For Today: April 1st

For Today: April 1^st

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
Eleanor Roosevelt

I could hardly believe my ears when I heard the OA saying, “What people think of me is none of my business.”  When your confidence is down around your ankles, thanks to your helplessness over food and fat, self-worth tends to go up and down with the tides of other people’s opinion.

With freedom from compulsive overeating and the return of my self-respect, I understood what the saying meant.  Today, I value the good opinion of my fellow humans but, good or bad, what others think cannot diminish the good feelings I have about myself.

For Today: The OA program gives me the self-confidence all creative people have. How impoverished the world would be if its original thinkers---its artists, writers, scientists and philosophers---took adverse criticism as a sign of their inferiority and turned to some other line of work!

People pleasing helped me get fat. Valuing other people’s opinions OVER my own; thinking it was important to please THEM at any cost, so maybe they’d look past my physical size and into my heart to see a good person. But that was convoluted thinking! If I was putting on an act to please someone else, what was IN my heart but false cheer???  

Being a phony is not being true to MYSELF or to God.

Being all happy on the outside and crying or condemning on the inside is  a misguided attempt to validate MYSELF through someone else’s opinion of me.

All that matters is MY opinion of me, my family’s opinion of me, my friends’ opinion of me & God’s opinion of me.

When I stay true to my food plan, I feel good about ME.  When I feel self-worth, I do not have to look to others to validate me; I find it within!

For today, I pray to stay true to my food plan so I can build on my self-confidence & self-worth. 

For today, when I say “I’m Worth It”, I want to believe it.