Read an excerpt from Love, Finally

As far back as I can remember, when I didn’t feel love, I ate.

Food was my secret way of giving to myself. It was also a way to hurt myself. I inhaled. I hid. I stole. Which proved that I was bad, damaged, doomed. At 11, 16, 25, I punished myself with food the way my mother punished me with her hands. In the middle of 20,000-calorie binges, insane with self-hatred, I’d chant: Good. Again. Harder. Until, when I was 27, having gained and lost more than a thousand pounds—the equivalent of a horse or a baby grand piano—in 17 years, I decided I had two choices: kill myself or stop dieting. I could not recall a single minute of my life until that point when I had been diet- or binge-free. I stopped dieting.

Within two days, I felt exuberant, giddy, released. Within a week, I knew I’d discovered a way out of hell.

Within a month, I started a dollar-a-night group for eight women to examine the ways we punished ourselves with food. Within two months, I’d lost 10 pounds by eating when I was hungry and stopping when I was full. I knew then that if I, who was as insane as anyone I’d ever met about food and weight, could break free from compulsive eating, anyone could—and I wanted to shout that discovery to women everywhere, so I did the next best thing: I wrote a book about it. Then 10 more.

For the next 40 years, I led workshops and retreats for thousands of women about using their relationship with food to change how they lived. One of those books, Women Food and God, became a number one New York Times bestseller. I spoke in stadiums, lecture halls, universities, appeared on Oprah. And yet. I woke up day after day haunted by a feeling that something was wrong and I was to blame. Years of spiritual practice and decades of good therapy softened but did not disappear the underlying discontent and self-hatred.

Although compulsive eating had ceased to be an issue, I still believed that true happiness was possible for other people, just not me. The fact that I had a successful career, close friends and was married to a man I loved, seemed like it should transform my chronic sense of being irrevocably damaged—only it didn’t, even though I got pretty damn good at acting as if I were normal, sane, whole. Sound crazy? Nah.

As I’ve discovered, I’m not alone. Most of us live with secret fears of being unworthy or unlovable playing in the background like a scratchy soundtrack. We may conceal our underlying self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy with a topcoat of getting, having, working, trolling for likes on social media—the hallmarks of a “normal” life. Yet all the while our shame, anxiety and negative self-judgment lie in wait, cruel masters that began with our earliest caregivers and have been shaping how we feel about ourselves, our relationships, and life itself ever since.

“Her pain became my element, the country in which I lived, the rule beneath which I bowed,” wrote Vivian Gornick about her mother in her book Fierce Attachments. My mother’s pain, her incessant negative judgments, were the air I breathed, the country in which I lived.

I always felt unworthy of love—an underlying belief that neither a happy marriage nor worldly success could touch. Until I met Coco—a seemingly ordinary, mostly blind 80-year-old woman who spoke about the importance of “naming and dissolving unavoidable yet false conclusions” and “the awake awareness” that was revealed when those conclusions fell away—and I burst out laughing.

Eventually, after many times of noticing when I was triggered and realizing it was about a mistaken interpretation I’d made decades ago, the self-hatred began to dissipate; I stopped repeatedly and automatically rejecting myself. The conclusions became lighter, transparent, dissolved, until I understood that they were never true. I understood that it was possible for all of us—even the most hardcore self-doubters—to come home to ourselves and to the blooming galaxy of aliveness that is our birthright. Even mine.

Here is what I know now: Losing weight is not the answer to anything but losing weight. Dropped pounds couldn’t erase the buried shame and lies I believed about myself. While it’s true that junky food leads to junky thoughts and that what we put into our mouths really does matter, it is also true that junky thoughts proliferate regardless of the food we eat. Sooner or later, usually sooner, our core beliefs about ourselves, our own worth, take center stage and run the show. Even when we are taking Ozempic or GLP-1 derivatives and the food noise is silenced. Even when we drop three jean sizes. Or when, as some women report, their moods are lifted and their shame about their bodies is eliminated. Even then, we are still left with the predicament of seeing the world through the unavoidable conclusions we (unknowingly) made before we were 7 years old. And of being swept into the cultural hypnosis of believing we are what we weigh.

Love, Finally is about giving ourselves permission to question what we’ve never questioned: that we see the world through our wounds, not as it really is. We see what we believe. And if we never question our conclusions about being unlovable or defective, those are the lenses through which we filter our experience. It’s like seeing the entire world drenched in yellow when we’re wearing yellow-tinted glasses. Freedom comes when we take the glasses off.