I spent years of my life looking for balance. I wanted the scale to balance on one number rather than another, but that balance eluded me until a more important balance was struck. That's the balance between my inner world and my outer one.

In active food addiction, one of these invariably outweighs the other. Often I was caught up with work, other people, and frenzied activity, thereby avoiding who I really was. At other times, I stayed alone as much as possible, shielded with food, books and TV. The built-in isolation of eating for a fix kept me separated from both the richness of my interior world and of the world around me.

If you relate to that kind of separation, you can rest easy knowing that with every day you live fix-free, you'll gently come more fully into the stream of life in a balanced way. Conversely, as you invite that fullness of life into your own experience, you'll find that abstinence from unhealthful eating gradually becomes natural and effortless.

The task at hand has two parts: first, to look within through self-study, meditation and prayer, then to reach out to others in friendship and service.

Life is filled with such inner and outer dualities. Creativity, for example, needs an idea (internal) and expression (external). Each depends on the other. Artists don't lose their talents when they express them. On the contrary, every poem or painting refines, perfects and intensifies the creative capacity of the person responsible for it. Along with your growing realization of your spiritual nature, your positive feelings and exuberance will actually increase as you express them in all you do.

Understandably, a lot of people regard spirituality as optional at best because it appears to have to do only with intangibles. For addicts, however, those intangibles can get solid pretty fast. We require an active, sometimes intense, spiritual practice in order to have a life worth living. Our spirituality provides us with the wherewithal to deal with food, people and problems just as surely as our work provides us with money for paying bills and going shopping. Declining a spiritual life would do to our recovery what declining an income source would do to our buying power.

You may already acknowledge your spirituality. To bring it to bear on your food situation could mean simply expanding that acknowledgment, coming to realize that food addiction affects the soul as well as the body and that it's important enough to take to your God.

Or perhaps you don't buy all this spirituality stuff. Self-examination may seem unnecessary and prayer ridiculous. Why pray if there's no one to hear? Why share and risk rejection? I think that we look inside when we're tired of living with a stranger. We pray when we're tired of living alone, and we share because we're grateful that we're no longer tired.

You see, spirituality is like food and exercise. If you don't eat, you can survive on fat reserves but not indefinitely. If you don't exercise, your muscle tone will last for a while but not for long. Going within provides you with spiritual food; giving to others is your spiritual workout. Their relationship is symbiotic.

…Where diets and their ilk focus on food, we're focusing on you and your relationship with the spiritual power within you that specializes in transformation. That goes far beyond the mere restructuring of your body. When a physical change happens without the involvement of the rest of your being, it's doomed from the outset. It's no wonder that ninety percent of the people who lose twenty-five pounds or more are said to regain it within two years. They don't realize that the body is, ultimately, a reflection—a reflection of what's going on inside: emotionally, intellectually and spiritually. A physical body of the size you fancy hasn't a chance of staying that way without the support of your heart, mind and soul.
 

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This excerpt is from Victoria Moran's book, The Love-Powered Diet. To learn more, click below.

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