15. Victim Consciousness 106
16. Taking Responsibility 116
17. Acceptance /Surrender 122
18. A Learning Perspective 128
19. Making an Internal Shift 131
20. Beyond Judgment and into Meaning 133

21. Leading with Your Strengths 140
22. Creating a Vision and Watching Miracles Unfold 142
23. Stepping into Change 151
24. Successful Strategy 156
25. Detaching from Other People’s Emotions and 161 Managing Your Energy
26. Practice Becomes Habit—Healing the Split 171
27. Correcting Your Course 177

28. Choosing Our Reality 180
29. The Power of Perception 186
30. Creating More Practices to Care for Yourself and Heal 189
31. Checking In, One Step Further 200
32. A Tool for Shifting Difficult Dynamics and 204 Challenging Circumstances

33. Applying the Principles and Practices to Weight 208 Specifically
34. Attitude of Gratitude 213
35. Creative Self-expression 217

36. Where Do We Go From Here--Beyond Weight Release 221
Appendix 231

Please read the following, as I in no way intend to mislead my reader.
True vs. Truth
In this book, I have used stories that contain truth but are not necessarily true. Some stories are fundamentally true but have intentionally been altered. I alter the stories for two reasons: one is to protect the anonymity of the individuals I am writing about; the second reason is artistic license. The characters in some of my stories are a composite of different people.

The events are sometimes combinations of events rather than historically accurate portrayals. My aim was to capture the quality of truth as an illustration of human circumstances, rather than to be accurate in portraying past situations. There are some instances where it was important to retell the events accurately. In those cases, I may have sought approval for revealing the details from the people involved, or changed the names and circumstances just enough to protect their privacy.

Professional Care and Guidance
I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist or a psychotherapist. This book is intended to be “food for thought,” or a new way of thinking about food. It is not intended to be a mandate for altering medications or nutrition plans that have been prescribed by a doctor or healthcare provider. If you are under the care of a licensed professional, I do not recommend you alter the treatment based on anything you read here, unless advised to do so by the licensed professional you are working with (or someone with equivalent qualifications). If you feel like you need professional care, I recommend that you seek it. This book should not be used as a substitute for medical or psychological treatment.

Acknowledgments
This book is much more than just the product of my own insights. The contributions of countless wonderful people who have profoundly influenced my life inhabit these pages. My gratitude is impossible to capture in words—but I will try:

To Tom Bunzel: I deeply thank you for your skill, your wisdom, and your friendship. The mark you made on this book is significant; I couldn’t have done it without you.

To my family: My loving supportive wife Jasmine; my precious children, Josh, Antonio, and Isabella; and my dear caring parents, John and Alanna, you have given me more than I could ever measure. I am so grateful.

To my extended family, including my brother Jim, my grandparents, uncles, and cousins: The lessons we learned together were not always painless, but I love you from the bottom of my heart.

To my teachers, Mark Monroe, Jim Sniechowski, Joyce and Andre Patenaude, and Mary and Ron Hulnick: Your influence shaped this book as your wisdom shaped me.

To my two best friends, who have lifted me up with their love and encouraged me throughout the years, Tim O’Brien, and Chopper Bernet: You are tremendous blessings in my life.

To my men’s group, Matt, Matt, Sam, Geoff, Fred, Sheldon, Adam, John and Robert: You sustained me with support throughout the process of writing this book; thank you.

Introduction
The Premise of this Book
Nothing is wrong. Where you are in your life is exactly where you are supposed to be. No part of your experience, past or present, has been a mistake. When you define your experience in negative terms, judgment is clouding your perspective, which is a major roadblock to healing and releasing weight. This book is not about solving problems. The process I have developed, called Service to Self™, does not operate from a “wrong” or “right,” “good” or “bad” viewpoint. From my perspective, you don’t have a weight “problem,” you have patterns of behavior that no longer serve you. The process, with information and exercises that follows this introduction, will demonstrate that much of what you have judged as good or bad, right or wrong, can be reframed and viewed as opportunities for growth and transformation. This new perspective will help cultivate a new relationship with your body and with food culminating in lasting weight release.

This is not a book about weight loss. I would not want to see you lose or give up anything. This is a book about self-acceptance, self-love, and the journey to discover your authentic self. This is a book about transformation that simply highlights one specific opportunity for transformation: weight. The aim is to reference weight but not focus on it. Focusing on weight makes weight the issue (and a problem)—but it isn’t.

Following the exercises in this book should bring a general sense of fulfillment on a number of levels, and weight release is just a natural by-product of the process.

My Own Journey
Let me share a bit about how I came to discover the process I lay out in this book.
Not long ago, my life was filled with stress and I was filling my stomach with food. Over a three-year period, as my real estate development company faced serious financial challenges and potential bankruptcy, my weight ballooned. Bags of snacks and plates of food went down my throat without me tasting a thing. I stuffed and shoveled. Sleepless nights and depressed days sent me running for the cupboard. I found temporary relief from the excruciating discomfort in “comfort food.” My weight became a profound outward manifestation of my inner struggle. Lifelong food issues were exacerbated by my situation.

I knew that I needed alternative ways to deal with my anxiety other than eating. It was time to take a good, hard look at my relationship with food, my relationship with stress, and ultimately my relationship with myself. The “self” that I needed to examine was defined largely from the “outside in.” When I say “outside in,” I mean the way I felt about myself was largely dependent on outer criteria, such as the balance of my bank account, rather than from inner criteria, a sense of wholeness and well-being. I measured my self-worth in terms of net worth, rather than examining my underlying sense of worthiness. As my bank account shrank, my sense of self, as I had constructed it, began to fall apart as well. From a spiritual perspective, this was a true miracle and ultimately a tremendous blessing. The precarious state of my business had primed me for learning lessons that might not have been absorbed so efficiently and effectively had my circumstances been different.

Up until that point in my life, I had always manipulated psychological and spiritual principles to fit my views. I hadn’t been truly willing to let go of my definitions of success and failure. My definitions of success and failure were largely based on what I was taught growing up by my culture, my society, and my family.
Whatever learning I acquired as an adult generally had to be adapted to my “programmed” beliefs. Despite having done a good deal of personal growth work, including earning a master’s degree in spiritual psychology, I still understood success in terms of dollars and status. The personal growth work was conveniently adapted to make me feel more likely to achieve “outward” success. It gave me a sense that I had a spiritual advantage in my striving for financial achievement.

The crisis I faced forced me to give up my identity as a successful businessman to gain the wisdom that came from rebuilding my sense of self from the “inside.” My inner work included sincerely examining my interpretations of success and failure. I began to re-interpret perceived failures as learning opportunities, both in the recent past and also in my childhood. I came to understand that it was my misinterpretations that caused so much of my suffering. And as I opened up, and compassionately embraced my experience, I began to feel incredibly successful—as a human being evolving in consciousness.

I came to understand that my wounds, those past events in my life that still held an emotional charge, were a collection of stories that involved a lot of misperceptions. Revisiting the past, with compassion for myself and all of the parties involved in my experiences, allowed me to embrace the humanity of my situation. I began to build a new sense of self-worth through self-acceptance and self-love. The old adage “the truth will set you free” became incredibly valid for me. I learned that “truth,” as I had previously comprehended it, had not, in fact, been the truth. I had misinterpreted many past events, as well as my present life circumstances, and I was internalizing shame and guilt, while projecting blame in a futile attempt to feel better about myself.

As the stories I had been telling myself, to defend the part of me that was ashamed and guilty, began to break down, I realized a deeper reality. I had the opportunity to reframe many of my interpretations. I began to see with incredible clarity.
I realized that I had been taking events beyond my control personally. I was feeling guilty for “mistakes.” I felt responsible for other people’s emotional experiences. I was ashamed to be in my financial predicament, and I was looking for people to blame. And of course, I was eating; historically when I got upset and began taking things personally, that had been my pattern. It took the breakdown of my identity as a successful businessman, to finally get me to look at my issues around food and around my weight.

What I Didn’t Understand
Prior to my breakdown, or what I learned to reframe as a breakthrough, I had spent years in therapy, attended many personal growth workshops, and had been a part of several men’s groups. But I had missed one crucial element as I explored my past experience in an effort to heal: my judgment blocked my healing. Even with trained professionals guiding me, I had misinterpreted the past. My judgment of myself and others left me caught in a cycle of shame, blame, and guilt.
During my years in therapy, tracking my wounds was painful. This experience left me feeling raw, but the kindness of the therapist—and the sense that I was learning something about how I had been wounded—seemed to suggest that I was healing. But I wasn’t.

In uncovering my “wounds,” I identified areas where I was particularly sensitive to other people’s behavior. My kind and well-meaning therapist termed the behavior I was sensitive to as “toxic,” as that was the identified effect we agreed that it had on me. The result was to create boundaries. Now, there is no problem with having healthy boundaries, but in this context, “boundaries” represented restrictions that I placed on myself and others in order to protect my wounded sense of self. I didn’t know it then, but I was negotiating the world from my wounds rather than healing them.

I didn’t recognize that my judgment (that people ought to be behaving in a particular way in order for me to feel safe or happy) was supporting my sense of myself as wounded. Furthermore, I determined that past events, and/or things that happened or were done to me, should not have occurred. I was judging everything that I was experiencing from a skewed perspective and I had an attachment to being a victim.

The Spiritual Psychology perspective:
The Spiritual Psychology perspective is that wounds are healable, but in order to heal the wounds, a person must release the shame, blame, and guilt connected to them. Any attachment to right or wrong, guilt or innocence, or “should have” or “could have” feeds the perception of oneself as wounded. These are judgments, and inevitably judgment keeps the limiting interpretation of oneself as “wounded” locked in place. Most importantly, judgment is not loving, so it cannot be healing—because healing is the process of applying love and compassion to the parts inside that hurt.*

Finally, judgment is not spiritual, because true spirituality involves acceptance of all that is without judgment or attachment. Yes, it may be important to track past events in order to heal, but there must be compassion for all of the “players” in the “human drama” (that is, spiritual perspective). Any and all judgments of oneself and others must be released through compassion and forgiveness (primarily self-forgiveness for misinterpretation). When the judgment is peeled away, only love and acceptance remain. In doing so, one can truly release the past, thereby creating a space for healing.

Compassion is an important part of healing, but compassion alone is not enough. Healing must also include activating a person’s inner authority in order to understand what the person needs for self-fulfillment.

Compassion for one’s humanity illuminates one’s human needs without any shame, blame, or guilt. When the needs are embraced (rather than rejected and judged), people tend to make different choices to satisfy their needs in more healthy ways. Becoming more compassionate toward the part of themselves that holds the shame, blame, or guilt, they begin to release the weight of unresolved issues. When “checking in” replaces “checking out” and a few deep breaths replace a bag of Cheetos, weight gets released—not merely lost. By releasing judgment and making self-honoring choices, it is natural and effortless to release weight.

Men and Women
This book is written from a man’s perspective (mine), but clearly the principles are applicable to both men and women. It is important to note that men and women have different programming. For me, as a man in this culture, my programming suggests that my value or worth is linked to my ability to make money. Women, in this culture, tend to associate success with their sex appeal and their ability to attract men. This is a broad generalization, and in modern times, there are many crossovers between male and female roles in society, along with myriad additional factors that affect a person’s self-esteem. Though I speak from a male perspective, I hope that I have included enough of the stories of women clients and friends to make the concepts clear to both sexes. I know the process well.

I spent many years trying to fix myself. I constantly lost and gained weight, but never really felt good about my body. My approach never worked because it was predicated on the assumption that something was wrong with me. The more I focused on the “problem,” the bigger the problem seemed to get—and the bigger I got.

Most people change their diet because they don’t like themselves, and they see their weight as an outward manifestation of their negative self image—and it is. They believe that by losing weight, they will change their negative self image—and they will, temporarily and superficially. But without true self-love and an ongoing practice of self-nurturing, no lasting shift in behavior will take place because their conditioned, underlying beliefs continue to promote negative perceptions.

Negative motivation is never a foundation for a positive self-image— and only a positive self-image will lead to lasting change. But positive thinking or affirmations alone aren’t enough. The doorway to true inner healing involves compassion and self-acceptance. Only by embracing one’s experience and releasing any residual shame, blame, or guilt can a person truly grow and affect lasting change. By reading this book, you will learn the principles and practices for success in this kind of transformational inner work.

By doing the exercises, you will begin to change your eating habits naturally, as you learn to love yourself. As you will experience, this is a different kind of learning, based on your inner experience and connection to your body—as opposed to simply feeding your intellect with information. I recommend that you carefully read the “Getting Personal” segments; in these stories, you may recognize yourself. This should help you realize that what you’re facing is not unusual and you are not alone. In going through this process, subtle changes will become noticeable. Hopefully, you will begin to give yourself credit for things you hadn’t realized, and reconnect with qualities you may have forgotten you ever possessed. You will also develop a more balanced and less judgmental view of yourself. You will find that instead of beating yourself up, you’ll realize that in most instances you (and perhaps those you’ve blamed for your “problems” in the past) have only done the best they could.

Other things will change as well. You may see your life changing in positive and surprising ways, and all of these new “yous” will simply be a byproduct of you becoming more compassionate and more authentic.
Many people think being authentic is about expressing feelings. But I believe being authentic is about taking responsibility for your feelings. Feelings are only information. Feelings let you know if your needs are being met. When you feel “good,” it is a strong indication that your needs are being met. When you feel “bad,” it is a sure sign that your needs are not being met.

The Service to Self™ process is about becoming clearer about your needs. It is about taking full responsibility for finding constructive, healthy ways to meet your needs. When you are clearer about what you need, you can express your feelings in a more open and honest way. That is being authentic.

If you express your feelings without blaming anyone, people will be more open and compassionate toward you. If you start asking for what you want without making other people responsible for your happiness, people will be glad to support you. If you begin proclaiming who you are without needing other people’s approval, the world around you will respond in surprising ways. Your life will blossom because you will satisfy your emotional needs in healthy and sustainable ways.
And food—whatever food has been for you—will change. Whether it has been your comforter, your protector, or your filler, it will find a whole new place in your life.

Now, stop and reflect on the following: If this prospect is exciting to you, keep on reading. If it terrifies you, then you may want to put the book down now; you may not be ready for this transformation yet, and that is fine.
Changing one’s life can be daunting and you may want to simply have the book ready. Read little bits and keep it around, but don’t commit to anything. This “warming up” to changing one’s life is a normal part of the process.
The life you are presently leading involves various predictable components. There is comfort in the “known.“ Walking into the unknown (another way of describing change) is scary, and if you’ve decided to continue, give yourself some credit for courage. This spiritual “leap of faith” may change more than your own life—it may influence the lives of countless other people who grow with you.

1. Why “Weight Release?”
Getting Personal: It Is Not about Losing Anything
A woman came to me looking for help. She told me that she had lost fifty-one pounds, but she seemed to be stuck at her present weight, and she felt that she needed to lose more. More specifically, she claimed that she “needed” to lose twenty more pounds. She wanted to know if I could help.

Initially, I told her two things. I told her that I couldn’t help her to lose the twenty pounds that she thought she needed to lose. I also told her I was concerned about the fifty-one pounds she had lost. Her face went blank. She was clearly thrown. Obviously I hadn’t told her what she wanted to hear.

My sense is that she would have dismissed me immediately after I said that I couldn’t help her lose weight, but the concern I shared about the fifty-one pounds she had dropped kept her engaged. “Why are you concerned about the weight I have lost?” she asked with a touch of indignation.

I explained that I was concerned that if she lost the weight, then she would be looking to find it or replace it. “Oh no,” she answered, “I am never going to be fat again.” At that point I was even more concerned.

“Tell me about being fat; what part of that person that you were don’t you like?” I asked her.

“I don’t like how weak I was, I just didn’t have the willpower to stop eating. Then one day I just woke up and decided that was it; I was going on a diet and I was never going to be fat again.” She was motivated by her negative self-image, which, in my opinion, is not a good place to start.

It was clear to me that this woman held tremendous judgment against herself. I knew that if she were to remain the slimmer size she had become, she would need to have compassion for the part of her that had gotten so big. She must take the journey into the “self” she despised and judged as weak or inadequate.

I worked with this woman over the course of several months, and my sense is that she really did open up to what I was suggesting, but she struggled with giving up the notion that she “still needed to lose twenty pounds.” I was able to help her reshape her view of food as sustenance and consider eating as a way of caring for herself. She created effective practices where exercise and healthy eating became viewed as a way to nurture herself. Periodically, I hear from her and I recognize in her words that she is still working on loving herself. I remind her that her relationship with herself is primary to staying healthy. Ultimately, I believe she “gets it,” but this is not a quick fix. This is an ongoing process.

Getting Personal: No One Needs to Be “Fixed”
Another woman came to me. She weighed more than 300 pounds. She was very upset when we met. She didn’t know she was upset and she tried to pretend like she was excited to meet me.

This was a woman whose sister had referred her to me—and she was suspicious. Her perception was that her sister was trying to “fix” her, and she was right to be concerned; that is exactly what her well-meaning sister was trying to do.
She was upset because I was going to “make” her lose weight. We talked for twenty minutes or more before the issue of weight came up. Frankly, I would rather it hadn’t. Prior to the issue arising, she had seemed to enjoy the conversation, and it was nice getting to know her. Finally she brought up the issue of her weight. “So how are you going to get me to lose weight?” she asked.
“I am not,” I answered. There was a pause as she thought about my response to her question. “Then why am I here?” she asked.

“That is exactly where I want to start,” I answered. I let her know that her sister’s agenda was not my agenda. Her sister believed that there was something wrong with her, whereas I saw her as a wonderful person I was enjoying getting to know. My only motivation was to be of whatever service I could in helping her become the best, happiest, and most fulfilled person she could possibly be.

From that point forward, the conversation changed dramatically. Once she understood that I wasn’t trying to fix her, she opened up. The truth is that she did want to release the weight but she was scared. So, from then on, we focused on what she wanted for her life. We examined her fears. We focused on her needs and observed her beliefs, but we very rarely discussed her weight. As we addressed her fears, wants, and needs directly, and focused on what she wanted in her life, her eating habits changed. As she healed, she made healthier choices and began to release weight.

“Weight Release” versus “Weight Loss”
Most “weight loss” books focus on overeating and lack of exercise; very few of them address the underlying cause of weight-related issues. These issues are a result of unhealthy patterns of behavior and a negative self-image. The Service to Self™ process, and this book, focus on reprogramming and healing old patterns of behavior to create a positive, lasting change, in self-image. ”Weight “release” is a natural byproduct of this process.

This book approaches weight-related issues from a different perspective. As I’ve already mentioned, I don’t want people to lose weight—frankly, I don’t want anyone to lose anything. When a person loses something, they inevitably look to find it or replace it, right? Frankly, the weight and/or the eating patterns have served a valuable purpose.

Let me use one common weight-related issue to illustrate my point. What if weight has been a source of protection? This can be very common when someone has been sexually abused. If a person has been hiding behind thirty, forty, or fifty pounds and suddenly they lose that protection, what are they going to do? Without addressing the fears, beliefs, and needs related to the protection, if they just lose the weight, they’re going to need to find it again, or replace it with some other form of protection.

On the other hand, when a person releases weight because they have resolved issues and found healthy ways to meet their needs; it has the potential to be lasting. They must truly address the fears, unconscious beliefs, and the needs that perpetuate their unhealthy behaviors. They must find constructive ways to: 1) deal with their fear, 2) negotiate with their beliefs, and 3) meet their needs, before change will be lasting. They must consciously replace the old patterns with new habits (I call them practices).

2. Your Relationship with Yourself
Getting Personal: “Don’t buy a scale, and if you have a scale, throw it out”
I went to visit a lifelong friend in the Pacific Northwest. I grew up with this friend and have known her all of my life. Part of knowing her for so long involves having seen her at various stages of her life. It was great to see her at this stage, with a husband, two kids, and a new house. But I had never seen her so heavy. Clearly, she was carrying extra weight.

Throughout her life, I had watched her weight go up and down. I knew enough about her history that I recognized a pattern linked to success and failure. When she felt successful, she tended to be thinner; when she didn’t feel successful, she got heavier. Just based on that understanding, I knew something was happening in her life that was making her feel unsuccessful.

Sure enough, I came to find out that her business was failing. It turns out that the company she owns with her husband was behind on the sales required to be the licensed West Coast representatives for the parent company. She was doing all she could to try to improve sales, but nothing was working. She was taking it hard, and subsequently, she was being hard on herself—even eating things that caused an allergic reaction. I could tell she was beating herself up.

My wife and I were on a beautiful hike with my friend and her husband, along a ridge up behind their house, when she brought up her weight. I think she and I had been talking about the kids and school, when she suddenly turned to me and blurted out in a frustrated voice, “I’m going on a diet.”

Without thinking, I exclaimed, “Don’t do that!”

Suddenly there was silence. The conversation my wife was having with her husband abruptly halted and everyone just stared at me. I quickly recovered by saying, “If you want to change your eating habits, I support you, but don’t go on a diet.”

“Well, I do want to change my eating habits but I need to have a plan,” she retorted.

“Yes,” I agreed, “you need to have a plan.”

“Should I buy a scale, to be able to see if my plan is working?” she asked.

“No, definitely don’t buy a scale. You’ll know if your plan is working by the way you feel,” I suggested.

No one was talking other than the two of us; again my words had instigated an awkward silence. “Look,” I said, “a scale is not a self-loving instrument; it only measures success and failure, which are judgments, and judgment is at the core of all weight-related issues.” I spent some time during that hike talking about the principles I had learned, how self-love and self-acceptance were the keys to healing and releasing weight. I even followed up with some e-mails to promote my alternative way of looking at the perceived problem. I’m not sure how much of it she considered useful, but I felt I had to try.

I haven’t heard from her in a while. My sense is that she is trying to fix things again. Her pattern is to push—to get motivated and try to stick with it until things change. I must admit that over the years, that seemed to have worked for her, but my sense is that the up-and-down nature of that type of approach is starting to wear on her. Getting a little older, it just seems to be more apparent that the pattern, (losing weight and feeling good versus gaining weight and feeling bad) isn’t really working. I know how hard it is to break the success-and-failure belief structure.

This lifelong friend was one of the inspirations for writing this book. I hope she reads it and I hope it helps.

The Challenge to Change
The status quo is always threatened by change. This is true in groups, organizations, countries, and religions. But it is also true of individuals. Some part of us is comfortable in the discomfort we have created in our lives. There may be patterns we may think we want to change, but there is a significant part of us that is scared of the unknown.

Guts, determination, and a deep understanding that change is necessary can prevail. You can succeed in changing your life. You need to know that there will be resistance, but if you are courageous and determined, you can step into a new life.

If you are reading this book, you are already on track. An inner authority has begun to let you know that you are capable of living life differently. The process begins with embracing the concept of “different.“
It is the intention to change that becomes the seed of crystallizing a vision for the “new” you.

The old adage, “If you do what you have always done, you will get what you have always gotten,” applies. To do something differently, you must first identify what part of your life is not presently working.

Your relationship with food is not working. The focus should be on the word relationship.

Relationship with Food
If the way you relate to food is not serving you, what is that relationship now, and most importantly, what could your relationship to food be in the future?
Food is sustenance and nourishment for your body, but it can also be poison. When you put food in your body that is not what your body needs for nourishment, you may be doing serious harm to your physical well-being. Food should not be a replacement for love, respect, or nurturing, but rather a fuel.
This is not a book about nutrition. For the most part, I won’t be telling you what to eat or when to eat it. While there are countless books that can provide you with that type of information, I want to suggest you consult a more accurate authority on what your body needs: your inner authority.

Let me be clear: If you feel like you need nutritional guidelines, by all means pick up a book about the subject. My guess is that most people reading this book have enough relative knowledge to make good decisions about what to put in their bodies. In suggesting that you consult your inner authority, I am saying, “Listen to your body and use your intuition to guide you.”

By moving into a dialogue with your body and observing your patterns, you can begin to link your relationship with food with emotional needs, and see how food has become part of a larger pattern of behavior. I call this process “checking in.” I am mentioning the concept now, but I will go into more detail and provide a “checking-in” exercise later in the book.

At this point in the book, I simply want to suggest that your body knows better than any expert what it needs and what is doing it harm. I believe that “checking in” will provide you with a customized nutritional plan that is far better suited to you individually than any expert can provide. The most important part of weight release stems from your relationship with yourself.

Success and Failure
Weight issues are almost always about something deeper than simply eating too much or eating the wrong foods. Many people who have been addressing weight from a purely physical perspective find that they are able to stay with a diet for a length of time, but ultimately the pounds come back. When they are thin, they feel as if they are happier for a short period (and they may be), but without addressing some underlying emotions, the unhealthy eating patterns almost always return.
The larger problem relates to the success-and-failure paradigm that they are caught in.

There is a measurement we subject ourselves to about success and failure—similar to the measurement that a scale literally quantifies for us each time we step on it. We have an image in our heads about what our lives “should” look like, which never allows us to just be where we are. We are constantly judging ourselves.
Your attachment to defining losing weight as “success” and gaining weight as “failure” exacerbates an unhealthy self-image. Releasing judgment means getting off the roller coaster ride; it involves getting to the underlying emotional issues. The process involves identifying the patterns of behavior and tracking the emotional connections to those patterns, then interrupting the patterns, addressing the emotions, and ultimately modifying the behaviors.

The entire process must involve self-acceptance and self-compassion to break the cycle of shame and guilt, to shift the paradigm from one of success and failure to one of healing and self-actualization. This will lead to a dramatic shift in your relationship with your body and with the world around you.

3. Meeting Needs Versus Denying Them
Getting Personal: My Divorce
In my first marriage, I found myself in a deep depression. I had ridden a wave of “external success,” and I was following a picture-perfect script. My bride was a model and actress. I was also an actor. We got engaged while I was playing the role of Drake Belson on The Young and the Restless soap opera. We had just bought an elegant condo in the hippest part of Los Angeles, right on the edge of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, just off the Sunset Strip. We went to the “right” parties and wore the “right” clothes. But inside, I was having a very hard time. My “happily-ever-after” life was less than happy. A few months into our marriage, I was no longer working on The Young and the Restless and I couldn’t land a new acting job. We soon discovered that we really couldn’t afford our swank condo. We began fighting constantly.

I started to medicate with food—actually, I overate then starved myself. The emotional trauma I was feeling led me to traumatize my body by stuffing and starving myself.

To “fix” our finances (which I was programmed to believe was my responsibility as the man in the relationship), I turned to construction. I had been around construction all of my life and I felt comfortable fixing up and remodeling apartment buildings because my father and grandmother owned two buildings in San Francisco. I talked my dad into buying two properties in Los Angeles, and I put a crew of guys together to fix them up.

But my wife had married a soap opera star, not a construction worker. After one short year of marriage, we split up.

Going through the divorce humbled me, and I found an incredible outlet in a powerful men’s support group. In my men’s group, I began to relate to my needs. I recognized that the fantasy world I had created denied my needs—I didn’t get to be “needy.“ I had been trying to play a role—the role of successful actor. I had an image, an imagined sense of what a “man” or a “movie star” should be, rather than what a human man should be. This was the first time that I focused on “taking care of myself.“ I often say that my divorce helped to make me “real.”

A Commitment to Heal
The first step in addressing any issue involves a commitment to looking at the issue. A fundamental part of most food issues involves denial. Similar to those living with a drug or alcohol addiction, those who use food to try to meet emotional needs are generally unable to admit that they are stuck in a negative pattern that is unhealthy and self destructive.

Eating becomes an unconscious way to try to fill emotional needs. For example, if a person is anxious and uncomfortable, food may temporarily alleviate the discomfort.

Most people who are overweight or have food issues are aware, on some level, that they have unhealthy eating habits.

Human Needs
Emotions are linked to needs and wants.
Human beings need to feel safe. They need acceptance. They want people to like them.

The list of needs and wants goes on and on. Perhaps the first well-known psychologist to delineate these needs was Abraham Maslow, in his famous Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s basic needs are as follows:

• Physiological Needs
These are biological. They consist of the need for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. These needs relate only to the survival or death of a person as a living organism.

• Safety Need
When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviors, Maslow stated that the need for security can become active. Generally, adults have little awareness of their security needs, except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as war or widespread rioting). Children often display the more outward, recognizable signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.

• Need for Love, Affection, and Belonging
When biological and safety needs are satisfied, the next set of needs involves love, affection, and belonging. Maslow claimed that people look to meet these needs in order to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves giving and receiving love and affection as well as the need for a sense of belonging.

• Need for Esteem
When the first three classes of needs are satisfied, the need for esteem becomes dominant. This involves both self-esteem and the esteem a person gets from others—also known as recognition. When these needs are frustrated, the person may feel inferior, weak, helpless, and/or worthless.

• Need for Self-Actualization
When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, the need for self-actualization is activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person’s need to be and do that which the person was “born to do.” There seems to be an inherent need for certain people to make music, act, write, or paint. I call this creative self expression. Not meeting these needs can result in feelings of discomfort or disconnectedness.

Meeting Your Need
If you feel hungry or tired, it is fairly easy to identify the need to be filled. If you feel unsafe, unloved, unaccepted, or you lack self-esteem, it may be more challenging to put your finger on the need or needs that are not being met.
When there is an unmet need for self-actualization, the basis for the need (or expression that might fill the need) can be quite elusive. The Service to Self™ process is designed to assist you in meeting all of your needs, including your need for self-actualization, culminating in becoming the “you” you were born to be.

Food and Needs
For most people who struggle with weight, food has gone from filling a physiological need for sustenance to being a psychological means to fill an emotional void. The flaw is that food cannot actually fill an emotional need. It is only a temporary distraction that leaves the need unmet.

I believe that emotional needs must be filled from inside of oneself rather than outside of oneself. There must be an inner authority directing your life. No new job, new lover, or new object will have a lasting impact if there is no inner voice assessing the input and determining its real value. This process begins by first acknowledging, then tracking, unmet emotional needs. There can be a lot of resistance to this part of the process. It takes a lot of self-compassion to venture into the inner experience of one’s unmet needs.

Tracking your behavior around food can provide important information about your needs. The following exercise is designed to help you recognize patterns of behavior around food and link that behavior to unmet needs.

Exercise: Auditing Needs and Self-care
Note: Working with a Partner
Many people find it is helpful to do work on a process such as this with a partner. In general, I recommend utilizing a partnership to promote growth and healing. It is important, however, to choose your partner wisely, and to establish very clear parameters for the relationship, as it relates to this process. It should not be either partner’s job to try to fix or solve anything for the other person. This would be working against the process. The partner’s role is simply to support the other. Please avoid the temptation to dispense advice to one another—as often projection can find its way into the dialogue. (I will speak more about projection later in the book). Your only job is to be a witness to the other person’s process and offer encouragement whenever appropriate.

You may find additional support by visiting the Service to Self™ website and joining the Wintention community (it’s free).

Asking for what you want, and having your needs met, is part of a larger strategy that I call “self-care”—valuing your own concerns and dealing with them effectively.

You will need a journal; it can be anything from a very nice leather-bound journal to a spiral notebook—try to get one with at least one hundred pages, as our exercises can go on for some time. (If you prefer, you can also type your journal on a computer.)

If you are working on a computer, it may be appropriate to e-mail the exercises or some part of the exercises to your partner. If you are working with a paper journal, you may want to simply e-mail a “progress report” about how the exercise went for you. If you are using Wintention, posting your experience and using the forum to explore other people’s experiences, can be very helpful and encouraging.
Another note about typing on the computer: In many exercises, you are tapping into your unconscious, so just write and resist the temptation to edit.

Start by drawing three columns (or on the computer, format three columns), as shown below. List the need in the far left column, how you presently attempt to meet the need goes in the middle column, and a possible alternative to meeting the need that might be more self-honoring in the third column.

Need: How I presently attempt to get my need met: Alternate, self-honoring, way of getting my need met:

As a general guide, here are some commonly articulated needs that you can use for the exercise, but personalize them for your own experience.
• I need attention.
• I need to have goals, something to look forward to.
• I need to feel like I am contributing to something.
• I need to be challenged.
• I need to express myself creatively.
• I need intimacy and to be touched.
• I need to feel a sense of control.
• I need some type of recognition.
• I need safety and security.

When your list is completed, write a brief summary of how you presently relate to your needs. Try to be compassionate with yourself. This part of the process is simply intended to activate your awareness of where you presently are and where you might want to go. Don’t necessarily commit to anything yet; this exercise is simply intended to initiate a preliminary dialogue with your inner authority. You will have many opportunities throughout this book to expand your list and adjust your self-honoring strategies. Be sure to leave a few pages in your journal to add things to the list later, as the program progresses. Now share as much as you feel comfortable sharing with your partner(s). If you are using Wintention, share your experience by posting a comment in a forum or offer some thoughts within a specific group.