Life Unchanged

I am less than a hundred pages from finishing the Cherry Pie Paradox book and I feel myself resisting it. Some of it seems so hokey, like these exercises to send love/gratitude to the various parts of my body. OK. I am all for body acceptance but I have seen this stuff before and it hasn't worked for me. If I want to be healthier, having a bunch of fat around my abdomen isn't something I want to accept because my goal is to not have that. A big premise of the mental health instruction is to deconstruct your beliefs about what happened to make you turn to food. This is stated in a way that makes it feel like, no matter what happened to you, you made up some story in your head about how it was way more awful than it really was. Some people have lived through truly awful things, I think that if we are accepting things it should be that we accept that we all live through things that hurt us and we handled it the best way we could at the time but now we need new tools. I do think writing the story from another person's perspective is very helpful. When I do this foe things my mother did that hurt me, there was more softness and understanding in me than I'd allowed in some time. The other criticism I have (so far) is this idea of stopping eating when you are 70% full. Ummmm, what does that feel like? How do I quantify that? It's so arbitrary. Another thing I don't like is there seems to be some inconsistent ideas. This is supposed to be a way to eat mindfully and supposedly no foods are off limits and you should only eat foods you like/want and don't eat foods you dislike. Yet she tells you to throw away all food that triggers you. Huh? The foods I like and the foods that trigger me are typically the same thing! Whenever I feel this way about a diet book it makes me run toward the familiar old diet ways I know. Now, if only I was successful at staying on track with those old methods! I will finish the book and I will try some of the practices but I truly don't think this will be a life changing read for me.