Permanent weight loss begins with admitting that you want something more for yourself. You want more happiness, more vibrancy and more aliveness. You want to feel peace and joy in your body. You want to return to the lightness that you were born with - a spring in your step and the peace that comes from knowing that you are living the life you are meant to live, not a life you have resigned yourself to.

Deep in your heart you know that you have settled for far less than you are capable of, and there is a longing to be joyous and free. You want to live a life that is unhampered by a weight problem and a struggle with food.

You must decide that you deserve more than you have been giving yourself. Yes, you want more out of life.  Yes, you are deserving of all the good that life has to offer. Yes, you are worthy of a healthier and more attractive body. Yes, you are worth spending time and effort on. You are tired of being on the sidelines of life. You are ready for a starring role in your own life. You are ready to shine!

Change requires courage - courage that comes from the belief that change is possible for you. You may have told yourself that you couldn’t change, so you gave up on yourself.

The fact is you can change, when you are good and ready. Until then, change is really impossible. You must be truly ready to put the old behaviors behind you. In order to have something new in your life, you must be willing to do something different. In order to do something different, you will have to come face to face with your fear of change.

Your desire for change must outweigh the desire for staying the same. The pull of the known is a very strong force. It has kept many people in the same old rut for a very long time.

For most people sameness equals safety. It feels comfortable, even if it’s a miserable kind of comfort. The comfort of the known lulls us from the present moment into a type of trance. The sameness of habit requires no real awareness or extra thinking. We can cruise through our lives asleep, coasting on autopilot.

Change jars us from our trance and forces us to live in the moment. It forces us to make new decisions and choices. It’s scary and unsettling.  It casts us adrift into the unknown.

Change is occurring whether we actively court it or not. Every day, our bodies grow a little bit older and a little bit weaker. Meanwhile, each day we lose a little more of the light of the spirit.

In order to overcome your fear of change, you must want losing weight more than what being overweight has been giving you. Yes, being overweight has been giving you plenty of benefits.

For many, food and weight is a distraction - a distraction from pondering the deeper questions in life. What do I really want to be doing this lifetime? If I am no longer struggling with food and weight what will I be doing instead? This can be a very scary question. For many food and weight is a hiding place. As long as you are struggling with food and weight, you don’t have to take risks and risk getting hurt.

You can complain about your body and feel bad about yourself, meanwhile your real life is passing you by. If you are no longer overweight, you may have to actually do some of the things you always said you would do. Then you will have to face something bigger - the fear of failure and the fear of success. There is also the fear of rejection, the fear of intimacy, the fear of being sexual, the fear of setting boundaries, and just plain fear.

A lot of overweight is really about fear. Underneath all the fear, is the fear of being seen for who you really are. As author Marianne Williamson writes in her book, A Return To Love, "It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us the most."

You may ask, "Who am I to shine? And what will happen if I shine my true light in the world and no one likes the real me?"

You may have received messages in your family that it wasn’t ok to be gorgeous, sexual, brilliant, gutsy, or to really shine. When you expressed that aliveness, you may have been put down or told to keep quiet in some way.

The message was that it wasn’t ok to be who you really are. In truth, you might have threatened your parents and friends because they hadn’t given themselves permission to shine. They wanted you to be as miserable as they were. Misery loves company. Or, they may have wanted to protect you from getting hurt, the way they had been hurt by others.

In order to live the life you were meant to you, will need to become a shining star! To be a shining star means being lit from within. It means no longer apologizing for being the brilliant ball of light that you really are. It is the end of playing small and the beginning of acknowledging your magnificence. Yes, you are magnificent, we all are. There are no exceptions.

You must stop making excuses and see them for what they really are - a way to protect yourself from life. Do you want to truly live? How will you feel at the end of your life knowing that you didn’t live up to your potential? How will you feel about the fact that staying safe and small was more important to you than truly living? Do you want a life of regret or do you want a life of fulfillment? That is the choice you have to make.

Safety is an illusion. The only real safety in life is the ability to deal with what life presents to you in the moment, the ability to live from one moment to the next. That is all any of us really have. The one certainty we have in life is that we are going to die some day. Yet, many of us live our life like it is a rehearsal for our future life. We live lives of someday. Someday I will ______________. A someday life is an imaginary life. There is no someday. There is only now.

Today is the rest of your life. Today is the day to begin. Today is the day to decide to change. Today is the day to make a decision to say yes to life!

I want you to say out loud, right now, “Today I awaken to my real life! I am through playing small. I want and deserve more. I want a life beyond food and weight. I want to lose weight for good! I want to live! I am a shining star!”

How does that feel?

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