It is hard to pay attention to everything in life – to our art, to our career, to all of our other responsibilities … and to our eating.
There are many reasons for our preoccupation with food, unhealthy eating patterns, and general insatiability. An important reason, rivaling the powers of culture, biology, and psychology to produce disordered eating, is a lack of meaning and life purpose. We use food as a meaning substitute and try to eat our way to meaning. Most people do not understand how to maintain meaning in healthy ways or create a life-sustaining menu of life purpose choices. This is a first step in mindful weight loss: to learn the powerful, never-taught-in-school skill of creating a menu of life purposes choices, one that accurately matches your intentions and your vision of life.
Next, if you want to lose weight, exercise, and live a more healthy life, those objectives must join the other life purpose objectives on your life purpose menu. Your life purpose choices might include art making, relationships, service, activism, and career—but now you add to that menu additional life purpose choices like healing trauma, recovering from an eating addiction or disorder, engaging in daily exercise, and maintaining an attitude of mindfulness toward eating. This is your second step: to add weight loss life purposes to your overall life purpose menu and to then create a plan for living your weight loss life purposes on a daily basis.
I am teaching these principles and techniques in a free online life purpose diet group that is just beginning. If you’d like to join in, please join the group and read the archived emails at the group site. The group begins in earnest this coming week. It may help you a lot! To join, visit here:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lifepurposediet/new
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P.S. Although the group is free, I am asking that you get a copy of Life Purpose Boot Camp, as that is the text for the class. You can join the group whether or not you purchase the book but having the book will make your experience that much richer. You can get your copy here: