Eating when you’re hungry helps maintain your setpoint and keep you at the weight that’s right for you, and denying your hunger leads to compensatory mechanisms that trigger fat storage and weight gain.

All you can do is present your truth. And then you can make choices about whom you want to surround yourself with. You are worthy of love. There are people who will enjoy you as you are, who will love and support you, even if you haven’t met them yet. Make it a priority to find them.

Food is a wonderful source of pleasure – but it will get you into trouble if it’s the only source of pleasure you have in your life.

Yet today there’s simply too much noise around the issues of food, hunger, and eating for us to listen to our own bodies. We live in a world that’s decided to define food as “good” or “bad,” a world that encourages us to ignore our hunger and fullness signals in favor of continually seeking out that Holy Grail of thinness, or to use food to fill needs that have nothing to do with sustenance.

Accepting your body is not just about physicality, it’s about accepting who you are, not continuing to wait until you become the person you imagine being.

There’s one nutritional concept that seems to make a healthy relationship with food particularly difficult, and that’s the idea that some foods are good while others are bad.

The only way to solve the weight problem is to stop making weight a problem – to stop judging ourselves and others by our size. Weight is not an effective measure of attractiveness, moral character, or health. The real enemy is weight stigma, for it is the stigmatization and fear of fat that causes the damage and deflects attention from true threats to our health and well-being.

Blaming fatness for heart disease is a lot like blaming yellow teeth for lung cancer, rather than considering the possibility that smoking might play a role in both. And telling people they need to lose weight is a lot like telling someone with pneumonia to stop coughing so much – it may not be possible and won’t make the disease go away.

You only have one body and despite how well you live your life, it may never change. Can you afford to hate yourself for the rest of your life?

In other words, the best way to win the war against fat is to give up the fight. Turn over control to your body and you will settle at a healthy weight. And regardless of whether you do lose weight, your health and well-being will markedly improve. You will find that biology is much more powerful than willpower.