Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first
There have been many articles about the top regrets that people have when they're dying. They are always, "I missed the ordinary moments. " We miss those ordinary moments, and yet, that's what we're trying to distract ourselves from at the same time.
Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories. When you don't infer your existence from replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your motherfatherbrotherteacherlover didn't see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you?
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. Treat yourself with outrageous kindness beginning today.
Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way - and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.
The real work of this life is not what we do every day from 9-5. . . The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in.