Chapter 2
Let’s start with some good news and some bad news. The good news and the bad news is one and the same. It is that the solution I will offer you is not going to be to control your eating habits. Why is that bad news? Because trying to control your eating is safe and familiar territory. It is something you have certainly tried before. In fact you’ve probably tried it many, many times. Maybe you even try it every day. Maybe you were expecting this to be a motivational book that would inspire you to try even harder this time.
No. This is not a motivational book. That is good news, precisely because you’ve already been motivated, motivated to try again and again. You’ve tried, and it hasn’t worked. How many years have you tried one motivational technique after another, only to fail in the long run? Oh, you’ve tried all right. In fact you’ve tried very, very hard. Thin people might look at your plate or your shopping cart or your body, and assume that you must be lazy, weak, greedy, undisciplined, or simply just not trying. People often assume that about you—hey, maybe you even assume that about yourself. It is this assumption that prompts people to offer motivation after motivation. They will tell you various tricks to control your appetite. They might try “tough love”, the boot camp approach, hoping that your own self-disgust will motivate you to try harder.
It is easy to understand how the logic of trying harder gets started. Trying hard actually does work—for a while. You lose 20, 40 pounds and you feel great. You feel good in your body and you feel good about yourself. You derive self-esteem from your success. But eventually, the cravings and appetites you have tried so hard to suppress come back with a vengeance. It can happen at any moment of weakness. Often it happens when there is some kind of upheaval in your life, perhaps when you lose your job, or when you have relationship troubles, or when you have a health problem. In the face of a personal crisis, the effort of control can just become too much to handle. Your weight balloons back up to what it was before, with a few extra pounds for good measure.
At this point, you naturally conclude, “It happened because I stopped trying,” or, “It happened because I didn’t try hard enough.” Eventually you decide to try again—harder this time—and you experience the same result: failure. You conclude, therefore, that you just must be weak. This pattern confirms your supposed weakness again and again.
This leads to the first key insight of Transformational Weight Loss. It is a different way to interpret the yo-yo diet pattern of repeated failure. Before you decide to go another round, consider this: If trying hard didn’t work, then isn’t trying harder doing more of what doesn’t work? It is like the man who tried to run to the horizon. The faster he ran, the faster it receded, so he concluded he just wasn’t running fast enough. Eventually, after a lifetime of running, he found himself back at his starting point.
Lets face it: control doesn’t work. If it worked, you would have a different body than the one you have today. Control doesn’t work, it never has worked, and it isn’t going to work. This would be terrible news if there weren’t another way. That is what I will offer you in this book, a way to transform your body and your life that does not depend on willpower, control, or trying harder.
I want you to know that at least one thin person (me) knows your countless struggles, knows how very hard you have tried, and doesn’t see you as weak, lazy, greedy, or self-indulgent. The reason I don’t see you that way is that I know you are not that way—even if you think you are. I know it beyond a shadow of a doubt, and you will realize it as well when you understand the alternative explanation I will offer.
By the way, not only do I know that you are not lazy and weak, I think you are heroic. I think that for two reasons. One is your indomitable spirit. Through all those years, no matter how beaten down you were, no matter how discouraged, you still found the strength to try and try again. You refused to believe that it had to be this way. You heroically refused to settle for obesity. In the midst of despair, you even learned to find joy and hope. Very few thin people know the incredible strength of spirit you have built through these struggles. Very few thin people know what it is like to be in a society where most people judge you, degrade you, and even insult you on a daily basis.
The second reason I think you are heroic is that you have taken on a huge and difficult challenge. Only a very powerful, noble, courageous soul would choose to be born into the circumstances you have chosen and the body that you have been. Of course, you may not be aware of having made this choice, but on a deep unconscious level you chose these circumstances because you were ready to take them on. You were ready for the spiritual growth that is available through experiencing and transcending the conditions of your life.
Many of you reading this book are ready to move on now from that state of being. You are ready to no longer be obese. You are ready because you have fully experienced and integrated the condition of obesity. Did you know that an essential part of that experience is the despair and hopelessness and hell of it? Without that, your experience would not be complete. Now I sense that many of you are nearing the point of complete surrender. That is when you despair of yet another bout of trying hard, and you just give up. You simply don’t know any more. You reach a state of emptiness. This state of emptiness is what will invite in something new. Unless you are close to that state, you probably won’t resonate with the message of this book. That is okay with me. I truly do not want you to follow my suggestions unless they feel right to you.
The state of surrender I just mentioned is not the same as “accepting that this is just the way I am.” Yes, self-acceptance is a big part of what I will offer you, but part of that is also accepting that the self can change. The surrender is not a surrender to being like this forever. It is actually a bigger surrender than that. It is more like, “I know life can be different and I can be healthy, I know it is possible but I just don’t know how to get there and I’m sick and tired of trying.”
Your situation is like the man locked in a room with no roof. He has felt along the walls, seeking an exit, seeking a weak point, digging and scraping with all his might for a very long time. Finally he gives up. Still believing deep down there is a way out, but having completely exhausted every possibility, he sits down in despair and raises his head. The walls are only six feet high. The exit was available the whole time. All he had to do is look up.
In a sense, your situation is hopeless. Your experience has already proven that, proven that no amount of trying will make and keep you thin. So are you ready for something else? Are you ready to look up? Are you ready to enter a new way of living and being? Because a change is possible in your near future that is so profound that life as you have known it will seem like a bad dream that fades rapidly upon waking. Your body and your experience of being alive can change so much that you might feel like you have been reborn in a different body. Indeed, something will have died and something will have been born, because you will be entering new and unfamiliar territory. The death of the familiar, a birth into something new—that is something that’s always a little bit scary. When you read what I am about to share with you, you might feel a strong fear response. The core of this work is so audacious that it is truly scary. But at the same time, you should feel a sense of boldness too, boldness and exhilaration. If you do not, then please respect your fear and wait until you are ready.
Fear has a bad reputation in spiritual circles. Often it is described as the opposite of love. But fear has its purpose too. We create for ourselves a cocoon or a womb of our fears, a safe space in which we can grow. Eventually we grow to the limits of that space, and the fears that once protected us become confining. Eventually we can no longer stand the smallness of the familiar space we inhabited, and we are born into something new. If you are ready for this work, the kind of fear you will feel is like that of a young child, about to enter the water for the first time. She really wants to go in, she is ready, yet she is afraid. If the fear you feel is more akin to the child being taunted by teenagers to take a high dive off the rocks, knowing she shouldn’t but afraid to say no, then please respect that feeling. File this information away, mull it over, and perhaps someday you will feel the true desire to take the plunge.