Be gentle.
Talk gently to yourself.
Think gently about things.
Tread gently in the world.

Do you remember when you were a child?
And someone treated you harshly?
Maybe they yelled, maybe they criticized, maybe they were unfair, maybe they shamed you.
You wanted to leave
Run away and hide.
And many times you couldn’t.

Maybe you learned, one of those times, that if you ate lots of food,
It numbed the pain, covered the hurt.

Maybe you also believed some of the mean things they said.
And then
maybe you made up a lot more mean things to say to you.
Maybe they sound something like this:
You’re fat
You’re ugly
You’re gross
You’re lazy
You have no self discipline
You’ll never succeed.

Remember being a child
And someone was gentle to you.
Loving.
And you wanted to stay.
You never wanted to leave.
And you had no need to comfort yourself with food
You felt accepted, calm.

That child is still there, and she’s you.
That adult is still there, and now she’s you.
Which adult are you going to be?

If you start to really listen to the thoughts in your head
As if you were listening to someone else talking to you
I‘m guessing you‘d be horrified
You’d probably never let anyone talk to someone you love that way.

You may not notice that you do this.
Most of my clients are totally unaware of how many mean mean things they say about themselves all day.
Why?
Because these mean things make them feel really bad
Ashamed
Despair
And so they use the trick they learned as children –
They hide
They numb
With food.

We don’t hear the terrible thoughts because we’re stuffing them down with food.

So this week,
Please
Lay down the whip
Softly.
Be gentle with you
Talk gently to yourself
Tell yourself you’re doing the best you can with the resources you have
Tell yourself you don’t have to be better than you are
Tell yourself you just are.

If you do this
You’ll be able to use the most important weight loss trick in the Universe:
You’ll find it very easy to stay.