The Spirit Junkie’s Secret to Loving Your Body

Hay House Publishing

Gabrielle Bernstein is now a best-selling author and self-proclaimed “spirit junkie,” known as a guru promoting self-love and radical self-acceptance. A spritely, energetic blonde, she is noticeably at home in her body. But like many other women, she started out binging on junk food, beating herself up at the gym and feeling at war with her figure.

She remembers the specific moment when she first noticed a change. Sitting in a roomful of women struggling with binge eating, she took one bite of a cupcake and didn’t want any more. The other women stared in disbelief. How? they wanted to know. She says that a thought came into her head, spontaneously and immediately: “I love myself too much to eat the whole thing.” The moment was incredibly powerful for her. She says, “I had this feeling of saying, ‘I am finally full. I don’t need to fill myself up with anything else.’”

While the moment might seem mystical—Gabby refers to it as a “miracle”—the steps she took to get there are anything but mysterious.  

“Projection is perception,” she says, meaning that the outside world acts like a mirror for our internal feelings. “If you project that a size 10 sucks, then it will suck. If you can change the focus to say, ‘my body is healthy and strong,’ then the world will reflect that back to you. Women who live in their bodies are the sexiest women in town.”

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To get that sexy, confident appeal down pat, Gabby encourages women to focus on recognizing and changing what they believe about themselves. Learning to love your body is, in her words, “an internal job. It is a decision to be kind to yourself.”