I hear it all the time, women saying to me, “Jena, your pleasurable weight loss idea sounds great, but I need to start with the basics. I’m not even sure I know how to have pleasure.”

“Apart from eating, my only pleasure is sitting in an armchair, wrapped in a blanket,” a bright, intelligent, creative woman in her late 30s recently told me, and my heart leapt out of my chest with compassionate alarm. She had came to me with her weight yo-yoing out of control after being on and off a 500-calorie-a-day-with-hormone-supplements diet for months. I could feel her pain.

It was crystal clear to me that she was living in an extreme pleasure deficiency, and that she would never be at peace with food until she expanded her ability to allow the simple, healthy, innocent pleasures of life into her awareness.

To my eyes, pleasure was knocking on her doorstep, waiting to be invited in. But she, paralyzed by her own emotional pain and trauma, sadly wasn’t able to open the door.

I mention this, because if you’re struggling with your weight, bad body image, or a painful relationship with food, you may be able to relate in your own way.

So let me ask you…

Have you researched what brings you delight?

Have you investigated what puts an irrepressible smile on your face?

Have you looked seriously into what makes your eyes sparkle?

Sadly most of us were not raised to assign much value to getting to know about own naturally-arising joy. We know a lot about many other kinds of trivia in life, but are semi-ignorant about what actually makes us feel good and whole.

We are conditioned to put our attention to “making it” by someone else’s standards in the “rat race.” To working hard to get a head. To paying attention to how to make “other” people happy.

We were raised with pleasure as an after-thought, a luxury, a once-in-a-while treat, and not as I invite you to see it, which is as a wise compass for existence, a necessity, nothing short of a biological requirement.

This is why we struggle as a culture en masse with weight. Because there’s a power struggle at play, a struggle in which your female body is both paradoxically winning and losing out at once, by making sure she gets her pleasure anyway–though food.

What you need to remember as you look in the mirror and tell yourself that you’re overweight, is that restriction can only get you so far, because to your female body, pleasure and sensual delight are not a luxuries, they are a requirement of life.

On the other hand, your mind has a different take on things, and rationalizes pleasure a luxury, diminishing it the role of the guilty forbidden fruit, with little importance in life’s priorities.

Do you see how a conflict might arise here, darling?

If you’re struggling with weight and emotional eating, it’s safe to say that you are playing out this power struggle with food as your battle-field.

I want to remind you to not get too caught up with your weight being a “food issue.” Instead be aware of the over-arching frame–whether or not your female body is getting the sensual gratification, pleasure, and nourishment she organically needs.

You’ll be amazed how when you start to consistently prioritize:

— including healthy pleasure as a daily way of life

— feeling the needs of your female body and to responding them

— consciously experiencing your life through your sensations, not just your mind

— feeling embodied, feeling sensual, feeling free

… that your food issues drop away, and with it as an easy, pleasurable side-effect, your weight troubles drop away too.

That’s why pleasurable weight loss works.

When you whole-heartedly peruse your truest pleasure, that which honestly lights you up the most, your previous sources of compulsion–what I commonly refer to as “counterfeit” pleasures–such as overeating, lose their charm and fall away.

So here’s my call to action: I urge you to do it. I urge you to take the leap of faith that the evidence is sound that making pleasure more of a priority in your life really *is* the key to your weight loss and food struggle being sustainably a thing of the past, allowing you to live diet-free forever.

Since only *you* can be the judge of what actually gives you pleasure or not, pleasure requires knowing yourself.  Though at first glance it may sound superficial, on the contrary, pleasure connects you to the deepest parts of yourself, because to begin to trust in the wisdom of pleasure, means simultaneously more deeply trusting in the wisdom of you.

I welcome you to the adventure of the personal discovery of your pleasure.

With love,

Jena