to register!