Geneen Roth quotes:

The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning and transformation.

Real change happens bit by bit. It takes great effort to become effortless at anything. There are no quick fixes.

And if you worry that not finishing the food on your plate is a slap in the face of all the hungry people everywhere, you are not living in reality. The truth is that you either throw the food out or you throw it in, but either way it turns to waste. World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.

Chocolate ... is not something you can take or leave, something you like only moderately. You dont like chocolate. You dont even love chocolate. Chocolate is something you have an affair with.

Weight loss does not make people happy. Or peaceful. Being thin does not address the emptiness that has no shape or weight or name. Even a wildly successful diet is a colossal failure because inside the new body is the same sinking heart.

It matters whether you see yourself as someone who is capable of effecting change or whether you see yourself as someone whose voice does not count. It matters whether you treat yourself with reverence or with carelessness. Every bit of work you do on yourself matters. Every time you choose love, it matters.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it.

Treat yourself as if you already are enough. Walk as if you are enough. Eat as if you are enough. See, look, listen as if you are enough. Because it's true.

Ask: is what I'm doing and thinking right now bringing me closer to myself or farther away? Opening my heart or closing it? You have a choice.

You are lovable, you are loving; your choices about food will reflect that, if you give yourself a chance.

The real work of this life is not what we do every day from 9-5...The real work is to be passionate, be holy, be wild, be irreverent, to laugh and cry until you awaken the sleeping spirits, until the ground of your being cleaves and the universe comes flooding in.

Your relationship to food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom.

Most of our suffering comes from resisting what is already here, particularly our feelings. All any feeling wants is to be welcomed, touched, allowed. It wants attention. It wants kindness. If you treated your feelings with as much love as you treated your dog or your cat or your child, you'd feel as if you were living in heaven every day of your sweet life.

The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable.

For every diet there's an equal and opposite binge (bulimia which is binging and purging is another way of depriving yourself).

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company

Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.

For some reason, we are truly convinced that if we criticize ourselves, the criticism will lead to change. If we are harsh, we believe we will end up being kind. If we shame ourselves, we believe we end up loving ourselves. It has never been true, not for a moment, that shame leads to love. Only love leads to love.

I tell my retreat students that they need to remember two things: to eat what they want when they're hungry and to feel what they feel when they're not.

If you try to lose weight by shaming, depriving and fearing yourself, you will end up shamed, deprived, and afraid. Kindness comes first. Always.

Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

You already have everything you need to be content. Your real work is to do whatever it takes to realize that.

And.. are you willing to go all the way? To understand that food is only a stand-in for love and possibility and spirit? Because if you aren't, you will get caught up in gaining and losing weight for the rest of your life. But if you are willing, then the portal to what you say you want is truly on your plate.

You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don't like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being.

. . . hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else . . . . Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first.

All any feeling wants is to be welcomed with tenderness. It wants room to unfold. It wants to relax and tell its story. It wants to dissolve like a thousand writhing snakes that with a flick of kindness become harmless strands of rope.

Ask yourself if you are in this for the long run-if it's only your weight you want to change or if you are willing to use your eating patterns as a portal to the inner universe. And if the answer is the latter, then there is no end to what you can learn, be, understand, become.

Awareness is a way you keep yourself company. When you are aware you are being compulsive, you are no longer locked in the behavior. You have a choice to stop. That choice--and therefore awareness itself--is freedom.

Awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage.

Be fully present for five minutes every day.

Being exaltingly thin was, of course, the foundation for the visibility, the man, the adornments of this life-to-be; it was the prerequisite that made the rest of the dream possible. And since no matter how thin I got, I was frightened that I could wake up tomorrow and be fat again, the rest of the dream was forever ten or twenty pounds away.

Being hungry is like being in love: if you don't know, you're probably not,

Bingeing is such an emotionally frenetic activity that no other concerns can exist in the same space. It is a hell that people who are food-sensitive are familiar with; and, because it is known, it is therefore not so terrifying as some of the problems that are outside our control. Problems like divorce, illness, death.

Change happens when you understand what you want to change so deeply that there is no reason to do anything but act in your own best interest.

Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first

Chocolate, I am sure, is the concrete manifestation of love.

Come back to yourself. Return to the voice of your body. Trust that much.

Compulsive eating is only the symptom; believing that you are not worth your own love is the problem. Go for the love. You will never be sorry.

Diets are based on the unspoken fear that you are a madwoman, a food terrorist, a lunatic"¦The promise of a diet is not only that you will have a different body; it is that in having a different body, you will have a different life. If you hate yourself enough, you will love yourself. If you torture yourself enough, you will become a peaceful, relaxed human being.

Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are.

How you eat is how you live.

How you eat is how you live. How you do anything is how you do everything.

I believe in love. And beauty. I believe that every single person has something they find beautiful and that they truly love. The smell of their child's hair, the silence of a forest, their lover's crooked grin. Their country, their religion, their family. And I believe that if you follow this love all the way to its end, if you start with the thing you find most beautiful and trace it's perfume back to its essence, you will perceive an intangible presence, a swath of stillness that allows the thing you love to be visible like the openness of the sky reveals the presence of the moon.

I feel like it's been important for me to use my own personal experiences with food and money to help people to not feel ashamed. I felt so much shame about my own experiences.

I live between fearing doom and wishing for it.

I think we all have a hunger that's hard to name. A lot of people who come to my retreats have never named it before, or else they've named it in church, but they can't actually see the connection between what they're doing with food and this yearning. I call it "the flame" that they have: They yearn for big answers to live a big life. But they have to start with the most basic fears.

If LOVE could talk to you about your relationship with food, what would it say?

If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks.

If you decided to reteach yourself your own loveliness today, what would you do? How would you speak to yourself? Can you allow yourself that much?

If you pay attention to when you are hungry, what your body wants, what you are eating, when you've had enough, you end the obsession because obsession and awareness cannot coexist.

If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.

If you treat your feelings with as much love as you treat your dog or your cat or your child you'll feel as if you were living in heaven.

If you want to eat when you're not hungry, you're hungry for something else.

Imagine not being frightened by any feeling. Imagine knowing that nothing will destroy you. That you are beyond any feeling, and state. Bigger than. Vaster than. That there is no reason to use drugs because anything a drug could do would pale in comparison to knowing who you are.

Imagine treating yourself with the kindness that you show people you love.

It's important to focus on the good in life and appreciate it.

It's never been true, not anywhere at any time, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale. We are unrepeatable beings of light and space and water who need these physical vehicles to get around. When we start defining ourselves by that which can be measured or weighed, something deep within us rebels. We don't want to EAT hot fudge sundaes as much as we want our lives to BE hot fudge sundaes. We want to come home to ourselves.

It's never been true, not anywhere at anytime, that the value of a soul, of a human spirit, is dependent on a number on a scale.

It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse.

Its not so much that we believe what we see, but that we see what we believe

It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.

Just because we form an opinion about ourselves, or anyone else, doesn't mean it is true.

Just because we live in an insane culture doesn't mean we have to be insane too.

Love includes vulnerability, surrender, self-valuing, steadiness, and a willingness to face - rather than run from - the worst of ourselves.

Meditation develops the capacity to question your mind. Without it, you are at the mercy of every thought, every desire, every wave of emotion.

Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake.

Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.

My closet was full, yet I was always focused on the sweater I didn't have, or on the next pair of boots. I wasn't allowing myself to take in what I had. I could never experience what "enough" was.

No act of love is ever wasted.

No matter how developed you are in any other area of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat tells all.

No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge.

No matter where you go, no matter how many gifts you give and receive this holiday season, unless you are actually present, it all flies by as if in a dream. Satisfaction in anything--a meal, an interaction, a gift, a sunset--depends on your willingness to take it in. Breathe. Feel your arms and your legs. You are allowed to love every little thing about yourself and your life. You are allowed to take up space and be all that you are. Really you are.

Our relationship with food -- how, when, what and why we eat -- is a direct expression of our underlying feelings, thoughts and beliefs about ourselves. It has to do with stances we take that get reflected not only in our relationship with food, but in all our relationships. It just so happens that the relationship with food causes enough conflict, grief, shame and hurt that we're willing to look at it.

Our work is not to change what you do, but to witness what you do with enough awareness, enough curiosity, enough tenderness that the lies and old decisions upon which the compulsion is based become apparent and fall away. When you no longer believe that eating will save your life when you feel exhausted or overwhelmed or lonely, you will stop. When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears.

People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.

Separate the desire to be thin from the desire to be cherished.

Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don't infer your existence from replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didn't see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you?

Take time to thank your body.

The big horrible thing isn't the plane crash or the earthquake or the diagnosis. When those things occur, we act, we know what to do. We live or we die. Hell is what we do in the meantime. It is the ways we starve our souls as we prepare for the future that never comes as planned. The true disaster is living the life in your mind and missing the one in front of you.

The problem isn't that we have bodies; the problem is that we're not living in them.

The problem with fantasy is the greatest benefit of fantasy: it prevents us from living in the present moment.

The purpose of healing is to live while you are alive instead of dying while you are alive. Healing is about being broken and whole at the same time.

The truth is that it's not about the weight. It's never been about the weight. When a pill is discovered that allows people to eat whatever they want and not gain weight, the feelings and situations they turned to food to avoid will still be there and they will find other more inventive ways to numb themselves.

There have been many articles about the top regrets that people have when they're dying. They are always, "I missed the ordinary moments." We miss those ordinary moments, and yet, that's what we're trying to distract ourselves from at the same time.

There's a basic feeling of lack that we want to distract ourselves from. We want to fix it by looking outside ourselves, as if it is going to fill us up.

To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act -- and to what you do when things don't go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat.

We always want to change the channel in our minds because we don't like what's going on. It's uncomfortable.

We are strong where we were broken.

We are using the food as a doorway to understanding the rest of our lives.

We eat the way we eat because we are afraid to feel what we feel.

We eat the way we live.

We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don't feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not when we don't do what they want us to do.

We start eating, watch television, surf the Internet, or go shopping and buy something. That gives us a rush of feeling, some adrenaline and excitement.

Weight (too much or too little) is a by-product. Weight is what happens when you use food to flatten your life. Even with aching joints, it's not about food. Even with arthritis, diabetes, high blood pressure. It's about your desire to flatten your life. It's about the fact that you've given up without saying so. It's about your belief that it's not possible to live any other way - and you're using food to act that out without ever having to admit it.

We're always looking for the Big Love, the Big High, the next Big Thing to happen. We miss what's in front of us.

What is pronounced these days is staying on the Internet for hours. It's really about distraction. We are living in such an over stimulated culture. There's a nervous energy of always having to be focused out there. People have a hard time just being happy, settled, and content. We're not taught how to just be by ourselves, be present. We always want to change the channel in our minds because we don't like what's going on. It's uncomfortable.

What you pay attention to grows. Pay attention to your loveliness, your magnificent self. Begin now.

When we give up dieting, we take back something we were often too young to know we had given away: our own voice. Our ability to make decisions about what to eat and when. Our belief in ourselves. Our right to decide what goes into our mouths. Unlike the diets that appear monthly in magazines or the thermal pants that sweat off pounds, unlike a lover or a friend or a car, your body is reliable. It doesn't go away, get lost, stolen. If you will listen, it will speak.

When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. And yes, it really is that simple.

When you don't want to be where you are, you create suffering for yourself. Change happens through acceptance, kindness and relaxation--not resistance, not warfare, not fights.

When you ignore your belly, you become homeless. You spend your life trying to erase your own existence. Apologizing for yourself. Feeling like a ghost. Eating to take up space, eating to give yourself the feeling that you have weight here, you belong here, you are allowed to be yourself -- but never quite believing it because you don't sense yourself directly.

Women look at their bodies, and they're never thin enough. The financial advisors that I've talked to say they ask their clients, "How much money do you need in order to feel secure?" "X amount." Then, as soon as the client got the amount, it would double automatically.

You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. Treat yourself with outrageous kindness beginning today.

You are not your past, not your habits, not your compulsions. When you get to know who you are, anything becomes possible.

You can be aware of your past without being it.

You can rescue yourself. No matter how you feel, no matter what you believe about your worth or your capacity to love and be loved, you can change.

You can't be stuck if you're not trying to get anywhere. Which, to me, means that when you stop fighting with the way things are, magic happens. You relax, open, and any action you take comes from alignment with what's true.

You don't need a scale to tell you whether you're allowed to like yourself today. You are. You belong here. No matter what you weigh, you deserve joy and happiness.

You will never stop wanting more until you allow yourself to have what you already have. To take it in. Savor it. Now is a good time to do that . . .

You will stop turning to food when you start understanding in your body, not just your mind, that there is something better...Truth, not force, does the work of ending compulsive eating.

Your body is the piece of the Universe youve been given.

The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The way we eat is the way we live.

The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering: getting back in touch with who you really are. Your true nature. Your essence.

The process is the goal.

Healing is about being awake. Being broken and whole at the same time.