Quotes from Geneen Roth

The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering:

compulsive eating is basically a refusal to be fully alive. No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge. The way we are able to accomplish all of this is by the simple act of bolting—of leaving ourselves—hundreds of times a day.

Imagine what you could do ... if you stopped turning your energy against yourself and use it instead to question what you've been hypnotized into believing about the size of your body. And to speak up for matters to you and your children.

Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher, says that hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else. Being constantly agitated—another word for nonaccepting—about the inevitable. Being in a relationship with someone and refusing to surrender to the love because you don't want to give yourself to something you will eventually lose.

We keep wanting more because we don't let ourselves have what we already have

If you think that your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.

Most of us are so enthralled with the scary tigers in our minds--our stories of loneliness, rejection, grief--that we don't realize they are in the past. They can't hurt us anymore.

The fantasy of the taste of M&Ms is more enchanting than the taste of M&Ms

There was always the next person, the next hope. A future in which I could dream myself whole without taking full responsibility for that wholeness, in the same way that many of us pin our hopes on the next diet, and the next after that. As long as we keep hoping someone is coming, we keep waiting. As long as we believe the answer is out there, we don't have to turn around and discover it now.

Take yourself in. Ask the questions no one ever asked you. Keep going until you know the answer and you know who's asking. Until you realize- it's not far away- that the essence of you, like the sky, was always here. You just happened to get distracted by the local weather for a few decades.

When we're convinced we have to earn joy, we don't notice the ten thousand places in which it is already waiting, asking, waving for our attention.

Banishing them to wild and ferocious brokenness. The possibility that there is a place in them, in everyone, that is unbroken, that has never gained a pound, never been hungry, never been wounded, seems like a myth as far-fetched as the Sumerian goddess Inanna ascending to earth after hanging on a meat hook in hell.

When you sneak food, you perpetuate the belief that you are too ugly, too needy, too intense to be seen and loved for who you are... You give yourself the message that who you are is not acceptable, and that you must pretend to be someone else to be loved.

I kept becoming larger in her presence, kept returning to who I would have been without the pretense of who I thought I should be.

hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

At its core, hatred is the desire to annihilate that which is causing us pain, in the misguided belief that if we could only incinerate what seems to be causing the pain, we would finally be at peace. All feuds, all wars, all acts of revenge are built on this principle, including our inner war with food and weight.

When you are not hungry and decide to eat, choose a food that you ate that day when you were hungry. Be aware of: 1. how the food tastes 2. how the taste was different when you were hungry 3. if you enjoy it as much as when you were hungry 4. what, since it's not hunger, you are feeling 5. how you know when to stop eating

But staying with the emptiness—entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself—that's radical.

You miss the life that happens in the middle zone—between now and what you think your life should be like. And when you miss those moments because you'd rather be doing something else, you are missing your own life. Those moments are gone. You will never get them back.

You can deal with the loneliness one night at a time. But what you can't deal with is the idea of loneliness, the fear of it.

To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act—and to what you do when things don't go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat. You will quickly discover if you

Live as if they know that they are worth their own time. Live as if they deserve to take care of their bodies. Live as

We are always whirling in the trance of deficiency in which we equate being alone with loneliness, restraint with deprivation, being silent with being empty. I get seduced by the promise of adding yet another ornament to the tree of myself and forget to pay attention to the heavenly invisibles.

But staying with the emptiness -entering it, welcoming it, using it to get to know ourselves better, being able to distinguish the stories we tell ourselves about it from the actual feeling itself - that´s radical