Wanna Lose Weight? My 3 Must-Do's for 2012

With the New Year only a few days behind us, fresh conversation about adopting new diets and exercise regimes still clog up the space around the water cooler at many offices and countless Americans are clipping the tags off new spandex shorts and hitting the roads in an attempt to shed the complimentary 5+lbs. that the holidays provide.

If you are one of these folks with “Lose Weight” at the top of your list of things to do in this New Year (like every year for the past 20), do yourself a favor and bump it down a couple lines and put “Read Geneen Roth’s When Food is Love” at the top, followed by “Now read Breaking Free from Emotional Eating (also by Roth)”. Really, you could just continue down the page and keep listing off her books, but you get the point.

Honestly, the light that Roth sheds on the subject of food and body image is solar in its power. I laughed and cried my way through both these books, feeling both understood and challenged at the same time. In fact, I have now added “Attend a Geneen Roth workshop” to my bucket list (a very elite compilation, I might add).

Here is a link to an O Magazine interview with Roth as well as a link to her website if you want to learn a little more about her.

Another source that I have found incredibly helpful in my journey to wholeness in the area of food/body image and one that I strongly encourage you to check out is the blog canyoustayfordinner.com. Here, Andie Mitchell eloquently chronicles not only her adventures in cooking, but also her life-changing journey from 268 lbs. to 133 lbs. Actually, Andie speaks a lot of Geneen Roth’s work on her blog, and was in fact the first to introduce me to Roth's books. Andie is Geneen’s philosophy in action.

Stay tuned as I continue the food/body image discussion in the coming weeks, and thanks to all of you who have contributed to the conversation over the past several months; your thought-provoking responses have led to much healing and freedom in my own life. Thank you!