A Course in Weight Loss

Love, and love only, produces miracles. Your primary work in doing this course is to identify where there is a lack of love in your life, and be willing to address it.

That includes your love of self, and your body is part of who you are. If you love your body when you’re thin but hate it when you’re not, then you love yourself conditionally, which is not love at all. If you can’t love your body, you can’t really love yourself.

Begin by asking yourself: What are you hating your body for? For being overweight? It didn’t do this to you; you did this to it! You haven’t been abused by your body; your body has been abused by you. And yet, unlike you, it has continued to hold up its side of the relationship. It has continued to function as best it can, even though you have made it harder. It has borne excess pounds, even though it has been a burden to do so. And it has continued to support you, even though you have often failed to support it.

Is it your body you hate, or its size? And since all negative emotions derive from fear, if you hate your body, you must fear something. What is that? Do you fear ridicule? Or is your deeper fear—one that overrides your fear of being overweight—a fear that you’ll be punished if you try to “play big” in life? What an irony, that those who are physically the biggest could be dealing with a fear of playing big. Again, what are you afraid of?

Do you actually hate your body at all? Or have you simply learned to hate it because others hurt you so much when you were thin?

Can you remember who the first person was who envied, hated, or judged your body? Do you remember the moment you looked at your body and made a quick decision to cover it up? Was the only way to feel you “belonged” in your family to eat as excessively as your parents and siblings did? Was the only way to feel loved in your family to be as overweight as they were? Were you considered hoity-toity or stuck-up if you sought a thinner, healthier body? Was there a particular person who either looked at you strangely or said something off-color when you were a child, making you feel shame at the thought of a beautiful body? At what point did you subconsciously decide that you didn’t deserve to be thin?

You can now rid yourself of the ghosts in your head. With God’s help, you can forgive those who in their ignorance might have led you down a path of pain. You can now surrender your limiting beliefs. And you can renew and revitalize all aspects of yourself.

Your body has not done anything to you; it has merely reflected the raging battlefield in your mind. With this lesson, try to forgive your body for what it did not do. That is the first step in forgiving yourself for what you did do. It’s correct to say there’s been a huge misunderstanding, and the goal of this lesson is to repair and restore the relationship between you and your physical self.

When you were born, your body was perfect. Just as your spiritual self expressed itself innocently and authentically at birth, so did your physical self. Both spiritually as well as physically, the perfect imprint of your original self has not been obliterated—it has only temporarily been covered over by fear-laden thoughts. Your mind and your body have the ability to return to their spiritual programming when you yourself program them to do so. Your body never forgot how to be perfect; you have merely resisted its perfection.

Just as there are rituals and brain triggers that produce overeating, there are rituals and brain triggers that produce wise eating. These rituals and triggers remind the body of its original perfection, so it can return more easily to its perfect form and functioning.

Your relationship to food is related to millions of years of evolution, but so is your relationship to your body. There is archaeological evidence—on view at any museum exhibit of ancient artifacts—that thousands of years ago people were adorning themselves with clothes, jewelry, and other forms of decoration. The wish to appear beautiful is an ancient impulse, not some trick invented by modern advertisers to mess with your mind. Yet there is ample evidence that in various cultures throughout the ages, the idea of beauty has been vastly disparate.

For the purposes of this course, what we mean by beauty is what is beautiful to you; the point here is that your desire to be beautiful is a natural one, and a feeling to which you are entitled.

Maybe you’ve been afraid of being thin as a result of a dangerous experience in your past, and only now can you face your fear and replace it with love. In fact, being thinner does not inherently make you vulnerable to danger. Being overweight, however, does make you vulnerable … to embarrassment, self-hate, discomfort, ridicule, and disease.

Begin by making an apology to yourself—just a simple movement inside your heart, asking forgiveness for having mistreated such a divine and magnificent gift as your physical body. Your body did nothing to deserve mistreatment, nor did you. But patterns of self-abuse were set into motion within you years ago, and now you must acknowledge these patterns, take full responsibility for them, atone for them, and ask God to remove these patterns so they can be cast out of your psyche. It’s been a long time since you knew the experience of healthy self-love, certainly in relation to your body, and that is the miracle we pray for now.

Let’s be very clear: If you are an addict, your mistreatment of your body has been extreme. It has been violent. If you have any doubt about this, stop for a moment, go into your bedroom, undress in front of a mirror, and take a good look at yourself. There you will see the scars of war: stretch marks, saggy bags of flesh produced by years of yo-yo dieting, maybe even surgical scars. Physically as well as psychologically, you’ve been waging war against yourself for a very long time.

But now it is time for peace. Just as with your relationship to food, your return to right relationship with your body is not something that can be fully accomplished in an instant. It would be self-defeating to expect this relationship to be fully perfected quickly after so many years of neglect. Yet the truce can begin.

This lesson involves some nice oil—even olive oil would do. Anointment by oil is a ritual used throughout the Bible, carrying a deep spiritual significance. With this lesson, you will anoint yourself with oil.

From the bottoms of your feet to the tips of your fingers, allow yourself to emotionally lean into your body, not recoil from it. In wishing to lose weight, you want your body to do something wonderful for you—and as with any relationship, it is wise to first give what you wish to receive. Give to it. Rub the oil into your body with acceptance, with love if you can, and with grief if necessary … but do not refuse it this gift. Take time over every inch of your body, paying attention to each limb, each curve, each scar, and each joint. Do not rush. Accept, affirm, apologize, and forgive.

You are learning to begin again. You are training your mind to give proper attention and respect to your body—in how you feed it, how you take care of it, how you adorn it, and how you use it. This ritual marks both the end of an abusive relationship and the beginning of an honorable one.

It would be unwise to perform this ritual in a messy bedroom or cluttered bathroom. Both mess and clutter are reflections of a distressed mind, and you deserve better from yourself. At least for now, clear up and beautify the area in which you are going to douse your body with oil. Unless you are standing in a shower, place a nice towel beneath you. Nothing with ragged edges or stains, please. You are developing the habits of beauty; the process is as important as the goal, because the goal is ultimately inherent in the process.

Remember that ancient kings and queens performed this ritual, and the energy they were summoning when they did so—of grace, strength, power, and beauty—is the same energy you are summoning now. Such energy is an eternal constant of the universe; it is not something that graces only a precious few, but rather an energy that is summoned by whoever summons it.

A powerful, beautiful you is the real you, a being of light at the center of the universe, placed there by divine auspices and rightfully proud and dignified and joyful. No matter what the experiences of the world have done to convince you otherwise, this is a course in reclaiming truths that were always true.

Having performed this ritual, wrap yourself in a towel, and when the oil is dry, place a nice robe or other soft garment on your body. Sit quietly and allow yourself to integrate the experience of reconnecting with your body. Meditate, play music, or do anything that brings you relaxation and peace.

This is not a course in wishing that your body were different. It is a course in loving your body as it is, knowing that in the space of that love it will automatically and miraculously rise to its highest expression. Of itself, it will self-correct.

Overweight people have often given up on movement and exercise, carrying a “What’s the point?” attitude of resignation and despair. And that is understandable. But it was a former you who had those attitudes, and the old you produced a former body. Your body might still look the same, but already it is not the same. A new you is emerging now, and from it will emerge a new body. The real you loves to move, and so does your body when it is allowed to express itself naturally. By reconnecting to your body, you are going to learn to listen to your body.

Once again, don’t set yourself up for failure. This lesson does not ask you to run a mile around the track or immediately go out and join a gym. Ten minutes of exercise you enjoy is better for you right now than an hour of exercise you hate. Until you can get to a place where you feel good about exercise rather than using it as an instrument of guilt, then you are not ready for more. The purpose you ascribe to something determines its effect on your life. You cannot bully yourself into a process of self-love. Gradual is the word here, and patient is the process.

Walking is often underrated. It increases your metabolism and helps reconnect you to yourself. It gets your muscles moving, relaying to your body a different message than it receives when you just sit around all day. It puts you in your body. You’ve emotionally disowned your body for a long time, and it’s now time to own it again.

As you walk, don’t count calories. Don’t obsess about how much it can or cannot do to help you lose weight. This walk is not just about your body; it’s about your spirit. It’s about what you’re walking away from and what you’re walking toward. You are walking toward your destiny now … your future, your beauty, and your happiness. It is in itself a ritual of rebirth.

You’ve fed your body excessive food, perhaps, but too little true love and care. And you will learn to change that now. A loving approach to eating will develop more easily when you take a more loving approach to your body in general.

Stroll through a museum and look at paintings painted a hundred or more years ago. Notice how people had such beautiful bodies … yet they didn’t belong to gyms! They didn’t exercise as a separate part of life, gritting their teeth but doing it anyway as a way to look good. No. Adequate movement, which itself amounts to exercise, occurred naturally as simply a part of right living. And that is what you want it to be for you.

Exercise isn’t some punishment you’re going to have to endure as a price you pay for being thin. Instead, it’s an aspect of right relationship with your body, something you give to it in exchange for all it does for you. Your body wants to move; movement helps your muscles, your heart, your lungs, your brain. Give your body what it really wants, and it will give to you what you really want.

Speaking of ancient wisdom, yoga—a Hindu practice thousands of years old—has a near-miraculous way of reconnecting body to spirit. It is a powerful conjunction of physical and spiritual energy, and can be as gentle or as strenuous as you make it. Yoga’s simple movements make it a particularly good practice for the recovering overeater, as it begins with basic postures that in a very easy way put you in touch with your own body. It restores your physical functioning in amazing ways, including your appetite for food. Whether or not scientists have completely figured out why it works so well, anyone who practices yoga has felt its benefits.

Once again, you don’t have to sign up for a series of classes, setting yourself up to fail at something one more time! Rather, just start gently. There are links to yoga videos on the Internet, and yoga television programs abound. You don’t have to begin with an hour class somewhere. Just get yourself a yoga mat. Give yourself that gift.

Watch a yoga video, and take just two minutes to try out one of the postures you see on it. Those two minutes will provide a benefit that you had not experienced yesterday. And as two turns to five, and then five turns to ten, and ten turns to a genuine desire to attend a yoga class, your body will awaken to the remembrance that it is part of a perfect universe.

Your relationship to your body has been damaged, and there is no pretending that it has not been. Like an estranged couple, you are now seeking to reunite your inner and outer selves. And in the process—as you rebuild your relationship with your body—you will reawaken to how supportive of you it really is, how powerful it really is, and how lovely it really is. It will take more than a day to achieve the kind of sweet and delightful relationship with your body to which you are entitled, but you have begun. As with any relationship, now you must feed it. Not just with healthy food—but with kindness. And movement. And love.

Place your bottle of oil on your altar as a sign of your anointment—anointment of both body and soul.

With your eyes closed, ask Divine Mind to guide you. See your body—exactly as it is—walking toward you. Notice your reactions to it, and where there is not love, see love begin to flow. Allow a mystical process of love and forgiveness to occur, as your soul begins to inhabit your body in a whole new way. Allow your spirit to infuse your body, and witness now as your body begins to reshape itself. See an elixir of golden light pouring over your entire body. Feel the miracle of this new beginning. Breathe in and out deeply, and surrender all.

Dear God,
May I forgive my body,
and may my body forgive me.
Repair my relationship
to this container of my soul.
Forgive me for abusing it.
Restore my mind to sanity
and my body to its proper shape.
Miraculously heal me,
dear God.
I cannot do this by myself.
Amen