Feelings — the general state of consciousness, an emotion or emotional perception or attitude

Bad Body Fever was one of the first things I learned about. The basic concept is laid out in the book "When Women Stop Hating Their Bodies." The theory is that whenever you have a random, negative thought about your body, something else is responsible for triggering it. For example, if you are walking down the street one sunny day, all is well and then all of a sudden you are thinking about how fat your thighs are, chances are something else is going on that you are avoiding.

Take a child for example. An infant or toddler does not hate their body if they are not thin. Children, when left to their own thoughts, are usually quite happy with their bodies. It isn't until parents, teachers, coaches and society begin to tell a child that they are not good enough the way they are that a child begins to despise their body.

I didn't believe the theory at first, not one bit. I was convinced that the only reason I ever thought about my fat thighs was because they were just that, F-A-T. In fact I tried the exercise just to prove the writers wrong, I learned a lot. Every time I had a Bad Body Thought (BBT) I would take the time to think about what I was, in their opinions, NOT dealing with. I'd prove them wrong.

The things I discovered…

If I was driving home and all of a sudden I hated my stomach I realized that just the thought before was about how I was unhappy in my career, felt trapped and underpaid and wanted to change jobs. If I thought about my fat arms, I was refusing to face the reality of my divorce. My hips were big because a thin woman walked by and I COMPARED myself to her. I thought because she was thinner than I was that she must have a much better life and be happier and that she was thinking how much better she was than me. Maybe she was thinking how fat and unfortunate I was.

Probably not. I know models and actresses who are thin and beautiful and have the same insecurities I do. In fact most people are so wrapped up in their own insecurities and lives that they can't be bothered to take the time to worry about someone on the street; they are too busy wondering what the other person is seeing wrong in them.

I know thin women who are single, who hate their jobs, who are in crappy relationships, who fight with their mothers and who all have the same problem heavier women have.

I have friends that are so thin they have to eat to keep from being walking skeletons and they are just as self-conscious about being too thin as I am about not being thin enough. And just whose voice is it that I'm hearing when I feel like I don't fit into society's mold for weight?

Every thought I had, every time I agonized over the size of a body part, I was really ignoring a feeling or thought I was having about something more important that was going on in my life. The size of my thighs was easier to deal with than the state of my career.

At this point I'm not saying that you should abandon the idea of losing weight, I'm simply saying that you have to be doing it for the right reasons and you can't be doing it just to "fit into the little black dress on the rack at Sax." If that's the case then you may never get there and you have a good chance at gaining it all back.

Being thin doesn't make your problems easier to deal with, when you are heavier you can avoid dealing with them because you are too wrapped up worrying about your weight and AVOIDING the issues at hand. Avoiding the issues causes mouth hunger and mouth hunger is what causes weight gain. So in reality, if you start to deal with the issues, the weight becomes less of one.

What I was doing was simple, instead of trying to change the issues that were hard, I was deflecting the discomfort onto my body and trying to change that, as if my some magical transformation once I lost weight, everything else would fall into place. It doesn't work that way, in fact it's the opposite, once the real work starts, the weight follows.