How I learned to question the things I was most certain of — starting with what I believed about myself

I want to start where I actually started, because I started exactly where you are…or were…

I carried a great deal of weight for most of my adult life. At fifty-eight I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol, and I decided I was not going to spend the rest of my life on a pile of medications — not when I had already healed my asthma, years earlier, with changes to my food. So I did the hard thing. I did it the strict way, holding a crystal vase of a plan for two years, terrified the whole time that I would drop it. And it worked. I released more weight than I ever believed my body could. I am not going to stand here and pretend it didn't. That plan gave me my health back. It taught me to love vegetables. It gave me a kind of peace I had never had.

And then, slowly, it started to take things too.

This is the story of how I learned to do the one thing that slowly loosened all of it — not a diet, not a rule, not a discipline. A practice. The practice of taking something I was completely certain of, holding it up to the light, and asking a question almost nobody around me was asking:

Is that actually true? And how would I know?

I have done this now with the biggest certainties of my life. Let me show you a few of them, in the order I came to them, because I think you are holding some of the same ones — and I think they are heavier than you know.

I was sure the number was mine

Someone handed me a goal. They took my height, and they subtracted their way down to a figure, and then — I want you to hear this part — they added a little back. For the excess skin. About what they remove in a tummy tuck, I was told, because that was how you arrived at a proper number. That figure was supposed to be mine. It was supposed to be the destination.

I fought for it. I did everything right, and my body would not go there. The hunger that had been my quiet companion for years turned ravenous. I was freezing ALL. THE. TIME. — a heater under my desk and a blanket on my lap, in SoCal. I stalled. And I was certain — completely, crushingly certain — that I had failed. While doing everything right.

So, finally, I questioned the number. I mean — I had eyes, and my body screamed: there is WAY MORE EXCESS SKIN THAN ten pounds on this now-mostly-tiny body. And here is what I found when I looked.

The number came from a table built in 1832, from a study of soldiers. When I went to the machine that calls itself the gold standard — the DEXA scanner, the one that is supposed to settle these things — I learned that it does not recognize excess skin as its own kind of tissue. The algorithm files it as lean mass. The most authoritative instrument in the room could not tell me one true thing about the body I was actually standing in.

Every instrument that had ever told me what my body should be was wrong. And the one that was supposed to check the others couldn't see me.

I was sure I had no willpower

This was the oldest certainty, and the cruelest. Every Monday restart. Every three good days, then the fall. Every plan that worked beautifully until, one evening, it didn't. I had filed every one of those away as evidence of the same verdict: that I was weak, that I lacked the thing other people seemed to have, that the failure was in my character. (Just to be clear — I did not go back to the engineered substances I call NF: Not Food. Some programs call these “NMF — Not My Food,” and I made a deliberate change to that, because “Not My Food” keeps it personal and forbidden, as though the problem were mine. It isn't. These substances aren't food for any body. So I dropped the “my.” Not My Food became Not Food — and that one small change turned a private restriction into plain discernment. But I know exactly what it is to crave them.)

Then someone handed me a reframe that cracked me open. They told me it wasn't weakness — it was biology. Willpower was a finite resource, they said, a tank that drained through the day, and by evening, depleted, I reached for what soothed me, and that was a tired brain, not a broken soul. For the first time in my life, I set down a whip I had been carrying so long I'd stopped feeling its weight. I owe that doorway everything. It is where this whole path began.

But years later I did to that idea what it had taught me to do to everything else. I questioned it. And what I found was almost funny, in a way that took my breath.

The specific idea that had set me free — the willpower tank — had already been discredited, in a large, careful, multi-laboratory study, almost twenty years earlier. The correction just never got carried through.

I will be honest: there is a flicker of “oh, come on” in me about that — that the finding sat there and nobody followed it where it led. But mostly, mostly, I felt set free a second time. Because willpower is real. It is your capacity to act on what you value, and you use it every day. It is genuinely harder when you're tired, stressed, hungry, or alone — but that is circumstance pressing on a real capacity. It was never a gauge emptying in fifteen minutes. The tank was folklore. And the whole cage of rigid rules had been sold to me as protection for a resource that, the way they described it, doesn't exist.

I was sure the rigidity was keeping me safe

Here was the certainty underneath the plan itself: that the grip was the only thing standing between me and the flood. Loosen it, and I'd fall back into the water. So I held the crystal vase. Bright lines. No decisions. Total structure. Because if willpower was a tank that ran dry, then obviously you couldn't have anything else pulling on it — you needed the rules precisely so they wouldn't drain the little you had.

But once the tank turned out to be folklore, the whole argument for the cage came apart in my hands. And when I questioned the rigidity directly, I found something I hadn't expected: it wasn't protecting me. It was manufacturing the very thing it claimed to prevent. Restriction is a physiological stressor. Deprive a body and hunger sharpens, food grows louder, and the rebound builds — this happens even in people with no history of food struggle at all. The grip doesn't prevent the fall. The grip builds the cliff.

I had been asked to live my whole life one foot from the ditch, braced at the edge, every single day. And I had called that safety.

A rigid rule and a sacred boundary can look identical — until you drift. Then a rule shatters, and a boundary holds.

So I stopped defending rules I'd never chosen, and started keeping only the boundaries that were actually mine — chosen from a settled place, not clutched under threat. That is not the same as chaos. It never was cage or flood. There was always a third thing. (Watch my Willpower Unmasked Workshop )

I was sure food was the problem

For decades I was certain that food was my enemy, my weakness, the thing gone wrong in me. When I finally turned that certainty over, I found the opposite was true.

Food was the solution. It was the first tool many of us ever had — the earliest, most reliable way we learned to quiet a nervous system, grooved in long before we had any other. Reaching for it under pressure was never a failure of will. It was a pathway firing exactly as it had been trained to fire, a long time ago, by a child who was doing the best she could with what she had.

Food got me through. It worked. It was the fastest thing available. And it isn't the only thing available now.

That single word — now — changed how I understood my whole history. Nothing about the past needed to be shameful. Food was right, then. The work was never to attack it. The work was to slowly, patiently whittle away at the reasons I reached, until other things could take its place, until the reaching got quieter on its own.

I was sure I was a pickle

There is an old saying that gets passed around recovery rooms, and maybe you've heard it. Once a cucumber becomes a pickle, it can never go back to being a cucumber. Meaning: once you're an addict, you're always an addict. The change is permanent. You can never again be trusted around the thing.

It's a vivid image, and it's a doctrine now, and it gets applied to food all the time. So of course I believed it about myself. I was a pickle. Whatever had happened to me was permanent, and the only sane response was to hold the lines forever, because I could never again be trusted.

So I questioned it. I went looking for the study underneath the saying — the evidence for the life sentence. Do you know what I found? I found that it traces back through recovery folklore to a newspaper piece in the 1980s and a handful of AA sayings. There is no body of research establishing that the pull is permanent for everyone. It is inherited wisdom, passed hand to hand, and it was built for substances you can put down and never touch again.

But you cannot put food down. Three times a day, forever, you have to walk into the room with it. So the one thing the doctrine leaves you free to abstain from is trust in yourself. Which is exactly the wound.

Here is what I can tell you, and I am going to be careful to tell it to you straight, because that carefulness is the whole of how I work. I am not going to promise you that the pull disappears. I don't know that for you. For some people it stays loud, and some of those people need more than I offer, and I will always tell you when that's true and point you toward the right help. What I can tell you is this: I was handed a life sentence by an analogy, and it turned out the analogy was folklore, and my own life did not go the way the folklore said it would.

It has been ten years. I do not have the pull I used to. It is so much quieter now. And when it does come up — what I like to call prickly pear syndrome, when too much of the hard stuff of life arrives at once, or my own self-care gets set down — I can see it coming. It lights up like a neon sign, from a distance,

before I reach. And that matters, because a craving I can see coming is no longer a verdict. It's information. It's an invitation to pause, to notice, and to ask what I actually need.

The urge didn't have to vanish. It only had to become legible.

I was sure I should be able to do this alone

This was the last one, and the quietest, and maybe the heaviest. I was certain that needing other people was a weakness — that a strong person handles her own struggles privately, that if I were doing this right I wouldn't need a room full of people to do it with me. So I isolated. I ate where no one could see. I gathered up the wrappers and carried them out myself so that no one would know. Isolation is not a side effect of food obsession. It is close to the engine of it.

And when I finally questioned even this — the belief that I ought to do it alone — I found the science pointing the other way. Connection makes self-regulation physically cheaper; the brain treats company as a resource. Which means the woman soothing herself with food late at night, by herself, is not weak. She is attempting the single hardest, most expensive version of the task, without the one thing that would lighten it.

So doing this alone was never strength. It was the most expensive possible way to try. That understanding is the reason a room is at the center of everything I build now. Not because community is a nice addition to the method. Because, on the evidence, it is much of the method itself.

What all of this is really about

Do you see the thread? Not one of those was a diet tip. Every single one was the same move, performed on a different certainty. Take the thing you are most sure of. Ask whether it's true. Look at it from another angle. Notice who benefits from your certainty, and what it costs you to keep it. And then hold what's left more loosely.

That is the practice. It is the whole practice. It is what I did to the number, to willpower, to the rigidity, to food, to the pickle, and to my own aloneness. And it is what I would love to do alongside you — not by handing you my answers, which would just be a new box to stand inside, but by teaching you the move itself, on the certainties that are keeping you stuck.

Because you almost certainly have one running right now, arrived dressed as a plain fact, that has closed the case before any questioning could begin. Something like: I have no self-control. I have to get back on the plan. This is just who I am. I've tried everything. That story feels like the truth. It feels like the ground.

I'd like to help you pick it up and turn it over. Gently, with company, over a good long while — because this is not quick, and anything that promises you quick is selling you the very thing that broke before. Your brain does not learn fast. That's not a flaw in the method. Speed was the flaw in all the others.

Keep your plan, if it's serving you. Keep your medication. I am not asking you to put anything down. I am asking one thing only: that we start turning down the noise, together, and whittling away at the reasons you reach — until the reaching gets quieter, and the reasons get fewer, and one day you notice, almost in passing, that you can see the neon sign coming from a long way off. Let's walk this path together.

You were sure you were broken.

You were the one thing I never questioned about you, and got to be certain of from the start.

You were never broken. You were biological.

With love and light,

Sonja

A note on care: This is teaching, not treatment — education about why food has been so hard, not individual clinical care and not a substitute for it. If your relationship with food has tipped into something that frightens you, please reach toward specialized support. You can find it at findEDhelp.com.