I was reading some more of Sark today and again I found a line that really resonated with me. In her book, Transformation Soup, she says how her therapist told her she had to "learn to love the fat girl inside".

I've always had this inner battle between wanting to lose weight to become this person I could love but also thinking that I should be able to accept myself as I am. It was an either/or situation - to love the fat me and stay fat, which I didn't want or to lose weight and be someone I could love, which wasn't happening.

And, to be honest, neither of them worked.

When I read that line it made me realise that I can do both. That I have to learn to love myself as I am and to work on the physical changes from that mindset. I think if I can't love me as I am then I'm never going to love me - no matter what weight I am or how I look. I also think that if I don't love me as I am then I can't lose weight, that ultimately I will fail.

It isn't about choosing between being fat and happy or rejecting my "fat" self in order to be thin - it is about accepting my "fat" self as part of me but also accepting my "thin" self.

I read on someone's blog the other day, and I can't link it because I've forgotten who it was (please let me know if you are reading this) that we store our emotions in our fat and, as we lose weight, those emotions are released and have to be dealt with. While I don't believe this is true in a literal sense, I do believe it is in metaphorically.

Eating, overeating I mean, has always been my way of dealing with situations that I can't handle any other way. When I was a kid, I had an extremely bad temper and my mum would say that I scared her. If I didn't learn to control it, I would end up killing someone. But no one ever taught me how to channel it in sane or constructive ways and, once I left home, I'd repress it by .. you guessed it, overeating. That is just one of the issues I think I need to deal with at the moment. One of the main layers of my complex psychological onion.

So, I'm off to the shrink this afternoon. I don't know if it will do any good, but I'm willing to give it a go. Meanwhile any advice on learning to "love the fat girl" would be really helpful.