I was recently reading an article in the May 2012 edition of the British Good Housekeeping magazine, and I highlighted a paragraph in it.  I reluctantly write the title of the article, "Eat well and still lose weight" by Dr Oz as I am very uncomfortable with the wording around weight.  I think there is far too much emphasis and pressure placed on losing weight and on diets.  I am a firm believer that dieting is a not solution to losing weight, as eating less, or less of a certain type of food or more of a certain type of food is just another pressure we put on ourselves and does not really look at why the body is "behaving" in a certain way.
From my own experience with diets, from workshops and from my own personal growth, I have come to see that the body has a mind of its own, speaking for you where you cannot speak for yourself.  So this particular article, and I am not sure why I started reading it as I usually skip over dieting articles, caught my eye, and in particular, a sentence in it that really resonated with my belief around the body.  Dr Oz says, "As a physician I see the burden that people put on their body with overeating and can't help thinking, what went wrong? What happened that you stopped loving your body?"  Now that last sentence is really powerful, very daring and very bold.  To me, it speaks volumes.  For many of us, our bodies do not look like we want them too, whether it is our weight, our shape, our ageing skin, our health, our physical imperfections, our physical limitations, our drooping boobs and bums, etc. It is so often a source of deep shame and pain for us.  So we set out in so many different ways, whether it be dieting, exercising, bingeing, starving, cosmetic surgery, botox, whatever, to try and make our bodies look like we think they should.  We stop loving them for what they are; when in fact they are complete miracles, housing our precious souls and we cannot hear what they are trying to tell us.  We listen to our mind, to society, to the media of what our bodies should be like; but how many of them in reality are really "perfect?"
So I invite you to ask yourself the question, if you feel it applicable,  "What happened that you stopped loving your body?" And sit quietly with it, no distractions, and just listen to what comes up; really listen.  That takes guts, because your body is always saying something on your behalf that you won’t let yourself say or acknowledge.
I highly recommend reading Women, Food and God, by Geneen Roth. It is a very insightful and powerful book, and for me, did not just relate to weight and food, but other personal issues that in fact had nothing to do with weight for me.
Then, if you really want to go big J book yourself on Angela Deutschmann's Embody workshop.  You'll never look at your body in the same light again.
In the meantime, be grateful for your magnificent body and what it allows you to do everyday.  Be gentle with it; be kind to it and hear it.