Grab yourself a nice, healthy drink and take a few moments to enjoy some inspiration from the No 1 New York Times Bestseller “Women Food & God” by the fabulous Geneen Roth :
Women Food And God - Geneen Roth
Geneen Roth :
“If you keep using food as a drug, if your life becomes about your weight, you miss everything that is not related to your weight problem. You die without ever having lived.
Here is the letter I wrote to No One in Particular who is hoping to be Someone Special and creating a weight problem in the meantime.
It seems as if you chose this career and therefore this career arc. Can you accept that? Not as resignation, which is how people define acceptance. Not as a sense of victimhood : “Poor me, I can’t do anything but accept the situation.” But as the willingness to stop defining your tasks as a means to an end and instead inhabit what you yourself have chosen. What if this is exactly what you are supposed to be doing because it is what you are doing? What if each nitty-gritty task is perfection itself and you keep missing it because you’re looking for something else?
It’s like washing the dishes. If you focus on getting the dishes done so that your kitchen will be clean, you miss everything that happens between dirty and clean. The warmth of the water, the pop of the bubbles, the movements of your hand. 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.
Even when you become Something because they were right, you really were Going Places – even when you arrive at being Someone because you are where you were going – your life may not be any better if you have learned to be awake, alive, now. To take this moment for what it is. It’s just as easy to be miserable when you are Someone Special as when you are No One in Particular. Because even Someone Special has to live in her own skin and deal with boredom, rejection, loneliness, disappointment. Even Someone Special comes home at night and does what the Nobodies do: falls asleep alone. You might as well learn how to pay attention now. How to inhabit the life you’ve chosen. How to take up every inch of your skin. Occupy the space in this body you were given. It’s your place. Only yours.
The writer Annie Dillard says “How you spend your days is how you spend your life.” Be unwaveringly honest. Ask yourself how you want to spend your days. Since you’re going to be reviewing documents anyway, why not be aware of your breath and the ticking clock while you’re doing it?
Whatever it offers, the reality of your day-to-day life has to be better than the self-inflicted misery you are creating through the stories you are telling yourself. It has to be better than the nightly binges and throwing yourself into the cycle of self-loathing and promises to stop eating so much.
Come back. Break the trance. Pay attention to your breath. Your arms. Your legs. Listen to sounds. The scrape of a chair. The whirr of the copy machine. Notice colours. The royal blue of a coworker’s dress. The coffee stain on your boss’s tie. Wake up to the riot of life around you every second. The singer Pearl Bailey said, “People see God every day; they just don’t recognise Him.” What if every day was a chance to see a new version of God? What if what you needed was right in front of you and you were not recognising it?
You already have everything you need to be content. Your real work, despite the corporate ladder you are climbing, is to do whatever it takes to realise that. And then it won’t matter if you’re Someone Special or No One in Particular because you’ll be fully alive in every moment – which is, I imagine, all you ever wanted from Going Places to be Someone.
Or from being thin.”
Click : ” Women Food and God” by Geneen Roth to learn more about Geneen’s transformational book.
“If I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
Mahatma Ghandi