famous, and I had been willing to invest a lot of time, money, and effort to get my message out there in order to HELP OTHERS. That was the reason I wrote The Restaurant Diet.
Know Your Value and Charge Appropriately!
I also needed to embrace the fact that I needed to take a good, hard look at my business model and areas where I was losing money, making money, and what I could do differently or better. I began working with a business coach who helped me see there was a ton of potential revenue out there that I was missing out on: seemingly easy money for doing things I was already doing, but that I didn’t have the gumption to charge for or charge enough for. Just like with everything else, business and finance were other areas, or layers of the onion, that needed to be addressed, and there was no time like the present. I needed to shift my perception from “I can’t charge X for what I am doing” to “My time and services are valuable and people are willing to compensate me” and “People who want to work with me will be willing to pay me enough for my time, so that I am making money, not losing money.”
I remembered the Universal Law that goes something like “you get back what you give” in quality and quantity. When I stopped looking at writing and selling books as a money or ego-driven proposition and began to accept, embrace, and own my own values and the value of what I was bringing to the table, I made some changes in how I did things, and the bottom line began taking care of itself. I was able to relax more, and trust in the universe that all was well. Just like with losing weight and keeping it off, nothing remains static in this life. We need to constantly and honestly examine and review what’s going on in our lives, and, where necessary, make appropriate changes that will better serve us. This is how we continually improve and become better versions of ourselves.
How Do We Love Ourselves?
Not everyone can just wake up one morning and decide: Today I’m going to love myself. The reality is, I did wake up one day and decide to love myself for the first time in my life. That day was the day I decided to deal with my weight problem and every other issue that was holding me back and keeping me from living the life I was meant to.
Fast-forward ten years. While I decided I would finally love myself by realizing I was a lovable person worth saving, it would take me years to truly accept, embrace, and grasp on a soul level what it meant to truly love myself. I said I loved myself. The truth is I loved myself only a little, but, during the past ten years, it was never a total, unconditional love and acceptance. I still struggled with codependent, controlling behaviors, continued to fear life, and still managed to get sidetracked and risked throwing everything away several times, including my grief of the loss of my father, my frustration about business matters I had no control over, and several bad breakups.
Let me repeat: to lose weight and keep it off, we must learn to truly love ourselves. Our journey to losing weight and getting healthier is way more than getting to a number on the scale, or fitting into a dress, or looking better for swimsuit season. These are all positive things and worthwhile goals, but they do not address the key component to lasting weight loss. Instead, we must deal with the inner sickness, our inner sense of lack, our lack of self-love, which doesn’t automatically happen when you lose weight. Learning to love ourselves isn’t something that happens in days, weeks, or months. You can’t just flip it on like a light switch, especially if you have been in the throes of addictive behavior for years. Most diets don’t teach self-love. Most people who go on a “diet” aren’t doing so out of true love for themselves. Rather, most dieters are looking to change their outside appearance, looking for quick gratification, thinking the pot of gold will be waiting for them at the end of the diet.
Diets don’t teach or encourage love.
They don’t teach elements that are crucial to self-love and a healthy lifestyle, like acceptance, balance, compassion, and concepts like gratitude and self-care, as well as honest, dedicated, disciplined, and nourishing to our bodies, minds, and souls. Most diets cause us to feel like bad people who deserve to be punished by being deprived of foods we enjoy. And when we fall off the wagon, we feel like complete failures for not sticking to the routine. We remain obsessed with food we can’t enjoy, resent the process, dislike the exercise, grow impatient—you know the drill. Even successful weight loss is very difficult, if not impossible, to sustain if we don’t learn to truly love ourselves.
We reach our ideal weight and expect life to suddenly be perfect—making the cover of GQ, getting a great job, a gorgeous girlfriend who “totally gets you,” making a lot of money, acting with a sense of confidence and self-esteem that doesn’t just “happen” as the result of weight loss. All of these things are possible and aren’t bad things, but they are just things. They aren’t the end-all-be-all and even if you got everything you thought you ever wanted as a result of weight loss (or it just happened to fall into your lap), you still wouldn’t be satisfied, you would want more.
I had to learn the hard way that I always had everything I ever wanted and I am everything I ever needed. I lost 150 pounds in a year and life wasn’t suddenly magical. I struggled with dating for years.
My codependent behaviors continued to resurface and wreak havoc in my personal and professional life. I looked for relationships and other people to complete me, like I wasn’t enough. I would have to struggle with my demons and tendencies to resort to old behaviors and learn to truly realize and accept the reality: I am a lovable person. I am a soul having a human experience. I came here with nothing but my soul. I am and have nothing but my soul, and I will leave here with nothing but my soul. Money, people, possessions, our bodies, our minds, all of it will cease to exist one day. I now believe in my heart of hearts that we are all eternal.
If I could summarize everything I have in just one word, it is LOVE. Love is the answer to the riddle of life. When we love ourselves, we no longer need the illusion of external gratification. We simply are. We accept what is. We are grateful. We don’t feel a need for excess food to fulfill us. We don’t pass our needs off on another person, who we may unreasonably and unfairly expect to fulfill our needs by loving, treating, and making us feel a certain way. The reality is nobody and nothing can make us feel anything.
Nobody and nothing can fill an inner emptiness. When we realize we always have had everything we ever needed, when we love ourselves, life suddenly becomes easier. We are no longer fighting with ourselves and with life, we stop looking outside of ourselves for love and fulfillment, stop indulging in bad habits like addictions to people, places, and things, such as food, alcohol, and drugs. These things lose their power as we step up and claim ours. We are powerful. We have the power. We have the keys to a beautiful bright future and to more than we could have ever imagined. It all begins within us.
My diet turned into so much more than losing weight. It led to the “total makeover” of every aspect of myself, which continues to this day. It didn’t stop once I reached a desirable weight. I struggled with this for years and had to continue to work on myself and learn to love the imperfect person I am in order to maintain my weight. I had to learn to forgive others. Most of all, I had to forgive myself. I had to let go of resentments. I had to learn to put my own needs first in a non-selfish way, which, as a recovering codependent, is very difficult. I had to learn new ways to enjoy life and to live each day to the fullest. I got to explore new activities and new destinations, while learning to make peace with my past, letting go of the pain, and discovering the remarkable being I am. In addition to embracing a positive attitude of acceptance, even when things weren’t as I might have liked, I learned to truly love myself, which made it easier to get up every day and strive to do my best and to work to improve every aspect of my life. I had to accept that I am human and will never achieve perfection, and that is fine. As long as I am honest and doing my best, I should be proud of myself.
Be Your Own Best Friend!
I learned to be my own best friend, which made sense since I spend more time with myself than with anyone else. I had to
