LIVE LIFE. LOVE LIFE!

"When you accept that hurting and healing are part of living, you can give up the fantasy that being thin controls your happiness."

Let's call his name as Superman, and I was crazy in love with him. Every breath he took, every word he uttered seemed as if it was designed to crack my heart open. I wanted to spend my life with him, grow old with him, have more children than Angelina Jolie with him. The only teensy problem was that he didn't feel the same way about me.

I was certain I could persuade him to love me, that he wasn't seeing clearly, that it was my job to show him that we were meant for each other. I was also certain that when I finally lost the 10 pounds I'd been losing and gaining for a hundred years, he'd be smitten.

And so I pulled out all the stops. I developed a sudden fascination for arts (his field), I baked cakes, I dyed my hair medium blonde (his preferred color). And most of all, I starved myself. I ate nothing but Grape-Nuts without milk for six weeks (don't ask). I chipped a few teeth, leached most of the calcium out of my bones, and probably depleted my muscle mass by half, but I did finally lose those 10 pounds. A few months into Project Superman, he fell in love with a size 16 brunette and moved away.

Most of the people are convinced that loves and losses can be titrated in pounds. That if only they were thin or thinner, everyone who didn't love them would love them. Life would be magical, easy, illuminated. In other words, they believe what many of us believe: If we control what we put in our mouths (and the size of our bodies), then we can control everything else. So we spend our lives focused on losing weight, believing that thinness will provide invincible protection from rejection, grief, and sorrow.

But as you probably have already guessed (or experienced firsthand), when you are as thin as you can ever imagine, the people who didn't love you before will still not love you, and the people who did love you before will love you still. People will come, go, leave, and die, no matter how much you weigh.

Talk about busting childhood myths. As children, we all believed that it was in our power to make our parents happy. If our mother was depressed, if our father was absent, if our parents fought incessantly, we were convinced that it was in our power to make things better. It wasn't. But how we self-medicated those hurts with food was, and still is.

"Well, I may not be in a relationship now, but when I get thin, I will find the perfect partner," you give yourself the illusion that you're in control. You may not be happy now, you tell yourself, but someday soon you will make a change and Prince Charming will suddenly show up at your door. You fool yourself into thinking that you have total control over when your unhappiness will end and perfect happiness will begin. And it has something to do with your weight.

How heartbreak can lead to overeating. It's the nature of hearts to break. It's in their job description. When a heart is doing what it's supposed to be doing, it holds nothing back. And sometimes it gets broken.

The hard part of emotional and compulsive eating is that in trying to avoid big heartbreaks, we break our own hearts every day. We eat more than our bodies want, we binge on foods that make us sick, we carry weight that makes it hard to move around. We tell ourselves mean stories about our thighs, our arms, our bellies. The cost of having the "when I am thin, everything will be fine" fantasy is that we end up trading the heartbreak of being alive for the heartbreak we cause ourselves.

And it's all to avoid something that can't be avoided. While we are postponing our joy for a future time when everything will be perfect, life is going on with or without our consent and we are missing it. People come and go, pain comes and goes. But so does joy. And if our hearts are closed because we don't want to suffer, they won't be open enough to recognize the joy as it flies by.

Hearts are made to be resilient. Think about it: Is there one thing that's happened to you that you haven't survived? Here you are, right now, reading this article despite all the heartache you've had in your life. Something in you is still awake, alive, eager to learn, ready to be moved.

And once you know that your heart is resilient, once you accept that part of being here on earth is, as a friend of mine says, living among the brokenhearted, then you can take in the huge streaks of delight, joy, and happiness as well. Once you understand that everything will end, you can finally let your life, the one you already have, not the one you imagine you'll someday lose.