Geneen Roth Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

Separate the desire to be thin from the desire to be cherished.

Geneen Roth
When you believe in yourself more than you believe in food, you will stop using food as if it were your only chance at not falling apart. When the shape of your body no longer matches the shape of your beliefs, the weight disappears. And yes, it really is that simple.

Geneen Roth
If there are any cages in this marriage, it is I who have built them. And I who hold the key to their locks.

Geneen Roth
The truth is that it's not about the weight. It's never been about the weight. When a pill is discovered that allows people to eat whatever they want and not gain weight, the feelings and situations they turned to food to avoid will still be there and they will find other more inventive ways to numb themselves.

Geneen Roth
The way you eat is inseparable from your core beliefs about being alive. Your relationship with food is an exact mirror of your feelings about love, fear, anger, meaning and transformation.

Geneen Roth
No matter what we weigh, those of us who are compulsive eaters have anorexia of the soul. We refuse to take in what sustains us. We live lives of deprivation. And when we can't stand it any longer, we binge.

Geneen Roth
Just because we form an opinion about ourselves, or anyone else, doesn't mean it is true.

Geneen Roth
You already have everything you need to be content. Your real work is to do whatever it takes to realize that.

Geneen Roth
You will stop turning to food when you start understanding in your body, not just your mind, that there is something better...Truth, not force, does the work of ending compulsive eating.

Geneen Roth
It matters whether you see yourself as someone who is capable of effecting change or whether you see yourself as someone whose voice does not count. It matters whether you treat yourself with reverence or with carelessness. Every bit of work you do on yourself matters. Every time you choose love, it matters.

Geneen Roth
The big horrible thing isn't the plane crash or the earthquake or the diagnosis. When those things occur, we act, we know what to do. We live or we die. Hell is what we do in the meantime. It is the ways we starve our souls as we prepare for the future that never comes as planned. The true disaster is living the life in your mind and missing the one in front of you.

Geneen Roth
Being exaltingly thin was, of course, the foundation for the visibility, the man, the adornments of this life-to-be; it was the prerequisite that made the rest of the dream possible. And since no matter how thin I got, I was frightened that I could wake up tomorrow and be fat again, the rest of the dream was forever ten or twenty pounds away.

Geneen Roth
You cannot spend your life wanting to be someone else, snipping off pieces of yourself you don't like, and suddenly expect, upon reaching a goal, to be confident, self-accepting, rooted like an oak tree in your being.

Geneen Roth
You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. Treat yourself with outrageous kindness beginning today.

Geneen Roth
You can't be stuck if you're not trying to get anywhere. Which, to me, means that when you stop fighting with the way things are, magic happens. You relax, open, and any action you take comes from alignment with what's true.

Geneen Roth
If you pay attention to when you are hungry, what your body wants, what you are eating, when you've had enough, you end the obsession because obsession and awareness cannot coexist.

Geneen Roth
Being hungry is like being in love: if you don't know, you're probably not,

Geneen Roth
Staying requires being curious about who you actually are when you don't take yourself to be a collection of memories.When you don't infer your existence from replaying what happened to you, when you don't take yourself to be the girl your mother/father/brother/teacher/lover didn't see or adore. When you sense yourself directly, immediately, right now, without preconception, who are you?

Geneen Roth
Meditation is a tool to shake yourself awake. A way to discover what you love. A practice to return yourself to your body when the mind medleys threaten to usurp your sanity.

Geneen Roth
The relentless attempts to be thin take you further and further away from what could actually end your suffering: getting back in touch with who you really are. Your true nature. Your essence.

Geneen Roth
It's not life in the present moment that is intolerable; the pain we are avoiding has already happened. We are living in reverse.

Geneen Roth
To discover what you really believe, pay attention to the way you act — and to what you do when things don't go the way you think they should. Pay attention to what you value. Pay attention to how and on what you spend your time. Your money. And pay attention to the way you eat.

Geneen Roth
Change, if it is to be long lasting, must occur on the unseen levels first

Geneen Roth
The purpose of a spiritual path or religion is to provide a precise and believable way into what seems unbelievable.

Geneen Roth
Awareness, not deprivation, informs what you eat. Presence, not shame, changes how you see yourself and what you rely on.

Geneen Roth
Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it's about knowing who you are. It's about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can't have it.

Geneen Roth
Hell is wanting to be somewhere different from where you are. Being one place and wanting to be somewhere else.... Wanting life to be different from what it is. That's also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It's as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first.

Geneen Roth
We need to build our friendships on truth and wholeness. We need friends who can be with us in our loneliness, not people who will cheer us up so that we don't feel it. We need friends who get furious with us when we are not being real or true to ourselves, not when we don't do what they want us to do.

Geneen Roth
No matter how developed you are in any other area of your life, no matter what you say you believe, no matter how sophisticated or enlightened you think you are, how you eat tells all.

Geneen Roth
The problem isn't that we have bodies; the problem is that we're not living in them.

Geneen Roth