Keep Friends Who Will Keep You Honest!
Last summer, a good friend met me at a bar not long after I had come home to Florida following several months touring and signing books out of state. I was upset about something and was looking for sympathy as I berated myself and questioned everything I was doing. Instead of agreeing with me or allowing me to beat myself up any longer, my friend said that I needed to stop making excuses, stop feeling sorry for myself, and “Needed to practice what I was preaching.” She said it was hypocritical for me to go out and share the story of my success with others and then go sit in a bar feeling sorry for myself and engaging in behavior that was harmful to myself.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. One of my best friends was totally taking me to the mat! What kind of friend would do something like that? A good one. We will all likely have friends who fall into several camps: the Naysayers, who want to rain on your parade and question what you do (you don’t need them); the Enablers, who will tell you you’re doing great, even when you know you aren’t (eat more, get fat again, we miss the old Fat Fred—you don’t need them either); and True Friends who will be 100 percent supportive, yet will call you out on your shit when necessary. For your own good! These are the friends you will want to keep.
She was right. Wake up, Fred! What are you doing? You’ve come so far for this? What possible good was I doing for myself or anyone else by feeling sorry for myself and going out and drinking too much? Thankfully, my friend called me on it and refused to enable me. I said, “You’re right, it’s time for me to leave and have someone drive me home.” What I was doing that afternoon was just another form of overeating, which I was reminded contains a lot of empty calories and went straight to my belly. Hurting myself wasn’t going to solve my problems. Rather, it would only make things worse.
Practice What You Preach!
The next day, I decided I didn’t like being called a hypocrite, and, more than that, I really didn’t like being one. I didn’t like how I was behaving: passing the buck and allowing everything and everyone outside of me to affect me so profoundly. Would it only be a matter of time before I started overeating and gaining back the weight? I began to not only practice what I was preaching, I began to fully EMBRACE it! What was I doing? I loved myself enough to lose 150 pounds. Why couldn’t I love myself enough to accept things I couldn’t change and realize that I had everything I needed, and everything was exactly as it was supposed to be, whether I liked it or not. I needed to stop looking elsewhere for gratification and fighting the reality of what is. I needed to start being kinder, gentler, and more honest with myself, like when I began losing weight. I was a thirty-year-old child who needed to be taken by the hand and treated with compassion and also with tough love, which my friend gave me.
I had to stop making excuses and enabling myself to do things that weren’t good for me.
Take Time Out for Reflection and Self-Assessment
After the first year of touring and signing books, I took some time off to reflect. I needed to go back to being gentle with myself, just like when I began to lose weight. I didn’t start The Restaurant Diet by telling myself I was a big, fat, undisciplined failure, like I had in the past. I needed to tell remind myself of all the positive things I had accomplished during the past year, related to my book tour and other areas of my life. I needed to remind myself that I did not write my book to make money or become 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.